IT was the proudest moment of Giuseppe Arena’s life. It was a pleasant August evening in 1987 and he was moving contentedly among 450 guests at a big reception centre in the Melbourne northern suburb of Brunswick, graciously accepting their best wishes.
Arena’s only daughter was being given the best traditional Italian wedding her father could provide. He had, in fact, wanted 900 guests but his family had persuaded him to halve the list.
It was a memorable night. Giuseppe, after all, was known as ‘The Friendly Godfather’ and was a popular and influential figure in the Italian community. As he circulated, people kept coming forward. Some shook his hand or patted him on the back. Some kissed him on the cheek.
The night went perfectly.
A year later Giuseppe Arena was dead. The father of three was shot from behind taking out the rubbish at his Bayswater home. It was a classic Italian organised-crime hit and has never been solved.
His widow, Maria, has no idea who killed her husband or why, but she now knows the power of Omerta — the code of silence. She says that, except for her immediate family, she has been abandoned by the guests who hugged and congratulated her husband at the wedding. ‘They have all dropped off like flies,’ she said.
‘Since the funeral we have not heard or seen from any of them. They were our friends. Now they are too frightened even to pick up the phone and ring. They should be ashamed of themselves. It is as if when Joe was buried we were buried too. If that is the Calabrian way, they can have it. They used him, now they have discarded us.’
She knows one of the wedding guests might have already been considering ordering her husband’s execution at the reception. But why? Joe Arena didn’t appear to be a big shot. Ostensibly a retired insurance broker, to those in an inner circle he was much more. He was an associate of Liborio Benvenuto, the undisputed Godfather of Melbourne.
Benvenuto rose to prominence following the 1963-64 market murders, committed at the height of a struggle for control of Melbourne’s Mafia. He was related through marriage to Vincenzo Muratore, who was murdered in 1964 and whose son, Alfonso Muratore, was murdered in 1992. It was during the power struggle in the markets that Australians learned that traditional Italian organised crime had become part and parcel of life in the lucky country. It began when Domenico Italiano died peacefully of old age in his West Melbourne home. His funeral, held at the nearby St Mary’s Star of the Sea in December, 1962, gave an insight into the power of the man.
The funeral was more befitting a head of state than a little-known migrant. Thousands of people attended the church and thronged the grounds. The pallbearers, including Italiano’s son-in-law, Michele Scriva, carried the body to its final resting place under an elaborate headstone in the Melbourne cemetery. In hindsight, it should have been no surprise that Italiano was accorded such respect. He was known as ‘II Papa’ or ‘The Pope’ and was The Godfather of the Honoured Society, known in some circles as The Black Hand.
Police already knew of its existence, with reports of mob-related extortion going back to the cane fields of Queensland as early as the 1930s. But they were unaware that the organisation had become a powerful influence in the fruit and vegetable industry where Calabrian migrants were helped by the Society, but in return were indebted, often for life. Soon after Italiano’s death another old Italian died. This was Antonio Barbara, known as ‘The Toad.’ He was Italiano’s right hand man and his violent streak was well-known. He had served five years for killing a woman near the Queen Victoria Market in 1936. The loss of both men left a void at the top of the Society, and a dangerous power struggle erupted.
Their places were filled by Domenico Demarte, who took Italiano’s position, and Vincenzo Muratore, who was the financial adviser. One man not happy with the easy succession was Vincenzo Angilletta, a gunman who had migrated to Australia in 1951. He became a producer of fruit and vegetables to the Society, but had bigger ideas. He wanted the Society to become the Australian version of the Sicilian-based Mafia in the United States. He wanted extortion rackets to be broadened to include non-Italians, a move rejected by Demarte and the elders.
Angilletta responded by refusing to sell his produce to designated wholesalers and going direct to the public. He was warned but refused to conform. He was stabbed once on Society orders but still refused to return to the fold. He was abducted and taken to Woodend where he was painted with human excrement as a ritualistic punishment called il tartaro. He vowed revenge and formed his own organisation called la Bastarda — The Bastard Society’ and recruited 300 members. He sold his market garden in Kew to a Greek couple rather than to a designated Calabrian family. Demarte, Muratore and the elders decided Angilletta must die. The renegade knew he was a marked man and began to carry a small pistol for protection. It did him no good. In the early hours of 4 April, 1963, Angilletta was shot twice with a shotgun from behind. It is considered a dishonourable way to die, to not be allowed to see the killer’s face. Forensic tests found he was killed with heavy lupara shot — the same sort of shot traditionally used to shoot wolves, and people, in Calabria.
Angilletta’s friends vowed revenge. They blamed Demarte and Muratore for the hit. On 26 November, 1963, Demarte was shot at 3.30 am as he left his North Melbourne home on the way to the market. He survived, but immediately retired from his senior position in the Honoured Society. On 16 January, 1964, Muratore was shot dead as he left his Hampton home about 2.30 am.
The Victorian Government asked for international help and it arrived in the shape of John T. Cusack, one of the most respected investigators of organised crime. In 1957 he had managed to document a key Mafia meeting in New York and as a result, 60 major mob criminals were arrested.
After completing his investigations in Melbourne Cusack submitted to the government a 17-page report which was never officially released. He made it clear organised crime was already well entrenched.
‘It is already engaged in extortion, prostitution, counterfeiting, sly grog, breaking and entering, illegal gambling and smuggling aliens and small arms. Its infiltration and effort to control the fruit and vegetable produce business has been exposed. Within the next 25 years, if unchecked, the Society is capable of diversification into all facets of organised crime and legitimate business,’ he wrote.
Cusack established the five rules of the Society. Aid was to be extended to a member, no matter what the circumstances; there was to be absolute obedience to officers of the Society; an offence against an individual member was an attack on the Society and must be avenged; no members could turn to a government agency for justice. The final rule, which has frustrated countless police investigations, was Omerta, the code of silence. No member was to reveal the name of other members or reveal any of the organisation’s secrets. ‘They realise in silence there is security while testimony against a Society member can bring death,’ Cusack said.
Police solved none of the murders and eventually peace returned.
A small, dapper fellow was largely responsible for bringing the Society back under control. Liborio Benvenuto was related through marriage to Vincenzo Muratore. Born on 15 December, 1927, in Reggio Calabria, he was allegedly the son of the boss of seven Italian villages. Benvenuto was in the fruit and vegetable industry.
His right hand man was Michele Scriva, who was married to one of the daughters of Domenico Italiano and related through marriage to Benvenuto. Scriva was born in Reggio Calabria, on 19 June, 1919, and migrated to Australia as a 17-year-old. In 1945 he was the main suspect in the killing of Giuseppe ‘Fat Joe’ Verscace, stabbed 91 times in Fitzroy.
Scriva was charged with two other men, Domencio Demarte and Domenico Pezzimenti. They were acquitted, but five years later Scriva was charged with murdering Frederick John Duffy, who had attempted to intervene in a fight and was stabbed to death. Scriva was sentenced to hang but this was commuted to life imprisonment. He served ten years.
Things seemed to settle but on 10 May, 1983, Benvenuto’s four-wheel drive was blown up at the market, where he worked with Alfonse Muratore. When asked what was behind the attack he said; ‘I have no enemies, only friends at the market. I don’t know why anybody would do this. I have never done anybody harm.’
A year later, two close associates of Benvenuto were found murdered in the Murrumbidgee River in the Riverina. Rocco Medici and his brother in law, Giuseppe Furina, both from the Melbourne suburb of East Keilor, had been tortured and their bodies dumped in the river. One of them had his ears sliced off, a symbolic warning that he heard too much.
While drugs, particularly marijuana, have become a huge money maker for the society, its role in primary production has remained strong. In fact, society members have been able to use their agricultural knowledge to grow cannabis, then use their fruit and vegetable trucks to transport the product and launder funds through the vegetable markets in capital cities.
The families have long since moved from the Queen Victoria market to the Melbourne Wholesale Market at Footscray. The location may have changed, but the old ways of business remain.
The market has a turnover of $1.2 billion a year. It sells 6000 tonnes of produce a day and is reputed to be the biggest growers’ market in the world. For years it was underpinned by a culture of corruption built on a cash economy, a fortress mentality backed with the constant threat of violence. To survive, you had to pay.
A registered casual grower at the market could pay a daily fee of about $30 for a stand to sell produce. If he didn’t pay a bribe on top of that, his stall location at the market would be changed daily so that regular customers couldn’t find him. The choice was simple: stand on your principles and watch your produce go rotten waiting for customers, or pay up.
Some officers had several schemes operating. One would walk into the coffee shop at the market and drop his hat on a table. Within minutes it was full of money. Some of the corrupt market officers called the bribe network ‘insurance money’ or the ‘retirement fund’. The growers in the market called it ‘the club’.
Buyers paid bribes to get into the market early to pick up produce, to park their truck undercover, to keep the fruit and vegetables out of the weather, and to leave the site before the 6.30 am exit time.
The sellers paid bribes to crib space for their stalls, to protect them from parking fines and to be given prime selling spots. Friday was collection day. Money was left on the seats of unlocked trucks or just collected from the stalls. It was no great secret.
Some market officers were netting $25,000 a year in tax-free bribes. One was ordered to pay $50,000 in back taxes. Three were found guilty of accepting secret commissions. One was sentenced to 16 months jail.
It wasn’t just small greengrocers who were forced to pay bribes. No-one was immune. Even Australia’s biggest retailing company, Coles Myer, had to pay. This meant that in real terms, every Australian was paying a secret tax to organised crime for the staple of life. Food.
‘It was all about money and power,’ said the then National Crime Authority chief investigator, Peter Fleming. ‘That is why people were prepared to kill for it and others prepared to die for it.’
The schemes varied. Growers said one corrupt official would, for a price, condemn truck-loads of perfectly good fruit as unsuitable for human consumption. It would then be secretly transported to a market merchant who would then sell it to a supermarket chain for a huge profit.
The market is a huge, undercover city. There were more than 750 forklifts on the property, which were supposed to be left in a secure cage. There was a huge black market in the machines. When police raided a huge marijuana property in the Northern Territory they found expensive farm gear, including four special motorised produce trolleys, reported missing from the Melbourne market.
Because of the cash economy in the market, there was a spate of robberies. Veterans were resistant to change and would not deal in anything but cash. Some merchants used two sets of books. Tax was routinely avoided. Some merchants began demanding a tax of 20 to 50 cents for every case of produce sold. This, combined with a double invoicing scheme, cost Coles Myer about $6 million a year.
In 1989 Alan Williams, a senior executive with the Coles Myer produce section, realised the company was paying exorbitant rates for fruit and vegetables. When a glut of cauliflowers flooded the market, the price dropped, but Coles Myer was still paying an inflated price.
Williams ordered an internal inquiry, recruiting one of his own men, John Vasilopolous, to bring prices into line. He tried to report his concerns to police, but they were lukewarm about investigating.
Vasilopolous was a family man who had chosen a career in retailing. He could hardly be expected to put his life on the line over the price of onions. He started to send some produce back, claiming it was sub-standard. In reality, he believed the prices were too high.
Some buyers had been paid bribes to look the other way, but Vasilopolous would not. He was rocking a corrupt system that had been operating for years. He was costing the Honoured Society money.
From July, 1990, he began to receive death threats, but continued to offer fair prices for fruit and vegetables. He was reading at home in December, 1990, when the doorbell rang. He called out to ask who was there. A male voice replied: ‘Open the door, John.’
He opened the door slightly, and was hit with a shotgun blast. Doctors later removed pellets from his legs, arms, stomach and chest.
Vasilopolous abandoned his promising career and Coles Myer brought in the produce wholesaler, Costas to try to insulate the company from the violence and corruption in the industry. But even then, while some of the obvious scams were closed, corruption continued.
In July, 1992, two well-known market identities, Alfonse Muratore and Orlando Luciano, met Coles Myer representatives in the Parkroyal Hotel on Little Collins Street to tell them of some of the schemes that had been costing them money. Coles Myer security men constantly checked the area, sweeping it electronically for bugs before the secret four-hour meeting.
Police believe the two men were pitching for business, claiming they could do the job cleaner and cheaper. Muratore had been out of the markets for two years and wanted to re-establish himself. But his reputation was tainted. He was married to Liborio Benvenuto’s daughter, Angela. Shortly after the Godfather died in 1988, Muratore left his wife for another woman, Karen Mansfield. In the Honoured Society, this was not a wise move. About 1.30 am on 4 August, about two weeks after his secret meeting with Coles Myer, Muratore was shot dead outside his Hampton home, almost exactly as his own father had been killed 30 years earlier.
Things hadn’t changed. One potential witness told police: ‘You can put me in jail; they can give me the death sentence.’ While detectives have not charged anyone over the killing they believe they know who was responsible. One was a member of the ‘Big Three,’ the men who ran Society business since Benvenuto died in 1988.
A three-year National Crime Authority investigation into Italian organised crime, code named Cerberus, found that the ‘Mafia’ was different in real life from the stereotype represented in films. It found that individual corrupt cells were involved in crime but there was no one ‘Mr Big’. Individuals came together, motivated by profit and greed.
‘Networks are used to facilitate organised criminal activity, particularly through the formation of temporary syndicates for the purpose of carrying out specific criminal ventures,’ the report said.
‘It is the family and extended family relationships that retain a significant role in Italo-Australia criminal organised crime at both the regional and national levels. There is a natural reluctance to inform on a family member or … associates who share a … town of origin.’
The study found that the syndicates had run extortion rackets from the 1930s to the 1970s, until drugs took over as the money-making business. The gangs became heavily involved in the cultivation and distribution of cannabis, importing marijuana, heroin and cocaine and the production and distribution of amphetamines.
Operation Cerberus also examined murders between 1974 and 1995 to see how many were connected to the Italian gangs. ‘While it is apparent that some members of the Italo-Australian criminal community have utilised murder as a mean of discipline and suppression within this country, it is also apparent that the threat of such extreme violence to the innocent members of the community is minimal. In fact, considering the extent of the Italo-Australian community within Australia and the perceived extent of the criminal element of the same community, the use of murder is a relatively rare occurrence.’
This was of little solace to the family of Donald Mackay.
IT is two decades since Donald Mackay disappeared and mouths are still shut. Despite thousands of hours and millions of dollars spent on investigation, the truth behind a crime that shames Australia is as elusive as it was the night he was killed. And justice is no closer to being done.
The known facts are bleak.
At 5.30 pm on Friday, 15 July, 1977, the 43-year-old Mackay had closed the furniture store his family had run since the 1920s and driven his mini-van to the nearby Griffith Hotel. He had earlier told his wife, Barbara, he would be home by 7 pm to look after the youngest of their four children while she went to a meeting.
At the hotel, he had a round of drinks and chatted with friends — largely about his efforts to draw attention to marijuana growing 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’.
Today, understandably, Binks’s recollections are even vaguer. He obligingly points out his old office, and where Mackay’s van was parked, but doesn’t want to rake over the embers.
In fact, he seems faintly embarrassed and nervous, an attitude shared with many other honest Griffith citizens, who 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 asks to be faxed a copy of anything he’ll be quoted on. He doesn’t want to stir up trouble, he explains apologetically.
Ian Salmon is not quite so shy. After 33 years in Griffith, he has moved interstate to retire and he sometimes thinks 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 hotel car park.
First, he noticed the imprint of a man’s 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 .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, career criminal and gunman, sits in a Victorian jail, convicted in 1986 for conspiring to kill Mackay and for another drug-related double murder, but he’s not the talking type.
Neither is George Joseph, the one-time gun dealer who sold Bazley a rare French .22 pistol believed to be the murder weapon and recommended Bazley when approached on behalf of a marijuana syndicate keen to hire a killer. With the exception of the late Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, who died 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 when they needed them.
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 wants 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, stronghold of the so-called ‘Honored Society’.
Sydney has a dark side, too, like Al Capone’s Chicago, where corruption seeped to the top, like rising damp in a wall. Some people in Griffith still wonder why investigations went nowhere, about who tipped off Trimbole 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, who was known locally as ‘The Godfather’. It was known that this man — once charged with having unlicensed pistols — could deliver blocks of votes to politicians he could deal with.
It was speculated he could also deliver campaign funds. What isn’t certain is whether he won any favors in return.
‘Don’t let anybody fool you,’ one long-time Griffith businessman says 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 neighbors 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 honor at a family gathering.
Grassby, after 1974 the federal Commissioner for Human Rights, was derided at a public meeting in Griffith when he claimed to have heard nothing about marijuana growing. Local lore had it that you could arrive at Griffith Airport on certain days and smell what locals called ‘Calabrese corn’.
This was long before Grassby was charged with criminal defamation for allegedly circulating a vicious document in 1980 that accused Barbara Mackay, her son and family solicitor Ian Salmon of conspiring to murder her husband. Grassby was found guilty in 1991 but was acquitted on appeal in 1992.
Investigators believed the document originated in one of the so-called ‘grass castles’ that members of certain families started to build in the early 1970s, and which are still being built today.
The Riverina has many such houses — eruptions of brick, tile and concrete so huge and so 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 mean marijuana, not wheat or rice.
They talk of ‘crop sitters’, minor players who specialise in the risky business of being gardener and guard to million-dollar marijuana plantations.
The accepted wisdom now is that the Griffith area is 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.
These days, they say, the crops are grown much further afield — as far as Queensland and the Northern Territory. But, even so, if there is a police raid it’s odd how often a Griffith connection is made: trickle irrigation equipment from a Griffith supplier; bags stamped with Griffith producers’ names; crop sitters from Griffith families. The younger members of such families disappear from town for a few days or weeks, then return flush with cash. They’ve got a crop off somewhere,’ locals mutter to each other. But not too loud, 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’ cashflow was from marijuana is still remarkably recession-free.
DONALD Bruce Mackay was, according to Ian Salmon, more than a decent man. He was a good bloke, as well. Like Mackay’s widow and (now adult) children, Salmon resents the headline argot that has labelled Mackay an ‘anti-drug crusader’.
It’s a tag that ignores the warmth, intelligence, humor and strong physical presence of a husband and father, businessman and sportsman. It leaves a patronising suggestion that he was a naive, wowserish zealot who blundered into trouble.
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 people ‘didn’t do anything, then evil won’.
A tendency to blame the victim has crept into references to Mackay by some who didn’t know him, which suits the ends of those responsible for his death. It has also suited them to suggest that support for Mackay and demands for a full investigation are somehow detrimental to the harmonious relations of an area that is more than 50 per cent Italian, mainly Calabrian.
For 20 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 righteous refrain that it’s unfair to brand all Calabrians as crooks. Unfair, but none the less convenient, 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. Many people openly 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.
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 former members of the now defunct group rarely meet and few are willing to be quoted. Time has dulled the outrage and the determination, but not the fear.
Compare the response in Australia with the death of a whistle blower with a similar case half a world away in America.
On 2 June, 1976, a little known reporter, Dan Bolles, was critically injured when his car was bombed. He died eleven days later. Bolles was killed on the orders of an organised crime figure to stop his investigations, published in the Arizona Republic newspaper.
In response to the death 40 reporters from 26 papers around the US arrived in Arizona. They decided to continue the dead reporter’s work to show that killing the messenger doesn’t kill the truth. Many of the reporters took leave to work on what became known as the ‘Arizona Project.’ Some turned up and worked for nothing.
After a seven-month investigation the team published 23 major articles around the country, exposing more than 200 people with organised crime connections, many with state and federal political links.
Years later, a mobster, Tony Spilotro, later to be murdered himself, was picked up on police phone taps, talking of killing a reporter who was investigating organised crime. He dismissed the idea. ‘I want nothing to do with another Arizona project,’ he said.
In America, creative minds tried to finish the work of the man killed by organised crime. In Australia one ‘creative’ mind wrote the song, I Ate The Yabby That Ate Donald Mackay. Many arms of the media in Australia were happy to run palpably false stories about Mackay. Such stories, shamefully, could usually be traced to people connected with those who had most to gain by discrediting Mackay and muddying the truth about his death.
For the locals anger can swiftly turn to apathy when the trail goes cold.
The Concerned Citizens of Griffith wanted Mackay to be awarded a posthumous Order Of Australia, which was found to be impossible. Instead funds were raised around the country for a permanent Churchill Fellowship to be awarded in his name to study anti-corruption issues around the world.
Robert Trimbole was able to escape from Australia after he was tipped off by police and a lawyer that he should leave before the Stewart Royal Commission was able to call him as a witness. He died a free man. Trimbole was an example of the sort of money — and influence — to be made in the marijuana industry.
In 1959 he ran a garage in Griffith — badly — and nine years later he was declared a bankrupt, owing $10,968,63 to the Tax Department. Two years later he moved into the marijuana business. He went on to own a butcher’s shop, a supermarket, a restaurant, a clothing store and a panel beating business. He had a string a luxury cars and showered friends and family with expensive gifts. He would often place bets of $20,000 on horse races. To his grass growing friends, Trimbole was the Mr Fixit, the man who could get things done. They turned to Trimbole when they wanted Mackay killed. He didn’t let them down.
His associates included police, local businessmen, politicians, journalists, jockeys and heavy criminals. His phone was illegally tapped and some prominent people were embarrassed when their relationships with ‘Aussie Bob’ became public.
Many of those who ordered the death have been called before inquiries where they have parroted their carefully scripted denials. They have now been left to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
The NSW police who actively hid evidence from their Victorian counterparts because they didn’t want another force to solve the case, have been allowed to retire with their reputations largely intact.
EVEN Barbara Mackay, the most articulate and fearless of women, feels there’s little to be gained by repeating herself. She will talk off the record, but sees no point in spoiling the harmony of her life by appearing bitter.
Now a grandmother, she lives in a pleasant unit overlooking a park in a quiet street in one of Griffith’s better areas. She is gracious, almost serene, given what she has suffered. She has faith in both God and in Griffith, but not so much in the system.
She has written a book that has been shelved by her publishers because of fears of defamation writs, but she plans to revive the project.
Meanwhile, her eldest son, Paul, still runs the family furniture store his grandfather started. But the youth who was outspoken and angry in the first years after his father’s death is gruff and suspicious when the subject is brought up. He has seen his family hurt too often by new stories circulated by reporters who were children when his father disappeared.
But the facts speak in favor of the Mackays. They have been accused of being ‘anti-Italian’ and ‘anti-Griffith’ yet Barbara has never considered moving and Paul is married to a woman called Maria Minato, whose mother’s family is from Plati in Calabria, a stronghold of the ‘Honored Society’ and birthplace of many Griffith Calabrians.
Barbara Mackay has been tortured by speculation about what happened to her husband’s body. The reality couldn’t be worse than all the rumors, she has told friends.
One story is that the body was put through a petfood 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.
It is unlikely she will ever know the truth about his death. What she has, however, is 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 soon to become clear that it was hitman James Bazley.
Mackay missed the appointment, instead sending an employee, Bruce Pursehouse. The reason? He 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,’ recalls Pursehouse, ‘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. Was it in vain?
1) 4 April 1963. Vincenzo Angilletta, cleaner and former produce grower, shot dead with a shotgun while parking his car in garage at home in Stafford Street, Northcote at 2.30 am.
MOTIVE: Allegedly shot when he rebelled against instructions of the Honoured Society to sell his farm to another member of the group. Killed on the instructions of Domenico Demarte and Vincenzo Muratore.
2) 26 November, 1963. Domenico Demarte, market commission agent wounded by shotgun blast while leaving his Chapman Street, North Melbourne, home for the market at 3.30 am.
MOTIVE: Allegedly shot as a payback for the killing of Angilletta. The shooters were believed to be two relatives of Angilletta.
3) 16 January 1964. Vincenzo Muratore, market merchant and commission agent, killed with a shotgun while leaving for the Victoria Market from his Avondale Street, Hampton home about 2.30 am.
MOTIVE: Payback for Angilletta murder. He was allegedly killed by two male relatives of Angilletta, one who escaped to Italy after the killing.
4) 18 January 1964. Antonio Monaco, a market seller was wounded when he was shot with a shotgun while leaving his home in Dandenong Road, Braeside, about 2.30 am.
MOTIVE: Attack involved three men as a payback over domestic dispute.
5) 6 February, 1964. Domenico Cirillo, a fruit and vegetable retailer, was wounded with a shotgun blast when leaving his Ardmillan Road, Moonee Ponds, home on his way to the market about 4.30 am.
MOTIVE: Two people involved in attack based on domestic and financial dispute.
6) 10 May, 1983. Toyota Landcruiser owned by Melbourne Godfather Liborio Benvenuto was blown up at the Melbourne Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Market. No-one injured.
MOTIVE: Attempted murder or warning to Benvenuto as part of a power struggle in the Honored Society.
7) 6 May, 1984. Murders of Melbourne men, Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina. Their mutilated bodies were found weighted down in the Murrumbidgee River near Griffith.
MOTIVE: Punishment for the bombing of Benvenuto’s car or the removal of rivals for senior positions in Honored Society.
8) 19 June, 1985. Greengrocer Giuseppe Sofra shot three times in the legs at the back of his Springvale Road fruitshop. The shop was owned by Antonio Madafferi.
MOTIVE: Related to price cutting war in green grocer trade in the area. Possible warning to Sofra. Possible warning to Madafferi.
9) 1 August, 1988. Giuseppe Arena, a popular insurance broker known as ‘The Friendly Godfather’, murdered in the backyard of his Bays water home.
MOTIVE: Killed on the instructions of a rival as he was seen as a possible successor as Honored Society leader. He was killed six weeks after Liborio Benvenuto died of natural causes.
10) 18 June, 1990. Coles manager Robert Desfosses seriously assaulted by two men in the carpark of the Sunshine Fruit and Vegetable Distribution Centre.
11) June, 1990. The wife of Coles fruit and vegetable buyer Terry Hoskin received call at home claiming she would be going to her husband’s funeral within a week.
12) August, 1990. Coles buyer Paul Rizza received an STD call at home warning him, ‘You better watch your back.’
MOTIVE: Backlash at attempts to clean up corrupt practices at the market.
13) November, 1990. Coles State Fruit and Vegetable Manager, John Vasilopolous, received a number of threatening phone calls.
MOTIVE: Believed to be connected with Mr Vasilopolous investigations into overpricing of produce from the wholesale market.
14) Early December, 1990. Paul Rizza’s wife receives a series of phone calls. No answer at the other end of the line.
15) Early December, 1990. Coles buyer, Charlie Raco, receives an anonymous call late at night. A male states: ‘Damage has been done, someone has to pay.’
MOTIVE: Connected with power struggle at the market.
16) 19 December, 1990. Coles State Fruit and Vegetable Manager, John Vasilopolous, opened the front door of his Ivanhoe home. A man with an Australian voice who claimed to be ‘Tony’ shot him in the stomach.
MOTIVE: Connected with Vasilopolous’ investigation into possible corrupt practices in the purchase of produce from the wholesale market.
17) 26 March, 1991. Ambush and $4000 robbery of Cheltenham fruiterer, Armedeo Di Gregorio.
18) 16 May, 1991. Cheltenham fruiterer, Jack Degillio ambushed and robbed of $1000 outside his home.
MOTIVE: Robbery.
19) 8 June, 1991. Arson caused $100,000 damage to Central Fruit Market in Bentleigh. Premises doused with kerosene and set alight.
MOTIVE: Unknown.
20) 11 June, 1991. Glen Waverley fruiterer, Antonio Peluso, ambushed and shot several times as he left his home on the way to the market. Robbed of $4000 but believed to be carrying $7000. Died on the verandah of his own home.
MOTIVE: Robbery.
21) 27 June, 1991. East Doncaster fruiterer, Tabaret Louey, bashed by two men and robbed of $2000 on his way to the market.
MOTIVE: Robbery.
22) 3 July, 1991. Ambush and $5000 robbery of Wantirna South fruiterer, Phillip Strati, outside his home.
MOTIVE: Robbery.
23) 5 August, 1991. Attempt to blow up the Central Fruit Market after explosives planted on the roof. Petrol was also poured onto the roof but it failed to ignite.
MOTIVE: Part of price cutting war involving local fruit and vegetable shops.
24) 20 November, 1991. Another attempt to burn down the Central Fruit Market. Petrol failed to ignite.
25) 29 February, 1992. Melbourne market fruiterer and his wife pistol whipped and robbed of $5000 at their Wandin home by two masked men.
26) 2 March, 1992. Robert Nancarrow, the founder of the Nancarrow supermarket chain, beaten to death in his Northcote shop. Drowned in his own blood.
MOTIVE: Robbery.
27) 4 August, 1992. Melbourne Wholesale Fruit and Vegetable Market wholesaler, Alfonso Muratore, shot to death outside his Hampton home.
MOTIVES: Dispute over money owed to the family business. Punishment for leaving his wife and family. Honoured Society power struggle. Involvement in attempts in bid to take major fruit and vegetable contracts from other market figures.