A Tale of Two Cities (11 page)

Enter Parrington – a man supremely confident in his own ability. History would show his confidence was misplaced.

The previous year he was given information on the murder of Maria Hisshion that with a little luck and a lot of digging could have linked the killing back to the Mr Asia drug syndicate. Parrington chose to ignore it – a decision Justice Stewart would later describe as ‘astonishing.'

A year after Mackay was killed, Parrington presented a sixteen-page summary of the case to the Woodward Royal Commission, still claiming a ‘lack of direct evidence to clearly indicate the reason for Mackay's disappearance'.

Despite the size of the investigation, when Parrington was promoted to the breaking squad in 1978 the Mackay file went with him. Any calls to the homicide squad on the murder were simply transferred to Big Joe.

As Parrington climbed the New South Wales police managerial ladder he remained in charge of the controversial case. By the end of 1981 it had stalled and would have remained unsolved if not for a split-second decision made by a policeman far away from the grass castles of Griffith and the political intrigue of Sydney. Which is where Trimbole's old pal Frank Tizzoni was forced into a starring role.

IN 1981 the New South Wales police and their federal counterparts agreed to run a risky stratagem that would effectively allow the Griffith Mafia to grow massive crops of marijuana in the hope that police would be able to gather enough evidence to arrest the principals.

The operation, code-named Seville, discovered the group would produce up to ten crops at a time because it worked on the theory that some would be discovered.

In March 1982 police watched as their targets met some unidentified men in Canberra and transferred nearly 100 kilos of marijuana into a vehicle.

But instead of heading to Sydney as expected, the men headed towards Melbourne in two vehicles. One was a gold-coloured Mercedes sedan; the other a van. Once they crossed the border into Victoria, the New South Wales police would have no jurisdiction.

Dismayed surveillance police made frantic calls to the Victorian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence with a request to follow but not intercept the vehicles.

An experienced Melbourne detective, John Weel, was instructed to tail the two vehicles as they reached Melbourne's northern outskirts. But because it was close to evening peak hour the policeman feared he could lose the targets, so he took a punt. He took it upon himself to pull them over – and found a bale of marijuana in the boot of Tizzoni's Mercedes, as well as more of the illicit crop in the van, driven by one Robert Enterkin. (A third man, Tony Barbaro, one of a notorious Griffith family, was a passenger in Tizzoni's car. Tizzoni said later it was Barbaro who had asked him to pick up the marijuana from near Canberra.)

Some cynics would later wonder why the careful Tizzoni would use his own car to carry part of the haul. But it was a different era: things were done differently then.

After his arrest, Tizzoni used a private investigator to discreetly inquire if Weel could be bribed. When he realised Weel was an honest cop, he knew he was in trouble. Tizzoni, Barbaro and Enterkin were charged and bailed but Tizzoni – neither Calabrian nor a sworn member of the Honoured Society – started looking for ways to trade his way out of trouble. A former debt collector and private detective, he saw himself as a businessman, if a shady one. He had been in partnership with Bob Trimbole in the pinball machine business since 1971, and had become increasingly
involved in wholesaling marijuana in Melbourne for Trimbole's Griffith connections. The easy money had appealed to Tizzoni but the outwardly respectable middle-aged family man from Balwyn, who had invested his drug earnings into several properties, had never been the sort of criminal who sees prison as an inconvenient occupational hazard. Somehow, he wanted to covertly negotiate his way out of a prison sentence without the risk of actually telling all he knew about the Honoured Society.

Two respected Bureau of Criminal Intelligence members, Bob Clark, an expert on Italian organised crime, and John Mc-Caskill, an intelligence specialist, turned Tizzoni into Australia's most important informer.

He eventually told them the story of how Trimbole had used him to recruit a hit man to kill Mackay and, later, Isabel and Douglas Wilson.

To provide a cover story for the fact that police dropped drug charges against Tizzoni, Weel pretended to be corrupt and to have been bought off.

The story was so realistic that a Mafia figure paid Tizzoni $30,000 as part of the bribe money. Naturally, Tizzoni kept the cash. He may have reformed but thirty grand is thirty grand.

Tizzoni volunteered to travel overseas and find Trimbole, and did. Because his wife and children were in Melbourne, and he owned a farm at Koo-Wee-Rup south-east of Melbourne, and at least one property at Griffith, he was not considered a bail risk. He went to Europe three months after his arrest and came back with Trimbole's address (and alias and car registration number) in Nice.

The Victorian police were keen to use the tip-off to nail Australia's supposedly most wanted man, who at that stage had been ‘on the run' for fourteen months, but there was nothing they could do but hand the address to ‘relevant authorities'.

Victoria police formed a taskforce, code-named Trio, under the command of Carl Mengler, to verify Tizzoni's claims.

Discussing it later, Mengler was tactful but critical: ‘I certainly believe that if such an address is given to police, and known to be accurate, as was the case with the address supplied by Tizzone, then every conceivable effort should be made to act on the information immediately and bring the person to justice. That didn't happen in Trimbole's case.'

Mengler said the information should have gone ‘straight to the Prime Minister', who should have authorised a small task force to go to France with special warrants to request the French to arrest Trimbole and extradite him. He said if it were true that the Stewart Royal Commission had been unable to do anything more than send a letter to the French authorities nominating Trimbole's address in Nice, it was pathetic – and that a golden opportunity had been wasted.

‘You don't write letters giving the address of somebody who is supposed to be Australia's most wanted man,' Mengler said. ‘You knock on his door.'

The truth was that the Stewart Royal Commission, for all its powers to ask questions, could only recommend that certain action be taken by the authorities. It was not Judge Stewart's fault no-one was sent after Trimbole. If it were anyone's fault, it lay elsewhere, somewhere among the silent alliance of politicians, public servants and police who had their reasons for looking out for their mate Bob.

‘He was protected in high places,' was Tizzoni's pithy postscript to the affair. It seems the only explanation for the lack of action.

If the Victorian police had been allowed to build on the confession they might have cracked the Mackay case. But the Trio taskforce was not looking to charge Tizzoni, Bazley and Joseph with Mackay's murder because it had happened over the border.
Instead, they settled on ‘conspiracy' because the murder plot had been hatched in Melbourne.

Detectives in Victoria were optimistic but their New South Wales counterparts were not happy. Parrington, especially felt it was a New South Wales case and believed the Victorian prosecution was doomed to fail.

Not for the first time, he was wrong. He had not endeared himself to Trio detectives: once refusing to discuss the case with expert investigators and demanding to be briefed by a commissioned officer. He made the comment that in New South Wales ‘we talk to the organ grinder and not the monkey.' Clearly he thought he was the big banana.

If it had just been trivial interstate rivalry it wouldn't have mattered but Parrington appeared to be concealing evidence that could have been used in the Melbourne prosecution in the hope he would use it later in New South Wales.

Bazley was sentenced to life in 1986 for the murders of the Wilsons, nine years for the conspiracy to murder Mackay and a further nine years for a $270,000 armed robbery

A subsequent judicial inquiry into the New South Wales handling of the case by retired judge John Nagle, QC, left Parrington's professional reputation in tatters.

‘Parrington anticipated that the Victorian conspiracy prosecution of Bazley would fail and wanted to hoard Pursehouse's evidence (a key Mackay witness) for a New South Wales prosecution … It was his all-consuming, but unthinking determination to bring the killers of the Donald Bruce Mackay to New South Wales that has proved his undoing,' Nagle wrote.

Nagle found that Parrington, ‘Presented as a stubborn man with little imagination or breadth of vision and no mental resilience … it involved impeding Victorian police officers and Crown law authorities in the prosecution of murder.

‘It is the commission's view that his motive was to gain credit for himself as an investigating officer and for the New South Wales police by a successful prosecution of Bazley in this state.

‘There is evidence warranting the prosecution of Frederick Joseph Parrington for the offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice.'

On 13 March 1987, Parrington was charged departmentally with two counts of neglect of duty and fined $500 on each charge, and removed for twelve months from his post as manager of criminal investigations.

Parrington was an honest man who wanted Mackay killers brought to justice in New South Wales. But his refusal to co-operate with Victorian authorities could have resulted in the case remaining unsolved.

Meanwhile, Tizzoni was the star witness … but did he tell the truth? According to one key investigator, ‘Frank told his version of the truth and made sure his role was minimised.'

Some wonder if Bazley, a small middle-aged man, could have shot a big man like Mackay in the Griffith Hotel carpark and bundled the body into a car then disposed of it on his own.

Mackay was a fit squash player, ruckman size at 192 centimetres and 95 kilos. Bazley was about 168 centimetres and lightly built. Almost certainly he would have needed help and many believe Tizzoni was his assistant. But if Frank had confessed that he would have opened himself up to murder charges.

In October 1984 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Mackay and the Wilsons and was sentenced to five years' jail. He was released into witness protection after just a year. In February 1986 he was released on parole and moved to Italy. He died there in 1988.

He had previously bought a grave in a Melbourne cemetery and pre-paid his tombstone. Both remain unused – he was buried in Italy.

His co-conspirator, the gun dealer George Joseph, became a prosecution witness and was sentenced to a maximum of seven years jail but released early in October 1984. He went on to be an occasional judge in various Miss Nude contests.

There is no justice.

IN March 1984, when the long-awaited inquest into the death of Donald Mackay began in Sydney, a barrister called Brian Morris made an odd submission to the coroner, Bruce Brown. ‘Business interests' overseas made it inconvenient for ‘Mr Trimbole' to attend just then, the lawyer said. Trimbole, in telephoned instructions, had not said he was unwilling to attend – merely unable to do so for some time. Morris then applied for leave to represent Trimbole – a request he would later withdraw on grounds he could not be properly instructed by his client.

Pressed by the Crown advocate to explain how he came to be appearing for a fugitive, Morris said he had originally been briefed by Trimbole before he had left Australia two years earlier – and that the instructions had been confirmed by telephone.

When the advocate inquired if Morris happened to know Trimbole's current address, the barrister said he did not have the exact address. Asked to produce a document giving Craig Trimbole power of attorney for his father, Morris produced one ostensibly signed by Trimbole senior and witnessed by a solicitor on 15 May 1981 – a week after Trimbole had fled Australia.

The inquest underlined the scandalous official silence about Trimbole's whereabouts. When it moved from Sydney to Griffith later that month, the sham was further exposed when a friend of Trimbole's wife, Joan, and daughters, Glenda and Gayelle, surprised the court with a frank picture of how easily the family stayed in touch with the man who had set them up in relative luxury.

Vicky Greedy, described to the inquest as a regular visitor to the Trimbole's Griffith home in the 1970s, told the coroner she knew that his married daughter Gayelle Bignold had kept in close contact with her father in the three years since he had fled overseas. Gayelle had told her she intended to send her father a videotape of her small son's birthday party. Most damaging, perhaps, to those authorities supposedly looking for Trimbole, was the revelation that she knew of a photograph taken of Trimbole and his small grandson – who had been born after Trimbole's departure from Australia in May 1981. And Gayelle Bignold had shown friends clothing for the child which she said her father had sent ‘from France'.

The coroner and his counsel could not ignore Greedy's evidence. When the inquest resumed in Sydney, Glenda Trimbole appeared and admitted that she, her sister Gayelle and Gayelle's husband, John Bignold, had visited Trimbole several times in his apartment on the French Riviera. They were a little more forthcoming than their brother Craig Trimbole, who told the inquest he had been to Nice with his wife, but he claimed he had not seen his father there. He even claimed he had not known whether his father had been in Nice at the time.

Although he held his father's power of attorney, Craig claimed not to know what type of business Trimbole senior was involved in and said he was not curious enough to ask. Under cross examination he denied telling his father to call him on Saturday evenings at his mother-in-law's house, where he always had dinner, rather than use his (Craig's) home number in Cabramatta. He denied that he had set up the Saturday night hotline arrangement because he thought his home telephone might be tapped by police. This was not widely believed.