Heartache has no end for family of Donald Mackay

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This was published 12 years ago

Heartache has no end for family of Donald Mackay

By Tony Wright

THE only man who might be able to tell Donald Mackay's four children the whereabouts of the remains of their father is James Frederick Bazley, 85 now, living at home in Melbourne.

Very quietly, the cold case unit of the NSW Police contacted the old trigger man through his Melbourne lawyer about 18 months ago.

Griffith businessman, Liberal party candidate and Griffith businessman and unsuccessful Liberal Party candidate Donald Mackay on the campaign trail in 1976.

Griffith businessman, Liberal party candidate and Griffith businessman and unsuccessful Liberal Party candidate Donald Mackay on the campaign trail in 1976.Credit: Riverina Grazier

Would he finally grant the Mackay family the small mercy of knowing what happened to their father almost 34 years ago?

Bazley, after all, had done his time for conspiring to murder Mackay. The ageing painter and docker and contract hitman got out of prison in 2001, having served less than 15 years of a life sentence, which also covered his killing of drug couriers Isabel and Douglas Wilson.

What would he have to lose now?

''He basically said no, full stop,'' Paul Mackay, the eldest son of the man who disliked being known as ''the prominent Griffith anti-drugs crusader'', told me this week.

It was the latest - and until now, untold - frustration in a story without end for the Mackays.

Donald Mackay was murdered on July 15, 1977, in the car park of the Griffith Hotel in the (often unaccountably) wealthy city of Griffith in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area of the NSW Riverina.

The Mackays' heartache, then, has been more than twice as long as Bazley spent in prison. Of course, Bazley wasn't convicted of murdering Don Mackay; just conspiring to do so. No one has been charged with the actual murder and Bazley has always said he didn't do it.

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It was a NSW cop named Fred Krahe, he has claimed. Four years ago, police thought they might have found their first clue to the missing body. A human bone was found under a tree on a farm not far from Griffith.

It was sent without publicity to a laboratory in the United States for analysis. Paul Mackay told me at the time that he hoped it wasn't from his father's body, for it was probably dug up by a wild dog and dragged there. There was no way of knowing where the rest of the body lay.

There was mixed relief, then, when the results came back: the bone was between 200 and 300 years old.

He knew he was marked down as an enemy of the drug-rich

Don Mackay's murder stirred up more than a family's anguish. It lifted the lid on what Mackay had almost given up hope of being properly investigated: an Australian Mafia's ability to corrupt police and politicians through the hugely profitable marijuana-growing industry.

It didn't stop the Griffith-based marijuana industry, however.

Three weeks ago, police took just five days to find 10,447 cannabis plants and 917 cut plants, estimated to be worth $23 million, on farms and at an orange orchard and vineyards all no more than 60 kilometres from Griffith. The Mafia, police knew, was still in business.

It happens that in company with a fellow journalist, Michael Cahill, I interviewed Don Mackay in his furniture shop in Griffith two days before he disappeared. It was the first time I had heard the term ''grass castles''. Most of the interview was never published, for it was off the record and anyway defamatory at the time.

Still, it remains a murdered man's next-to-last words. Among other things, Mackay named the man he believed was the ''real'' long-standing godfather in Griffith, and it wasn't Robert Trimbole.

He also told us he knew he was marked down as an enemy of the small group of drug-rich families because he had acted secretly against them … and he was sure they had found out. In 1975, he had learned of a big crop being grown at Coleambally, about 65 kilometres from Griffith. This was dangerous knowledge.

A year previously, an agriculture inspector named Joseph Patrick Keenan had stumbled across a group of men and women, including a fellow named Antonio Sergi from a district winery, packing marijuana into green plastic bags in a farm shed.

When Keenan reported the matter to Griffith police, he was taken aback. Detective Sergeant John Kenneth Ellis didn't seem interested and took no statement. Within a day, Keenan got a call from one of Sergi's relatives informing him the family knew he had spoken to the police.

Several weeks later, the body of a man named Joseph Patrick Keenan was found floating in a canal near Griffith. This Joseph Patrick Keenan was no relation of the agricultural inspector.

Ellis, who was in charge of the investigation of the unfortunate man's death, reported at his inquest that he was an alcoholic and there were no suspicious circumstances.

Ellis and the other two detectives from Griffith at the time, Senior Constable John Francis Robbins and Detective Sergeant Brian James Borthwick, were later to be given prison stretches for perverting the course of justice in relation to two drug crops.

Unsurprisingly, Don Mackay didn't trust the local cops. He quietly contacted drug squad police from Sydney who, he told us, then used his furniture store as their secret Griffith headquarters. On November 10, 1975, they raided the crop at Coleambally and found $60 million worth of marijuana. It was the biggest haul in Australian history and would have caused a sensation if Gough Whitlam hadn't been sacked the following day.

At the subsequent court case, one of the drug squad detectives was forced to hand over his notebook to the defence team representing Giuseppe Agresta, Leonardo Gambacorta, Pasquale Agresta, Luigi Pochi and Franco Sergi. In it was Mackay's name as informant.

Mackay told us he felt cold fear when he learned of this.

He told us, too, that the real godfather of the Griffith families had long been a man named Peter Calipari, who owned a shoe shop in the main street.

Calipari, he said, had been respected by the families who had their roots in Calabria, Italy, as an old-style godfather, holding meetings in the basement of his shoe shop, where business and disputes were settled in a traditional and usually benign manner. Calipari had arrived in Griffith in 1951 from the Calabrian town of Plati and had built esteem and apparent wealth beyond that expected of a humble shoe salesman.

Trimbole, Mackay said, was by comparison only a half-smart thug, a bankrupt whose panel-beating shop had burned down (a fellow known as ''The Torch'' was thought to have assisted), and who had muscled his way in by building a fortune from the drug trade.

Calipari used his reputation to become a political fixer, Mackay claimed, specifically for Al Grassby, the flamboyant local MP who championed multiculturalism as a minister in the Whitlam government.

''On election day, Peter Calipari would be driven around the polling booths in his big car, stopping and winding down the window so his people would remember who they were voting for,'' Mackay told us. Mackay was an unsuccessful Liberal candidate, though in 1974, his preferences ousted Labor's Grassby in favour of the National Party's John Sullivan.

Grassby, Mackay said, had become a close friend of and apologist for all the big drug families, opening their wineries and attending their weddings. When Calipari had been arrested in 1965 for having an unlicensed pistol, Grassby had appeared as a character witness for him.

Mackay reserved his greatest contempt for Grassby's journey in 1974 to Plati, where he was granted the keys to the town. Among those who travelled with him was Calipari. While there, Grassby used his power as Australia's immigration minister to grant visas to three men who had been refused on grounds of character and the fact that one of them, Domenico Barbaro, had previously been deported from Australia because of his criminal record. After visiting Australia on his new Grassby-blessed visa, Barbaro returned to Plati and, with a cousin named as the godfather of Plati, headquarters of the 'Ndrangheta - the Calabrian Mafia - was arrested for having earlier kidnapped the son of an industrialist.

In 1977, it all seemed a bit mind-blowing.

Two days later, however, Mackay vanished from a Griffith hotel car park. His car keys were on the ground next to his locked mini-van, the door was smeared with blood and three spent .22 cartridges lay near blood and scuff marks on the ground.

Up the street at the Area Hotel, local detective Graham Keech had been at dinner that night with two men who would become suspects in the ordering of the killing, Tony and Domenic Sergi. Along for the party were two former Griffith detectives who had flown in, Arthur Andrew O'Sullivan and the aforementioned Brian Borthwick.

Three years later, Grassby gave South Australian attorney-general Chris Sumner a document implying that Mackay's wife, Barbara, their son Paul and family solicitor Paul Salmon had conspired to murder Mackay. Sumner refused Grassby's request to read the loathsome thing in Parliament. A day later, Grassby tried to persuade NSW MP Michael Maher to read the same document in his state Parliament. Maher also refused.

Twelve days later, the Sydney Sun-Herald, under the headline ''Mackay killing: not the mafia'', published a vague report based on the document Grassby had been hawking around. Grassby was later charged with criminal libel. Twelve years later, on appeal, he was acquitted and awarded $180,000 in costs.

Barbara Mackay died in 2001, never to know where her husband's body was dumped.

In 2007, the ACT Labor government of Jon Stanhope unveiled a statue of a laughing Grassby in Canberra. It cost ACT taxpayers $72,000.

The Griffith Rotary Club paid for a statue of Donald Mackay, which stands in the main street of the town, inscribed with Edmund Burke's admonition that ''All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.''

And in Melbourne, James Frederick Bazley maintains his silence.

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