A Tale of Two Cities (10 page)

In this group, a powerful currency is The Tip – inside information that this horse will win or that favourite won't. That such ‘certainties' can hardly be predicted without some form of conspiracy has never stopped otherwise honest people from falling under the spell of those who regularly tip winners – and losers.

The organised crime figure who uses punting to launder black money can buy influence beyond the crude buying power of the tainted cash he uses to bribe jockeys, stablehands and trainers, to pay doping gangs or to pay criminal race-fixers, perhaps even to ‘sweeten' racing officials. Not only does bribery improve the
odds of achieving his main aim of laundering black money by landing winning bets – but in the case of the gregarious Trimbole, fixing races gave the opportunity to claim acquaintance with and influence powerful or useful people otherwise beyond his reach. How? Because people that would not dream of accepting a bribe will scramble for a tip like children for lollies. They will blithely – and blindly – bet on ‘sure things' that common sense suggests are probably the fruit of organised race rigging. This gives the tipper, if he uses his corrupt inside information carefully, a hidden power, just as effective but far less risky than the blackmail racket of setting up targets with illicit sex and threatening or implying exposure, as the sinister Abe Saffron did for decades to compromise those in power. Whereas many people secretly disliked or feared Saffron, most people who knew Bob Trimbole liked him. He loved racing and a lot of racing people returned the compliment. The most common phrase used about him was that he was ‘a good bloke', a view some people stuck to even after he was exposed as a mobster with a murderous streak.

What was the secret to Trimbole's appeal? That question teased Carl Mengler, a senior officer in the Victoria Police in the early 1980s who would head a task force on the recommendation of the Stewart Royal Commission when it made its report in early 1983. Mengler would spend years dissecting Trimbole's public and private life, reading documents and interviewing scores of his associates, and probably knows as much about him as anyone alive.

It was Mengler who told crime reporter Keith Moor a story that captured the deft way Trimbole got to people who were useful to him and, by extension, to the Calabrian crime family he belonged to and to other crime outfits he knew.

‘There was this quite prominent chap interviewed about his association with Trimbole,' said Mengler. ‘He said he hadn't wanted anything to do with Trimbole at first, but they had become
friends over time. Now this bloke was a racing man, frequently at the track, as of course was Trimbole, and that's how they met. This man was of high social standing and in a position of being able to influence a lot of prominent people; he was from a very respected family.

‘He recalled this untidy little man often being near him. Now, Trimbole was an expensive dresser, but never quite looked the part. His belly was hanging over his trousers and the trouser bottoms were just that bit long that they hung over his dirty shoes, not the sort of man our influential friend would normally associate with, him being a real toff and mixing in all the right circles.

‘The toff started to take notice of this man being around him wherever he went. He would look along the bar and this bloke would nod at him. After a while Trimbole got to saying hello to the toff. The toff said he hadn't wanted to talk to this “little scrag” and had more or less told him to “piss off”. A week or so goes by and the toff sees Trimbole, again at the races, and the toff has a guilty conscience about having been rude to Trimbole, so this time when Trimbole says hello the toff has a brief chat with him.

‘A week later the toff was at the bar and the waiter brought a drink over and said it was from the bloke at the other end of the bar, and of course the bloke was Trimbole.'

And so the story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion, as the patient Trimbole, the onetime mechanic who shouted the bar when he won on the punt, played the ‘mark' like a fish. As the casual race-day conversations moved naturally from small talk to the real business of the day – punting – Trimbole wormed his way into the other man's estimation with the one thing that's at a premium at the track: inside information.

The toff fancies himself as a racing man, on first-name terms with owners and trainers, and one day he suggests Trimbole back a particular horse. It so happens that Trimbole knows something about that particular race and suggests that a different horse, at
longer odds, will win. The toff shrugs – but can't help being puzzled and impressed when Trimbole's tip romps in and his own doesn't. This is the bait. He takes the hook the following week, when Trimbole tips him a winner, which he backs. Trimbole doesn't have to tip many – but when he does, they mostly win. And the toff puts plenty on them. So he starts seeking Trimbole out, inviting him to lunch and dinner regularly. It is a complete role reversal, so that in the end Trimbole calls the shots because he is owed the favours and still supplies the ‘mail'.

Call it the power of ten to one.

TRIMBOLE might never have needed to call in a favour from that particular man but the toff was only one of many he had cultivated and compromised. And many of them knew people in high places: state and federal police, politicians, lawyers and public servants. Some were actually paid for favours done – to have charges dropped or sentences made lighter. Others were befriended, just in case. For Trimbole and the shadowy people behind him, this was like an insurance policy. In early 1981, it was time for Trimbole to make a claim.

The international publicity surrounding the Mr Asia trial had exposed the network of corruption that Terry Clark had exploited, and posed questions that Trimbole and others would find difficult to answer. Despite Trimbole's ability to foil the law, it was becoming obvious to some of his well-placed contacts that the looming Stewart Royal Commission would make him too ‘hot' to be around. After years of his acting with relative impunity, there would be nowhere to hide … at least, not in Australia.

Even if Trimbole had been brash enough to think he could tough it out in the witness box, his publicity-shy backers in the La Famiglia, the Griffith cell of the Honoured Society, were anxious to get him out of the way to avoid a repeat of the scrutiny they'd endured during the earlier Woodward Royal Commission
prompted by the Donald Mackay murder.

After years of being the secret society's front man, Trimbole had become something of a liability. The public backlash over the Mackay scandal had been followed by the debacle of Isabel and Douglas Wilson's murder, and now there was the link to the murderous ‘Mr Asia' heroin syndicate to scandalise the public.

So, by the new year of 1981, Trimbole was getting the message loud and clear. He had done a deal to ‘buy out' the Australian arm of the Mr Asia business for $30 million, and had visited Clark and his crew in London for long periods in 1979, where he combined gambling in West End clubs with making shady new European contacts involved in arms smuggling as well as drugs. Perhaps he was thinking ahead, making contingency plans, because when the warning signals started filtering through more than a year later, he seemed ready to step into a new world.

Secret telephone taps that New South Wales Criminal Intelligence Unit detectives illegally put on Trimbole's telephone in April 1981 show that four prominent people – a Sydney lawyer and a doctor and two senior New South Wales police officers – each warned Trimbole that the Stewart inquiry was going to open and that he would be called before it. The doctor had links with illegal SP bookmakers in Melbourne and organised crime figures. Police telephone taps also picked up Trimbole talking to leading trainers and jockeys. During one taped conversation, much quoted later, a jockey famously told Trimbole that another rider ‘doesn't care if he gets six months. He'll almost strangle a horse to pull it up.'

Transcripts of telephone tapes later leaked to the legendary investigative reporter Bob Bottom showed that Trimbole telephoned a former Labor Party power broker on 4 April 1981 and asked him if he had yet spoken to a State judge ‘so we can see where we're up to'.

The Labor man:
I've talked to a lot of people.

Trimbole:
yeah, but have you spoken to him or …

Labor man:
No, I couldn't. They couldn't get to the judge
(then adds)
I spoke to someone very close to him.

Trimbole:
I see, fair enough, all right mate. Well, I just wanted to know because if not I've got a bloke who knows him pretty well, too.

Labor man:
It never hurts to have more (than) one talking to
…

Trimbole:
I just didn't want to double up.

Labor man:
yeah, you don't want to overplay.

Although each is too wily to mention specific names on a telephone, the meaning is clear. Later in the conversation the Labor man says: ‘I spoke to somebody a bit down the line that's probably got more influence and I think they're all worried about the situation.' He then says that he will be having lunch with the judge the following week (‘I've been a mate of his for thirty years') and warns Trimbole not to overplay his hand through other approaches because ‘sometimes judges get a bit touchy.'

Less than four weeks later, on 1 May, Trimbole spoke to a senior Sydney policeman who asked to meet him to avoid talking on the telephone. There was a clear inference he had ‘hot' information to give Trimbole. Next day, a Sydney doctor told Trimbole on the telephone, ‘the heat's on'.

Asked who was putting the heat on, the doctor says: ‘You might be washed up, do you get me? Re down south; they're pretty wet, you know.'

Another senior policeman warned Trimbole on 2 May there was definitely a ‘set-up' and referred obliquely to a new investigation. Trimbole lapsed into racing slang. ‘… it looks as though I better get me … on and keep fit. We'll just see what happens. One thing, if I break down I've got plenty of assistants.'

A Sydney lawyer arranged to meet Trimbole on 6 May in offices in the city. During a telephone conversation the previous day, he told Trimbole: ‘Well, I would be thinking I would be having a holiday if I was you.'

The letters patent for the Stewart Royal Commission were issued by the Governor-General in the last week of June 1981. But the reluctant star witness, forewarned from so many quarters, had already flown.

On 7 May, under an overcast sky, Trimbole walked through Customs at Sydney Airport with the confidence of a man who knew something others didn't. He was flying to Europe via the United States on his own passport but he had filled in his flight departure card with a false birth date, a detail he knew would be enough to throw off the Customs computer programmed to detect his exit.

As usual, Aussie Bob the race fixer had inside knowledge and had set up a ‘boat race' for himself. Luckily, too, the police taps on his telephone had been suspended two days earlier. That's what friends are for.

THE Australian public would not glimpse Trimbole again for more than three years. But those who knew where to look could find him if they wanted. This did not seem to include the relevant Australian authorities.

Trimbole's old partner-in-crime Gianfranco ‘Frank' Tizzoni knew where to look. The Melbourne-based Tizzoni had first linked up with Trimbole in 1971 to sell and service pinball machines before moving into marijuana distribution with him. In July 1982, Tizzoni visited France and met with Trimbole, who was using the name Robert White and living in luxurious circumstances in Nice with his long time de facto wife and her daughter. He was not the only Australian villain to see the wanted man in France: the disgraced doctor Nick Paltos visited Trimbole after getting through Customs by mysterious means despite being under investigation for massive medi-fraud. But that's another story. By this time, unknown to Trimbole and the rest of the Honoured Society, Tizzoni was already talking to the Victoria Police,
a choice he had made after being picked up by what he was told was ‘pure chance' while driving back to Melbourne from New South Wales on 31 March 1982.

But that was later. To understand what a can of worms the Mackay case posed to various law enforcement bodies, it is necessary to go back to where the mess began – to the appointment of a New South Wales policeman to handle the case. He was Joe Parrington, who in the 1970s was a poster boy for the New South Wales Police Force. Big and handsome in a lantern-jawed way, he was a double for laconic American tough-guy actor Lee Marvin.

The disappearance of Donald Mackay was a big case but Parrington believed he was up to the challenge. In 1977 the Detective Sergeant (second class) considered himself ‘the most senior and most experienced operational homicide investigator' in the state.

Despite the crime scene including bullets and blood that matched Mackay's type, rumours began early that he had engineered his own disappearance. The rumours were peddled by the corrupt local politician, Al Grassby, bent police and senior members of the New South Wales government, as outlined in a separate chapter. The media was briefed behind the scenes not to ‘jump to conclusions' that Mackay had been killed. This was despite the fact that Mackay was a devout Christian and a committed family man who ran a successful business and had not moved any money as part of some mad plan to set up another life. There was not a skerrick of evidence to justify the claims but the hurtful rumours would persist for years.

The irony was that the group of faceless men who had ordered the murder had first considered compromising Mackay by setting him up with a woman but concluded he was too moral to fall for the trap.

Despite national outrage and public memorials in Griffith, the New South Wales government's response was as cynical as it was
pathetic. It offered a paltry $25,000 reward for the ‘missing' man. Soon the reward reached $100,000 – through public donations.