13

The Murder of Donald Mackay

In the Irish Supreme Court in March 1985, Australia’s most notorious organised crime boss, Robert Trimbole, was released on bail. From there he fled to Spain. Yet again Trimbole had escaped the clutches of Australian authorities – who had been hunting him all over the world so they could have a chat with him about a range of crimes he had allegedly committed back home. One of those crimes was the murder of Griffith anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay.

Of Italian parents, Bob Trimbole was born in Australia on 19 March 1931, and grew up on his parents’ farm in the NSW Riverina district town of Griffith. Trimbole wasn’t very good at legitimate business, and in 1968 he was declared bankrupt when his uninsured panel beating business was burnt to the ground. He and his wife were forced to move into a Housing Commission house.

Then suddenly Trimbole’s fortunes changed dramatically. By 1972 he was the owner of a number of successful local businesses, including a bar, a butchery, a liquor store, and a big Sydney supermarket. Trimbole began spending most of his time in Sydney, buying real estate and getting involved in a variety of company ventures that required risk capital at high interest rates. He became well known in racing circles, where it was said that he was involved in race-fixing scams.

By the mid-1970s it was no secret that Bob Trimbole was involved in selling huge amounts of marijuana grown in the Griffith district. The money involved was in the millions, and Trimbole was now dealing with some of the biggest crime syndicates in Australia.

Trimbole’s good fortune hadn’t gone unnoticed in his home town; rumours were rampant that Griffith, with its rich soil and ideal climate, was now the drug-producing capital of Australia. Small farmers who had been on their knees a couple of years earlier now lived in huge houses or ‘grass castles’ as the locals called them, and drove Mercedes Benzs.

Trucks would come and go in the night, their cargo the best marijuana that Australia had ever produced – as good as the imported product and half the price. And the marijuana market of the early to mid-1970s took all that they could supply.

One local who conducted a well-publicised protest against the drug trade was Donald Mackay, a father of three who was well known and respected in the district. Mackay was president of the local Liberal Party branch and a Liberal Party state and federal candidate on three occasions, and campaigned strongly against the blatant marijuana growing and drug trafficking in Griffith and surrounding townships.

Mackay’s fate was sealed after police diaries were used in evidence in a 1977 drug trial. In the diaries, Mackay was named as a source of the information that had led police to a property at nearby Coleambally where they had pulled off what was at the time the biggest marijuana haul in Australia’s history.

The day before the culprits of the Coleambally bust were to appear in court, police – acting on information they had received as a direct result of the Coleambally raid – descended on another property, at Euston, 300 kilometres west of Griffith, and discovered another huge marijuana plantation ready for harvest.

Both crops belonged to the Griffith-organised crime bosses, and these two busts had cost them over $40 million in lost sales and many more hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost equipment and legal fees.

In May 1977 the bosses called a board meeting. At that meeting it was decided that Donald Mackay was too dangerous to go on living, and that Bob Trimbole was the man who would organise his execution.

Trimbole turned to his trusted Victorian lieutenant, Gianfranco Tizzoni, an Italian who had immigrated to Australia in 1955 and was well respected within organised crime circles. Following Trimbole’s instructions – he didn’t want the ‘hit’ in any way connected with the Italian underworld, especially the Griffith drug syndicates – Tizzoni employed the services of James Bazley, a professional criminal who accepted the job for $10,000.

On the night of 15 July 1977, Donald Mackay disappeared as he walked to his car in a Griffith car park. He has never been seen since. Bob Trimbole was conveniently having dinner in Sydney at the time Mr Mackay vanished.

By the late 1970s Trimbole was the most feared crime boss in the country. He had graduated from local marijuana to smuggling heroin internationally. Trimbole became involved with the ‘Mr Asia Drug Syndicate’ headed by the notorious Terrence Clark. In 1979 the bodies of Mr Asia Syndicate drug couriers Douglas and Isabel Wilson were found buried in shallow graves in bushland in Victoria.

At the inquest into the murders of the Wilsons, one witness refused to answer questions on the grounds that he may incriminate himself. That witness was Robert Trimbole.

With his failure to answer questions at the murder inquest and a summons out for him to appear at the top of the list of witnesses in the forthcoming Stewart Royal Commission into drug trafficking, Aussie Bob decided that now was a good time to leave town.

In May 1981, Trimbole and his de facto wife, Anne Marie Presland, and her daughter fled overseas. For the next three years they played cat and mouse with the Australian authorities, who were prepared to extradite him back from anywhere in the world – if possible. By now the many warrants out for Trimbole’s arrest included conspiracy to murder Donald Mackay and the Wilsons, drug trafficking and heroin smuggling.

Eventually Australian authorities got a tip-off that Trimbole was living in an expensive hotel in Dublin and, in October 1984, local detectives arrested him in the foyer for allegedly carrying a gun. Incredibly, given the nature of his crimes, three months after his arrest and following a bungled extradition attempt, Australia’s most wanted man was given bail – within a heartbeat he had vanished without a trace.

In Trimbole’s absence, on 16 April 1986, James Bazley was found guilty in the Melbourne Supreme Court of conspiring to murder Donald Mackay. He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for that, and to life imprisonment for murdering the Mr Asia drug couriers Douglas and Isabel Wilson.

But while the authorities weren’t having any luck catching up with Trimbole, it seemed his health was. While in Dublin, Trimbole, under the alias of Michael Hanbury, had undergone an unsuccessful operation for prostate cancer. He had been given only months to live, but he hung on for almost three years.

On 13 May 1987, Trimbole admitted himself to a public hospital in the Spanish town of Villa Joyosa – a town that was notorious for hiding international criminals – under the name of Robert Wittig. Within two hours he was dead from a heart attack.

Australian authorities were so familiar with Trimbole’s tricks for eluding them that they couldn’t be convinced Aussie Bob was dead until they had actually sighted and fingerprinted the body.