A Tale of Two Cities (14 page)

Barbara's mother, the elderly Mrs Dearman, moved into her daughter's house and when Barbara said she was worried about the way her daughters were thinking and talking, and felt she should have ‘a big talk' with them, Mrs Dearman seized the opportunity to make it happen.

She said, ‘Look, I'll go to the bathroom and you can talk, just the three of you.' In the bathroom she slipped, fell and could not get up, waves of pain coming from her injured leg. But the old lady was staunch. Not a whimper escaped her while Barbara was speaking to the girls. She just gritted her teeth. When it was over, she was found and taken to hospital. Like mother, like daughter: when the weekly pre-natal class was held after the murder, physiotherapist Barbara Mackay was there to take it as usual.

She was in the media spotlight, every face muscle analysed for its emotional content. Some found the Methodist Ladies College Old Girl's calm assurance a passionless way for a newly-widowed woman to behave. Rumours flew: one had it that Don Mackay had a secret lover and that his van was seen parked outside a motel the night before he was killed (police checked it out, and it was a complete furphy, but the smear lived on). Local conversations featuring ‘Calabria … La Famiglia … Euston crop … mafia … Griffith …' made many in the Riverina feel that to be Italian was to be misunderstood, and being Calabrian was to be a suspect.

Barbara held the public funeral ten days after Don's death, on an icy, windy Tuesday afternoon outside Griffith Hospital. The Combined Church Thanksgiving Service drew a heap of clergymen, community leaders and 5000 to 6000 locals, about half of Griffith.

Britain's TV star interviewer, David Frost, questioned Mrs Mackay at the Yoogali Club, to which locals were invited. Local State ALP member Lin Gordon was given a rough time – he had been on the radio pooh-poohing talk of Griffith being a big marijuana town at the very time Mackay was gunned down, and Liberal candidate Mackay's preferences had nearly toppled him at a recent election. But Griffith reserved its sharpest contempt for Al Grassby, the premier's Special Consultant for Community Relations. He was booed as he went into bat for ‘honest Italians'.

Mackay's death, called a ‘disappearance' in all official references for years, forced the government to do something publicly. Premier Wran promised a royal commission into drug trafficking less than a week after Mackay disappeared. Justice Phillip Woodward's team visited Griffith for in-camera hearings and then three days of public sessions. The commissioner's party stood outside some of the overblown houses Mackay and others had called ‘grass castles'. Legalistic arguments about wild marijuana and the hemp rope industry were swept aside. ‘The Mackay Bill', so-called because it was the main plank of the petition Don was involved in, outlawed marijuana growing in New South Wales, the last state to do so.

With Don Mackay out of the way, it was back to business for Bob Trimbole. He continued to move marijuana – mostly grown far from the Riverina by 1978. But he was less and less interested in that greasy kid stuff. The high-quality smack Terry Clark and his pals moved was the future, and stashing money safely took more and more of his time. There were important race meetings to go to, for a punt, to meet ‘by chance' people who could introduce him to Terry Clark, to be on the lookout for horses' connections and jockeys he could buy to help with his lucrative hobby of fixing races. But by early 1981, of course, Trimbole would be too hot to handle, and so flee the country after being tipped off that a royal commission was about to put him in the witness box.

Trimbole wasn't the only Riverina rogue to have his reputation shredded. The 1980s would see Al Grassby's reputation trashed, too – mainly as collateral damage because he allowed himself to be too close to the Calabrian figures behind Trimbole.

Playing his self-appointed part as the ‘Father of Multiculturism' and ‘social justice campaigner', the nation's noisiest enemy of racism continued to speak out against the way his Italian exconstituents were being tarred with the mafia brush because of
the activities of a tiny minority. Grassby's shrill pitch was that all the ‘grass castle' allegations demeaned Griffith's vibrant multicultural success story, and people talking of ‘mafia' had been watching too much late-night TV. He made an inviting target for political enemies.

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.