THE dapper man and the decent woman were both aware of their respective fates.
The woman had been ill for years and knew her condition was terminal. The man had been in jail for years and was aware that he would soon be free.
They both chose to remain silent. The man because he stuck to his old-time criminal code; the woman because she had always sought – and achieved – peace and dignity.
The woman was Barbara Mackay, whose husband, Donald, was murdered in the carpark of the Griffith Hotel on 15 July, 1977. His body has never been found.
The man was Australia’s oldest known hitman, James Frederick Bazley, who shot Mackay, a man he had never met, for just $10,000.
In late January 2001, Bazley, then 75, was released from Loddon Prison, near the Victorian country town of Castlemaine. He had been sentenced to life for killing three people for cash. Few expected at the time he would ever be released. A few weeks later Barbara Mackay was to die. All she wanted from Bazley was to know where her husband’s body had been dumped, so she could finally say goodbye.
The career criminal could not bring himself to break the habits ingrained into him over his long lifetime. Even now he could not tell the truth.
In the mid-1970s Mackay was a little-known local businessman and anti-drugs campaigner who was exposing the growing marijuana industry in the district.
The heads of the Griffith syndicate, known as The Family, were making large amounts of money, turning themselves from struggling, and in some cases, failed, local farmers and businessmen into some of the most affluent and influential figures in the district.
They were paying off some local police and didn’t need an upstart local furniture retailer to try to expose them. They thought of bribing him, or setting him up with a woman, but there was a problem – he was too loyal and too honest.
They decided their only option was to kill him, and employed Bazley to do the job. He was not short of work. The hard man from the Painter and Docker end of the Melbourne underworld had also killed drug couriers Isabel and Douglas Wilson, the New Zealanders whose bodies were found buried in the beach town of Rye in May, 1979.
The Wilsons were killed on the orders of the notorious Mr Asia drug syndicate boss, Terrence John Clarke, after corrupt police told him the couple were talking to Queensland detectives.
Bazley was alleged to have been paid $20,000 for the double murder. He was also told to kill the couple’s dog, Taj, but as a dog-lover and former poodle breeder, he refused.
To Bazley, killing people was just a job, but to kill a dog for no reason was an inexcusable crime. He said, ‘Dogs wag their tails, people wag their tongues.’ When he was told to kill Taj he said, ‘Why the dog? The dog didn’t talk.’
He was as good as his word. Taj was later found wandering in the street in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. His owners ended up in a shallow grave.
THE murder of Donald Mackay was to become a defining moment in the exposure of organised crime in Australia, and he was to become a national martyr.
The Family was to learn that while Mackay was a threat when he was alive, he was far more dangerous, dead.
No-one other than the concerned people of Griffith would have ever heard of Donald Mackay if they had let him live. It would have been business as usual.
But when Mackay was murdered he became a national martyr. A few corrupt cops couldn’t keep the lid on this one – although it didn’t stop them trying.
The murder made headlines around the country and the national media descended on Griffith. It took reporters less than 24 hours to identify the main suspects – some of whom were prepared to be interviewed.
It took some rather less enthusiastic members of the law enforcement community almost a decade to make the same connections.
As a result of the public outcry, there was a series of inquiries and royal commissions that exposed judicial, political and police corruption and resulted in the establishment of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and the National Crime Authority.
Police say Bazley remains the only person alive who really knows what happened in the Griffith carpark the night Mackay disappeared.
Two of the key figures are now dead. Crime figure ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, who helped organise the contract killing, died in Spain in 1987, and key informer, Gianfranco Tizzoni, died in hiding in Italy in 1988, not long after being tracked down by Melbourne journalist, Keith Moor.
Bazley was sentenced to life in 1986, for the murders of the Wilsons, nine years for the conspiracy to murder Mackay, and a further four years for a $270,000 armed robbery. He has always maintained he was not involved in the three murders.
Police said that when he took the contract to kill Mackay he was told the body was never to be found and a shotgun was not to be used, as it was seen as the traditional weapon of the Mafia. He used a French-made .22 calibre ‘Unique’ pistol with a specially-fitted silencer.
After he was convicted, Bazley was resigned to dying in jail.
He told veteran crime reporter Tom Prior in 1987: ‘I’m in here for keeps. The only way out is over-the-wall or in a pine box.’
But the Supreme Court later set his minimum sentence at fifteen years – or just five per murder – with the armed robbery thrown in free of charge. Now the career criminal had real hope.
When Bazley realised he might live long enough to be freed he started to lobby for his release. He contacted former deputy commissioner and head of the homicide squad, Paul Delianis, and asked him to give evidence on his behalf before the Parole Board.
Although he was retired, Delianis made contact with his longtime adversary. ‘I told him that would be possible, if he would say what happened to Mackay’s body,’ Delianis said. ‘That was the end of the phone call and I haven’t heard from him since.’
Delianis remains convinced only Bazley can solve the mystery. ‘I believe he is the only person who would know. He was a loner. Every time he worked with someone he would come unstuck.
‘He saw killing as a business. To him, it was just a job. I suspect that he buried the body somewhere near Griffith and I believe he acted alone.’
Bazley, known as ‘Mr Cool’, looks nothing like a hitman. He looks more like a gentle grandfather than a paid killer.
The quietly spoken and polite elderly man wants to spend his final years with his wife, Lillian, and was given regular day-leave to prepare himself for life on the outside. Few who saw the elderly couple walking hand in hand, could have imagined their past.
Lillian was related to one of Melbourne’s most notorious old-time gunmen, Horatio Morris and was used to losing her husband for years when he was in prison.
Bazley had a heart condition, but kept himself fit and always had an eye open for a business opportunity. He was quick to reach an arrangement to be personal trainer and jail protector for the disgraced Coles-Myer boss, Brian Quinn, when the former top businessman was serving just over two years for fraud.
Bazley may have been old, but he was still influential. He put out the word in jail that Quinn, an obvious soft target, was not to be touched. He wasn’t.
A former Victorian police deputy commissioner, Carl Mengler, who built the case against Bazley, believes the hitman should not have been freed until he revealed where Mackay’s body was hidden.
Mengler urged people to look beyond the grandfatherly appearance of the hitman. ‘He was the worst sort of murderer. He was an intelligent man who simply killed people he didn’t know for money.
‘Jim Bazley showed no mercy to his victims and has left their relatives to grieve every living day of the rest of their lives. He has never shown any remorse for what he has done.’
Mengler is by nature a compassionate man. He often felt sympathy for some of the murderers he has helped convict. Many, he says, were driven by anger or compulsion. Some were driven to circumstances beyond their limits.
But Bazley, he argues, was a middle-aged man who chose his own path. ‘He was a mature man when he accepted the contracts to kill. He has no excuses.’
Bazley, a Painters and Dockers gunman in the 1970s, was shot twice during the ‘dockies’ war in which dozens of men died and went missing.
He has a 50-year history of armed robbery and violence, but prison officers say he became a model inmate and was well respected by fellow prisoners. In a world where contacts are everything, Bazley had friends. ‘He was still well connected,’ one officer said.
For a career armed robber, Bazley had found some ridiculous ways to get caught. In 1975 he robbed a Melbourne bank of $10,000, but was grabbed by a one-legged butcher who worked next door.
He was later to think that shooting an innocent man in a darkened carpark was an easier way to make the same sort of money.
Bazley became overconfident and lazy when he murdered Isabel and Douglas Wilson. He and Lillian regularly rented a holiday house in Rye, and he noticed a hole had been dug in bushland next door, which local children used as a play-pit.
A man on his regular walk noticed one day that the hole had been dug deeper. Next day, he saw that it had been filled with fresh soil and covered with tea-tree.
He called police and the bodies were discovered.
The trail went directly to Bazley.
He was convicted of the murders of the Wilsons, but only of conspiracy to murder Mackay. The anti-drugs campaigner was killed in NSW, but the plot to employ Bazley to do the hit was finalised in Melbourne. He agreed to the plan to commit the murder, while sitting in Tizzoni’s car in a quiet, tree-lined street behind the Kew cemetery, in Melbourne’s affluent inner-east. The deal, later revealed to police by Tizzoni, was enough to secure the conspiracy conviction.
The NSW investigation into Mackay’s murder was a disaster. Corrupt police tried to sabotage the process, others refused to co-operate with the Victorian investigation because they were blinded by interstate jealousies. They wanted the glory. Barbara Mackay wanted only justice.
High profile individuals, to their disgrace and others’ disgust, deliberately spread baseless stories about Donald Mackay, to suggest he may have deliberately disappeared, or might have been murdered because of his own dishonest or immoral activities.
This cynical rumor-mongering, done to pander to the people who had ordered Mackay’s murder, even tainted politics. Those who allowed themselves to be used by organised crime are now conspicuous by their silence.
But it wasn’t only politics that was tainted by the stench of corruption that spread from the marijuana plantations.
The NSW police force did its share. It was one of the force’s finest, a detective, who warned Robert Trimbole to leave the country because he was about to be the target of a royal commission investigation.
When the bent detective was finally exposed he left the force for a career in primary industry.
Knowing all these things made it even harder for Barbara Mackay to endure – for more than 20 years – what one of her friends called ‘the appalling silence’ that followed Robert Mackay’s disappearance.
Mrs Mackay knew for more than a year that her husband’s killer was being prepared for release. She was in her hospital bed when she was told by a reporter he would soon be free.
Surprisingly, perhaps, she bore him no malice and said she hoped he and Lillian could enjoy their last few years together. She knew what it was like to be cheated of the chance to grow old with the husband you love.