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 T
rimbole 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 t
he 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.
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