A Tale of Two Cities (13 page)

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.

The silver-haired and theatrical Patrick MacEntee, veteran of defending IRA terrorists, predicted it would not be easy to get his
client back to Australia. For a start, he said, the authorities would have to prove beyond doubt that the man in Mountjoy Prison
was
Trimbole. ‘Then there are the legal issues involved in extradition,' he said, which could take ‘months rather than weeks' to sort out. His client had refused to give his fingerprints, which hindered formal identification.

Others well qualified to know Trimbole had no doubt he was the prisoner. Apart from his daughter Glenda being present, her brother, Craig Trimbole, flew in with a
60 Minutes
television crew to film the circus. Two days later, lawyers appearing for the absent Trimbole at extradition proceedings in Australia officially admitted what the whole world knew, that the man in jail in Dublin was their client.

But the circus wasn't over by a long way. When
60 Minutes
went to air on the Nine network in Australia the following Sunday, Trimbole's estranged but loyal born-again Christian wife, Joan, admitted only that the man being held in Ireland had ‘an incredible resemblance' to her runaway husband, and that he was certainly in the company of their daughter Glenda. Not to mention their son, Craig, of course.

In the interview with Jana Wendt, Joan Trimbole revealed that her pet name for the man she hadn't seen in three years was ‘The Godfather'. This was because, she explained, ‘he was always helping other people and always looking after his friends.' To her eternal credit Wendt, the consummate professional, kept a straight face.

THE hasty decision by an Irish policeman to hold Trimbole on the bogus gun charge hung over the drawn-out proceedings that followed. By Christmas week, two months after his arrest, Trimbole had appeared in court nine times to play a mute part in a show that he was paying for. And there was more to come in the new year of 1985.

While Trimbole's son, Craig, and another in-law, Tony Addabo, flew to Italy twice, obviously to get cash from some secret source, the most expensive battery of defence lawyers ever seen in Ireland worked on a case to prevent Trimbole being extradited to Australia.

Putting Trimbole's case were not only two of Ireland's most senior barristers but an English QC regarded as the best extradition lawyer in the business and a junior counsel and two instructing solicitors, one from London. It was the first time an English barrister had appeared with an Irish barrister in a Dublin court since ‘The Troubles'. The Irish barrister MacEntee was said to be paid a retainer of 1000 pounds a day. But that was nothing compared with the latest addition to the team, an 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner called Sean MacBride – Irish nationalist hero, world-renowned civil rights lawyer and co-founder of Amnesty International. This venerable figure was turning out for the short, fat crook from Griffith – at a price estimated to be several thousand pounds a day. But he was worth it. Reporters noted that the judge, Justice Egan, paid close attention to the great MacBride's arguments against extraditing Trimbole.

If Justice Egan mulled over the case during the legal vacation during Christmas and New Year, he thought of nothing to undermine MacBride and MacEntee's case for Trimbole. On 5 February, the judge directed that Trimbole be released and ruled that because the first arrest had been unlawful, everything that flowed from it was tainted with that illegality. The Australian Government officials assigned to the case were disappointed – but their chances of holding Trimbole until a legal way could be found to re-arrest him were scuttled when the Irish Supreme Court ruled that, once released, he could not be placed under surveillance, as that would technically be like remaining in custody. The law, at great expense, had been turned inside out to give the cancer-stricken drug baron and murderer a loophole. In essence, the
Irish police had to let him escape in order to re-arrest him with clean hands. And he was never going to let that happen.

Trimbole walked out of Mountjoy Prison at 2pm on 6 February 1985 and stepped into a car driven by his solicitor Con O'Leary. Local and Australian television crews gave chase and a helicopter hovered overhead as the car sped away. It was last seen heading towards Dublin airport. He most likely left the country in a chartered aircraft later that night. He was gone. Nothing was left behind but rich lawyers and a smell that would not go away.

THE rumour was that Trimbole was in Spain, where so many wanted men went because the attitude about extradition was so relaxed that jokes about the ‘Costa del Crime' were standard. Anyone with enough pesetas could hide from their past. But if there were any information about Trimbole's whereabouts, no Australian authorities acted on it. Cynics speculated that Trimbole knew too much to be too hotly pursued. They suspected that the faceless men in the Honoured Society had contacts at every level and could reach out and touch key people when needed. The theory went that Trimbole's years of compromising people were an insurance policy: if bribery weren't enough, blackmail could be.

Another view, of course, was that the failure to pursue Trimbole after the long, expensive Dublin debacle was not a conspiracy but a stuff-up, a bureaucratic and legal tangle that could not be pinned on one person or department. Unspoken, but not forgotten, was the fact that he was dying anyway. That ‘Aussie Bob' lived so long must have been an embarrassment to all except Trimbole's family and shrinking band of friends.

The news broke on a Melbourne autumn morning in 1987, when an astute reporter called Geoff Easdown got a tip from a police contact that Australia's most wanted man had died in Spain. The leak was that Craig Trimbole had telephoned the Australian Embassy in Madrid asking how he could get his father's
body home. (It would turn out that Craig had flown straight to Spain in secrecy – so secret that his passport showed no record of his leaving Australia, an offence for which he was later fined.)

Easdown stood the story up well enough to get it on page one of
The Herald
and then agitated to fly to Spain to follow up his exclusive. But the newshound was blocked by the bean counters, who ruled it would be cheaper and faster for the group's London correspondent Bruce Wilson to cover it.

The wily Wilson was in a Fleet Street pub when he got the call. He hastened slowly, stopping off in Madrid to recruit the services of a newspaper ‘stringer' called Ed Owen, who spoke excellent Spanish, before flying to Alicante, already widely tipped as the area where Trimbole had been hiding.

It was Saturday morning when they landed near Alicante. Their first stop was the local hospital, where they found that Craig Trimbole had signed the death certificate of one ‘Senor Witte', who had died of a heart attack three days earlier. They were told the body had been moved to the mortuary at a nearby cemetery at Villajoyosa. While Wilson distracted two National Guard members guarding the mortuary, a helpful gravedigger showed Owen the body on the slab.

It was a grotesque sight: the naked body was bloated and discoloured, the head resting on a brick. It turned out later that Craig Trimbole, who had reached Alicante just four hours before his father died, had paid an undertaker to dress the body in a smart suit and tie but that somewhere between the hospital and mortuary the clothes had disappeared. ‘Somebody stole the Godfather's clothes,' Wilson later deadpanned.

He obtained a picture of the body. Trimbole, born a peasant, looked like one again with his body slumped on the slab in the crude outbuilding in the Spanish backwater. It was only after the body was flown back to Sydney in a lead-lined casket that the ostentatious trappings of his gangster lifestyle were restored. He
was embalmed, placed in a silk-lined coffin and dressed in a white suit: Liberace meets The Godfather. But the photographs of the naked body in the morgue, published nationwide, became the enduring image of Trimbole's death, to the anger of his family and friends.

Anne-Marie Presland, Trimbole's de facto wife for fourteen years, later told a women's magazine that she had almost vomited when she saw the photographs.

‘I never ever thought that they could stoop so low as to do that to someone. He was a man of pride … he was very proud … and they took all that away from him. They stripped him of something he had always had,' she said. But that was later. In Spain on that Saturday in May 1987, Bruce Wilson was still chasing the story.

AFTER leaving the mortuary, Wilson spread the word among English-speaking ex-patriates that he was looking for a woman and teenage girl connected to a man who had just died. The same night, two teachers from the local international school said a girl called Melanie at the school had left it the previous Thursday because her father had just died. Wilson headed to a pub where ex-pats drank and found a youth who said he went to school with Melanie – and that he knew where the family had been living.

The boy took them to Villa Conchita, a white bungalow set among fruit trees, vegetables and palms

‘There was nobody home,' Wilson later told Keith Moor. ‘I went through the garbage and found a couple of hypodermic syringes and some phials of painkiller. I was looking for anything that would confirm it was Trimbole's house.'

He saw some people next door picking fruit and showed them the picture of Trimbole's corpse. They said it was their neighbour ‘Senor Wittig'. This was the proof that Villa Conchita had been the trio's home almost from the time they had fled from Dublin
more than two years earlier. They had lived under the name Wittig – Anne-Marie Presland's maiden name.

By the time two National Crime Authority officers arrived from Australia next evening, Wilson had the story nailed down. The officers could not or would not confirm that the man in the morgue was Robert Trimbole, although their continued presence was silent proof they believed it was him. Further proof was that they tried to prevent media access to the morgue, but a Spanish magistrate overruled the Australian lawmen and allowed the gathering media pack to film the body, to the anger and distress of the dead man's family.

Wilson filed a story suggesting that if Trimbole had been Australia's most wanted man, then the second-most wanted man could sleep very soundly indeed.

TRIMBOLE'S body arrived in Australia in the cargo hold of a British Airways jumbo jet on 21 May, a week after his death. It was almost another week before the funeral at St Benedict's Church in the Sydney suburb of Smithfield on 27 May.

The time and place of the funeral Mass was the worst-kept secret in Sydney, although the police supposedly did not know about it. Trimbole's body arrived in an expensive hearse, followed by two black Ford Fairlanes. His son Craig, wearing a black suit, dark sunglasses and with a black scarf hiding his face, entered the church through a rear entrance with his wife Josephine, flanked by other men. Anne-Marie Presland and her daughter, Melanie, and Trimbole's daughters, Gayelle and Glenda, also attended, though there were no reports of Joan Trimbole and her oldest son, Robert junior, who had reportedly become a born-again Christian under the strain of having such a notorious namesake as his father. The 150 mourners contained many who were obliged to be there because of the Calabrian Honoured Society's code of showing respect. But they resented publicly exposing their link
with the notorious organised crime figure responsible for Donald Mackay's murder. Some of them attacked and abused gathering reporters, photographers and cameramen.

One man leapt from a car, wielding a long baton and scuffled with television crews, screaming abuse. Someone tried to rip a camera from a Channel Seven cameraman. Famously, an ABC reporter, Max Uechtritz, suffered a bloody nose and suspected broken hand after he went to help a photographer, Nick Andrean, who was being bashed and kicked by six men. Uechtritz held his own against three would-be assailants, an effort that won him plenty of admirers.

As the service began, police started to arrive in response to emergency calls and by the time it ended an hour later were organised enough to prevent any more ugly scenes. A cortege of more than 60 cars drove to the Pine Grove Memorial Park near Blacktown in Sydney's west, escorted by police cars and with media helicopters overhead. The coffin was placed in a large family crypt near his parents, Dominco and Saveria, where there was room for another ten bodies. A Blacktown councillor later attacked the Trimbole family for tarnishing the area's image by burying the murdering mafia fixer in his municipality, calling on them to exhume the body and move it to Griffith.

‘He should have been buried in Griffith where he came from. It's their shame, not our fame,' he said.

The Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, telephoned Max Uechtritz to congratulate him on defending the photographer in the brawl at the funeral. When this became public, Craig Trimbole was incensed and called talkback king John Laws on radio to attack Hawke over it. Maybe he thought that because La Famiglia, the ‘family' of murderous drug traffickers, owned Hawke's cabinet minister Al Grassby, that they had bought the entire Government.

He was wrong, of course. But it wasn't hard to see how he had got the idea.

A POLITICIAN'S DOUBLE LIFE EXPOSED

One sentence buried Grassby: ‘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 loved her husband fiercely but she was a realist: she did not entertain unrealistic hopes after his disappearance. With the blood, the bullet shells, the silence, the situation … she knew he was dead. She gathered her strength to get herself and her children through shock, grief and loss. Paul, 19, happened to have travelled down from Sydney for the weekend and James was only 3. Ruth, 16, and Mary, 13, came home from boarding school.