SMACK

EXPRESS

SMACK

EXPRESS

HOW ORGANISED CRIME
GOT HOOKED ON DRUGS

CLIVE SMALL & TOM GILLING

Every effort has been made to find the copyright holders of the photographs used in this book. Please contact the publisher should there be any issues of ownership of the photographs. The authors and publisher would be pleased to make the necessary corrections in any future edition.

First published in 2009

Copyright © Clive Small and Tom Gilling 2009

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National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Small, Clive.

Smack express : how organised crime got hooked on drugs.

ISBN 9781741756364 (pbk.)

Bibliography

Includes index.

Drug traffic—Australia.

Organized crime—Australia.

Drug control—Australia.

Drug abuse and crime—Australia.

Crime—Australia—History.

Other Authors/Contributors:

Gilling, Tom.

364.1770994

Index by Trevor Matthews

Internal design by Lisa White

Set in 11.5/15.5 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To all the honest cops past and present who
have fought the good fight against
organised crime

In memory of Sandra Harvey

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

Cast of Characters

Afterword

What Happened to . . .?

Bibliography

Index

Preface

In his 1979 book The Godfather in Australia, Bob Bottom surveyed organised crime’s rise and coming of age. Drawing together the findings of a series of inquiries into aspects of organised crime, evidence previously hidden in the records of state and federal law-enforcement agencies, and crucial new information, Bottom demonstrated the growing power and reach of organised crime in Australia and detailed its attempts to form alliances with the American Mafia. A year later, Alfred McCoy’s Drug Traffic focused on the scale of Australia’s surging drug trade.

Bottom and McCoy exposed a situation that retired Justice Athol Moffitt, in his own book, A Quarter to Midnight, described as ‘the Australian crisis’. In a damning swipe at governments and the police, Moffitt denounced the ‘constant political wrangling and point-scoring on matters of organised crime and corruption, coupled with political apathy and fancy side-stepping in the face of an unrestrained escalation in organised crime’.

That escalation has continued. Organised crime has adapted its methods, but its focus on secrecy and self-protection is unchanged. So is the willingness to use violence, intimidation, and the corruption of state and federal politicians, police, and Customs, taxation and immigration agents. Criminals are becoming ever more adept at sheltering behind lawyers and hiding their profits and their investments—both legal and illegal—with the aid of accountants and business advisers. Occasionally investigators will break through one of these protective walls, but the edifice remains.

Despite the difficulties, our knowledge of organised crime has grown significantly in recent decades. Intelligence comes from ‘rollovers’, informants, telephone intercepts and covert listening devices, physical surveillance, the detailed tracking of financial transactions and court cases, the investigation of crime figures and their associates, and occasional media exposés.

Though imperfect and incomplete, all of this information is valuable. The picture it gives us may be obscure in parts, but it tells us much about the business of organised crime. And without studying where organised crime has come from, it is impossible to predict where it might go.

Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to those colourful characters on both sides of the law—many of whom must remain nameless—who helped directly or indirectly in the writing of this book. Thanks also to the journalists who over the decades have reported fearlessly on the growth and influence of organised crime.

Special gratitude to Bob Bottom, Steve Barrett, Keith Moor, Nick McKenzie, Stephen Gibbs, Neil Mercer, John Laycock, Bruce Provost, Peter Smith and the late Sandra Harvey for their support and advice.

About the Authors

During his thirty-eight-year career in the New South Wales Police Service, Clive Small spent much of his time on investigative work, and received several commendations. From 1977–80 he was an investigator with the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking. For the next three years he was with the Commonwealth–state Joint Task Force investigating the Nugan Hand merchant bank and the activities of Murray Riley and his associates. In 1984 Small joined the policy team of newly appointed Police Commissioner John Avery, specialising in drug law enforcement and drug policy. In 1987–88 he was an investigator on Strike Force Omega, which reexamined the 1984 shooting of Detective Michael Drury. In 1989 he exposed the fiasco that was the investigation and attempted prosecution of former Police Superintendent Harry ‘the Hat’ Blackburn for alleged crimes of sexual assault, assault and robbery, and detaining for advantage. In the face of opposition from the police hierarchy and a smear campaign against him, Small insisted on Blackburn’s innocence and recommended that all charges against him be dropped. A 1990 royal commission headed by Justice J.A. Lee supported Small’s conclusions and exonerated Blackburn. In the early 1990s Small led the Backpacker Murders investigation, which resulted in the arrest of Ivan Milat for the abduction and murder of seven backpackers in the Belanglo State Forest, south of Sydney, between 1989 and 1992. In 1996 Milat was convicted of all seven murders and sentenced to life in jail. During the mid-1990s Small led a secret investigation which uncovered widespread police corruption in the Fairfield–Cabramatta area. After the 1994–97 Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service, Small was appointed to head the newly created Crime Agencies. In 2001 he was placed in charge of the Greater Hume Police Region, which covers western Sydney, to lead efforts to clean up Cabramatta, then Australia’s heroin capital. Small spent his last two years in the Police on secondment to the Premier’s Department as a Director of Community Solutions and Crime Prevention. He then joined the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption as executive director of operations.

He left ICAC in March 2007. His police experience and contacts built up over several decades give him unrivalled insight into the workings of organised crime in Australia.

Tom Gilling is the author of The Sooterkin (1999) and Miles McGinty (2001), both of which were shortlisted for major awards and chosen as notable books of the year by the New York Times. They have been translated into several languages. His latest novel, Dreamland, appeared in June 2008. During his career as a journalist, Gilling worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Bulletin, The Guardian (UK), The Observer (UK) and the New York Times, among other publications. He has co-written two non-fiction books: Trial and Error (1991, revised 1995), about the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, and Bagman: The Final Confessions of Jack Herbert (2005), about the events that led to the Fitzgerald Commission into police corruption in Queensland.

Cast of Characters

‘Aunty’, the name given by police to one of Australia’s biggest cocaine importers, is a Colombian woman in her fifties who came to Australia with her family in the 1970s. She is the face of a Sydney-based syndicate that has been operating for two decades, importing and distributing around a tonne of cocaine every eighteen months.

Barry Richard Bull, born 25 July 1943. Bull was trafficking cannabis for a decade before becoming ‘Snapper’ Cornwell’s partner. He spent long periods in jail during the late 1980s and ’90s.

Leo ‘the Fibber’ Callaghan (aka Jack Warren and Patrick William Warren), was born in 1924. A professional shoplifter and member of Australia’s infamous Kangaroo Gang during the 1960s, Callaghan fell in with Lennie McPherson and George Freeman and went on to become a major cannabis importer.

Daniel Michael Chubb, born 12 June 1942. Along with Michael Hurley, Chubb was one of the ‘Balmain Boys’ who, during the 1970s, stole from warehouses, bond stores and licensed clubs. A decade later Chubb was importing cannabis and heroin. Among his major distributors were Neddy Smith, Michael Sayers and Tony Eustace.

Richard Bruce ‘Snapper’ Cornwell, born 29 January 1946. Like Riley, Cornwell was a member of Michael Moylan’s drug syndicate during the 1970s. When the Moylan syndicate collapsed, Cornwell and Riley set up their own operation. By the early 1980s Cornwell was importing cocaine and cannabis with Barry Bull. For a time, one of their biggest customers was Michael Hurley.

Kenneth Robert Derley, born 18 September 1949, was involved in drugs and property theft when he joined Murray Riley’s drug operation in the mid 1970s. On Riley’s orders he hired Neddy Smith as a heroin distributor and strong-arm man. After serving time for his role in Riley’s 1978 cannabis importation, Derley stayed out of serious trouble until the late 1990s when he returned to the drug trade.

‘Johnsonny’ Bi Dinh, born in the mid 1950s, used his connections as a standover man and collector of money from illegal gaming machines to sell heroin for Barry McCann and George Savvas in Cabramatta. From the mid 1980s Johnsonny fed bulk heroin to Cabramatta’s Vietnamese youth through pool halls and other hangouts. On 1 April 1987 he survived an attempted assassination—probably the result of a street war with rival illegal gaming operators. In October 1977 he was jailed for money laundering on behalf of an Asian controlled international drug syndicate.

Khanh Quang Do, born 23 May 1973. Do was the leader of a gang commonly referred to as the Bankstown Boys. Seen as intruders, they were in a state of constant conflict with the local Cabramatta gangs. In 2001, Do survived two assassination attempts by Hoang Ha La’s gang.

Thomas Christopher ‘Tom’ Domican, born 1 February 1943, hit the headlines in 1980 over allegations of vote rigging in the Enmore branch of the Australian Labor Party. During the 1980s, his interests were illegal gambling and protection. In Sydney’s gang war he sided with Barry McCann against Lennie McPherson and George Freeman. Domican has been charged and acquitted of one murder, one attempted murder and five counts of conspiring to murder.

William ‘Bill’ El Azzi, born 25 December 1958, joined the police in 1981, using underworld boss Frank Hakim—the Lebanese Godfather—as a referee. He was a close associate of Tom Domican. El Azzi left the police and became an amphetamine cook for a major Sydney drug syndicate. In 2003 he was convicted of conspiring to manufacture amphetamines and sentenced to seven years’ jail.

Anthony ‘Pommy Tony’ Eustace, born 26 November 1942 in England. Eustace arrived in Australia in 1964. By the early 1970s he was a close associate of the main players in Sydney’s underworld. He was involved in illegal gambling, protection, drug importing and trafficking. A former boxer, he revelled in his reputation as a tough guy.

Malcolm Gordon Field, born 22 May 1941. After learning his trade with the Balmain Boys, Field was responsible for a spree of large-scale thefts. In 1973 he became an international thief and fraudster and was jailed in Paris and Stockholm. With Hurley, he imported cannabis and ecstasy using a network of companies and bank accounts in at least eleven countries.

Christopher Dale Flannery, born 15 March 1949. A relatively unsuccessful Melbourne criminal, Flannery moved to Sydney and became known as ‘Rent-a-Kill’. He provided protection for George Freeman and formed a corrupt association with Detective Sergeant Roger Rogerson. His attempt to murder Detective Michael Drury in his Chatswood home left Drury severely wounded. Flannery killed several people during the Sydney gang war of the mid 1980s and wanted control of organised crime for himself.

George David Freeman, born 23 January 1934. After meeting in jail, Freeman and McPherson became lifelong friends and partners in crime. In the 1960s Freeman’s SP bookmaking empire was protected by police and corrupt politicians.

Albert Jaime ‘Flash Al’ Grassby, born 12 July 1926, was elected the Labor MLA for the New South Wales electorate of Murrumbidgee in 1965. Four years later he won the federal seat of Riverina and became the Minister for Immigration. According to the underworld rollover Gianfranco Tizzone, Grassby was at the ‘beck and call’ of the Calabrian Mafia (whose existence he always denied) for forty years.

Shayne Desmond Frederick Hatfield, born in 1965, was a standover man and drug trafficker. He met Michael Hurley at Alcoholics Anonymous. By the late 1990s he was a major cocaine distributor for ‘Aunty’. During 2004, Hatfield and ‘Tom’ sold 200 kilograms of cocaine. With Hurley and Les Mara, they imported 30 kilograms of cocaine before ‘Tom’ rolled over to the New South Wales Crime Commission.

Graham John ‘Abo’ Henry, born 18 November 1951, was Neddy Smith’s partner in drugs and armed robbery. After Smith was jailed for murder in 1988, Henry was given eight years for stabbing a police officer. In jail, he and Smith rolled to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Michael Nicholas ‘Mikel’ Hurley, born 5 November 1946. Another member of the Balmain Boys, Hurley committed large-scale thefts throughout the 1980s. He began importing cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine with another Balmain Boy, Malcolm Field. Hurley and another associate, Leslie Robert Mara, were arrested after a botched 2005 cocaine importation.

Duong Van Ia (known as Van Duong and Ah Sau or Brother Number Six), born 7 May 1955. Van Duong approached the heroin business the way he approached his gambling—with calculated risks aimed at huge wins. By the mid 1990s Van Duong was the sole supplier of heroin to the 5T gang. In one month alone Van Duong gambled $24 million at the Sydney Harbour Casino.

Hoang Ha La, born 3 March 1979. La’s gang was a late arrival on the Cabramatta heroin scene. Its emergence prompted the final break-up of the already severely weakened 5T.

Warren Charles Lanfranchi, born 1958, met Neddy Smith in jail during the late 1970s. After his release Lanfranchi became a major heroin distributor for Smith. When Lanfranchi fell behind in his payments, Smith cut him off. Lanfranchi turned to drug rip-offs and armed robberies. As a potential rollover, he was a threat to both Smith and corrupt detective Roger Rogerson.

Van Ro Le (known as Madonna), born 13 January 1970. For a time Madonna was a leader of Cabramatta’s 5T Vietnamese street gang, which was involved in murders, violence, protection rackets and drugs. More than any other gang, the 5T was responsible for the flourishing drug market on the streets of Cabramatta.

Barry Raymond McCann, born 28 July 1943. McCann was one of Murray Riley’s partners in the infiltration of organised crime into licensed clubs in the 1960s. He trafficked heroin with the Mr Asia gang and later with his partner George Savvas. It was through the McCann–Savvas syndicate that large-scale heroin deliveries reached Cabramatta.

Bruce Michael ‘the Godfather’ McCauley, born 28 May 1937, was Danny Chubb’s drug partner and financial advisor. After Chubb’s murder in November 1984 McCauley continued to import and traffic in heroin, sometimes with Neddy Smith. In 1992 he was arrested in Sydney with 15 kilograms of heroin and sentenced to seventeen years’ jail.

Lawrence Edward McLean, born 5 April 1931. McLean had a long criminal record in Melbourne before he moved to Sydney. By the mid 1970s he was growing and importing cannabis with Stan Smith. A decade later, McLean was masterminding importations from one of the world’s biggest suppliers, Englishman Phillip Sparrowhawk, and forging links with another, Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks.

Leonard Arthur McPherson, born 19 May 1921. In the late 1960s, along with George Freeman and Stan Smith, McPherson emerged as one of the big three of organised crime. Their main businesses were illegal gambling, SP bookmaking, protection and skimming money from licensed clubs.

Leslie Robert Mara, born 14 March 1953, played first grade rugby league from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s before turning to crime. Mara became a major player in the drug trade, importing cocaine with Michael Hurley and others. Their operation in 2005 came unstuck when an associate, ‘Tom’, rolled over and gave them up. Mara was arrested after eighteen months on the run.

Phuong Canh Ngo, born 9 July 1958, arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1981 and soon became involved in local politics. The Mekong Club was his power base in Cabramatta’s Vietnamese community and he was closely associated with the violent 5T gang. Ngo and John Newman, the Labor member for Cabramatta, were bitter enemies. After Newman was assassinated in 1994 Ngo was charged with his murder.

Khanh Hoang Nguyen, born 8 May 1976. Khanh was a senior member of the 5T. In 1997–98 the gang splintered when Khanh Hoang Nguyen and David Nguyen (not related) broke away and formed their own gangs.

‘David’ Van Dung Nguyen, born 27 December 1977. Despite its small size, David’s gang, as it was known, was particularly violent. They were the aggressors in a series of savage encounters with Khanh Nguyen’s gang during 1999 and 2000.

The ‘Rat’ was a detective at Fairfield. There he led a small group of detectives known as the ‘Rat Pack’ which was involved in drugs and money rip-offs, the theft of money from illegal card games, perverting the course of justice and the fabrication of evidence.

Murray Stewart Riley, born 5 October 1925. Riley joined the New South Wales Police at nineteen and resigned in 1962. Riley had been in a corrupt relationship with McPherson since the 1950s. From the mid 1970s he was a major player in the cannabis and heroin trade, along with Snapper Cornwell and Neddy Smith.

Roger Caleb Rogerson, born 3 January 1941, joined the New South Wales Police and became one of its most decorated—but notorious—detectives. He formed corrupt relationships with various criminals, including Neddy Smith, and was accused (but acquitted) of having been involved in the attempted assassination of Detective Michael Drury in 1984. He was dismissed from the police in 1986 and was later jailed for perverting the course of justice.

George Savvas, born 1941, was a longtime political and criminal ally of Tom Domican. In 1984 Barry McCann and Savvas became partners. Over eighteen months they imported more than 100 kilograms of heroin and oversaw the first large-scale deliveries of heroin to Cabramatta. In 1987 McCann was shot dead. Two years later Savvas was jailed for twenty-five years for conspiring to import and to supply heroin. He was acquitted of murdering McCann.

Michael John ‘Mick’ Sayers, born 16 April 1946, moved to Sydney from Melbourne, where he was suspected of several murders. During the early 1980s he became a major player in illegal starting price bookmaking, race rigging and the drug trade. He was a close ally of Christopher Flannery.

Antonio ‘Tony’ Sergi, born 29 October 1935. Sergi ran the growing side of Trimbole’s cannabis operation. The Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking identified Sergi as a senior member of the Calabrian Mafia.

Pasquale ‘Pat’ Sergi, born 1 January 1946, in Plati, Calabria, is a cousin of Antonio ‘Tony’ Sergi and married into the Trimbole family. According to the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking, ‘The distribution of the product [cannabis], and the channelling of finance back to the Griffith end of the operation, was carried out by persons in Sydney, including Pasquale Sergi’, who were ‘under the immediate control of [Aussie Bob] Trimbole’.

Arthur Stanley ‘Neddy’ Smith, born 27 November 1944. Smith was hired by Murray Riley in the mid 1970s as a heroin distributor and strong-arm man. Later he set up his own syndicate with William Sinclair and Warren Fellows. A close associate of Flannery, Smith sold heroin for Danny Chubb and was given the green light to commit crime by corrupt Detective Roger Rogerson.

Stanley ‘Stan the Man’ Smith, born 3 January 1937. One of the three original ‘Mr Bigs’ of organised crime, Smith later teamed up with Lawrie McLean to build a multi-million-dollar international cannabis operation. Smith was McLean’s Sydney distributor until McLean was arrested in 1996.

Victor Thomas Spink, born 1942, moved from shoplifting and theft into the drug trade. He featured prominently on the so-called ‘jockey tapes’, along with Mick Sayers, another drug-running punter who was murdered in a gang war. In 1994 Spink and others were arrested over a 15-tonne cannabis importation. He was sentenced to nine years’ jail, a light sentence that owed something to the unspecified ‘assistance’ he gave authorities.

Gianfranco Tizzone, born 1934. On Trimbole’s orders Tizzone hired Melbourne criminal James Frederick Bazley to murder Donald Mackay and, two years later, drug couriers Douglas and Isabel Wilson.

‘Tom’ has been a drug trafficker since leaving school in the mid 1970s. By 2000, he was selling bulk cocaine for Shayne Hatfield. During 2004 he and Hatfield sold 200 kilograms of cocaine supplied by Aunty. They paid Aunty $24 million and made $6 million. With Hurley and Mara they imported another 30 kilograms of cocaine. In late 2004 ‘Tom’ rolled to the New South Wales Crime Commission and gave up his colleagues.

Tri Minh Tran, born 10 December 1974, became leader of 5T gang in the early 1990s after Madonna was jailed. Under Tran the 5T dealt drugs, robbed illegal casinos and extorted money from local Asian businesses. Tran was a strong-arm man for Phuong Ngo but rejected his $10,000 offer to murder Labor MP John Newman. After his release from jail in 1995, Madonna challenged Tran for the leadership of 5T, but lost. Madonna formed his own gang.

Bruno ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, born 19 March 1931. Trimbole entered the cannabis trade in the late 1960s and soon joined forces with the `ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, centred on Griffith. When Donald Mackay threatened the mafia’s operations, Trimbole had him killed. He went on to become a key member of the Mr Asia heroin syndicate.

Chapter 1
Bob Trimbole

The `ndrangheta and the
Mr Asia gang

Griffith is a country town about 500 kilometres southwest of Sydney in the rich heart of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, one of the largest wine, fruit and vegetable growing regions in Australia. In the 1970s it had about 12,500 residents, almost three-fifths of whom were Italian-born, the highest proportion in any town in New South Wales. Most were immigrants from Calabria, an impoverished region in Italy’s deep south.

On 15 July 1977 a forty-four-year-old anti-drugs campaigner and local Liberal Party activist, Donald Mackay, left the Griffith Hotel after drinks with friends—and vanished. His disappearance was widely attributed to a ‘mafia hit’. The ‘mafia’ tag referred to a group of local Calabrians whose homes were too opulent and whose cars were too flashy to have been paid for out of income from their farms and orchards. The money came, in fact, from growing and selling cannabis. It was rumoured that corrupt police and Labor politicians protected the Griffith mafia, whose drug activities were led by Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole (also spelt Trimboli), the Australian-born son of Calabrian migrants. Tip-offs supplied by Mackay had recently been responsible for a series of police raids that resulted in the seizure of large cannabis crops and the arrest of several growers, all of Calabrian descent.

The public outcry over Mackay’s disappearance forced the New South Wales Labor government to set up the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking, which started its inquiries in Griffith within weeks and ran for the next three years.

The rumours were correct. The commission found that Trimbole was the ‘practical leader’ of a secret organisation known as the Onorata Società or Honoured Society, or, in the Calabrian dialect, `ndrangheta (pronounced en-drang-ay-ta). It was the Calabrian version of the Sicilian Mafia. The `ndrangheta is believed to have been born in the nineteeth century as a loose grouping of families who found kidnapping, robbery, bribery and extortion more lucrative than farming their rugged, rocky land. When Calabrians emigrated to the US and Australia, so did the `ndrangheta.

Italian secret crime societies commonly referred to as mafia first took root along Australia’s east coast, from the northern Queensland cane fields to Melbourne, in the late 1920s. The `ndrangheta was one of these groups. It became prominent in the 1930s through a terror campaign that included at least ten murders and thirty bombings of Calabrians who had dared to resist or compete with its members.

By the early 1950s police were well aware of the `ndrangheta, which had cells in cities and country towns across Victoria and New South Wales and thrived on protection and extortion rackets based around produce markets and labour exchanges. The threat of violence was usually sufficient to secure compliance. Murders were few. Violence, where it did occur, was rarely reported to authorities.

This changed in 1963–64, when a struggle for control of the growers’ markets in Melbourne led to at least five murders and several attempted murders. But that mayhem was minor compared with what Trimbole unleashed when he introduced the `ndrangheta in Australia to the drug trade.

Trimbole was born in 1931 and spent much of his early life on his parents’ farm outside Griffith. At the age of twenty-one he broke with tradition and married an Anglo-Australian, Joan Quested. After a period on the farm they moved to a rented house in town. There Trimbole expanded a small motor-vehicle repair business into a petrol station with panel-beating and spray-painting facilities.

In 1968 Trimbole was declared bankrupt. About this time the petrol station burned down, along with all records of the business. Until now Trimbole’s criminal activities had been limited to illegal gambling. Soon he began growing cannabis on a big scale. The profits enabled him to buy a series of businesses and he was regularly seen making extravagant bets at the races.

Trimbole knew of the `ndrangheta from his family—his father is said to have been a low-level `ndrangheta member in both Calabria and Griffith, and relatives in Calabria were active in it—but he was not a member. His nickname ‘Aussie Bob’ came from a preference for Australian ways. But now he turned to the Calabrian Mafia with a proposal: a national cannabis cultivation and distribution network that could yield millions of dollars a year and transform the `ndrangheta in Australia.

Trimbole’s family connections gave him quick and trusted access to the leaders of the Griffith cell, who found his offer too good to refuse. Making use of established extortion and protection networks and a ready supply of skilled agricultural labour, the drug business flourished.

For the `ndrangheta it was a novel arrangement. Trimbole never became an initiated member: the relationship with him was chiefly a business partnership. For the purpose of the drug operations he became the society’s ‘practical’ head but control of the `ndrangheta itself remained with his partners.

By 1972 the crops were huge and so were the profits. Trimbole invested his share in seemingly legitimate businesses such as property, licensed premises, a wine cellar and a supermarket, and used sham loans to buy more farms. As the operation expanded, he handed over responsibility for the growing side to Antonio ‘Tony’ Sergi, born on 29 October 1935, of the House of Sergi Winery, now Warburn Wines. Woodward noted that ‘It [the “Winery complex”] seems to have been financed with cash funds from unknown sources’. As an example, he observed Trimbole had ‘loaned’ Sergi more than $350,000 cash which was ‘used in the Winery operations and construction’ and that none of this ‘loan’ had been repaid. ‘[T]hese payments are not in fact “loans”,’ Woodward wrote, ‘but constitute the introduction of organisational funds [i.e., cash from an organisation running the cannabis trade] into the Winery’. ‘[A] continual flow of organisational money poured into this business,’ Woodward concluded.

Trimbole’s focus now was the distribution networks, which he managed with his customary vigour. By the time of his discharge from bankruptcy in 1975, he had accumulated assets of more than $2 million and gambled away several million dollars more.

Between 1974 and 1978 police across Australia found twenty-two large-scale cannabis plantations. Most appeared to have produced multiple crops of the drug, and all were under the control of persons of Calabrian descent. Of forty-five people arrested, twenty-two were born in the Calabrian village of Plati, eighteen were born elsewhere in Calabria and two had Calabrian parents. The remaining three were from Sicily, Genoa and Nice. Many of the plantations had demonstrable connections with Griffith. The Woodward Royal Commission concluded that it could not be satisfied that any of the twenty-two plantations were ‘unconnected’ to Griffith and the `ndrangheta.

It was an industry spread across at least four states and generating—in today’s values—hundreds of millions of dollars a year in profits. Attempting to trace the source of the growers’ funds, the commission uncovered never-repaid ‘loans’ between families; bank accounts whose owners could not explain where the money came from; cash from overseas, particularly from the sale of deceased estates in Plati; betting wins by occasional gamblers; and huge payments from the firm of Trimbole, Sergi and Sergi for ‘farm produce’ for whose cultivation no investments could be identified. Large sums of cash had also been found ‘by chance’ in the homes of deceased relatives.

As to the fate of Donald Mackay, the commission found that he had been murdered. His van had been found where he’d left it in the Griffith Hotel car park. Nearby were blood stains, Mackay’s car keys and three spent .22-calibre shell casings. Trimbole and the other drug bosses had ironclad alibis: they’d been out of town that day, booked into hotels in Sydney and Surfers Paradise. Those who remained in Griffith had been in a restaurant in the company of local police officers. The commission concluded that these alibis were arranged because ‘they knew what was going to happen’.

More details of the murder emerged after the commission ended. In March 1982 Gianfranco Tizzone, a Melbourne mafia identity, was arrested for cannabis trafficking. Not long afterwards, he ‘rolled’ and became a police informant. He said that since 1971 he had been the Melbourne distributor for Trimbole’s multi-million-dollar cannabis network, selling more than $1.5 million worth of the drug each year. He also told police that in 1977 Trimbole had asked him to arrange for Donald Mackay to be killed because he was causing problems for the `ndrangheta’s drug operations. Tizzone approached another well-known Melbourne criminal, George Joseph, who had excellent police connections: he was the patron of the Victoria Police gun club. Joseph put him in touch with James Frederick Bazley, a member of the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union, which was notorious for violence and intimidation. Bazley was a hitman who wore the scars of several shootouts and assassination attempts. He agreed to kill Mackay. It was not the last time Trimbole would use Tizzone to organise a hit.

Although Tizzone talked to police, it was not until 1 June 1983 that he made a formal statement. Part of this was released three years later by the special inquiry into the police investigation of Mackay’s death. In the statement Tizzone claimed that by May 1977 ‘the threat by Mackay to our operations was considered so important that the problem was discussed at a meeting between Tony Sergi, Tony Barbaro [a brother-in-law of Sergi], Bob Trimbole and myself at the home of Tony Sergi in Griffith. During the meeting we discussed three alternatives designed to overcome the problem. One was to buy off Mackay at any price; another was to compromise him by getting him involved with a woman. The third alternative and the last resort was execution.’

Two days after making the statement, Tizzone retracted his claims against Sergi and Barbaro. He maintained this retraction during questioning by New South Wales police and during court proceedings.

One man closely involved in the Mackay murder investigation was Karl Mengler, an assistant commissioner of the Victoria Police. According to author Keith Moor, in his book Crims in Grass Castles, Mengler had ‘no doubt that the first statement Tizzone made was the correct one’. He thought Tizzone ‘decided to withdraw that statement to save his skin and protect his family’.

Neither Sergi nor Barbaro was charged in connection with Mackay’s murder, although this allegation is contained in full in the 1986 Nagle Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry into the police investigation into the death of Donald MacKay.

A week after he disappeared, several thousand people attended a church service for Donald Mackay. Bob Bottom notes in his book Shadow of Shame that, while several Liberal and National Party politicians attended, not one Labor politician did. When the then Premier, Neville Wran, finally went to Griffith, ‘the local Labor Party MP, Lin Gordon, took him to see an Italian [Calabrian] political godfather, Pietro Calipari, but not [Mackay’s wife] Barbara.’ Many Griffith residents—and state police—saw Calipari as not just a political godfather but a mafia-style one.

Twelve years earlier, Calipari and others had been arrested and charged when police seized a number of firearms in a series of raids in Sydney and Griffith. The raids had followed Victoria Police investigations into the 1963–64 Melbourne market murders. A local Labor MP named Al Grassby gave character evidence for Calipari, as did a local detective, John Ellis. As a result, Calipari got off with a $40 fine. Ellis was one of several Griffith police who provided ‘pre-arranged’ alibis for Tony Sergi and others identified by the Woodward Royal Commission as `ndrangheta members. He was later sentenced to a jail term.

Part of the profits of the Griffith drug trade was spent on buying the assistance of bookmakers and bankers (who could help launder drug profits), lawyers, police, public servants—and politicians. Prominent among these was Grassby. Tizzone claimed that the `ndrangheta had started cultivating Grassby early in his career. They funded his election campaigns and delivered the Italian vote to Labor. ‘The time and money they spent on Grassby was paid back in favours he did for them,’ Tizzone said.

‘Flash Al’, as he was known (for his natty suits and colourful ties), had married into a local Calabrian family. In the mid 1960s he won the state seat of Murrumbidgee for Labor. In 1969 he switched to federal parliament and won the seat of Riverina. Three years later he became Minister for Immigration. When Grassby lost his seat in the 1974 election, he blamed Donald Mackay and his claims about the local mafia and its Labor connections.

Ignoring Grassby’s close ties to the powerbrokers of Griffith’s drug trade, in 1975 the Whitlam Labor government appointed Grassby Commissioner for Community Relations, a position he held until 1982.

In the mid 1960s, as a member of the New South Wales Parliament, Grassby had strenuously denied the existence of the mafia in the Murrumbidgee area. He told the parliament that anyone who believed there was such an organisation ‘had been watching too much late-night TV—probably Eliot Ness in The Untouchables’. He stuck to this position in the face of mountains of evidence in the hands of police that proved the `ndrangheta had existed in Griffith since at least the early 1930s.

In February 1974, as Federal Minister for Immigration, Grassby visited Plati, in Calabria, as an honoured guest and was presented with a gold key to the town and honorary citizenship. In return, he used his ministerial authority to grant Australian visas to three Plati citizens who were known members or associates of the `ndrangheta and who had previously been denied entry to Australia on grounds of bad character. One of them, Domenic Barbaro, had previously migrated to Australia but been deported after racking up a string of criminal convictions.

In the months after Mackay’s murder, questions were asked in the New South Wales Parliament and the media about Grassby’s role in granting the visas. Premier Neville Wran, who was also the Minister for Police, defended Grassby’s actions. Bob Bottom recounts in his book The Godfather in Australia how Wran ‘blundered in’ to the controversy, ridiculing suggestions that Barbaro was a hardened criminal and arguing that the visa decision had been made to enable him to ‘see his dying mother for the last time before she met her Maker’. Unfortunately for Wran, it emerged a couple of days later that Barbaro had spent fewer than half his ten days in Australia with his ‘dying mother’ and that she was still alive and well three and a half years after the visit.

At the time Grassby authorised Barbaro’s visit to Australia, he was a suspect in the kidnapping for ransom of an Italian industrialist’s son. Not long after his return to Italy, Barbaro was arrested and charged over the kidnapping. A report of the Calabrian anti-Mafia police noted that the purpose of Barbaro’s visit to Australia was to ‘take money from kidnappings to that country [Australia] to . . . invest in Indian hemp plantations’ and to launder the profits. Shortly after his arrest—and two years before Wran’s defence of Grassby—an Italian court had declared Barbaro to be ‘socially dangerous and associated with the mafia’.

Years earlier Grassby had sponsored `ndrangheta figure Rocco Carbone’s migration to Australia and settlement in South Australia. Carbone had been convicted in the late 1940s of exploding a hand grenade in a Calabrian police station, killing several police, according to a confidential police report.

In each case the sponsored `ndrangheta member’s family was closely related to the Griffith drug bosses.

Grassby also went to the assistance of Luigi Pochi, another Calabrian-born `ndrangheta member identified by the Woodward Royal Commission. Pochi married a sister of Tony Sergi and in 1975 went into business with Trimbole and Sergi in Vignali Wines in Canberra. The store was officially opened by Grassby eight months after Pochi and others had been arrested and charged over an $80 million cannabis crop at Colleambally. Pochi was subsequently convicted and served half of his two-year jail sentence. The Woodward Royal Commission found that Vignali Wines had been funded by the Griffith drug trade.

After Pochi’s release from jail, the then Liberal government began proceedings to deport him. Several Labor MPs made representations on his behalf. So did Al Grassby, by then the Community Relations Commissioner. A long legal battle ended with the High Court upholding the deportation. However, in 1983 the government revoked the deportation order on the ground that it would place an unfair burden on the family of Pochi, who had lived in Australia since 1959.

Even as the government weighed up Pochi’s deportation, he and others were under police investigation for cannabis growing. Roderick Campbell, Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, in their 1992 book The Winchester Scandal, note that despite the ongoing drug investigation’s clear bearing on the deportation issue, ‘no attempt appears to have been made to bring it to [John] Hodges’s [the Immigration Minister’s] attention.’ This failure was never publicly explained.

More evidence of close relationships between `ndrangheta members and Labor MPs emerged in late 1985, when Giuseppe Verduci, who had been committed for trial on cannabis charges, agreed to inform against the `ndrangheta. His detailed police statement was passed on to the National Crime Authority. According to Andrew Keenan, in a 1987 Sydney Morning Herald article headlined ‘Silence on Possible Mafia Arrests’, Verduci, a longtime Labor Party fundraiser, claimed that in 1981 he had gone to the Canberra home of a Labor figure and warned him that the party should not be supporting Pochi’s fight against deportation because he was still involved in the cannabis trade. According to Campbell, Toohey and Pinwill, Verduci produced cannabis from the boot of his car to support his claim. The Labor identity’s response was ‘to take a handful of the marijuana, explaining that his wife enjoyed it’.

Opposing Pochi’s deportation, the South Australian Labor MP Mick Young told parliament, ‘I am not sure that we are not taking this action [deportation] because we cannot get the real culprits [for the Mackay murder].’ Ken Fry, the Labor member for Fraser, chimed in that the government had not considered ‘the fundamental question’, namely, ‘whether he [Pochi] is likely to offend again . . . I do not see that there is any justification at all for believing that he would offend again . . . There is no evidence that he will offend again.’ Fry went on to describe Pochi as ‘a battler’. The idea that he was a Mr Big of organised crime ‘is a product of the imagination of the police’. Outside parliament, Gareth Evans, the then Labor spokesman for legal affairs, added his voice to the chorus, saying there was nothing to suggest that Pochi had any continuing involvement with criminals or drugs. There is no suggestion that any of these was the ‘Labor figure’ to whom Verduci had spoken.

Apparently the Labor figure did not bother to tell his colleagues of his conversation with Verduci less than a year earlier. Instead, he allowed them to mislead parliament and the public.

A short time later, Pochi and others were arrested and charged over two more cannabis crops, this time at Bungendore, about 50 kilometres east of Canberra. Pochi was committed for trial over one of the crops, but the prosecution did not proceed and he was discharged.

At the time of this arrest, Pochi was associated with a company that had cleaning contracts for Australian Federal Police buildings, including AFP headquarters, as well as other government buildings in Canberra. This posed a potentially serious security risk.

After Donald Mackay’s murder, with the Woodward Royal Commission throwing an unwelcome light on its activities, the `ndrangheta again enlisted Grassby’s help. His assignment echoed the line in the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects where Kevin Spacey’s character, Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint, says, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’ In Grassby’s case, the devil was the `ndrangheta. In 1979 Grassby began spreading rumours implicating Mackay’s wife Barbara, their son Paul and their family solicitor in his murder. He tried without success to persuade politicians in the parliaments of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia to read an unsigned document suggesting they were behind the killing. However, he got lucky when the Sun-Herald newspaper ran a story based on the document under the headline, ‘Mackay Killing: Not the Mafia’. According to Bruce Provost, a former federal police agent and senior investigator with the then NCA, Trimbole paid Grassby $40,000 to circulate the document.