HOW BOB TRIMBOLE BEAT THE ODDS
‘The Commonwealth, New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland Governments have established a judicial inquiry into the possible drug trafficking and related activities of Terrence John Clark and other persons associated with him. It will be headed by His Honour Mr Justice Donald Gerard Stewart of the New South Wales Supreme Court …’
WHEN the Stewart Royal Commission was born on 30 June 1981, the words were formal but the meaning was as plain as the plot in any western: a new sheriff had been handed a badge and a posse to round up the bad guys.
The Stewart inquiry had many fathers – its birth was announced by the acting Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, and the premiers of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. It was rigorous, vigorous and blessed with many investigators – detectives, lawyers and accountants. But a Royal Commission is not born overnight. There had been a long gestation. Since the arrest of Clark and his lackeys for Martin Johnstone’s murder, and the inquest into Douglas and Isabel Wilson’s murder in 1979, it had been inevitable the authorities would be forced to shine light in dark places, to ask questions dodged too long, to break what a family friend of the murdered Donald Mackay called ‘the appalling silence’ about the drug lords who corrupted police, politicians and the judiciary.
Long before Judge Stewart’s posse started knocking on doors, dragging in witnesses and asking them tough questions under their draconian powers, the dogs had been barking about the new inquiry. And no one knew more dogs than ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, a man whose adult life had been spent cultivating contacts as skilfully as his Calabrian cousins cultivated cannabis among the rows of irrigated grape and tomato vines and citrus trees around Griffith, Mildura, Shepparton and South Australia’s Riverland.
The racecourse members’ bar and betting ring is where the social and professional barriers of the outside world can be broken down by a powerful lubricant – the desire to back a winner. In Sydney, especially, it was routine that judges, lawyers, politicians, captains of industry and senior police rubbed shoulders with ‘colourful racing identities’ whose sources of income were a mystery or an open secret, depending on who was asking.
In this group, a powerful currency is The Tip – inside information that this horse will win or that favourite won’t. That such ‘certainties’ can hardly be predicted without some form of conspiracy has never stopped otherwise honest people from falling under the spell of those who regularly tip winners – and losers.
The organised crime figure who uses punting to launder black money can buy influence beyond the crude buying power of the tainted cash he uses to bribe jockeys, stablehands and trainers, to pay doping gangs or to pay criminal race-fixers, perhaps even to ‘sweeten’ racing officials. Not only does bribery improve the odds of achieving his main aim of laundering black money by landing winning bets – but in the case of the gregarious Trimbole, fixing races gave the opportunity to claim acquaintance with and influence powerful or useful people otherwise beyond his reach. How? Because people that would not dream of accepting a bribe will scramble for a tip like children for lollies. They will blithely – and blindly – bet on ‘sure things’ that common sense suggests are probably the fruit of organised race rigging. This gives the tipper, if he uses his corrupt inside information carefully, a hidden power, just as effective but far less risky than the blackmail racket of setting up targets with illicit sex and threatening or implying exposure, as the sinister Abe Saffron did for decades to compromise those in power. Whereas many people secretly disliked or feared Saffron, most people who knew Bob Trimbole liked him. He loved racing and a lot of racing people returned the compliment. The most common phrase used about him was that he was ‘a good bloke’, a view some people stuck to even after he was exposed as a mobster with a murderous streak.
What was the secret to Trimbole’s appeal? That question teased Carl Mengler, a senior officer in the Victoria Police in the early 1980s who would head a task force on the recommendation of the Stewart Royal Commission when it made its report in early 1983. Mengler would spend years dissecting Trimbole’s public and private life, reading documents and interviewing scores of his associates, and probably knows as much about him as anyone alive.
It was Mengler who told crime reporter Keith Moor a story that captured the deft way Trimbole got to people who were useful to him and, by extension, to the Calabrian crime family he belonged to and to other crime outfits he knew.
‘There was this quite prominent chap interviewed about his association with Trimbole,’ said Mengler. ‘He said he hadn’t wanted anything to do with Trimbole at first, but they had become friends over time. Now this bloke was a racing man, frequently at the track, as of course was Trimbole, and that’s how they met. This man was of high social standing and in a position of being able to influence a lot of prominent people; he was from a very respected family.
‘He recalled this untidy little man often being near him. Now, Trimbole was an expensive dresser, but never quite looked the part. His belly was hanging over his trousers and the trouser bottoms were just that bit long that they hung over his dirty shoes, not the sort of man our influential friend would normally associate with, him being a real toff and mixing in all the right circles.
‘The toff started to take notice of this man being around him wherever he went. He would look along the bar and this bloke would nod at him. After a while Trimbole got to saying hello to the toff. The toff said he hadn’t wanted to talk to this “little scrag” and had more or less told him to “piss off”. A week or so goes by and the toff sees Trimbole, again at the races, and the toff has a guilty conscience about having been rude to Trimbole, so this time when Trimbole says hello the toff has a brief chat with him.
‘A week later the toff was at the bar and the waiter brought a drink over and said it was from the bloke at the other end of the bar, and of course the bloke was Trimbole.’
And so the story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion, as the patient Trimbole, the onetime mechanic who shouted the bar when he won on the punt, played the ‘mark’ like a fish. As the casual race-day conversations moved naturally from small talk to the real business of the day – punting – Trimbole wormed his way into the other man’s estimation with the one thing that’s at a premium at the track: inside information.
The toff fancies himself as a racing man, on first-name terms with owners and trainers, and one day he suggests Trimbole back a particular horse. It so happens that Trimbole knows something about that particular race and suggests that a different horse, at longer odds, will win. The toff shrugs – but can’t help being puzzled and impressed when Trimbole’s tip romps in and his own doesn’t. This is the bait. He takes the hook the following week, when Trimbole tips him a winner, which he backs. Trimbole doesn’t have to tip many – but when he does, they mostly win. And the toff puts plenty on them. So he starts seeking Trimbole out, inviting him to lunch and dinner regularly. It is a complete role reversal, so that in the end Trimbole calls the shots because he is owed the favours and still supplies the ‘mail’.
Call it the power of ten to one.
TRIMBOLE might never have needed to call in a favour from that particular man but the toff was only one of many he had cultivated and compromised. And many of them knew people in high places: state and federal police, politicians, lawyers and public servants. Some were actually paid for favours done – to have charges dropped or sentences made lighter. Others were befriended, just in case. For Trimbole and the shadowy people behind him, this was like an insurance policy. In early 1981, it was time for Trimbole to make a claim.
The international publicity surrounding the Mr Asia trial had exposed the network of corruption that Terry Clark had exploited, and posed questions that Trimbole and others would find difficult to answer. Despite Trimbole’s ability to foil the law, it was becoming obvious to some of his well-placed contacts that the looming Stewart Royal Commission would make him too ‘hot’ to be around. After years of his acting with relative impunity, there would be nowhere to hide … at least, not in Australia.
Even if Trimbole had been brash enough to think he could tough it out in the witness box, his publicity-shy backers in the La Famiglia, the Griffith cell of the Honoured Society, were anxious to get him out of the way to avoid a repeat of the scrutiny they’d endured during the earlier Woodward Royal Commission prompted by the Donald Mackay murder.
After years of being the secret society’s front man, Trimbole had become something of a liability. The public backlash over the Mackay scandal had been followed by the debacle of Isabel and Douglas Wilson’s murder, and now there was the link to the murderous ‘Mr Asia’ heroin syndicate to scandalise the public.
So, by the new year of 1981, Trimbole was getting the message loud and clear. He had done a deal to ‘buy out’ the Australian arm of the Mr Asia business for $30 million, and had visited Clark and his crew in London for long periods in 1979, where he combined gambling in West End clubs with making shady new European contacts involved in arms smuggling as well as drugs. Perhaps he was thinking ahead, making contingency plans, because when the warning signals started filtering through more than a year later, he seemed ready to step into a new world.
Secret telephone taps that New South Wales Criminal Intelligence Unit detectives illegally put on Trimbole’s telephone in April 1981 show that four prominent people – a Sydney lawyer and a doctor and two senior New South Wales police officers – each warned Trimbole that the Stewart inquiry was going to open and that he would be called before it. The doctor had links with illegal SP bookmakers in Melbourne and organised crime figures. Police telephone taps also picked up Trimbole talking to leading trainers and jockeys. During one taped conversation, much quoted later, a jockey famously told Trimbole that another rider ‘doesn’t care if he gets six months. He’ll almost strangle a horse to pull it up.’
Transcripts of telephone tapes later leaked to the legendary investigative reporter Bob Bottom showed that Trimbole telephoned a former Labor Party power broker on 4 April 1981 and asked him if he had yet spoken to a State judge ‘so we can see where we’re up to’.
The Labor man: I’ve talked to a lot of people.
Trimbole: yeah, but have you spoken to him or …
Labor man: No, I couldn’t. They couldn’t get to the judge (then adds) I spoke to someone very close to him.
Trimbole: I see, fair enough, all right mate. Well, I just wanted to know because if not I’ve got a bloke who knows him pretty well, too.
Labor man: It never hurts to have more (than) one talking to…
Trimbole: I just didn’t want to double up.
Labor man: yeah, you don’t want to overplay.
Although each is too wily to mention specific names on a telephone, the meaning is clear. Later in the conversation the Labor man says: ‘I spoke to somebody a bit down the line that’s probably got more influence and I think they’re all worried about the situation.’ He then says that he will be having lunch with the judge the following week (‘I’ve been a mate of his for thirty years’) and warns Trimbole not to overplay his hand through other approaches because ‘sometimes judges get a bit touchy.’
Less than four weeks later, on 1 May, Trimbole spoke to a senior Sydney policeman who asked to meet him to avoid talking on the telephone. There was a clear inference he had ‘hot’ information to give Trimbole. Next day, a Sydney doctor told Trimbole on the telephone, ‘the heat’s on’.
Asked who was putting the heat on, the doctor says: ‘You might be washed up, do you get me? Re down south; they’re pretty wet, you know.’
Another senior policeman warned Trimbole on 2 May there was definitely a ‘set-up’ and referred obliquely to a new investigation. Trimbole lapsed into racing slang. ‘… it looks as though I better get me … on and keep fit. We’ll just see what happens. One thing, if I break down I’ve got plenty of assistants.’
A Sydney lawyer arranged to meet Trimbole on 6 May in offices in the city. During a telephone conversation the previous day, he told Trimbole: ‘Well, I would be thinking I would be having a holiday if I was you.’
The letters patent for the Stewart Royal Commission were issued by the Governor-General in the last week of June 1981. But the reluctant star witness, forewarned from so many quarters, had already flown.
On 7 May, under an overcast sky, Trimbole walked through Customs at Sydney Airport with the confidence of a man who knew something others didn’t. He was flying to Europe via the United States on his own passport but he had filled in his flight departure card with a false birth date, a detail he knew would be enough to throw off the Customs computer programmed to detect his exit.
As usual, Aussie Bob the race fixer had inside knowledge and had set up a ‘boat race’ for himself. Luckily, too, the police taps on his telephone had been suspended two days earlier. That’s what friends are for.
THE Australian public would not glimpse Trimbole again for more than three years. But those who knew where to look could find him if they wanted. This did not seem to include the relevant Australian authorities.
Trimbole’s old partner-in-crime Gianfranco ‘Frank’ Tizzoni knew where to look. The Melbourne-based Tizzoni had first linked up with Trimbole in 1971 to sell and service pinball machines before moving into marijuana distribution with him. In July 1982, Tizzoni visited France and met with Trimbole, who was using the name Robert White and living in luxurious circumstances in Nice with his long time de facto wife and her daughter. He was not the only Australian villain to see the wanted man in France: the disgraced doctor Nick Paltos visited Trimbole after getting through Customs by mysterious means despite being under investigation for massive medi-fraud. But that’s another story. By this time, unknown to Trimbole and the rest of the Honoured Society, Tizzoni was already talking to the Victoria Police, a choice he had made after being picked up by what he was told was ‘pure chance’ while driving back to Melbourne from New South Wales on 31 March 1982.
But that was later. To understand what a can of worms the Mackay case posed to various law enforcement bodies, it is necessary to go back to where the mess began – to the appointment of a New South Wales policeman to handle the case. He was Joe Parrington, who in the 1970s was a poster boy for the New South Wales Police Force. Big and handsome in a lantern-jawed way, he was a double for laconic American tough-guy actor Lee Marvin.
The disappearance of Donald Mackay was a big case but Parrington believed he was up to the challenge. In 1977 the Detective Sergeant (second class) considered himself ‘the most senior and most experienced operational homicide investigator’ in the state.
Despite the crime scene including bullets and blood that matched Mackay’s type, rumours began early that he had engineered his own disappearance. The rumours were peddled by the corrupt local politician, Al Grassby, bent police and senior members of the New South Wales government, as outlined in a separate chapter. The media was briefed behind the scenes not to ‘jump to conclusions’ that Mackay had been killed. This was despite the fact that Mackay was a devout Christian and a committed family man who ran a successful business and had not moved any money as part of some mad plan to set up another life. There was not a skerrick of evidence to justify the claims but the hurtful rumours would persist for years.
The irony was that the group of faceless men who had ordered the murder had first considered compromising Mackay by setting him up with a woman but concluded he was too moral to fall for the trap.
Despite national outrage and public memorials in Griffith, the New South Wales government’s response was as cynical as it was pathetic. It offered a paltry $25,000 reward for the ‘missing’ man. Soon the reward reached $100,000 – through public donations.
Enter Parrington – a man supremely confident in his own ability. History would show his confidence was misplaced.
The previous year he was given information on the murder of Maria Hisshion that with a little luck and a lot of digging could have linked the killing back to the Mr Asia drug syndicate. Parrington chose to ignore it – a decision Justice Stewart would later describe as ‘astonishing.’
A year after Mackay was killed, Parrington presented a sixteen-page summary of the case to the Woodward Royal Commission, still claiming a ‘lack of direct evidence to clearly indicate the reason for Mackay’s disappearance’.
Despite the size of the investigation, when Parrington was promoted to the breaking squad in 1978 the Mackay file went with him. Any calls to the homicide squad on the murder were simply transferred to Big Joe.
As Parrington climbed the New South Wales police managerial ladder he remained in charge of the controversial case. By the end of 1981 it had stalled and would have remained unsolved if not for a split-second decision made by a policeman far away from the grass castles of Griffith and the political intrigue of Sydney. Which is where Trimbole’s old pal Frank Tizzoni was forced into a starring role.
IN 1981 the New South Wales police and their federal counterparts agreed to run a risky stratagem that would effectively allow the Griffith Mafia to grow massive crops of marijuana in the hope that police would be able to gather enough evidence to arrest the principals.
The operation, code-named Seville, discovered the group would produce up to ten crops at a time because it worked on the theory that some would be discovered.
In March 1982 police watched as their targets met some unidentified men in Canberra and transferred nearly 100 kilos of marijuana into a vehicle.
But instead of heading to Sydney as expected, the men headed towards Melbourne in two vehicles. One was a gold-coloured Mercedes sedan; the other a van. Once they crossed the border into Victoria, the New South Wales police would have no jurisdiction.
Dismayed surveillance police made frantic calls to the Victorian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence with a request to follow but not intercept the vehicles.
An experienced Melbourne detective, John Weel, was instructed to tail the two vehicles as they reached Melbourne’s northern outskirts. But because it was close to evening peak hour the policeman feared he could lose the targets, so he took a punt. He took it upon himself to pull them over – and found a bale of marijuana in the boot of Tizzoni’s Mercedes, as well as more of the illicit crop in the van, driven by one Robert Enterkin. (A third man, Tony Barbaro, one of a notorious Griffith family, was a passenger in Tizzoni’s car. Tizzoni said later it was Barbaro who had asked him to pick up the marijuana from near Canberra.)
Some cynics would later wonder why the careful Tizzoni would use his own car to carry part of the haul. But it was a different era: things were done differently then.
After his arrest, Tizzoni used a private investigator to discreetly inquire if Weel could be bribed. When he realised Weel was an honest cop, he knew he was in trouble. Tizzoni, Barbaro and Enterkin were charged and bailed but Tizzoni – neither Calabrian nor a sworn member of the Honoured Society – started looking for ways to trade his way out of trouble. A former debt collector and private detective, he saw himself as a businessman, if a shady one. He had been in partnership with Bob Trimbole in the pinball machine business since 1971, and had become increasingly involved in wholesaling marijuana in Melbourne for Trimbole’s Griffith connections. The easy money had appealed to Tizzoni but the outwardly respectable middle-aged family man from Balwyn, who had invested his drug earnings into several properties, had never been the sort of criminal who sees prison as an inconvenient occupational hazard. Somehow, he wanted to covertly negotiate his way out of a prison sentence without the risk of actually telling all he knew about the Honoured Society.
Two respected Bureau of Criminal Intelligence members, Bob Clark, an expert on Italian organised crime, and John Mc-Caskill, an intelligence specialist, turned Tizzoni into Australia’s most important informer.
He eventually told them the story of how Trimbole had used him to recruit a hit man to kill Mackay and, later, Isabel and Douglas Wilson.
To provide a cover story for the fact that police dropped drug charges against Tizzoni, Weel pretended to be corrupt and to have been bought off.
The story was so realistic that a Mafia figure paid Tizzoni $30,000 as part of the bribe money. Naturally, Tizzoni kept the cash. He may have reformed but thirty grand is thirty grand.
Tizzoni volunteered to travel overseas and find Trimbole, and did. Because his wife and children were in Melbourne, and he owned a farm at Koo-Wee-Rup south-east of Melbourne, and at least one property at Griffith, he was not considered a bail risk. He went to Europe three months after his arrest and came back with Trimbole’s address (and alias and car registration number) in Nice.
The Victorian police were keen to use the tip-off to nail Australia’s supposedly most wanted man, who at that stage had been ‘on the run’ for fourteen months, but there was nothing they could do but hand the address to ‘relevant authorities’.
Victoria police formed a taskforce, code-named Trio, under the command of Carl Mengler, to verify Tizzoni’s claims.
Discussing it later, Mengler was tactful but critical: ‘I certainly believe that if such an address is given to police, and known to be accurate, as was the case with the address supplied by Tizzone, then every conceivable effort should be made to act on the information immediately and bring the person to justice. That didn’t happen in Trimbole’s case.’
Mengler said the information should have gone ‘straight to the Prime Minister’, who should have authorised a small task force to go to France with special warrants to request the French to arrest Trimbole and extradite him. He said if it were true that the Stewart Royal Commission had been unable to do anything more than send a letter to the French authorities nominating Trimbole’s address in Nice, it was pathetic – and that a golden opportunity had been wasted.
‘You don’t write letters giving the address of somebody who is supposed to be Australia’s most wanted man,’ Mengler said. ‘You knock on his door.’
The truth was that the Stewart Royal Commission, for all its powers to ask questions, could only recommend that certain action be taken by the authorities. It was not Judge Stewart’s fault no-one was sent after Trimbole. If it were anyone’s fault, it lay elsewhere, somewhere among the silent alliance of politicians, public servants and police who had their reasons for looking out for their mate Bob.
‘He was protected in high places,’ was Tizzoni’s pithy postscript to the affair. It seems the only explanation for the lack of action.
If the Victorian police had been allowed to build on the confession they might have cracked the Mackay case. But the Trio taskforce was not looking to charge Tizzoni, Bazley and Joseph with Mackay’s murder because it had happened over the border. Instead, they settled on ‘conspiracy’ because the murder plot had been hatched in Melbourne.
Detectives in Victoria were optimistic but their New South Wales counterparts were not happy. Parrington, especially felt it was a New South Wales case and believed the Victorian prosecution was doomed to fail.
Not for the first time, he was wrong. He had not endeared himself to Trio detectives: once refusing to discuss the case with expert investigators and demanding to be briefed by a commissioned officer. He made the comment that in New South Wales ‘we talk to the organ grinder and not the monkey.’ Clearly he thought he was the big banana.
If it had just been trivial interstate rivalry it wouldn’t have mattered but Parrington appeared to be concealing evidence that could have been used in the Melbourne prosecution in the hope he would use it later in New South Wales.
Bazley was sentenced to life in 1986 for the murders of the Wilsons, nine years for the conspiracy to murder Mackay and a further nine years for a $270,000 armed robbery
A subsequent judicial inquiry into the New South Wales handling of the case by retired judge John Nagle, QC, left Parrington’s professional reputation in tatters.
‘Parrington anticipated that the Victorian conspiracy prosecution of Bazley would fail and wanted to hoard Pursehouse’s evidence (a key Mackay witness) for a New South Wales prosecution … It was his all-consuming, but unthinking determination to bring the killers of the Donald Bruce Mackay to New South Wales that has proved his undoing,’ Nagle wrote.
Nagle found that Parrington, ‘Presented as a stubborn man with little imagination or breadth of vision and no mental resilience … it involved impeding Victorian police officers and Crown law authorities in the prosecution of murder.
‘It is the commission’s view that his motive was to gain credit for himself as an investigating officer and for the New South Wales police by a successful prosecution of Bazley in this state.
‘There is evidence warranting the prosecution of Frederick Joseph Parrington for the offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice.’
On 13 March 1987, Parrington was charged departmentally with two counts of neglect of duty and fined $500 on each charge, and removed for twelve months from his post as manager of criminal investigations.
Parrington was an honest man who wanted Mackay killers brought to justice in New South Wales. But his refusal to co-operate with Victorian authorities could have resulted in the case remaining unsolved.
Meanwhile, Tizzoni was the star witness … but did he tell the truth? According to one key investigator, ‘Frank told his version of the truth and made sure his role was minimised.’
Some wonder if Bazley, a small middle-aged man, could have shot a big man like Mackay in the Griffith Hotel carpark and bundled the body into a car then disposed of it on his own.
Mackay was a fit squash player, ruckman size at 192 centimetres and 95 kilos. Bazley was about 168 centimetres and lightly built. Almost certainly he would have needed help and many believe Tizzoni was his assistant. But if Frank had confessed that he would have opened himself up to murder charges.
In October 1984 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Mackay and the Wilsons and was sentenced to five years’ jail. He was released into witness protection after just a year. In February 1986 he was released on parole and moved to Italy. He died there in 1988.
He had previously bought a grave in a Melbourne cemetery and pre-paid his tombstone. Both remain unused – he was buried in Italy.
His co-conspirator, the gun dealer George Joseph, became a prosecution witness and was sentenced to a maximum of seven years jail but released early in October 1984. He went on to be an occasional judge in various Miss Nude contests.
There is no justice.
IN March 1984, when the long-awaited inquest into the death of Donald Mackay began in Sydney, a barrister called Brian Morris made an odd submission to the coroner, Bruce Brown. ‘Business interests’ overseas made it inconvenient for ‘Mr Trimbole’ to attend just then, the lawyer said. Trimbole, in telephoned instructions, had not said he was unwilling to attend – merely unable to do so for some time. Morris then applied for leave to represent Trimbole – a request he would later withdraw on grounds he could not be properly instructed by his client.
Pressed by the Crown advocate to explain how he came to be appearing for a fugitive, Morris said he had originally been briefed by Trimbole before he had left Australia two years earlier – and that the instructions had been confirmed by telephone.
When the advocate inquired if Morris happened to know Trimbole’s current address, the barrister said he did not have the exact address. Asked to produce a document giving Craig Trimbole power of attorney for his father, Morris produced one ostensibly signed by Trimbole senior and witnessed by a solicitor on 15 May 1981 – a week after Trimbole had fled Australia.
The inquest underlined the scandalous official silence about Trimbole’s whereabouts. When it moved from Sydney to Griffith later that month, the sham was further exposed when a friend of Trimbole’s wife, Joan, and daughters, Glenda and Gayelle, surprised the court with a frank picture of how easily the family stayed in touch with the man who had set them up in relative luxury.
Vicky Greedy, described to the inquest as a regular visitor to the Trimbole’s Griffith home in the 1970s, told the coroner she knew that his married daughter Gayelle Bignold had kept in close contact with her father in the three years since he had fled overseas. Gayelle had told her she intended to send her father a videotape of her small son’s birthday party. Most damaging, perhaps, to those authorities supposedly looking for Trimbole, was the revelation that she knew of a photograph taken of Trimbole and his small grandson – who had been born after Trimbole’s departure from Australia in May 1981. And Gayelle Bignold had shown friends clothing for the child which she said her father had sent ‘from France’.
The coroner and his counsel could not ignore Greedy’s evidence. When the inquest resumed in Sydney, Glenda Trimbole appeared and admitted that she, her sister Gayelle and Gayelle’s husband, John Bignold, had visited Trimbole several times in his apartment on the French Riviera. They were a little more forthcoming than their brother Craig Trimbole, who told the inquest he had been to Nice with his wife, but he claimed he had not seen his father there. He even claimed he had not known whether his father had been in Nice at the time.
Although he held his father’s power of attorney, Craig claimed not to know what type of business Trimbole senior was involved in and said he was not curious enough to ask. Under cross examination he denied telling his father to call him on Saturday evenings at his mother-in-law’s house, where he always had dinner, rather than use his (Craig’s) home number in Cabramatta. He denied that he had set up the Saturday night hotline arrangement because he thought his home telephone might be tapped by police. This was not widely believed.
Earlier, at the Griffith hearing, Vicky Greedy said she had been a regular visitor to Joan Trimbole’s house until Donald Mackay’s disappearance in 1977. Sometimes Robert Trimbole had been at the house, and she would see him speaking ‘in a confidential way’ in Italian with his ‘great friend’ Joe Calabria. This was unusual for the Australian-born Trimbole, who normally spoke English to anyone who could speak English, which Calabria could.
Another local woman, Olive Middleton, gave evidence that Trimbole and Joe Calabria had, while visiting her property at Coleambally, asked her for some empty cans to use for targets because they wanted to ‘try out some new guns’.
Middleton said she and her husband had sold the property to Calabria in June 1975. She had assumed Trimbole was Calabria’s business partner from Sydney.
The Coleambally connection soon came up again, when a detective sergeant, Ronald Jenkins, of the New South Wales drug squad, told the inquest he had met Donald Mackay at a Griffith motel in November 1975. Mackay had given him information and handed him a sketch map which showed marijuana crops in the area. As a result the police had arrested and charged several Calabrian men who had more than 30 acres of marijuana growing – a massive crop that would have produced $25 million in 1975 values, a staggering amount when the entire farm on which it was grown had cost $45,000.
During the marijuana conspirators’ subsequent trial, the inbuilt flaws of the legal system had exposed Mackay as the secret police source because Jenkins’ police diary was freely available to defence lawyers. One way or the other, the Calabrian crime syndicate got to know Mackay’s name, and started to plan his death. And Trimbole had been at the centre of it, as the Mr Fixit for La Famiglia – the Griffith cell of N’Dranghita.
Now he was long gone. And although friends and family and potential enemies like Tizzoni could reach him at will, it looked as if no-one else wanted to find him – bar those who didn’t have the authority to do so.
IN July 1984, Trimbole was reportedly spied at the Los Angeles Olympics, but it barely raised a ripple. Sleeping dogs were allowed to lie until October that year, when committal hearings were held against the two men Tizzoni had named as co-conspirators in Donald Mackay’s murder: the hit man James Frederick Bazley and a North Melbourne gun dealer, George Joseph, who had recommended Bazley for the ‘job’ at Tizzoni’s request.
Much to Tizzoni’s anger, he was also charged over Mackay’s death, despite his calculating efforts to earn immunity from prosecution by informing on Trimbole, Bazley and Joseph – although he was too canny to directly implicate any of the Griffith syndicate by name. Because Mackay had been killed in New South Wales, the three accused could not be tried for murder in Victoria and instead were charged with conspiracy to murder, because they had arranged the murder in Melbourne.
The committal forced the story back onto the front page – and heightened public interest in the ‘mystery’ of Trimbole’s whereabouts and the scandal that he was not hunted down. Coincidentally, given the three-year hiatus, Australian Embassy officials in France announced on 8 October 1984, that a man matching Trimbole’s description had been arrested by French police. The story went nowhere – although clearly Trimbole did – but it might have stirred public unrest about Trimbole’s dream run as a fugitive.
Just two weeks later, Victoria’s Director of Public Prosecutions, John Phillips QC, called for a ‘massive effort’ by Australian and international police to track down Trimbole.
‘Grave public disquiet’ about the Trimbole affair would ‘not be dispelled’ until he was brought before an Australian court, Phillips said. There was enough evidence to charge Trimbole with complicity in the murders of Donald Mackay and Douglas and Isabel Wilson. He even proposed an unprecedented step: to appoint one magistrate to conduct all proceedings against Trimbole, whether in New South Wales or Victoria.
‘When this has been done it will be incumbent on the Australian and international police services to mount a massive effort to secure Trimbole’s arrest,’ he said. He was backed by the Victorian Attorney-General, Jim Kennan, who said he was ‘anxious to see all steps should be taken’ to bring Trimbole back to face justice. Fine words. Noble sentiment. But not much use.
Even if it were Trimbole that had been arrested in France in early October, the French authorities had not bothered to identify or to hold him. The inference was that he had bribed his way out and then fled France because it was getting a little too ‘hot’. Either way, the next time Trimbole was heard of, he was in Ireland. Where, as it turned out, he had already established a hiding spot.
Meanwhile, back in Australia, a story broke that he had once tried to lobby three Queensland knights in an attempt to nobble a Queensland Turf Club inquiry. Telephone taps showed that before he fled Australia, Trimbole had called former Labor Party stalwart Sir ‘Jack’ Egerton and asked him to speak to former Federal Defence Minister, Sir James Killen and a former Supreme Court judge and QTC chairman, Sir Edward Williams. All because he wanted a favour for a mate, a horse trainer who had been ‘rubbed out’ and wanted to be granted a Queensland trainer’s licence. It didn’t work this time, but it showed how comfortable Trimbole was about approaching friends in high places. And how good he was at making new ones.
THE real Michael Pius Hanley was as much of a mystery as the man who took his name. No one managed to track Hanley down later, supposing he was even alive, to find out just how a fugitive Italian-Australian drug baron came to buy, borrow or steal his identity. Or, to be precise, to ask how the Australian came by the real Hanbury’s driver’s licence and social insurance cards.
The address on the cards led to a run-down tenement block behind Dublin’s law courts. But if the real Michael Hanbury had been there, no one was telling nosy Australian reporters who came calling on the last weekend of October 1978. A man describing himself as Michael Hanbury’s brother, Jimmy, was there with his wife but neither was inclined to clarify where or who Michael might be. Neighbours guessed he might have gone to London – or perhaps even to Australia. Or, and this was pause for thought, that he might be dead.
Trimbole, like Terry Clark and his associates in the ‘Mr Asia’ organisation, was a master at obtaining false passports. A favourite scam they had used in Australia was to take details from an infant’s gravestone inscription or death notice then use them to apply for a passport, which could then be parlayed into a string of other identification documents used to open bank and credit accounts. But finding someone down and out who found they could use extra money more than they could use a passport also solved the problem in those unsophisticated days.
When ‘Michael Hanbury’ and his wife, Anne, and their daughter, Melanie, first turned up in the little tourist and fishing town of Westport on Ireland’s west coast in March 1984, the locals noticed that he had an Australian accent but took his claims of Irish heritage and citizenship at face value.
Given that Ireland’s main export for two centuries had been people, the Irish were used to thousands of distant ‘cousins’ visiting the old country to dig over their family roots. It was true that Michael Hanbury didn’t quite look or sound like a transplanted son of Ireland but why would anyone question it? He was gregarious, generous, loved horse racing and, whether in a pub bar or the best restaurant, had a knack of making friends. He always had great ‘craic’ about him – and plenty of money. It helped, of course, that he talked about spending big – making plans to buy land and build a house.
The Hanburys enrolled Melanie at a remote convent boarding school called Kylemore Abbey, in April. By that time they had already become friendly with a local builder and deep sea fisherman called Padraic Conlon, a trusting soul who, with his wife Mai, grew fond of the cheerful Australian and his wife. The helpful Conlon helped his new friend select land and plan his new house in a quiet spot a little out of Westport. Ireland’s sleepy west coast was the ideal place to stay out of sight yet be close enough to the main hubs of Europe that a businessman with diverse interests could stay in touch.
Later, when most of his movements were unravelled, it became clear that ‘Michael Pius Hanbury’ came and went from Ireland several times in 1984, which might have accounted for the report of him being ‘arrested’ in France early in October.
Given the lack of a co-ordinated international push to trace him, Trimbole’s cover was good enough that he could move with relative impunity. If he hadn’t been diagnosed with prostate cancer that October, perhaps he would never have been caught at all.
For three years he had stayed in touch with family and friends in ways that had evaded whatever rudimentary steps the Australian authorities were taking to monitor communications. But when he took ill and was told it was potentially terminal, it seems that the usual evasive tactics were abandoned. The calls made to the Trimbole family were intercepted, and it was so clear that worried family members would go overseas to see him that it was impossible to miss – or ignore, given the pressure building over Trimbole’s absence during the highly-publicised Mackay inquest. So when Glenda Trimbole left the family home at Griffith and flew overseas, probably early that October, all the investigators had to do was follow. Like tracking an elephant through snow.
THEY arrested him just after he left the Gresham Hotel in Dublin on 25 October, a Thursday evening. He was with Anne-Marie Presland and his daughter, Glenda, who had unwittingly led investigators to him almost three weeks earlier. The arrest, the authorities claimed, was the result of joint undercover work by investigators from Australia, Ireland and Britain.
After tracing the origins of calls following telephone intercepts in Griffith and Sydney, police had watched Trimbole from when he and Presland and her daughter Melanie had arrived back in Ireland from Switzerland on 7 October. The trio had then flown in a light plane from Dublin to the west coast to avoid a four-hour journey by road, and stayed at the Hotel Westport, where they were well-known from previous visits.
The hotel receptionist would later tell reporters that the Australian she knew as Mr Hanbury ‘did not look at all well.’ She was right. Trimbole was suffering severe abdominal pains that had driven him to seek treatment in Zurich. He was in so much pain that his friend Padraic Conlon told him that he should join him in going to a hospital in Dublin, where Conlon was already booked in for a check up. They all drove to Dublin next day, where they met Glenda Trimbole. The women booked into the luxurious Gresham Hotel while Conlon and Trimbole went to the Mater Hospital.
Conlon left the hospital after his check-up but ‘Michael Hanbury’ stayed for two weeks, while Ann Marie Presland, her daughter and Glenda lived at the hotel. In that time he had an exploratory operation that confirmed the cancer had spread and would kill him, probably in a matter of months.
When the party checked out of the Gresham Hotel next day, set to leave Ireland, the police swooped. Within hours, Australia’s most wanted man was in Mountjoy Prison and Australian reporters were on their way to Ireland.
While the Melbourne Herald’s Steve Price filed his exclusive about sleeping in Trimbole’s bed at the hotel in Westport, The Age’s veteran correspondent John Stevens covered the strange chain of events that would unfold over the next few days.
It seemed clear that the Irish police had bent the rules a little to accommodate their Australian counterparts, a decision that would throw the whole case against Trimbole off course. ‘At best it can be described as unorthodox, even questionable,’ wrote Stevens. ‘Perhaps it would be unkind to describe the whole strange affair as very Irish.’
The reason for the raised eyebrows was that Trimbole was arrested not in his own name but as Michael Hanbury and held under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act on suspicion of possessing a firearm, a catch-all measure sometimes used to hold IRA terrorists. But although ‘Hanbury’ was suspected of dealing in arms as well as drugs – probably with IRA contacts – no firearm was ever found, leading a High Court judge to conclude that the gun charge was a sham concocted to hold Trimbole for the Australian police while bureaucrats and lawyers scrambled to arrange a one-off extradition deal with Ireland, which had no formal extradition treaty with Australia at the time.
‘A man from Foreign Affairs reached Dublin white-faced and exhausted after a non-stop flight from Canberra, bearing information to support the warrant – allegations of eleven offences including the murder of Donald Mackay and Douglas and Isabel Wilson,’ wrote Stevens.
None of this impressed the High Court judge at a special sitting on the Friday evening, the day after Trimbole’s arrest. This underlined the apparently strange decision by the Irish police, the Garda, to run the bogus gun charge when they already had firm information from telephone taps that the Australian, regardless of his real identity, was a known associate of IRA terrorists and had been supplying them with weapons. If they had offered the real information to justify the Australian’s arrest, the court would probably have been obliged to rule that the arrest was lawful. So what was the problem?
The most likely reason, it emerged later, was sensitive local politics. The embarrassed Irish police probably did not want to reveal the truth about their sources: the gun-running intelligence had been passed to them by British police, a fact they would rather hide. The British-Irish relationship during ‘The Troubles’ was strained. And the relationship between different police forces is strange at any time, even among the different state and federal police back in Australia.
It was just the loophole that Trimbole needed. He might have looked like ‘your average suburban greengrocer’, as one reporter described him, but he had the spending power of a mafia don. Ireland’s most eminent criminal barrister, Patrick MacEntee, appeared for him with two other counsel and a solicitor, Con O’Leary. This elite legal team demolished the faintly farcical police case, which rested on alleged possession of a non-existent gun, but ‘Hanbury’s’ freedom was as short-lived as it was expensive: after 15 minutes he was re-arrested outside the High Court and whisked to the District Court to face an extradition warrant – as Robert Trimbole – that had been hastily patched up by the Federal Attorney General’s department in Canberra.
Anne-Marie Presland, meanwhile, kept up the charade. She would answer only to ‘Mrs Hanbury’ and told reporters outside the Dublin police station that police had the wrong man. ‘I don’t know what the hell is going on here. I don’t know what the hell the police are talking about. My husband’s name is Hanbury. He was born in Ireland,’ she insisted. Not even the Irish police believed her. But, for a few days, his lawyers stuck to the Hanbury story.
The silver-haired and theatrical Patrick MacEntee, veteran of defending IRA terrorists, predicted it would not be easy to get his client back to Australia. For a start, he said, the authorities would have to prove beyond doubt that the man in Mountjoy Prison was Trimbole. ‘Then there are the legal issues involved in extradition,’ he said, which could take ‘months rather than weeks’ to sort out. His client had refused to give his fingerprints, which hindered formal identification.
Others well qualified to know Trimbole had no doubt he was the prisoner. Apart from his daughter Glenda being present, her brother, Craig Trimbole, flew in with a 60 Minutes television crew to film the circus. Two days later, lawyers appearing for the absent Trimbole at extradition proceedings in Australia officially admitted what the whole world knew, that the man in jail in Dublin was their client.
But the circus wasn’t over by a long way. When 60 Minutes went to air on the Nine network in Australia the following Sunday, Trimbole’s estranged but loyal born-again Christian wife, Joan, admitted only that the man being held in Ireland had ‘an incredible resemblance’ to her runaway husband, and that he was certainly in the company of their daughter Glenda. Not to mention their son, Craig, of course.
In the interview with Jana Wendt, Joan Trimbole revealed that her pet name for the man she hadn’t seen in three years was ‘The Godfather’. This was because, she explained, ‘he was always helping other people and always looking after his friends.’ To her eternal credit Wendt, the consummate professional, kept a straight face.
THE hasty decision by an Irish policeman to hold Trimbole on the bogus gun charge hung over the drawn-out proceedings that followed. By Christmas week, two months after his arrest, Trimbole had appeared in court nine times to play a mute part in a show that he was paying for. And there was more to come in the new year of 1985.
While Trimbole’s son, Craig, and another in-law, Tony Addabo, flew to Italy twice, obviously to get cash from some secret source, the most expensive battery of defence lawyers ever seen in Ireland worked on a case to prevent Trimbole being extradited to Australia.
Putting Trimbole’s case were not only two of Ireland’s most senior barristers but an English QC regarded as the best extradition lawyer in the business and a junior counsel and two instructing solicitors, one from London. It was the first time an English barrister had appeared with an Irish barrister in a Dublin court since ‘The Troubles’. The Irish barrister MacEntee was said to be paid a retainer of 1000 pounds a day. But that was nothing compared with the latest addition to the team, an 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner called Sean MacBride – Irish nationalist hero, world-renowned civil rights lawyer and co-founder of Amnesty International. This venerable figure was turning out for the short, fat crook from Griffith – at a price estimated to be several thousand pounds a day. But he was worth it. Reporters noted that the judge, Justice Egan, paid close attention to the great MacBride’s arguments against extraditing Trimbole.
If Justice Egan mulled over the case during the legal vacation during Christmas and New Year, he thought of nothing to undermine MacBride and MacEntee’s case for Trimbole. On 5 February, the judge directed that Trimbole be released and ruled that because the first arrest had been unlawful, everything that flowed from it was tainted with that illegality. The Australian Government officials assigned to the case were disappointed – but their chances of holding Trimbole until a legal way could be found to re-arrest him were scuttled when the Irish Supreme Court ruled that, once released, he could not be placed under surveillance, as that would technically be like remaining in custody. The law, at great expense, had been turned inside out to give the cancer-stricken drug baron and murderer a loophole. In essence, the Irish police had to let him escape in order to re-arrest him with clean hands. And he was never going to let that happen.
Trimbole walked out of Mountjoy Prison at 2pm on 6 February 1985 and stepped into a car driven by his solicitor Con O’Leary. Local and Australian television crews gave chase and a helicopter hovered overhead as the car sped away. It was last seen heading towards Dublin airport. He most likely left the country in a chartered aircraft later that night. He was gone. Nothing was left behind but rich lawyers and a smell that would not go away.
THE rumour was that Trimbole was in Spain, where so many wanted men went because the attitude about extradition was so relaxed that jokes about the ‘Costa del Crime’ were standard. Anyone with enough pesetas could hide from their past. But if there were any information about Trimbole’s whereabouts, no Australian authorities acted on it. Cynics speculated that Trimbole knew too much to be too hotly pursued. They suspected that the faceless men in the Honoured Society had contacts at every level and could reach out and touch key people when needed. The theory went that Trimbole’s years of compromising people were an insurance policy: if bribery weren’t enough, blackmail could be.
Another view, of course, was that the failure to pursue Trimbole after the long, expensive Dublin debacle was not a conspiracy but a stuff-up, a bureaucratic and legal tangle that could not be pinned on one person or department. Unspoken, but not forgotten, was the fact that he was dying anyway. That ‘Aussie Bob’ lived so long must have been an embarrassment to all except Trimbole’s family and shrinking band of friends.
The news broke on a Melbourne autumn morning in 1987, when an astute reporter called Geoff Easdown got a tip from a police contact that Australia’s most wanted man had died in Spain. The leak was that Craig Trimbole had telephoned the Australian Embassy in Madrid asking how he could get his father’s body home. (It would turn out that Craig had flown straight to Spain in secrecy – so secret that his passport showed no record of his leaving Australia, an offence for which he was later fined.)
Easdown stood the story up well enough to get it on page one of The Herald and then agitated to fly to Spain to follow up his exclusive. But the newshound was blocked by the bean counters, who ruled it would be cheaper and faster for the group’s London correspondent Bruce Wilson to cover it.
The wily Wilson was in a Fleet Street pub when he got the call. He hastened slowly, stopping off in Madrid to recruit the services of a newspaper ‘stringer’ called Ed Owen, who spoke excellent Spanish, before flying to Alicante, already widely tipped as the area where Trimbole had been hiding.
It was Saturday morning when they landed near Alicante. Their first stop was the local hospital, where they found that Craig Trimbole had signed the death certificate of one ‘Senor Witte’, who had died of a heart attack three days earlier. They were told the body had been moved to the mortuary at a nearby cemetery at Villajoyosa. While Wilson distracted two National Guard members guarding the mortuary, a helpful gravedigger showed Owen the body on the slab.
It was a grotesque sight: the naked body was bloated and discoloured, the head resting on a brick. It turned out later that Craig Trimbole, who had reached Alicante just four hours before his father died, had paid an undertaker to dress the body in a smart suit and tie but that somewhere between the hospital and mortuary the clothes had disappeared. ‘Somebody stole the Godfather’s clothes,’ Wilson later deadpanned.
He obtained a picture of the body. Trimbole, born a peasant, looked like one again with his body slumped on the slab in the crude outbuilding in the Spanish backwater. It was only after the body was flown back to Sydney in a lead-lined casket that the ostentatious trappings of his gangster lifestyle were restored. He was embalmed, placed in a silk-lined coffin and dressed in a white suit: Liberace meets The Godfather. But the photographs of the naked body in the morgue, published nationwide, became the enduring image of Trimbole’s death, to the anger of his family and friends.
Anne-Marie Presland, Trimbole’s de facto wife for fourteen years, later told a women’s magazine that she had almost vomited when she saw the photographs.
‘I never ever thought that they could stoop so low as to do that to someone. He was a man of pride … he was very proud … and they took all that away from him. They stripped him of something he had always had,’ she said. But that was later. In Spain on that Saturday in May 1987, Bruce Wilson was still chasing the story.
AFTER leaving the mortuary, Wilson spread the word among English-speaking ex-patriates that he was looking for a woman and teenage girl connected to a man who had just died. The same night, two teachers from the local international school said a girl called Melanie at the school had left it the previous Thursday because her father had just died. Wilson headed to a pub where ex-pats drank and found a youth who said he went to school with Melanie – and that he knew where the family had been living.
The boy took them to Villa Conchita, a white bungalow set among fruit trees, vegetables and palms
‘There was nobody home,’ Wilson later told Keith Moor. ‘I went through the garbage and found a couple of hypodermic syringes and some phials of painkiller. I was looking for anything that would confirm it was Trimbole’s house.’
He saw some people next door picking fruit and showed them the picture of Trimbole’s corpse. They said it was their neighbour ‘Senor Wittig’. This was the proof that Villa Conchita had been the trio’s home almost from the time they had fled from Dublin more than two years earlier. They had lived under the name Wittig – Anne-Marie Presland’s maiden name.
By the time two National Crime Authority officers arrived from Australia next evening, Wilson had the story nailed down. The officers could not or would not confirm that the man in the morgue was Robert Trimbole, although their continued presence was silent proof they believed it was him. Further proof was that they tried to prevent media access to the morgue, but a Spanish magistrate overruled the Australian lawmen and allowed the gathering media pack to film the body, to the anger and distress of the dead man’s family.
Wilson filed a story suggesting that if Trimbole had been Australia’s most wanted man, then the second-most wanted man could sleep very soundly indeed.
TRIMBOLE’S body arrived in Australia in the cargo hold of a British Airways jumbo jet on 21 May, a week after his death. It was almost another week before the funeral at St Benedict’s Church in the Sydney suburb of Smithfield on 27 May.
The time and place of the funeral Mass was the worst-kept secret in Sydney, although the police supposedly did not know about it. Trimbole’s body arrived in an expensive hearse, followed by two black Ford Fairlanes. His son Craig, wearing a black suit, dark sunglasses and with a black scarf hiding his face, entered the church through a rear entrance with his wife Josephine, flanked by other men. Anne-Marie Presland and her daughter, Melanie, and Trimbole’s daughters, Gayelle and Glenda, also attended, though there were no reports of Joan Trimbole and her oldest son, Robert junior, who had reportedly become a born-again Christian under the strain of having such a notorious namesake as his father. The 150 mourners contained many who were obliged to be there because of the Calabrian Honoured Society’s code of showing respect. But they resented publicly exposing their link with the notorious organised crime figure responsible for Donald Mackay’s murder. Some of them attacked and abused gathering reporters, photographers and cameramen.
One man leapt from a car, wielding a long baton and scuffled with television crews, screaming abuse. Someone tried to rip a camera from a Channel Seven cameraman. Famously, an ABC reporter, Max Uechtritz, suffered a bloody nose and suspected broken hand after he went to help a photographer, Nick Andrean, who was being bashed and kicked by six men. Uechtritz held his own against three would-be assailants, an effort that won him plenty of admirers.
As the service began, police started to arrive in response to emergency calls and by the time it ended an hour later were organised enough to prevent any more ugly scenes. A cortege of more than 60 cars drove to the Pine Grove Memorial Park near Blacktown in Sydney’s west, escorted by police cars and with media helicopters overhead. The coffin was placed in a large family crypt near his parents, Dominco and Saveria, where there was room for another ten bodies. A Blacktown councillor later attacked the Trimbole family for tarnishing the area’s image by burying the murdering mafia fixer in his municipality, calling on them to exhume the body and move it to Griffith.
‘He should have been buried in Griffith where he came from. It’s their shame, not our fame,’ he said.
The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, telephoned Max Uechtritz to congratulate him on defending the photographer in the brawl at the funeral. When this became public, Craig Trimbole was incensed and called talkback king John Laws on radio to attack Hawke over it. Maybe he thought that because La Famiglia, the ‘family’ of murderous drug traffickers, owned Hawke’s cabinet minister Al Grassby, that they had bought the entire Government.
He was wrong, of course. But it wasn’t hard to see how he had got the idea.