CONTRACT KILLING FOR THE MAFIA
He told them why they were to die and shot Wilson first, then his wife. But he did not shoot their dog.
THE bitch was a stray – part cattle dog, part fox terrier, mostly lucky. When she wandered into the Altona street where a meat inspector called Dennis Brown and his wife lived in the mid-1970s, instead of calling the dog catcher the couple adopted the little black and white mongrel. They called her Mitzy.
When the Browns bought an unfinished fibro holiday shack in the ti-tree behind Rye on the Mornington Peninsula, Mitzy was in her element. There were kangaroos and rabbits to chase, smells to investigate on walks along the tracks winding through the scrub-choked vacant blocks. The only danger was snakes in the grass.
Almost thirty years on, Danny Street is filled with houses, some of them expensive. But in 1978 it was an unmade road with a handful of shacks in it. The Browns were at Lot 55, and the two blocks to the south were covered in scrub. Dennis kept a few bee hives in the ti-tree and sometimes went shooting rabbits, Mitzy at his side. Man and dog didn’t miss much.
Early that year, Brown was checking his hives when he noticed that a long, narrow hole had been dug in the sandy soil under the ti-tree on Lot 59. Intriguingly, it had been covered with scrub. On visits after that, he would glance at the hole. For more than a year, nothing changed. But in April, 1979, he saw that the unknown digger had cleaned out and deepened the hole and covered it again with some fresh scrub.
About five weeks later, on 18 May, a Friday, Mitzy and her master came down early for the weekend. They were going for their usual walk when she stopped where the hole was and started to scratch furiously. Brown realised that the hole had been filled in – and saw signs that foxes and other dogs had already been scrabbling in the freshly turned sand. Whatever was in the hole attracted carnivores.
A less observant man might have missed it. A less curious one might have shrugged it off. Dennis Brown had worked at abattoirs all over Australia, among rough men in a tough business, and his instincts were high. Since he’d first seen it, he had fancied that the long, narrow hole looked a little too much like an empty grave. Now it was filled in, his fancy hardened into suspicion: if it were a grave, maybe it was no longer empty.
He whistled his excited dog away, got into his maroon 1976 Holden Kingswood and drove the four kilometres into Rye to talk to the police about the sandy grave in Danny Street.
At first, local cops thought it might be a cache of stolen property. Then they stuck a probe into the sandy soil and caught a whiff of something that made them feel sick.
The homicide crew came late that afternoon and forensic experts soon after. Portable generators throbbed all night to power the crime-scene lights. Dennis Brown didn’t hang around to see what he had found; he had a pretty good idea it wouldn’t be pretty and he was right.
There were two bodies. The first out was a young woman, fully dressed except for one boot – the other was later found on the road nearby. It didn’t take ballistic experts to see that she had been shot through the breast and the head. Underneath her was a man of about the same age. He had been shot twice in the chest and once in the neck.
Some distinctive clothing and jewellery – wedding ring, brooch and hair comb – gave the police a lead, but they must have suspected who they were looking for. It took less than 48 hours to identify the dead pair as Douglas and Isabel Wilson. It was, as police were learning to say in the 1970s, clearly drug-related.
The Wilsons were from New Zealand and they had form. The Victorian homicide squad, then headed by the renowned Paul Delianis, were keen to talk to their associates. Especially a Martin Johnstone and one Terry Sinclair, who had recently changed his surname by deed poll from his birth name. Johnstone and Sinclair were also New Zealanders, who had joined thousands of their countrymen to flock to the bright lights of Sydney.
So why had the Wilsons turned up dead outside Melbourne, a full day’s drive and almost 1000 kilometres south of where they had been living in Sin City? Delianis and his detectives were determined to find out. Not everyone in other Australian law enforcement bodies seemed to have the same enthusiasm for the task.
THE path that led the Wilsons to a shallow grave in a sleepy Victorian holiday town started on the other side of the Tasman where, a decade earlier, the teenage Douglas Wilson started dabbling in drugs while an above-average student at Auckland Grammar. But when his family treated him to a year in America in his final year, he developed a taste for drugs, spurning his private-school education and a comfortable middle-class start in life by dealing to support his own growing habit – and his scorn for the workaday world. His slide across the social divide to the dark side continued until he dropped out of a university accounting course and was arrested for trafficking marijuana and LSD in early 1972 when he sold an undercover cop some drugs. This slip earned him a short jail sentence.
Jail hardened Wilson’s habits into vices, pulling him further from the life he might have led into the one that would destroy him. By this time, he already knew Isabel, who was a year younger and had been mixing in a group which used drugs after she’d left home at sixteen.
Not long after getting out of prison in mid-1973, Wilson had returned to working as a tiler with his father’s business when a small-time crook recruited him to sell Thai ‘buddha sticks’ to the university crowd that the middle-class Wilson could mix with more comfortably than working-class criminals could. The man who recruited him was Terrence John Clark, who would use a string of aliases and later change his surname to Sinclair.
Wilson met Clark through a small-time criminal called James McBean, sometimes referred to as ‘Jim the Grammar School man’, who had helped Clark sell buddha sticks.
Wilson was good at selling dope: he sold 40,000 of a payload of 200,000 sticks that the edgy Clark and his smooth-talking associate Martin Johnstone had smuggled into New Zealand on a yacht called Brigadoon, netting each a million dollars at a time when that was enough to buy a street full of houses. But Clark and Johnstone weren’t interested in real estate just yet. They were bankrolling a bigger foray into international drug trafficking.
For all three, this early success was the bait that would lure each to his destruction. As for Isabel, she was fated to hook up with the drug-dealing, freewheeling Wilson as well as to drugs, and went along for the ride. She married him in 1977, and rarely left his side, but devotion didn’t help. It was a fatal attraction. They both ended up with raging heroin habits and clouded judgment. And that would eventually put them in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a ticket to a sandy grave.
THE wrong place and time was the Gazebo Hotel in Brisbane in June, 1978. By then the Wilsons had been in Australia a few months. They were just two of several ‘kiwis’ Clark had recruited to distribute heroin in his expanding empire. Douglas Wilson was being paid a retainer of $400 a week by Clark, who had skipped bail and left New Zealand two years earlier, in 1976, after being charged with importing two cigarette cartons full of heroin fetched from Fiji by a woman friend. He had been living in Brisbane and Sydney under a string of aliases, moving from place to place. All the while building the drug running syndicate he liked to call ‘The Organisation’, but which would later become tagged by the media as the ‘Mr Asia’ syndicate.
Clark had developed a theory of avoiding detection through caution and planning. If he had stuck to the rules he laid down for the rest of the gang, he might have made and laundered millions of dollars and eventually lived the dream of ‘going legitimate’ and getting out in time.
Recruiting the Wilsons was an early example of the flawed reasoning and carelessness that would bring him undone. According to his contemporaries, Clark despised drug addicts, almost as if he wanted to ignore the effect of his obscenely profitable trade. But despite this contempt for ‘junkies’, he had chosen the Wilsons to work for him as drug and money couriers – and even part paid them in heroin for their own use, as well as the hefty retainer.
In Australia, he favoured using fellow New Zealanders and perhaps saw the Wilsons as more malleable – more reliant on him – because they were slaves to the drug he could supply along with the easy money they needed to support their indolence. Clark came to realise that slaves might obey cruel masters because they have to – but are not loyal to them. He could rule by fear, but fear is a form of hatred.
At first, Clark had encouraged the Wilsons to seek medical help to get ‘clean’, by entering a private hospital. When this failed, he turned against them, as he had done before – and would do again – with people that he lured with fast money then ruled by intimidation. So when Clark invited the Wilsons to Brisbane in June 1978 for a boat cruise to help get over their addiction, they accepted the offer at face value, as far as their contemporaries could tell. But – as they would subsequently confide – Clark had started saying things that played on their minds. He had a black sense of humour and made cryptic comments that fed junkie paranoia.
Before the Brisbane trip, talking about the proposed boat cruise, he asked if the couple’s dog, a pampered Belgian keeshond called Taj, would get seasick. When Wilson said he didn’t think so, because keeshonds were ‘barge dogs’, Clark deadpanned: ‘Does he freak out on guns going off?’
As the late Richard Hall observed in his book Greed: The ‘Mr Asia’ Connection, ‘Whether the plan was to kill the Wilsons or just give them a convalescent cruise will never be clear, for … Clark was about to pay the price for that sense of humour.’
Clark fancied himself as a cool and cautious criminal ‘executive’ who made a show of running his drug syndicate on pseudo-corporate lines, but behind the cool mask was a boastful smartarse who couldn’t help wanting to show how much cleverer he was than the herd. So when he checked into the Gazebo Hotel he signed the register not with one of his many aliases, some of them backed with false passports, but with the words ‘J. Petersen, MP’.
He might have got away with ‘Petersen’ but adding ‘MP’ was stupid for a man with so many reasons to avoid attracting attention. The Hon. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was at the time the longserving Premier of Queensland and a nationally-famous public figure, respectively loved and lampooned by his many admirers and detractors. Using the Petersen name in vain was asking for trouble, and he got plenty.
The worried hotel manager spotted the false name and concluded the hard-partying guests were not only subversives mocking the Premier but running up a huge champagne bill, and so probably were fraudsters who would not pay their bill. He called the police.
Queensland consorting squad detectives of that time were what are now sometimes referred to as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘robust’. When the squad came knocking, they found the sort of evidence that quickened an old-fashioned detective’s pulse: $5276 in cash, for a start. After what Clark would later describe as some tough questioning, they searched his Jaguar and found an unregistered pistol which, it would turn out, was probably a murder weapon. Meaning Clark was in big trouble. As were his Brisbane ‘representatives’ and his right-hand man, Jimmy Shepherd, also pulled in by the police. More significantly, so were the Wilsons, taken in for questioning after arranging to meet Clark at the Gazebo.
The Queensland police and the Narcotics Bureau soon ran checks establishing that Clark was wanted in New Zealand on heroin charges laid two years before. Clark, a dab hand at corrupting officials, tried and apparently failed to buy his way out, although word might have spread about his almost bottomless financial resources.
A detective sergeant, Ron Pickering, later dutifully reported that Clark had offered $50,000 to obtain bail. The obvious conclusion was that had Clark got bail, he would have disappeared again, using one of his many false identities.
In other circumstances – such as, say, if Clark had been picked up for drink-driving and fingerprinted – the old heroin charge hanging over him in New Zealand might have seemed disastrous. But, given the gravity of the charges he risked in Australia, being extradited to New Zealand might well have been a better bet than facing the music here – a fact that later stuck in the craw of Victorian police investigators who began to question how and why Clark had been released to New Zealand when he was a suspect for so many serious crimes in Australia, including murder.
These accusations came to light within days of the Gazebo Hotel arrests, when the Queensland police interrogated the nervous Wilsons.
‘Still suffering from the long, drawn-out process of withdrawal, frightened of Clark’s growing coolness, and finally apprehensive of his growing talk about the sound of guns, they talked. A lot.’ writes Hall.
By the end of the week, when the Wilsons (and their pampered pet dog) were turned loose with strict instructions not to bolt, the police – and, by extension, the Narcotics Bureau – had heard a long, rambling story painting Clark as a huge heroin dealer, a callous killer and, significantly, a high-level corrupter. In the 112-page transcript of the tapes the police secretly made over six days, they made some startlingly specific allegations.
One was that Clark had a senior Customs official in his pocket in Sydney – ‘an embittered, cynical old copper’ on a $25,000 annual stipend plus bonuses for extra valuable information. They told how Clark and his helpers stashed heroin in Thermos flasks buried in Frenchs Forest in Sydney and that Clark had recently bought blocks of land in Fiji. But, most tellingly, they said that the purple Jaguar and the pistol Clark had brought to Brisbane were the same car and weapon he used to murder a drug courier known as ‘Pommy Harry’.
It would not have taken much checking, even in the pre-computer age, to reveal that ‘Pommy Harry’ was the nickname of one Harry Lewis, who had disappeared in late May 1978, soon after being apprehended at Sydney Airport with some Thai buddha sticks. As would be revealed later, Lewis had been nabbed at the airport on 13 May and released on bail posted by one of Clark’s lieutenants, Wayne Shrimpton. On 19 May, just six days later, the Narcotics Bureau opened an individual file on Clark. Clark knew this because his ‘inside man’ leaked it to him in return for cash. The fatal conclusion was that Lewis had said too much under interrogation.
Clark, in Singapore enjoying a secret liaison with Wayne Shrimpton’s girlfriend, Allison Dine, at the time of Lewis’s arrest, had flown back to take charge of the situation like the troubleshooting executive he fancied himself to be. He arranged to drive Lewis to Brisbane, promising him he had arranged for him to escape on a boat. Lewis agreed. He had little choice: to run from Clark, without any money to survive, would prove conclusively that he had ratted, something he did not think Clark could know for sure. He had to keep up the pretence of normality, hoping Clark meant what he said about an escape by sea.
But Lewis was doomed. He was given a 24-hour reprieve because Clark saw the chance to hook up with the opportunistic Allison Dine, a former trainee kindergarten teacher with an eye for the main chance. After sending Dine’s boyfriend Wayne Shrimpton to Singapore to buy gems, Clark calmly postponed the Brisbane trip to take Dine to the Hilton Hotel, as his wife Maria was in hospital having some plastic surgery. The lovers got drunk, booked the king size suite and stayed the night.
When Lewis came around to the Sydney Hilton next morning for the trip north, he struck Dine as ‘pensive’. She thought at the time (or so she would claim later) that he was sad about leaving his girlfriend. Perhaps Lewis’s instincts were stronger than hers, and he feared driving 1000 kilometres with the man he’d informed on the week before.
Clark was driving a new purple Jaguar. Somewhere in northern New South Wales, they damaged the exhaust system and Clark decided to head back to Sydney – his intention all along. At dusk he pulled over, claiming the transmission was slipping, and asked Lewis to have a look under the bonnet. Obediently, he obliged and Clark shot him in the head.
It would later be revealed that Clark, the supposed cool master criminal, lost his nerve and bolted after rolling the body into a ditch. After driving for more than an hour, he turned back, found the body and loaded it into the boot and took it down a bush track. Then he lugged it into the bush and dumped it, after cutting off the hands and smashing the teeth to hinder identification. Having made the mistake of killing Lewis instead of sending him far away, he compounded it by not burying the body so it would never be found. Then he drove back to Sydney, wearing blood-spattered clothes, and promptly told Dine his version of the killing – that Lewis had attacked him.
The story of Pommy Harry’s murder was soon known to everyone in The Organisation … including Douglas and Isabel Wilson. Clark no doubt meant Lewis’s death to inspire fear, but it was never going to guarantee silence. The Wilsons were so frightened they would be next that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking to the police, they signed their own death warrant.
The question still is: did anyone in authority believe the Wilsons’ tale when they told it? Or was it, in the beginning, more convenient to dismiss it all as the paranoid delusions of heroin addicts?
This decision to allow Clark to leave the country – and to shelve the charges against him in Queensland – would later be prodded in court. In committal proceedings against two Narcotics Bureau officers and a bent law clerk in Sydney in April 1980, a senior Victorian policeman, Assistant Commissioner Rod Hall, made withering answers under cross examination that made it clear the Victoria Police suspected Clark had been given a ‘green light’ by inept, or corrupt, investigators.
Hall knew his stuff. He had run a joint Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Federal investigation into the Mr Asia drug syndicate but without the powers to check bank records and demand answers.
He said the experience showed him there was a need for a standing Royal Commission or National Crime Authority.
Many senior police were concerned that Hall had broken the coppers’ code of silence and was prepared to publicly speak of corruption.
Three decades later, he remains unrepentant. ‘There is no doubt that Clark was paying off investigators inside the Narcotics Bureau,’ he told the authors.
He also found that some states involved in the taskforce were more enthusiastic in uncovering corruption than others.
Later in his investigation when Clark was jailed in Lancashire, Hall went to England and asked a local policeman to interview the inmate. ‘What questions do you want asked and what answers do you want written down?’ the local responded.
It was, after all, a different era.
The evidence against the Narcs was damning. So much so that Justice Sir Edward (Ned) Williams in yet another Royal Commission into Drugs eventually called for the Narcotics Bureau to be disbanded and its role to be absorbed into the newly formed Australian Federal Police.
One of the criticisms of the Bureau was that it took credit for the jobs conducted by state police. Some things never change.
Meanwhile, back in Brisbane, Terry Clark was in an uncomfortable spot …
TWO Queensland undercover police put in the cells with Clark and Jimmy Shepherd overheard conversations between the pair that supported what the Wilsons were telling their colleagues in an interview room not far away. Clark and Shepherd whispered to each other about running The Organisation. Why such streetwise operators would be so careless is hard to say – unless Clark was already confident he could pull strings in Sydney or Canberra to get extradited. And that he was equally confident he could bribe enough witnesses to beat the old New Zealand heroin charge. (Which, in fact, he later boasted of doing.)
Whether it was apathy or something more, Sydney police did not do anything to protect the Wilsons from Clark’s revenge. On 30 March 1979, Douglas Wilson called the New South Wales homicide squad. He said he was frightened because Clark had come to his house the previous day and threatened him. A detective called Dawson gave Wilson his home telephone number and reported the call to Sergeant John McGregor, telling him Clark was in New Zealand and under surveillance. But ten days later the homicide squad got a fax from New Zealand police informing them that Clark was in Australia. Notwithstanding this, the police did not put the Wilsons in protective custody, or even contact them.
It was odd. Somehow, the Wilsons’ story was not considered strong enough to hold Clark and investigate him for murder and serious trafficking. And yet someone, somewhere – perhaps in the Narcotics Bureau – thought the Wilsons’ story was strong enough to sell. And Clark certainly thought it strong enough to buy. He complained later that he’d had to pay $250,000 for the Wilson tapes. And another $250,000 to have them killed.
To do that he needed local talent – a trusted middleman who could arrange a hit.
Enter ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole.
FOR a Calabrian peasant’s son raised in the secretive ways of the sinister mafia organisation known as N’Dranghita, Robert Trimbole was different from most of his contemporaries. His parents and many of his relatives had come to Griffith in boatloads, migrating en masse from the poverty and crime-ridden town of Plati in Calabria before and after World War II. They left the grinding poverty behind but brought the crime with them: relatively humble members of the so-called ‘Honoured Society’ established themselves high in a new pecking order in the new country. And because they came in such numbers, and stuck together so strongly, in some ways they still lived in the village their parents had left behind in southern Italy.
But Trimbole, born in Griffith in 1931, showed the ability from an early age to get along with people outside the tight circle of what the Griffith Calabrians called, among themselves, La Famiglia – The Family – the local cell of N’Dranghita. While the clannish Calabrians didn’t all share Trimbole’s gregarious nature and easygoing engagement with the wider world, the senior figures in the secret society recognised his potential usefulness and would exploit it. Unusually, Trimbole married outside the Calabrian community – where cousins often married each other – when he wed Joan Quested, an Anglo-Australian secretary he met while working in Sydney in 1952. They would have several children, all with ‘Australian’ Anglo names – one son was called Craig – and Trimbole did not follow his parents onto the irrigation block. A talented mechanic, he did his apprenticeship in Sydney with Pioneer Tours and later ran a garage in Griffith. But he was always a punter and, inevitably, he lost more than he won in the 1950s and 1960s, although he was well-known for shouting the bar at the local club when he’d had a good win. And although he was good ‘on the tools’, the garage barely supported his growing family and his punting. In 1968, he was declared bankrupt.
‘His trouble was he wanted to be a mate to everybody and never charged enough for the work he did,’ a former garage employee said of his former boss to journalist Keith Moor in the late 1980s.
‘Customers took advantage of his good nature and he was always a soft touch for a hard luck story. He accepted all sorts of things in payment for work done, even down to race tips. He was always a gambler – bet on anything, he would. He was forever nipping away from the garage to put a bet on and racing broadcasts were a constant background noise at work.’
To the outside world, the young Trimbole was a battling small businessman, a mug punter, a loving father and a good mate. The description ‘good bloke’ was often used about him, even after he was disgraced. But no matter how well Trimbole got on with outsiders, he was still connected by birth, geography and instinct to the shadowy organisation that flourished in the irrigation districts of Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton, and whose tentacles reached the fruit and vegetable markets in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
For decades, the Family hierarchy extorted money from fellow Italians by standing over growers and stall holders. But by the early 1970s, there was a new cash crop in town: marijuana.
As proved in the Prohibition era in America in the 1920s, the banning of a substance that was impossible to stamp out and easy to supply created a multi-million dollar black market, created and enriched a criminal class, and corrupted police, politicians, public servants and the judicial system. Not to mention jockeys, horse trainers and racing officials because, one way or another, black money tends to find its way to the racetrack as well as to casinos. Crooks, with rare exceptions, are gamblers by both nature and nurture. More importantly, gambling is a swift and relatively simple way to launder the proceeds of crime.
Marijuana produced mountains of black money that had to be filtered some way before it could be spent on visible assets. Trimbole was never the ‘Godfather’ of the Griffith Family, but he was its most active operator – a fixer whose main task was to handle the marketing of marijuana and the laundering of cash. Punting was in his blood. Now he could attempt to rig races himself or to buy information from race-fixing gangs who bribed or intimidated jockeys and trainers and had horses doped.
As Moor outlines in his book Crims in Grass Castles, the first known turning point in Trimbole’s fortunes came in 1971 when the manager of a local club, Archie Molinaro, suggested he might be interested in taking over a business selling, leasing and repairing pinball machines throughout the Riverina. Trimbole had the necessary mechanical skill to repair the machines, and so he took it on in partnership with Molinaro – and with a Melbourne man called Gianfranco Tizzoni, a onetime debt collector with interesting contacts.
Tizzoni, three years younger than Trimbole, was also Italian but not a Calabrian and, although he was an associate of the Griffith crew, he lived in suburban Melbourne and was never an insider like Trimbole. It was an association that would make them both rich, eventually, and then infamous. But it wasn’t the pinball machines that made the big money. It was the new crop being grown under cover in the middle of the irrigation blocks. Local wags called it ‘Calabrese corn’ and there were stares and whispers around the Riverina as battling ‘blockies’ suddenly accrued the trappings of wealth on irrigation blocks that had been hard pressed to support a family for decades.
Tizzoni would later tell police that it began in 1971, when Trimbole said to him that he had to raise some money for an operation on the eyes of a friend’s son – and that he proposed to sell marijuana to get the money. Whether the story of the eye operation was true is debatable, but Tizzoni agreed to arrange marijuana distribution in Melbourne.
‘He told me there was an endless supply from the Griffith area, and that Tony Sergi was organising the growing part of it and the supply part of it,’ Tizzoni told police.
‘Different farmers were growing it for him (Tony Sergi) and Tony Barbaro was supervising the farmers. Bob Trimbole was organising the distribution and my job was to distribute in Victoria under Bob’s instructions.’
That was the beginning of a decade of greed. By the time Trimbole became one of Australia’s best-known ‘racing identities’ a few years later, he had laundered tens of millions of dollars for himself and the Griffith godfathers, including the aforementioned Sergi and Barbaro. Along the way, the professional ‘good bloke’ had compromised scores of useful people from jockeys and strappers to some of the highest in the land: politicians, senior police and public servants, lawyers and judges.
By the time Terry Clark asked for Trimbole’s help to get rid of Douglas and Isabel Wilson in 1978, he had already arranged murders. One, in particular, would go down as one of the most shameful episodes in Australian history. That was the murder of another ‘good bloke’ from Griffith – this one a decent man called Donald Mackay.
IT happened on a Friday evening in winter. At 5.30pm on 17 July 1977, Don Mackay closed the furniture store his family had run in Griffith since the 1920s and drove his mini-van to the nearby Griffith Hotel. He had earlier told his wife, Barbara, he would be home by 7pm to look after the youngest of their four children while she went to a meeting.
The Mackays were that sort of family – public spirited, generous, industrious and honest. And also fearless. If there was one thing Don Mackay had, it was moral courage. But in Griffith, in 1977, moral courage was a dangerous quality. Perhaps it still is.
The known facts are bleak, and haven’t changed in half a lifetime.
At the pub, Mackay had a round of drinks and chatted with friends – largely about his efforts to draw attention to the open scandal of large-scale marijuana crops being grown in the area – before buying a cask of white wine in the bottle shop and heading to the car park to go home. He was never seen again.
It was dark, the street almost deserted. Two people were working late in the office building on the other side of the car park. One was Mackay’s solicitor and friend, Ian Salmon. The other was an accountant called Roy Binks.
Salmon heard nothing, although he was later called from home to look for his missing client. Binks, however, later told police he’d heard a noise ‘like someone being sick’ and that he thought he’d heard a sound like ‘whip cracks’.
Years later, understandably, Binks’ recollections were even vaguer. In 1997, on the twentieth anniversary of Mackay’s murder, he obligingly pointed out his old office to the authors – and where Mackay’s van was parked. But he didn’t want to rake over the embers of fading anger and sorrow.
In fact, he seemed faintly embarrassed and nervous, an attitude shared with many other honest Griffith citizens, who still tend to start sentences warily with ‘It’s all such a long time ago’. The unspoken suggestion is that it’s easier to let sleeping dogs lie.
Binks was anxious about being quoted. He didn’t want to stir up trouble, he explained apologetically.
Ian Salmon was not quite so shy. After 33 years in Griffith, he moved interstate to retire and often thought about what happened that Friday evening after a worried Barbara Mackay called to say Don hadn’t come home.
Salmon agreed to drive around looking for him, as Mrs Mackay was reluctant to call the police immediately.
At first he didn’t feel it was sinister, only that it was out of character for Mackay not to go home. But, by midnight, he was getting worried and contacted police. He kept looking and found the mini-van in the Griffith Hotel car park.
First, he noticed the imprint of an adult hand on the driver’s window. Then he swung his car around so the headlights lit the scene. That’s when he saw pools of blood and three spent .22 bullet shells glinting on the ground.
DON Mackay’s body has never been found. No one has been convicted of his murder. No one is likely to be.
An old and dangerous man called James Bazley, criminal and gunman, was convicted in 1986 for conspiring to kill Mackay and for another drug-related double murder, but he’s not the talking type. Finally released in 2001, aged 75, he has never broken his silence to say anything useful, except that he’d been ‘told’ that Mackay’s body was buried on a large Griffith rice farm owned by Gianfranco Tizzoni, the man whose evidence helped put him away on murder conspiracy charges. Where, he couldn’t say.
Neither is George Joseph saying much. The one-time gun dealer sold Bazley a French .22 calibre pistol believed to be the murder weapon and recommended Bazley to do the ‘hit’ when approached on behalf of a Griffith marijuana syndicate keen to hire a killer.
With the exception of Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole (who would eventually die on the run in Spain in May 1987) those who ordered Mackay’s death – many of them publicly named by a royal commission – are still going about the business of turning illicit millions into legitimate assets. They do this with the best legal and financial help money can buy. The way, some say, they bought police and politicians.
Mackay’s family, friends and supporters see this but they are powerless where governments and police have pointedly failed. Some avoid certain shops in Griffith, or cross the street rather than share the footpath with certain people. None have ever been willing to be quoted.
It’s hard to credit this nightmarish undercurrent in the bustling main street of an outwardly peaceful country town. But the Riverina, for all its Banjo Paterson red gums and sunlit plains, is in secret ways a little Calabria, still a stronghold of the so-called ‘Honoured Society’.
Sydney had a dark side, too, like Al Capone’s Chicago, where for decades corruption seeped upwards like rising damp, regardless of which premier or police commissioner was in power. Some people in Griffith still wonder why investigations went nowhere, about who tipped off Trimbole to flee Australia in 1981 and why he was not arrested after Victorian police passed on his address to other authorities.
They recall the times that visiting political figures would go straight to the shop of a Calabrian identity, now dead, known locally as ‘The Godfather’. It was suggested that this man – once charged with having unlicensed pistols – could deliver blocks of votes. It was speculated he could also deliver campaign funds. What isn’t certain is what favours he scored in return.
‘Don’t let anybody fool you,’ one long-time Griffith businessman told the authors in disgust. ‘In this town, crime pays. Crime is probably the biggest industry here.’ By this he means drug money used to establish legitimate businesses.
It costs millions to buy and set up modern, irrigated vineyards and orchards but some families have no trouble finding the money, although neighbours on identical farms remember the same people battling to get by before the 1960s – before the marijuana boom.
The businessman points at a house nearby, owned by a family whose common Italian surname, Sergi, figured prominently in the Woodward Royal Commission’s report in 1979. He remembers former local member (and Whitlam Government Immigration Minister) Al Grassby’s Commonwealth car, Australian flag fluttering on the bonnet, arriving as guest of honour at a family gathering.
The Riverina, like Melbourne’s northern fringe, has many ‘grass castles’ – eruptions of brick, tile and concrete so huge and ugly that they’re worth less the day they’re finished than the total cost of construction. These are not built as an investment but as a self-aggrandising way to soak up black money. There are always tradesmen who will work for cash.
Marijuana growing has ensured some words have entered the local language. When Riverina people talk of a ‘crop’, they don’t mean wheat or rice but marijuana. They talk of ‘crop sitters’, pawns who specialise in the greedy business of being gardener and guard to million-dollar dope plantations.
The accepted wisdom is that the Griffith irrigation area soon became ‘too close to home’, too closely observed by agricultural pilots and local police keen to clean up the tarnished reputation of their predecessors, of whom three went to jail for corruption in the early 1980s.
Later, the crops were grown much further afield – as far as outback Queensland and the Northern Territory. But, even so, if there was a police raid interstate it was odd how often a Griffith connection was made so far from home: trickle irrigation equipment from a Griffith supplier; bags stamped with Griffith producers’ names; crop sitters from Griffith families.
The younger members of such families disappeared from town for a few days or weeks then returned flush with cash. ‘They’ve got a crop off somewhere,’ locals muttered to each other. But not too loudly, and never on the record.
Meanwhile, money keeps pouring into an already prosperous district. The town where tax investigators in the 1970s estimated half the banks’ cash flow was from marijuana has remained remarkably recession-proof. Some suggest the same of Shepparton and Mildura.
DONALD Bruce Mackay was, according to Ian Salmon, more than a decent man. He was a good bloke, too. Like Mackay’s widow Barbara (until her death in 2001) and adult children, Salmon resented the headline writer’s shorthand that labelled Mackay an ‘anti-drug crusader’.
It’s a tag that ignores the warmth, intelligence, humour and strong physical presence of a husband and father, businessman and sportsman. It leaves a lingering and offensive suggestion that he was a naive, wowserish zealot who blundered into trouble. As if, somehow, it was his fault. Blaming the victim has been popular in some circles ever since the murdering Mafia peasants used their tame politician, Grassby, and bent police and others to try to poison public opinion. There were those, prominent in politics, the mob had compromised long before.
The truth, says Salmon, is that Mackay was big – in size, intellect and heart – and brave enough to stand by his principles when lesser people shuffled their feet and looked the other way. Two days after he disappeared, Barbara Mackay told reporters her husband believed if good people ‘didn’t do anything, then evil won’.
The weasel tendency to blame the victim has crept into references to Mackay by some who didn’t know him, which suits those who plotted his death. It has also suited them to suggest that support for Mackay and demands for a full investigation are somehow harmful to the harmonious relations of an area that is more than half Italian, mainly Calabrian.
For thirty years it has been repeatedly asserted that ‘98 per cent’ of Griffith people are law-abiding citizens, which is undoubtedly true. What some find galling is that the other two per cent – representing organised crime – have much to gain by repeating that assertion.
The feeling is that the corrupt few can hide among the law-abiding majority, at the same time leading a refrain that it’s unfair to brand all Calabrians as crooks. It would, of course, be unfair – but that is a convenient loophole for the people who plotted murder.
Ten days after Don Mackay disappeared, 5000 people crowded the lawns of the local hospital for an ecumenical memorial service. Shops closed. People wept.
Two weeks later, 2000 people jammed a local club to take part in a television special hosted by famed British interviewer David Frost, who flew in for the event. Al Grassby was jeered off stage at the same event when he claimed he’d had only one complaint of marijuana growing. The snake in the grass was posturing for the benefit of his long time sponsors – the crims in grass castles.
Meanwhile, a reward of $25,000 soon leapt to $100,000 with pledges from local business people – and there were predictions it would reach the then staggering sum of a million dollars.
Members of Concerned Citizens of Griffith were widely quoted about the need to investigate and clean up drug trafficking and corruption.
But as the years came and went without any sign of Mackay’s body, the group ran out of energy and its members rarely met and would not be quoted. Time dulled the outrage and the determination but not quite all the fear.
EVEN Barbara Mackay, the most articulate and fearless of women, grew to feel that there was little to be gained by repeating herself. When the authors visited her in 1997, she would talk off the record but saw no point in spoiling the harmony of her family’s life by appearing publicly bitter.
At 61, and a grandmother, she lived then in a tasteful unit overlooking a park in a quiet street. She was gracious, almost serene, given what she had suffered. She had faith in both God and in Griffith but not so much in the system that had let her down so cruelly.
She said she had written a book that had been shelved by her publishers because of fears of defamation writs but she planned to revive the project. That idea would die with her in 2001.
Meanwhile, her eldest son, Paul, was still running the family furniture store his grandfather had started just after World War I. But the youth who was outspoken and angry in the first years after his father’s death was, nearing 40, gruff and suspicious when the subject was brought up. Like everyone else in town, he did not want to be quoted. After all, all the talk in the world couldn’t undo the great wrong done to his family.
But the facts speak in favour of the Mackays. They have been accused by the stupid and the self-serving of being ‘anti-Italian’ and ‘anti-Griffith’ yet Barbara never considered moving and Paul married a woman called Maria Minato, whose mother’s family is from Plati, a stronghold of N’Dranghita and birthplace of many Griffith Calabrians.
Barbara Mackay went to her grave still tortured by speculation about what happened to her Don’s body. The reality couldn’t be worse than all the rumours, she sometimes told friends.
One story is that the body was put through a pet food grinder, another that it was burned in a hospital incinerator or an old brick kiln, another that it was weighed down and dumped in a river, or set in concrete underneath a building.
She never did get the truth about his death. What she had, though, was the truth about his life.
Three days before he died, there was an attempt to lure him to Jerilderie, 160 kilometres away, to meet a mysterious ‘Mr Adams’, who claimed he was a lottery winner who wanted to furnish an entire house. It was later to become clear that it was the hired hit man, James Bazley.
Mackay missed the appointment, instead sending an employee, Bruce Pursehouse. The reason? Mackay was arranging the funeral of a poor man called Harold Craig, one of many people he had helped in Griffith. ‘If the truth’s known,’ Pursehouse would recall, ‘Don probably paid for the funeral as well as doing everything else.’
He was like that. Three days later, he paid for his social conscience with his life. The question remains: was it in vain?
Two years later, in 1979, a Queen’s Counsel assisting the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking put it this way: ‘One school of thought is that people behind the (drug) trade have been incredibly stupid in acting against someone as prominent as Don Mackay. The other school says it was a masterstroke which has created enough fear to keep people’s mouths shut for the next ten years.’
More than thirty years later, mouths are still shut. After thousands of hours and millions of dollars being spent on investigation, the truth behind a crime that shamed Australia is as elusive as it was the night Don Mackay was killed.
AROUND the race tracks and clubs and restaurants favoured by the big spenders they called Trimbole ‘Australian Bob’, later contracted to ‘Aussie Bob’. It was part of the casual criminal slang favoured by people who liked the quasi-anonymity of using nicknames and aliases rather than the surnames on their birth certificates. Not that they had any trouble, in the 1970s, getting fake birth certificates, driver’s licences and passports. Trimbole had a book of 100 birth certificate blanks filched from a public building in Griffith. Nothing was a problem to Aussie Bob. He was everybody’s mate, because he never knew when they might come in useful.
One of the people Trimbole knew from the racetrack – and from eating in Tati’s restaurant in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst – was Jimmy Shepherd. They had much in common: both were huge punters who laundered – or sometimes just lost – drug money at the races. Clark met Trimbole through Shepherd in the Sydney scene. As the Griffith marijuana business got a little ‘tropical’ after Donald Mackay’s murder in 1977, the two grew closer. Outwardly dissimilar, they had interests and abilities in common.
Trimbole, the bridge builder, started playing an active part in Clark’s organisation and would eventually pay, on behalf of his Griffith principals, some $30 million to take over the Australian end of what the media would later call the ‘Mr Asia’ syndicate – Clark’s Organisation – while Clark stayed overseas. He, too, by mid-1978 was getting ‘tropical’.
On appearances and background, the scruffy, big-bellied Italian racing identity and the flinty, physically fit and impeccably-dressed Clark, who despised punting as a mug’s game, had little in common except an aversion to honest work and access to obscene amounts of black money. The first real test of their fledgling business relationship was when Clark asked Trimbole to solve a problem for him. He wanted Douglas and Isabel Wilson killed.
His instructions were chillingly specific: he wanted the pair to disappear, as if they might have done a runner and changed their identities. Knowing how devoted they were to their dog, he wanted it killed, too; presumably because anyone who knew the Wilsons knew they wouldn’t leave the dog. And, just before they were killed, they were to be told why: ‘You get this for talking to the police in Queensland.’
Trimbole was keen to please. He said he had just the man: one who had done another ‘job’ for him. He meant the middleaged painter and docker James ‘Iceman’ Bazley.
According to ‘Frank’ Tizzoni, who would later testify against Bazley, Trimbole called him on 27 March 1979, and asked him to pick him up at Melbourne Airport. When Tizzoni did, they went to a hotel car park, where Trimbole told him Clark wanted to get rid of two people who had talked to police in Queensland. Tizzoni said he would find out if the hit man who had killed Mackay was available. Trimbole relayed the instructions about killing the dog, and about leaving the Wilsons’ car in the long-term car park at the airport to make it look as if they had fled using false identities.
Tizzoni, himself a middle man, called the shifty Melbourne gun dealer, George Joseph, who by virtue of his occupation had friends on both sides of the law – criminals, police and security guards. Joseph had set up a meeting between Bazley and Tizzoni two years earlier at Trimbole’s request.
The meeting took place at the same spot: in a car parked in the leafy residential street running behind Kew Cemetery. Tizzoni relayed the orders but Bazley resented the order to kill the Wilsons’ dog, Taj. ‘Why do the dog? Dogs don’t talk,’ he said, in a bizarre display of compassion.
Tizzoni shrugged it off, and told Bazley the Wilsons would drive down from Sydney, expecting to meet a person at a Seymour motel (north of Melbourne) that they had been told they were ‘taking over from’ in Melbourne. Bazley would pose as that person. He suggested the following Sunday, 8 April, and asked for $10,000 for each victim. Tizzoni readily agreed, as Trimbole had made it clear there was much more money available than that. He agreed to drop the Wilsons’ car at the airport and to ensure the bodies would never be found.
‘There’s no worry about that; I’ll put them through the mincer,’ Bazley promised. These barbaric details were music to Clark’s ears when later relayed to him by Trimbole.
When Trimbole heard Bazley was reluctant to kill the Wilsons’ dog, he remonstrated and Tizzoni spoke to Bazley, who reluctantly agreed.
The Wilsons left Sydney that Sunday and drove south down the Hume Highway to Seymour, an hour north of Melbourne’s suburbs. But Bazley had to cancel at the last minute because he had hurt his arm, which was in a sling. It was too late to head off the Wilsons. Trimbole flew to Melbourne and Tizzoni drove him to the Seymour motel the Wilsons had booked into, to make sure they were there, and had not suspected anything was amiss.
The Wilsons returned to Sydney, their lives spared for five more days. Two days later, Bazley told Tizzoni his arm was better and suggested the ‘job’ go ahead that Friday. This was proof, if nothing else, that Bazley was neither religious nor superstitious.
It was Friday the 13th, and also Good Friday.
This time Bazley was waiting for the unsuspecting couple. No one knows exactly where he asked them to follow him, but it was most likely to a suburban house with a garage somewhere close to the airport. He told them why they were to die and shot Wilson first, then his wife. But he did not shoot the dog.
Taj the keeshond was found wandering the streets in the northern suburbs on Easter Monday, and was taken in and cared for by a man who later handed him in to police. Like Bazley, the Wilsons and Dennis Brown, the man who found their bodies a month later, he was a dog lover – which was more than could be said of Terry Clark. He loved only himself and money – or, rather, the power it bought him over others.
Clark couldn’t resist boasting about the murder to his third wife Maria Muhaury, mother of his son, Jarrod. During an argument, he threatened to get the same hit man to kill her if she caused any trouble. This might explain why she had no qualms about testifying against him later. But it doesn’t explain why so many women threw themselves at Clark. His own theory was that it was the money.