Aniello Vinciguerra, 37, is awaiting sentence for his involvement in a gang that carried out lucrative ATM raids carried out across NSW in 2014.

The modus operandi involved disabling alarms and severing communication lines in shopping centres before targeting various ATMs under the cover of darkness.

At one raid at the St Andrews Shopping Centre, near Liverpool, the offenders cut into a roof and smashed through a wall in a toilet block to get into an ATM bunker, getting away with $98,900 in cash

Before arriving in Australia that year, the Mr Vinciguerra appears to have lived an extraordinary life.

There was his time fleeing war-affected Yugoslavia; an ability to speak 11 languages; a decade on the run from authorities in Europe, and his three identities.

Most notably was the allegation he was involved in a people smuggling operation in Belgium in 2001 that resulted in eight immigrants, including two children, suffocating to death in a shipping container on route to Ireland.

At a sentencing hearing in Sydney, Vinciguerra - known as Bekim Zogaj in his native Kosovo - argued he was only implicated in the people smuggling catastrophe because of his association with another man arrested.

"They arrest me because I was with him in a couple of places in normal life," he told the Downing Centre District Court last month.

His sentence was adjourned to enable counsel to gather more information about Vinciguerra's denials in the people smuggling tragedy.

However, Vinciguerra's brother has spoken out against him, claiming he built his adult life around stealing and cracking safes before moving into people smuggling.

Speaking from his home in Ireland, Anton Zogaj, said he paid his brother 5000 German marks in 2000 to help him leave Kosovo for a new life.

"He put me in the truck with my wife and son and said we would be in there for six hours," he said.

"And for three nights and four days we were starving in that truck. I didn't care about myself but my son and my wife."

The family eventually re-settled in Ireland.

Mr Zogaj, 41, said he left his home in Yugoslavia in 1999 to escape the bloody civil war, leaving behind his mother and sister.

He claimed Vinciguerra moved towards a life of crime as a child, stealing from shops before eventually travelling to Spain, where he cracked safes. He funnelled his ill-gotten gains into property in Kosovo, Mr Zogaj said.

While Mr Zogaj was living in Ireland in 2001, he heard about the people smuggling disaster that had claimed eight lives.

He didn't tie his brother to it until he received a call from authorities in Belgium asking about Vinciguerra's whereabouts.

"I didn't have nothing to help them, he had just run away," he explained.

Not long after Vinciguerra called his older brother Mr Zogaj from a phone booth in Spain.

"I told him this was going on and he was going to be charged," Mr Zogaj said.

"I said 'is this true or not?'

"He accused me of telling the police about him and he said never call me again."

In 2002, Vinciguerra and a number of other people were arrested and charged over the deaths. But Vinciguerra was released on bail and went on the run.

After 10 years evading authorities, Vinciguerra was arrested in Germany in 2012. He had already been convicted of eight counts of manslaughter in his absence by a court in Belgium.

Yet in a further twist, Vinciguerra claimed he was released in 2013 after the High Court in Belgium quashed his absentia conviction.

A year later, as Vinciguerra tells it, he made the decision to move to Australia - using a false italian passport under the name Aniello Vinciguerra - after his house was shot up.

He joined a gang of Albanians, using blow torches to crack open ATMS in seven locations in NSW.

It was in Darwin where Vinciguerra and his three co-accused were arrested in November 2014 after an investigation by NSW's Property Crime Squad.

He is due to be sentenced on March 24 after being convicted of 16 offences.