A Tale of Two Cities (4 page)

The known facts are bleak, and haven't changed in half a lifetime.

At the pub, Mackay had a round of drinks and chatted with friends – largely about his efforts to draw attention to the open scandal of large-scale marijuana crops being grown in the area – before buying a cask of white wine in the bottle shop and heading to the car park to go home. He was never seen again.

It was dark, the street almost deserted. Two people were working late in the office building on the other side of the car park. One was Mackay's solicitor and friend, Ian Salmon. The other was an accountant called Roy Binks.

Salmon heard nothing, although he was later called from home to look for his missing client. Binks, however, later told police he'd heard a noise ‘like someone being sick' and that he thought he'd heard a sound like ‘whip cracks'.

Years later, understandably, Binks' recollections were even vaguer. In 1997, on the twentieth anniversary of Mackay's murder, he obligingly pointed out his old office to the authors – and where Mackay's van was parked. But he didn't want to rake over the embers of fading anger and sorrow.

In fact, he seemed faintly embarrassed and nervous, an attitude shared with many other honest Griffith citizens, who still tend to start sentences warily with ‘It's all such a long time ago'. The unspoken suggestion is that it's easier to let sleeping dogs lie.

Binks was anxious about being quoted. He didn't want to stir up trouble, he explained apologetically.

Ian Salmon was not quite so shy. After 33 years in Griffith, he moved interstate to retire and often thought about what happened that Friday evening after a worried Barbara Mackay called to say Don hadn't come home.

Salmon agreed to drive around looking for him, as Mrs Mackay was reluctant to call the police immediately.

At first he didn't feel it was sinister, only that it was out of character for Mackay not to go home. But, by midnight, he was getting worried and contacted police. He kept looking and found the mini-van in the Griffith Hotel car park.

First, he noticed the imprint of an adult hand on the driver's window. Then he swung his car around so the headlights lit the scene. That's when he saw pools of blood and three spent .22 bullet shells glinting on the ground.

DON Mackay's body has never been found. No one has been convicted of his murder. No one is likely to be.

An old and dangerous man called James Bazley, criminal and gunman, was convicted in 1986 for conspiring to kill Mackay and for another drug-related double murder, but he's not the talking type. Finally released in 2001, aged 75, he has never broken his silence to say anything useful, except that he'd been ‘told' that Mackay's body was buried on a large Griffith rice farm owned by Gianfranco Tizzoni, the man whose evidence helped put him away on murder conspiracy charges. Where, he couldn't say.

Neither is George Joseph saying much. The one-time gun dealer sold Bazley a French .22 calibre pistol believed to be the murder weapon and recommended Bazley to do the ‘hit' when approached on behalf of a Griffith marijuana syndicate keen to hire a killer.

With the exception of Robert ‘Aussie Bob' Trimbole (who would eventually die on the run in Spain in May 1987) those who
ordered Mackay's death – many of them publicly named by a royal commission – are still going about the business of turning illicit millions into legitimate assets. They do this with the best legal and financial help money can buy. The way, some say, they bought police and politicians.

Mackay's family, friends and supporters see this but they are powerless where governments and police have pointedly failed. Some avoid certain shops in Griffith, or cross the street rather than share the footpath with certain people. None have ever been willing to be quoted.

It's hard to credit this nightmarish undercurrent in the bustling main street of an outwardly peaceful country town. But the Riverina, for all its Banjo Paterson red gums and sunlit plains, is in secret ways a little Calabria, still a stronghold of the so-called ‘Honoured Society'.

Sydney had a dark side, too, like Al Capone's Chicago, where for decades corruption seeped upwards like rising damp, regardless of which premier or police commissioner was in power. Some people in Griffith still wonder why investigations went nowhere, about who tipped off Trimbole to flee Australia in 1981 and why he was not arrested after Victorian police passed on his address to other authorities.

They recall the times that visiting political figures would go straight to the shop of a Calabrian identity, now dead, known locally as ‘The Godfather'. It was suggested that this man – once charged with having unlicensed pistols – could deliver blocks of votes. It was speculated he could also deliver campaign funds. What isn't certain is what favours he scored in return.

‘Don't let anybody fool you,' one long-time Griffith businessman told the authors in disgust. ‘In this town, crime pays. Crime is probably the biggest industry here.' By this he means drug money used to establish legitimate businesses.

It costs millions to buy and set up modern, irrigated vineyards and orchards but some families have no trouble finding the money, although neighbours on identical farms remember the same people battling to get by before the 1960s – before the marijuana boom.

The businessman points at a house nearby, owned by a family whose common Italian surname, Sergi, figured prominently in the Woodward Royal Commission's report in 1979. He remembers former local member (and Whitlam Government Immigration Minister) Al Grassby's Commonwealth car, Australian flag fluttering on the bonnet, arriving as guest of honour at a family gathering.

The Riverina, like Melbourne's northern fringe, has many ‘grass castles' – eruptions of brick, tile and concrete so huge and ugly that they're worth less the day they're finished than the total cost of construction. These are not built as an investment but as a self-aggrandising way to soak up black money. There are always tradesmen who will work for cash.

Marijuana growing has ensured some words have entered the local language. When Riverina people talk of a ‘crop', they don't mean wheat or rice but marijuana. They talk of ‘crop sitters', pawns who specialise in the greedy business of being gardener and guard to million-dollar dope plantations.

The accepted wisdom is that the Griffith irrigation area soon became ‘too close to home', too closely observed by agricultural pilots and local police keen to clean up the tarnished reputation of their predecessors, of whom three went to jail for corruption in the early 1980s.

Later, the crops were grown much further afield – as far as outback Queensland and the Northern Territory. But, even so, if there was a police raid interstate it was odd how often a Griffith
connection was made so far from home: trickle irrigation equipment from a Griffith supplier; bags stamped with Griffith producers' names; crop sitters from Griffith families.

The younger members of such families disappeared from town for a few days or weeks then returned flush with cash. ‘They've got a crop off somewhere,' locals muttered to each other. But not too loudly, and never on the record.

Meanwhile, money keeps pouring into an already prosperous district. The town where tax investigators in the 1970s estimated half the banks' cash flow was from marijuana has remained remarkably recession-proof. Some suggest the same of Shepparton and Mildura.

DONALD Bruce Mackay was, according to Ian Salmon, more than a decent man. He was a good bloke, too. Like Mackay's widow Barbara (until her death in 2001) and adult children, Salmon resented the headline writer's shorthand that labelled Mackay an ‘anti-drug crusader'.

It's a tag that ignores the warmth, intelligence, humour and strong physical presence of a husband and father, businessman and sportsman. It leaves a lingering and offensive suggestion that he was a naive, wowserish zealot who blundered into trouble. As if, somehow, it was his fault. Blaming the victim has been popular in some circles ever since the murdering Mafia peasants used their tame politician, Grassby, and bent police and others to try to poison public opinion. There were those, prominent in politics, the mob had compromised long before.

The truth, says Salmon, is that Mackay was big – in size, intellect and heart – and brave enough to stand by his principles when lesser people shuffled their feet and looked the other way. Two days after he disappeared, Barbara Mackay told reporters
her husband believed if good people ‘didn't do anything, then evil won'.

The weasel tendency to blame the victim has crept into references to Mackay by some who didn't know him, which suits those who plotted his death. It has also suited them to suggest that support for Mackay and demands for a full investigation are somehow harmful to the harmonious relations of an area that is more than half Italian, mainly Calabrian.

For thirty years it has been repeatedly asserted that ‘98 per cent' of Griffith people are law-abiding citizens, which is undoubtedly true. What some find galling is that the other two per cent – representing organised crime – have much to gain by repeating that assertion.

The feeling is that the corrupt few can hide among the law-abiding majority, at the same time leading a refrain that it's unfair to brand all Calabrians as crooks. It would, of course, be unfair – but that is a convenient loophole for the people who plotted murder.

Ten days after Don Mackay disappeared, 5000 people crowded the lawns of the local hospital for an ecumenical memorial service. Shops closed. People wept.

Two weeks later, 2000 people jammed a local club to take part in a television special hosted by famed British interviewer David Frost, who flew in for the event. Al Grassby was jeered off stage at the same event when he claimed he'd had only one complaint of marijuana growing. The snake in the grass was posturing for the benefit of his long time sponsors – the crims in grass castles.

Meanwhile, a reward of $25,000 soon leapt to $100,000 with pledges from local business people – and there were predictions it would reach the then staggering sum of a million dollars.

Members of Concerned Citizens of Griffith were widely quoted about the need to investigate and clean up drug trafficking and corruption.

But as the years came and went without any sign of Mackay's body, the group ran out of energy and its members rarely met and would not be quoted. Time dulled the outrage and the determination but not quite all the fear.

EVEN Barbara Mackay, the most articulate and fearless of women, grew to feel that there was little to be gained by repeating herself. When the authors visited her in 1997, she would talk off the record but saw no point in spoiling the harmony of her family's life by appearing publicly bitter.

At 61, and a grandmother, she lived then in a tasteful unit overlooking a park in a quiet street. She was gracious, almost serene, given what she had suffered. She had faith in both God and in Griffith but not so much in the system that had let her down so cruelly.

She said she had written a book that had been shelved by her publishers because of fears of defamation writs but she planned to revive the project. That idea would die with her in 2001.

Meanwhile, her eldest son, Paul, was still running the family furniture store his grandfather had started just after World War I. But the youth who was outspoken and angry in the first years after his father's death was, nearing 40, gruff and suspicious when the subject was brought up. Like everyone else in town, he did not want to be quoted. After all, all the talk in the world couldn't undo the great wrong done to his family.

But the facts speak in favour of the Mackays. They have been accused by the stupid and the self-serving of being ‘anti-Italian' and ‘anti-Griffith' yet Barbara never considered moving and Paul married a woman called Maria Minato, whose mother's family is from Plati, a stronghold of N'Dranghita and birthplace of many Griffith Calabrians.

Barbara Mackay went to her grave still tortured by speculation about what happened to her Don's body. The reality couldn't be worse than all the rumours, she sometimes told friends.

One story is that the body was put through a pet food grinder, another that it was burned in a hospital incinerator or an old brick kiln, another that it was weighed down and dumped in a river, or set in concrete underneath a building.

She never did get the truth about his death. What she had, though, was the truth about his life.

Three days before he died, there was an attempt to lure him to Jerilderie, 160 kilometres away, to meet a mysterious ‘Mr Adams', who claimed he was a lottery winner who wanted to furnish an entire house. It was later to become clear that it was the hired hit man, James Bazley.

Mackay missed the appointment, instead sending an employee, Bruce Pursehouse. The reason? Mackay was arranging the funeral of a poor man called Harold Craig, one of many people he had helped in Griffith. ‘If the truth's known,' Pursehouse would recall, ‘Don probably paid for the funeral as well as doing everything else.'

He was like that. Three days later, he paid for his social conscience with his life. The question remains: was it in vain?

Two years later, in 1979, a Queen's Counsel assisting the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking put it this way: ‘One school of thought is that people behind the (drug) trade have been incredibly stupid in acting against someone as prominent as Don Mackay. The other school says it was a masterstroke which has created enough fear to keep people's mouths shut for the next ten years.'

More than thirty years later, mouths are still shut. After thousands of hours and millions of dollars being spent on investigation, the truth behind a crime that shamed Australia is as elusive as it was the night Don Mackay was killed.

AROUND the race tracks and clubs and restaurants favoured by the big spenders they called Trimbole ‘Australian Bob', later contracted to ‘Aussie Bob'. It was part of the casual criminal slang favoured by people who liked the quasi-anonymity of using nicknames and aliases rather than the surnames on their birth certificates. Not that they had any trouble, in the 1970s, getting fake birth certificates, driver's licences and passports. Trimbole had a book of 100 birth certificate blanks filched from a public building in Griffith. Nothing was a problem to Aussie Bob. He was everybody's mate, because he never knew when they might come in useful.