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-consumi
ng, 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.
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