In August 1980 a Sunday tabloid ran an article headed NOT THE MAFIA. The article was reminiscent of the tired and malicious ‘Other Woman’ rumour, but with a domestic twist, implying Don Mackay’s disappearance might have a lot to do with Barbara, son Paul and family lawyer Ian Salmon, the man who had found Mackay’s van. The article prophesised that a document, supposedly written by two policemen, would be tabled in the New South Wales Parliament, where it would be safe from defamation suits. And it sourced the document to Michael Maher, a backbencher of the Wran Labor New South Wales government.
Most of the document was concerned about stereotyping Riverina Italians and Grassby banging his usual multi-cultural drum. The original four pages were never found, but from photocopies of them police concluded it was typed on Jennifer Sergi’s typewriter on paper supplied by the New South Wales Government Printing Office. But typewriters leave no clues to when they are used, or who has done the typing. Armed with copies of this scurrilous document, Grassby went to a lot of trouble to get it read in parliament. He approached three parliamentarians with lots of Italians in their electorate: Chris Sumner, Michael Maher and Giovanni Srgno, a Calabrian who wisely rejected him outright. Grassby had phoned Maher and asked him to call on him. At Grassby’s office two brothers called Sergi, he thought, from Griffith, and the wife of one of them, were present. Maher was ‘bluntly’ asked to read it in parliament but he explained that even if he wanted to, as a junior backbencher he could not. Grassby disagreed. Maher claimed he never read it at all but sent it on to the Police Minister, asking it be investigated, the day after the newspaper reported it. Maher said he did not give it to the Press. Grassby said he hadn’t, either; but the reporter said Maher had given it to him, saying he’d got it from Grassby who’d got it from ‘two policemen’ never named. A smell lingered over the whole episode.
Two completely different policemen did read it. They were the head of the New South Wales homicide squad, Inspector Harry Tupman, and his boss, CIB Chief Superintendant Ray Goldsworthy, and they discussed questioning the ex-minister about its origin. But Grassby was a VIP, so they ran the idea past their immediate boss, Assistant Commissioner Cecil Abbott. The wily Abbott could see no merit in police questioning Grassby, so he killed the idea.
New South Wales Police mulled over the document again in 1983. The officer in charge of the Mackay murder investigation, Joe Parrington, wanted to question Grassby over it, but dropped the idea. Both Abbott and Parrington would be criticised for their decisions later.
The allegations and implications saw Al Grassby’s life publicly dissected.
For an unfortunate start, Al was born plain Grass, and added the ‘–by’ to celebrate his mother’s Irishness. His father, Spanish with a touch of Chile, was an engineer on the Southampton docks when he was killed in the Blitz when Albert was a teenager. Grassby was educated ‘at thirteen schools in Australia and abroad’, worked for British Army intelligence and as a journalist and came to the Riverina as a CSIRO information officer. There he met, and in 1962 married, Ellnor Louez.
Ellnor Louez had been romantically linked with Antonio (Tony) Sergi, a son of the viticultural and winemaking family, some of whom traded as F & J Sergi, a family private company, in the 1970s. Around Griffith, Italians tended to marry Italians. Of 574 such weddings between 1950 and 1967 only 31 brides and 65 grooms married ‘out’, and the Calabresi married Calabresi. After Ellnor’s marriage to Grassby, she remained a good friend of Tony and his branch of the big Sergi clan, and Al became a family friend. As Al grew more prominent in The Area, he became a regular accessory at Calabresi functions. It was Al who proposed the nuptial toast at big Sergi weddings – 2000 to 3000 guests, lavish amounts of food and wine, and two and three days long. At some stage Ellnor had an interest in a workers’ pub in Sydney, close to Paddy’s Markets, and Tony Sergi stayed there later. Ellnor had supported Tony, proclaimed his innocence, and was happy to pose with her old flame, champagne glasses in hand, for a newspaper photographer.
Al, meanwhile, talked up The Area outside the Riverina and brought visitors to meet the locals. The word soon spread: Al Grassby might not have been everybody’s idea of a rural member, he dressed like a funny bugger, dyed his hair and never shut up, but he knew people. He mixed with people high and low, inside The Area and out, and spruiked the Riverina’s future and products relentlessly. Pretty soon, Grassby was cemented in as a Riverina booster. Riverina wines were always at hand in his electoral and parliamentary offices. He and Ellnor threw large private parties at home.
Al had been elected on the ALP ticket to the New South Wales seat of Murrumbidgee in 1965. When he took the federal seat of Riverina in 1972, the ALP was astonished. Grassby was in line for an important ministerial post, and Agriculture seemed a natural, but some senior Agricultural Department public servants quietly convinced their masters Grassby would never do. Al confirmed these suspicions by giving his maiden speech in a purple suit. Country Party members called him ‘Paterson’s Curse’ after the purple-flowered noxious weed – ‘colourful but useless’ the joke went. Al pointed out that farmers also called the weed ‘Salvation Jane’ when drought struck and stock would turn to it when there was no grass. When the laughter in the House died down, they gave Flash Al immigration and he changed the country. He killed off the last vestiges of The White Australia Policy, abolished the old imperial preferences that favoured British migrants, freed up tourist visas for Southern Europeans and Asians, and made multiculturalism a key plank of Australian policy.
Although his name first brings images of the outrageous wide ties he wore, WASPish taste prejudices did not worry the citizens of the village of Plati, population 4000, when Al, Ellnor and their daughter arrived there in 1974. Grassby wrote a column, a sort of travel diary, for the Griffith paper, the Area News. ‘Every building and thousands of people carried Australian flags. I have never seen so many Australian flags before – not even in the national capital.’ Posters of welcome in English and Italian were on lamp posts. The mayor, Francesco Catanzariti, gave him a gold key to the city and some sort of honorary citizenship. (R. V. Hall visited Plati ten years later and found it ‘a mean, homicidal town’, most houses abandoned, the few hundred townsfolk with only twenty surnames mainly old people, among them a few returnees from America and Australia.) But to readers in Australia in 1974, Plati meant one thing: it was where the grass castle guys came from, our mafia Honored Society, L’Onorata. In Calabrian slang they call the local crime society the Mal Vita, Bad Life.
In Griffith they remembered how, when Pietro Calapari was raided and arrested following the shootings in the Melbourne Markets in the 1960s, Al and a local detective, John Ellis, went character evidence for him. Fine: $40. Al scoffed that talking about the mafia showed you were a TV addict, but it was more like The Godfather, a big hit in the 1970s, with Australia and Calabria standing in for America and Sicily. Grassby had done a foolish thing going to Plati at all, shooting himself in the electoral foot in a town where mafiosi shot real feet with real bullets. But he compounded his woes with promises he made there.
He granted entry visas for three men called Barbaro, two Domenicos and a Rosario, overruling his department. The three had been refused entry or been deported from Australia in the past. When a Barbaro returned to Italy after his twelve-day trip, he was arrested in connection with the kidnapping of a wealthy Italian man’s son, and he’d skipped assault charges when he left. But for the fuss over that, they would have quietly slipped in and out without questions in the House, and their banking deposits here unknown. Grassby toughed it out, and Premier Neville Wran got a cheap laugh by revealing these criminals’ record included ‘larceny of a goat’. Rumours flew that Al had smuggled ‘ransom money’ back within his entourage’s luggage, allegedly to fund crops. Back home, people were angry with Labor MP Lin Gordon when he took the visiting Premier Wran to meet community leader Pietro Calapari but not Barbara Mackay. Mrs Mackay’s decision to stay in town was admired for the courage it showed.
Before and after his grand tour of Italy, Grassby was honoured with grand titles for his work on Italo-Australian relations and social justice: Commendatore Order of Solidarity of Republic of Italy, Knight Military Order of St Agatha, and Grand Cross of Merit.
Ellnor moved into insurance, becoming an agent working from Canberra. It was unfortunate timing because around that time NRMA Insurance found the Riverina had three times the level of road accident claims other regions produced. Investigators found a trend: the third parties injured were mainly farmers, mainly from Calabria, mainly from Plati, and mostly called Sergi or Pangallo or Barbaro. In fact, the Sergis often hit Pangellos or vice versa, 62 times, and the drivers all escaped injury. Claims on NRMA totalled $40 million. GIO Insurance clients were also unlucky on the roads of the Riverina. One out-of-luck driver had 25 front-to-rear collisions in four years. A truck driven by Joe Trimboli hit a car driven by Domenico Nirta; bit of a coincidence because they were accused of growing the same marijuana crop. John Fahey, then New South Wales Opposition Leader, later reckoned ‘the mafia’ hauled $140 million a year out of insurance companies’ coffers in the 1980s.
By the end of the 1970s Grassby was spending less time with Ellnor in Canberra: work took him to Sydney a lot, and there he met Angela Chan, and it was often Angela who was on his arm at functions. Relations with Ellnor remained cordial and their domestic arrangements were well understood as the 1980s and 1990s rolled by. Al was so multicultural he effectively had two wives – one for Sydney and one in Canberra.
Not so flashy was the grieving widow Barbara Mackay, whose persistence and quiet dignity brought media, community and national support where Grassby’s antics often brought contempt. She told reporters about the eerie feeling when she saw a man rumoured to be a top L’Onorata player, possibly one of those who ordered her husband’s death, ruffle her youngest son’s hair in the street one day. A friend from her congregation, Lesley Hicks, wrote a book called The Appalling Silence. A Concerned Citizens of Griffith group pressed the New South Wales government for an investigation of the police investigation itself, which had, it seemed, gone nowhere for years.
And that is what they got: Justice Nagle’s Special Inquiry into the Police Investigation of the Death of Donald Bruce Mackay. Ten years had passed since the murder; Justice Woodward had concluded an unknown hit man working for a branch of L’Onorata killed him. The Coroner had declared Don Mackay legally dead of ‘gunshot wounds’ in 1984. More to the point, Frank Tizzoni was singing. Justice Nagle was critical of much, but especially critical of Parrington withholding Bruce Pursehouse’s evidence (of the first attempt to lure Mackay) from the inquest and from Victoria Police. Al Grassby appeared on the stand, and Barbara Mackay learned more and more about Grassby’s vigorous promotion of the four-page document that smeared her.
The Opposition Leader, Nick Greiner, accused Al of trying to get the mafia ‘off the hook’, a view many came to share as the story behind the document emerged. Grassby had no real option but to stand down from his job when the report was handed down in December 1987. One sentence of the report buried Grassby: ‘The commission makes only one comment – that no decent man could have regarded the general attacks on the Calabrians as justifying him in propagating the scurrilous lies contained in the anonymous document’.
Barbara Mackay sued Grassby for defamation and in April 1987 he issued a full, unreserved public apology and paid $5000 to cover the legal costs she and solicitor Ian Salmon had incurred.
National Crime Authority officers knocked on Angela Chan’s door and arrested Grassby and took him to court in late 1987. The charges included conspiracy to pervert the course of justice (the course of the Mackay murder investigation) and criminal defamation (of Salmon, Paul Mackay and Barbara Mackay). These alleged crimes originally stipulated ‘with Robert Trimbole and others’. ‘Others’ would eventually include Guiseppe Sergi, doyen of the community and father-in-law of the typewriter-owning Jennifer Sergi, who was also charged. Charges against her were subsequently dropped, mainly because there was no proof of who had used her typewriter to type the scurrilous document smearing the Mackays.
The case twisted and turned, bounced up and down from lower courts to higher ones (including the High Court itself), tore off sideways for rulings and appeals, but all at a snail’s pace. For five years.
The magistrate who heard committal proceedings felt that Grassby and the Sergis had a case to answer, but the alleged offences were already seven years cold and the civil court had already dealt with the three defamed parties’ ‘injuries’, as they are called in law, settled with one defendant’s apology and payment of costs. The defence moved to stay proceedings and the magistrate agreed. This meant that nothing further would happen, there would be no trial, unless something new came up. Grassby was delighted but the prosecution appealed, maintaining the magistrate had no power to do this, and a judge agreed.
The prosecution was ferocious. At one stage they refused to let Grassby’s team have copies of court transcripts without money paid up front; Grassby, almost broke, his legal team unpaid for years, appealed to another court; and that court ordered the copies be provided free. Every time costs were awarded to the defendants, the prosecution appealed, clearly hoping the delay would force Grassby to throw in the towel. They froze Grassby’s modest assets, and a separate legal action had to be mounted to thaw them. The Director of Public Prosecutions and (behind the scenes) the National Crime Authority spared no taxpayers’ dollar for a win. The defence called it a ‘vendetta’.
There is little doubt the prosecution would have squashed Grassby if his best mate had not been a barrister, with a nephew who was also a lawyer. Jennifer Sergi’s defence was she didn’t type the smear document, that her typewriter was widely available to many, and that she wasn’t in Grassby’s office on the day in question. Also, she wasn’t the only Jenny married to a Sergi, a surname more common than Smith or Jones there, a point the expensive Melbourne lawyer Frank Galbally put to the court.
Eventually a trial was forced. If the prosecution couldn’t get them on criminal defamation, they wanted attempted criminal defamation as a back up. The National Crime Authority, desperate for a scalp and wanting to justify the high salaries that the state police resented, had been busy. They had found two witness, a ‘Mr Smith’ and ‘Mr Jones’ whose real names were suppressed.
John Foley, reading the brief of evidence in bed before the pre-trial started, was impressed with what his adversaries had. Mr Smith had worked for Ellnor’s Trades Hall Hotel, but he was also Bob Trimbole’s man. And at Paddy’s Market, close by the pub, he had twice delivered bags with $20,000 in them, and seen Flash Al scuttle off, bag in hand. Mr Jones was cellarman at the Trades Hall. He said he’d driven marijuana from Canberra to Sydney for $500 for Flash Al, had taken delivery of wine boxes full of grass at the pub, and been present when Bob Trimbole and Al talked, noting how Al treated Bob ‘like a god’. But it was all a bit good to be true.
Eventually, the evidence of both was ruled inadmissible, and questions were asked about where the NCA had dug them up. Mr Smith was a convicted heroin trafficker and briber of police. Mr Jones, too, had ‘a long criminal history’ and the magistrate, using Mr Jones’s own term, called him a ‘rip-off merchant’ and an ‘immoral opportunist’. In other words, hardly reliable witnesses.
The resulting trial – R v. Grassby, Sergi & Sergi – was highly technical and tedious. Ex-prime minister Gough Whitlam talked of his affection and respect for Grassby and said he was universally liked and had dismantled every vestige of White Australia policies. The jury was sent out, but it returned after eight hours to say its members could not all agree. They were encouraged to give it another try, and two hours later, returned verdicts of not guilty to defamation, but guilty of attempted defamation. Because criminal defamation charges are seldom laid, the sentence could have been anything from a slap on the wrist to three years in prison. The judge fined Grassby $7000, suggesting Grassby’s motives
as more misguided than calculated, and said he accepted he did not mean to cause harm.
An appeal was certain, and, in 1992, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed the verdicts, saying they looked like compromises rather than verdicts, did not make logical or legal sense, and there was ‘a gap’ between the Crown evidence and their line of reasoning. Grassby was awarded costs of $180,000, contested of course.
More than five years of litigation had not crushed Grassby’s spirit. He showed his tie for the cameras – a lucky shamrock pattern. It had beaten his wallet around and the shame of the charges meant employment was difficult, but he had a role in the administration of the Racial Discrimination Act and on ethnic radio. He wrote books on battlefields – military history an enthusiasm arising from his days as a junior British Army intelligence officer at the close of World War II, and on multicultural, republican and political themes. An Order of Australia, Italian government honours and a UN peace medal were conferred on him during the time of his dark cloud and after it cleared. He continued to spend most of his time with Angela Chan in Sydney, but never severed ties with Ellnor in Canberra. He eventually died of heart failure while ailing with kidney cancer, in a Canberra hospital in 2005, aged 78.
There were two funerals: a state funeral at St Christopher’s Cathedral in Canberra with an Irish piper playing and his ‘official wife’ Ellnor as chief mourner, and civil libertarians and political friends and co-workers. The following week, another funeral was held at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Sydney with a flamenco guitarist and writers, actors, journalists and Sydney friends. Chief mourner at this one was his companion of 25 years, Angela Chan.
As if two funerals weren’t enough, Slippery Al also left two wills – and headaches and heartaches for the two wives in his life. For although he left little – ‘half a house, an old VW and his army uniform’ his lawyer guessed – both women had claims. In Sydney, Grassby had signed a will in February 2005 thought to be in Angela Chan’s favour. But in March or April, the month of his death, he had made another that might have gone the other way.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 11