A Tale of Two Cities by John Silvester Page A

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 waspathetic. It offered a paltry $25,000 reward for the ‘missing’ man. Soon the reward reached $100,000 – through public donations.
    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