Underbelly 5 Read online

  In July 2001, 28 years after Kirste Gordon and Joanne Ratcliffe disappeared, South Australian Police had still not taken a signed statement from Sue Lawrie about the thin-faced man she saw.

  CHAPTER 7

  Silence of the damned

  They thought of bribing him or setting him up with a woman, but he was too loyal and too honest.

  THE dapper man and the decent woman were both aware of their respective fates.

  The woman had been ill for years and knew her condition was terminal. The man had been in jail for years and was aware that he would soon be free.

  They both chose to remain silent. The man because he stuck to his old-time criminal code; the woman because she had always sought – and achieved – peace and dignity.

  The woman was Barbara Mackay, whose husband, Donald, was murdered in the carpark of the Griffith Hotel on 15 July, 1977. His body has never been found.

  The man was Australia’s oldest known hitman, James Frederick Bazley, who shot Mackay, a man he had never met, for just $10,000.

  In late January 2001, Bazley, then 75, was released from Loddon Prison, near the Victorian country town of Castlemaine. He had been sentenced to life for killing three people for cash. Few expected at the time he would ever be released. A few weeks later Barbara Mackay was to die. All she wanted from Bazley was to know where her husband’s body had been dumped, so she could finally say goodbye.

  The career criminal could not bring himself to break the habits ingrained into him over his long lifetime. Even now he could not tell the truth.

  In the mid-1970s Mackay was a little-known local businessman and anti-drugs campaigner who was exposing the growing marijuana industry in the district.

  The heads of the Griffith syndicate, known as The Family, were making large amounts of money, turning themselves from struggling, and in some cases, failed, local farmers and businessmen into some of the most affluent and influential figures in the district.

  They were paying off some local police and didn’t need an upstart local furniture retailer to try to expose them. They thought of bribing him, or setting him up with a woman, but there was a problem – he was too loyal and too honest.

  They decided their only option was to kill him, and employed Bazley to do the job. He was not short of work. The hard man from the Painter and Docker end of the Melbourne underworld had also killed drug couriers Isabel and Douglas Wilson, the New Zealanders whose bodies were found buried in the beach town of Rye in May, 1979.

  The Wilsons were killed on the orders of the notorious Mr Asia drug syndicate boss, Terrence John Clarke, after corrupt police told him the couple were talking to Queensland detectives.

  Bazley was alleged to have been paid $20,000 for the double murder. He was also told to kill the couple’s dog, Taj, but as a dog-lover and former poodle breeder, he refused.

  To Bazley, killing people was just a job, but to kill a dog for no reason was an inexcusable crime. He said, ‘Dogs wag their tails, people wag their tongues.’ When he was told to kill Taj he said, ‘Why the dog? The dog didn’t talk.’

  He was as good as his word. Taj was later found wandering in the street in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. His owners ended up in a shallow grave.

  THE murder of Donald Mackay was to become a defining moment in the exposure of organised crime in Australia, and he was to become a national martyr.

  The Family was to learn that while Mackay was a threat when he was alive, he was far more dangerous, dead.

  No-one other than the concerned people of Griffith would have ever heard of Donald Mackay if they had let him live. It would have been business as usual.

  But when Mackay was murdered he became a national martyr. A few corrupt cops couldn’t keep the lid on this one – although it didn’t stop them trying.

  The murder made headlines around the country and the national media descended on Griffith. It took reporters less than 24 hours to identify the main suspects – some of whom were prepared to be interviewed.

  It took some rather less enthusiastic members of the law enforcement community almost a decade to make the same connections.

  As a result of the public outcry, there was a series of inquiries and royal commissions that exposed judicial, political and police corruption and resulted in the establishment of the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence and the National Crime Authority.

  Police say Bazley remains the only person alive who really knows what happened in the Griffith carpark the night Mackay disappeared.

  Two of the key figures are now dead. Crime figure ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, who helped organise the contract killing, died in Spain in 1987, and key informer, Gianfranco Tizzoni, died in hiding in Italy in 1988, not long after being tracked down by Melbourne journalist, Keith Moor.

  Bazley was sentenced to life in 1986, for the murders of the Wilsons, nine years for the conspiracy to murder Mackay, and a further four years for a $270,000 armed robbery. He has always maintained he was not involved in the three murders.

  Police said that when he took the contract to kill Mackay he was told the body was never to be found and a shotgun was not to be used, as it was seen as the traditional weapon of the Mafia. He used a French-made .22 calibre ‘Unique’ pistol with a specially-fitted silencer.

  After he was convicted, Bazley was resigned to dying in jail.

  He told veteran crime reporter Tom Prior in 1987: ‘I’m in here for keeps. The only way out is over-the-wall or in a pine box.’

  But the Supreme Court later set his minimum sentence at fifteen years – or just five per murder – with the armed robbery thrown in free of charge. Now the career criminal had real hope.

  When Bazley realised he might live long enough to be freed he started to lobby for his release. He contacted former deputy commissioner and head of the homicide squad, Paul Delianis, and asked him to give evidence on his behalf before the Parole Board.

  Although he was retired, Delianis made contact with his longtime adversary. ‘I told him that would be possible, if he would say what happened to Mackay’s body,’ Delianis said. ‘That was the end of the phone call and I haven’t heard from him since.’

  Delianis remains convinced only Bazley can solve the mystery. ‘I believe he is the only person who would know. He was a loner. Every time he worked with someone he would come unstuck.

  ‘He saw killing as a business. To him, it was just a job. I suspect that he buried the body somewhere near Griffith and I believe he acted alone.’

  Bazley, known as ‘Mr Cool’, looks nothing like a hitman. He looks more like a gentle grandfather than a paid killer.

  The quietly spoken and polite elderly man wants to spend his final years with his wife, Lillian, and was given regular day-leave to prepare himself for life on the outside. Few who saw the elderly couple walking hand in hand, could have imagined their past.

  Lillian was related to one of Melbourne’s most notorious old-time gunmen, Horatio Morris and was used to losing her husband for years when he was in prison.

  Bazley had a heart condition, but kept himself fit and always had an eye open for a business opportunity. He was quick to reach an arrangement to be personal trainer and jail protector for the disgraced Coles-Myer boss, Brian Quinn, when the former top businessman was serving just over two years for fraud.

  Bazley may have been old, but he was still influential. He put out the word in jail that Quinn, an obvious soft target, was not to be touched. He wasn’t.

  A former Victorian police deputy commissioner, Carl Mengler, who built the case against Bazley, believes the hitman should not have been freed until he revealed where Mackay’s body was hidden.

  Mengler urged people to look beyond the grandfatherly appearance of the hitman. ‘He was the worst sort of murderer. He was an intelligent man who simply killed people he didn’t know for money.

  ‘Jim Bazley showed no mercy to his victims and has left their relatives to grieve every living day of the rest of their lives. He has never show
n any remorse for what he has done.’

  Mengler is by nature a compassionate man. He often felt sympathy for some of the murderers he has helped convict. Many, he says, were driven by anger or compulsion. Some were driven to circumstances beyond their limits.

  But Bazley, he argues, was a middle-aged man who chose his own path. ‘He was a mature man when he accepted the contracts to kill. He has no excuses.’

  Bazley, a Painters and Dockers gunman in the 1970s, was shot twice during the ‘dockies’ war in which dozens of men died and went missing.

  He has a 50-year history of armed robbery and violence, but prison officers say he became a model inmate and was well respected by fellow prisoners. In a world where contacts are everything, Bazley had friends. ‘He was still well connected,’ one officer said.

  For a career armed robber, Bazley had found some ridiculous ways to get caught. In 1975 he robbed a Melbourne bank of $10,000, but was grabbed by a one-legged butcher who worked next door.

  He was later to think that shooting an innocent man in a darkened carpark was an easier way to make the same sort of money.

  Bazley became overconfident and lazy when he murdered Isabel and Douglas Wilson. He and Lillian regularly rented a holiday house in Rye, and he noticed a hole had been dug in bushland next door, which local children used as a play-pit.

  A man on his regular walk noticed one day that the hole had been dug deeper. Next day, he saw that it had been filled with fresh soil and covered with tea-tree.

  He called police and the bodies were discovered.

  The trail went directly to Bazley.

  He was convicted of the murders of the Wilsons, but only of conspiracy to murder Mackay. The anti-drugs campaigner was killed in NSW, but the plot to employ Bazley to do the hit was finalised in Melbourne. He agreed to the plan to commit the murder, while sitting in Tizzoni’s car in a quiet, tree-lined street behind the Kew cemetery, in Melbourne’s affluent inner-east. The deal, later revealed to police by Tizzoni, was enough to secure the conspiracy conviction.

  The NSW investigation into Mackay’s murder was a disaster. Corrupt police tried to sabotage the process, others refused to co-operate with the Victorian investigation because they were blinded by interstate jealousies. They wanted the glory. Barbara Mackay wanted only justice.

  High profile individuals, to their disgrace and others’ disgust, deliberately spread baseless stories about Donald Mackay, to suggest he may have deliberately disappeared, or might have been murdered because of his own dishonest or immoral activities.

  This cynical rumor-mongering, done to pander to the people who had ordered Mackay’s murder, even tainted politics. Those who allowed themselves to be used by organised crime are now conspicuous by their silence.

  But it wasn’t only politics that was tainted by the stench of corruption that spread from the marijuana plantations.

  The NSW police force did its share. It was one of the force’s finest, a detective, who warned Robert Trimbole to leave the country because he was about to be the target of a royal commission investigation.

  When the bent detective was finally exposed he left the force for a career in primary industry.

  Knowing all these things made it even harder for Barbara Mackay to endure – for more than 20 years – what one of her friends called ‘the appalling silence’ that followed Robert Mackay’s disappearance.

  Mrs Mackay knew for more than a year that her husband’s killer was being prepared for release. She was in her hospital bed when she was told by a reporter he would soon be free.

  Surprisingly, perhaps, she bore him no malice and said she hoped he and Lillian could enjoy their last few years together. She knew what it was like to be cheated of the chance to grow old with the husband you love.

  CHAPTER 8

  The last to leave

  ‘It is possible we would be prosecuting an innocent man.’

  STEPHEN Millichamp is the man who wouldn’t grow up. A successful businessman with a list of associates that included television personalities, champion footballers, actors and stylish young women; he had a lifestyle that many would envy and few could emulate.

  As he approached middle-age, some of his friends would tell the well-known ‘party boy’ to slow down, but Millichamp was never the sort to turn his broad back on a good time.

  While many of his mates were to marry and settle into family life, the former pub bouncer turned trendy hotelier and cosmetics king, saw no reason to change. ‘Steve just wouldn’t leave the ‘80s,’ was the way one of his friends put it.

  Even earlier, back in the 1970s, when Millichamp was a bouncer at the Croxton Park Hotel, he was determined to have a good time – usually in the company of young women.

  ‘He was a big, friendly sort of guy,’ recalls the then manager of the ‘Croc’, John Chalker.

  ‘He always had a smile on his face and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Back then he was a part-time actor, and he would say he was in movies to impress the girls.’

  Millichamp was cast in bit parts and because of his size – about 198 centimetres and 120 kilograms – was often asked to play a policeman in films such as Mad Max. He appeared in more than 30 television dramas including Blue Heelers, Phoenix, Power Without Glory and Homicide.

  Perhaps his insatiable desire for fun was fuelled through getting a second chance at life – he lost a kidney to cancer when he was about 30 – or it might have been that spending some of his working life connected with nightclubs helped mould his personality into an Australian version of Hugh Hefner.

  The expensive alterations he ordered to his $2.5 million, ivy-covered, double-storey house in South Yarra were purpose built for parties – whether big business functions or more intimate affairs.

  His lavish cellar was designed with a unique feature, a glass wall giving an underwater view of the swimming pool. Upstairs were three bedrooms – the main with the mandatory water-bed – and a solarium. Two spare bedrooms were always made up for various house guests.

  Neighbors say he was warm and generous and his parties were legendary. They recall there was never a shortage of young women drawn to the indulgent atmosphere and luxurious lifestyle.

  But the boy from an English migrant family, who had come a long way from St Albans in Melbourne’s battling western suburbs, worked hard to maintain all the signs of success. He was one of Australia’s most successful salesmen, working for years for the Le Tan group, before branching out on his own.

  ‘He was more than just a party boy,’ one friend said. ‘He is a smart bloke who earned everything he owns. He likes a good time, but he also knows when it is time for business.’ By the late 1990s Millichamp was flying. He had survived cancer and a downturn in his nightclub investments. He had clawed his way back to wealth through his booming cosmetics interest, Coral Colours, and his investments in a travel agency and tour business.

  It must have seemed that he had cleared all his hurdles and was finally looking at an easy run. But there was to be one more the big man didn’t see.

  IT WAS early Sunday, 21 September, 1997, when Millichamp cruised into the Imperial Hotel in Chapel Street, South Yarra. It was his habit to mix business and pleasure by going to the hotel he part owned to check out his investment – and the patrons.

  Almost immediately he spotted two well-known Melbourne celebrities, Channel Nine’s Eddie McGuire and Ten’s Stephen Quartermain. Although the pair were working at competing networks they had been mates for years, having worked in the same newsroom in the 1980s.

  A few hours earlier, they had been to a Channel Ten reunion and then moved on to the Imperial for a quiet chat. They were both sober – McGuire usually swears off alcohol during the football finals, to ensure he is at his best for the Footy Show and his other media commitments.

  The two had been part of Melbourne’s celebrity ‘Rat Pack’ in the 1980s and were regulars at the best nightclubs. Managers would give them drink cards – allowing them to drink for nothing for as long as they liked. It
was considered good for business to have celebrities at the bar.

  But their priorities had long since changed – long-term relationships and work commitments meant they rarely partied as they once had.

  Millichamp moved to join McGuire and Quartermain, knowing he would be welcome. While the three were not close friends, they had all been involved in raising more than $1 million for children suffering from cancer, through the Trevor Barker Foundation.

  The hell-raising hotelier and McGuire also shared a passion for Collingwood. Millichamp was a sponsor of the club and McGuire would soon become its president.

  Also in the bar were two attractive young women. One was considering throwing in her job as a sales representative and approached McGuire and Quartermain for some ‘career advice’, as it was later described.

  Both men are often approached with offers and requests for help. It is one of the reasons they have become more selective in their social lives.

  The two women, in their twenties, had been friends from university days in Sydney. ‘Lyn’ moved to Melbourne and her friend, ‘Paula’, worked in an art gallery in Sydney.

  But Paula had flown to Melbourne for a few days and the two had decided to go clubbing. Lyn, 24, had been to dinner in St Kilda with her boyfriend, a man in his late 30s, and another couple. Around 11pm Paula joined them and the two woman went to the Sunset Strip nightclub before getting a taxi to the Imperial.

  Millichamp, then 40, knew the women; they had been to his home previously. He provided them with free liqueurs until the hotel closed.

  Around 3am McGuire and Quartermain left. Seeing the two women and Millichamp looking for a taxi, they offered them a lift. Lyn was later to tell police it was fun to be in McGuire’s car for the short trip, because people recognised the TV host and waved at them.

  When they arrived at Millichamp’s home, all five went in.