Sydney - Australian mobster Tony Mokbel began serving a 12- year jail sentence for cocaine-trafficking Saturday after his extradition from Greece.

"Fat Tony" arrived in Melbourne aboard a chartered Gulfstream executive jet and was driven straight to a maximum security prison to serve a sentence given him in absentia in 2006.

The 42-year-old was arrested in a seaside suburb of Athens in June last year.

He had been living there with his girlfriend under a false name and wearing a give-away ill-fitting wig.

Mokbel had been fighting a legal battle to serve out his sentence in Greece before Greek Justice Minister Sotiris Hadjidakis approved Australia's extradition request earlier this month.

Mokbel is expected to be charged with murder and other offences committed during a gangland turf war in Melbourne that cost 28 lives. The tit-for-tat series of killings began in 1998 when drug lord Alphonse Gangitano was gunned down in his house. (dpa)