A Tale of Two Cities Read online

  At first, Clark had encouraged the Wilsons to seek medical help to get ‘clean’, by entering a private hospital. When this failed, he turned against them, as he had done before – and would do again – with people that he lured with fast money then ruled by intimidation. So when Clark invited the Wilsons to Brisbane in June 1978 for a boat cruise to help get over their addiction, they accepted the offer at face value, as far as their contemporaries could tell. But – as they would subsequently confide – Clark had started saying things that played on their minds. He had a black sense of humour and made cryptic comments that fed junkie paranoia.

  Before the Brisbane trip, talking about the proposed boat cruise, he asked if the couple’s dog, a pampered Belgian keeshond called Taj, would get seasick. When Wilson said he didn’t think so, because keeshonds were ‘barge dogs’, Clark deadpanned: ‘Does he freak out on guns going off?’

  As the late Richard Hall observed in his book Greed: The ‘Mr Asia’ Connection, ‘Whether the plan was to kill the Wilsons or just give them a convalescent cruise will never be clear, for … Clark was about to pay the price for that sense of humour.’

  Clark fancied himself as a cool and cautious criminal ‘executive’ who made a show of running his drug syndicate on pseudo-corporate lines, but behind the cool mask was a boastful smartarse who couldn’t help wanting to show how much cleverer he was than the herd. So when he checked into the Gazebo Hotel he signed the register not with one of his many aliases, some of them backed with false passports, but with the words ‘J. Petersen, MP’.

  He might have got away with ‘Petersen’ but adding ‘MP’ was stupid for a man with so many reasons to avoid attracting attention. The Hon. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was at the time the longserving Premier of Queensland and a nationally-famous public figure, respectively loved and lampooned by his many admirers and detractors. Using the Petersen name in vain was asking for trouble, and he got plenty.

  The worried hotel manager spotted the false name and concluded the hard-partying guests were not only subversives mocking the Premier but running up a huge champagne bill, and so probably were fraudsters who would not pay their bill. He called the police.

  Queensland consorting squad detectives of that time were what are now sometimes referred to as ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘robust’. When the squad came knocking, they found the sort of evidence that quickened an old-fashioned detective’s pulse: $5276 in cash, for a start. After what Clark would later describe as some tough questioning, they searched his Jaguar and found an unregistered pistol which, it would turn out, was probably a murder weapon. Meaning Clark was in big trouble. As were his Brisbane ‘representatives’ and his right-hand man, Jimmy Shepherd, also pulled in by the police. More significantly, so were the Wilsons, taken in for questioning after arranging to meet Clark at the Gazebo.

  The Queensland police and the Narcotics Bureau soon ran checks establishing that Clark was wanted in New Zealand on heroin charges laid two years before. Clark, a dab hand at corrupting officials, tried and apparently failed to buy his way out, although word might have spread about his almost bottomless financial resources.

  A detective sergeant, Ron Pickering, later dutifully reported that Clark had offered $50,000 to obtain bail. The obvious conclusion was that had Clark got bail, he would have disappeared again, using one of his many false identities.

  In other circumstances – such as, say, if Clark had been picked up for drink-driving and fingerprinted – the old heroin charge hanging over him in New Zealand might have seemed disastrous. But, given the gravity of the charges he risked in Australia, being extradited to New Zealand might well have been a better bet than facing the music here – a fact that later stuck in the craw of Victorian police investigators who began to question how and why Clark had been released to New Zealand when he was a suspect for so many serious crimes in Australia, including murder.

  These accusations came to light within days of the Gazebo Hotel arrests, when the Queensland police interrogated the nervous Wilsons.

  ‘Still suffering from the long, drawn-out process of withdrawal, frightened of Clark’s growing coolness, and finally apprehensive of his growing talk about the sound of guns, they talked. A lot.’ writes Hall.

  By the end of the week, when the Wilsons (and their pampered pet dog) were turned loose with strict instructions not to bolt, the police – and, by extension, the Narcotics Bureau – had heard a long, rambling story painting Clark as a huge heroin dealer, a callous killer and, significantly, a high-level corrupter. In the 112-page transcript of the tapes the police secretly made over six days, they made some startlingly specific allegations.

  One was that Clark had a senior Customs official in his pocket in Sydney – ‘an embittered, cynical old copper’ on a $25,000 annual stipend plus bonuses for extra valuable information. They told how Clark and his helpers stashed heroin in Thermos flasks buried in Frenchs Forest in Sydney and that Clark had recently bought blocks of land in Fiji. But, most tellingly, they said that the purple Jaguar and the pistol Clark had brought to Brisbane were the same car and weapon he used to murder a drug courier known as ‘Pommy Harry’.

  It would not have taken much checking, even in the pre-computer age, to reveal that ‘Pommy Harry’ was the nickname of one Harry Lewis, who had disappeared in late May 1978, soon after being apprehended at Sydney Airport with some Thai buddha sticks. As would be revealed later, Lewis had been nabbed at the airport on 13 May and released on bail posted by one of Clark’s lieutenants, Wayne Shrimpton. On 19 May, just six days later, the Narcotics Bureau opened an individual file on Clark. Clark knew this because his ‘inside man’ leaked it to him in return for cash. The fatal conclusion was that Lewis had said too much under interrogation.

  Clark, in Singapore enjoying a secret liaison with Wayne Shrimpton’s girlfriend, Allison Dine, at the time of Lewis’s arrest, had flown back to take charge of the situation like the troubleshooting executive he fancied himself to be. He arranged to drive Lewis to Brisbane, promising him he had arranged for him to escape on a boat. Lewis agreed. He had little choice: to run from Clark, without any money to survive, would prove conclusively that he had ratted, something he did not think Clark could know for sure. He had to keep up the pretence of normality, hoping Clark meant what he said about an escape by sea.

  But Lewis was doomed. He was given a 24-hour reprieve because Clark saw the chance to hook up with the opportunistic Allison Dine, a former trainee kindergarten teacher with an eye for the main chance. After sending Dine’s boyfriend Wayne Shrimpton to Singapore to buy gems, Clark calmly postponed the Brisbane trip to take Dine to the Hilton Hotel, as his wife Maria was in hospital having some plastic surgery. The lovers got drunk, booked the king size suite and stayed the night.

  When Lewis came around to the Sydney Hilton next morning for the trip north, he struck Dine as ‘pensive’. She thought at the time (or so she would claim later) that he was sad about leaving his girlfriend. Perhaps Lewis’s instincts were stronger than hers, and he feared driving 1000 kilometres with the man he’d informed on the week before.

  Clark was driving a new purple Jaguar. Somewhere in northern New South Wales, they damaged the exhaust system and Clark decided to head back to Sydney – his intention all along. At dusk he pulled over, claiming the transmission was slipping, and asked Lewis to have a look under the bonnet. Obediently, he obliged and Clark shot him in the head.

  It would later be revealed that Clark, the supposed cool master criminal, lost his nerve and bolted after rolling the body into a ditch. After driving for more than an hour, he turned back, found the body and loaded it into the boot and took it down a bush track. Then he lugged it into the bush and dumped it, after cutting off the hands and smashing the teeth to hinder identification. Having made the mistake of killing Lewis instead of sending him far away, he compounded it by not burying the body so it would never be found. Then he drove back to Sydney, wearing blood-spattered clothes, and promptly told Dine his version of the killing �
� that Lewis had attacked him.

  The story of Pommy Harry’s murder was soon known to everyone in The Organisation … including Douglas and Isabel Wilson. Clark no doubt meant Lewis’s death to inspire fear, but it was never going to guarantee silence. The Wilsons were so frightened they would be next that it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. By talking to the police, they signed their own death warrant.

  The question still is: did anyone in authority believe the Wilsons’ tale when they told it? Or was it, in the beginning, more convenient to dismiss it all as the paranoid delusions of heroin addicts?

  This decision to allow Clark to leave the country – and to shelve the charges against him in Queensland – would later be prodded in court. In committal proceedings against two Narcotics Bureau officers and a bent law clerk in Sydney in April 1980, a senior Victorian policeman, Assistant Commissioner Rod Hall, made withering answers under cross examination that made it clear the Victoria Police suspected Clark had been given a ‘green light’ by inept, or corrupt, investigators.

  Hall knew his stuff. He had run a joint Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and Federal investigation into the Mr Asia drug syndicate but without the powers to check bank records and demand answers.

  He said the experience showed him there was a need for a standing Royal Commission or National Crime Authority.

  Many senior police were concerned that Hall had broken the coppers’ code of silence and was prepared to publicly speak of corruption.

  Three decades later, he remains unrepentant. ‘There is no doubt that Clark was paying off investigators inside the Narcotics Bureau,’ he told the authors.

  He also found that some states involved in the taskforce were more enthusiastic in uncovering corruption than others.

  Later in his investigation when Clark was jailed in Lancashire, Hall went to England and asked a local policeman to interview the inmate. ‘What questions do you want asked and what answers do you want written down?’ the local responded.

  It was, after all, a different era.

  The evidence against the Narcs was damning. So much so that Justice Sir Edward (Ned) Williams in yet another Royal Commission into Drugs eventually called for the Narcotics Bureau to be disbanded and its role to be absorbed into the newly formed Australian Federal Police.

  One of the criticisms of the Bureau was that it took credit for the jobs conducted by state police. Some things never change.

  Meanwhile, back in Brisbane, Terry Clark was in an uncomfortable spot …

  TWO Queensland undercover police put in the cells with Clark and Jimmy Shepherd overheard conversations between the pair that supported what the Wilsons were telling their colleagues in an interview room not far away. Clark and Shepherd whispered to each other about running The Organisation. Why such streetwise operators would be so careless is hard to say – unless Clark was already confident he could pull strings in Sydney or Canberra to get extradited. And that he was equally confident he could bribe enough witnesses to beat the old New Zealand heroin charge. (Which, in fact, he later boasted of doing.)

  Whether it was apathy or something more, Sydney police did not do anything to protect the Wilsons from Clark’s revenge. On 30 March 1979, Douglas Wilson called the New South Wales homicide squad. He said he was frightened because Clark had come to his house the previous day and threatened him. A detective called Dawson gave Wilson his home telephone number and reported the call to Sergeant John McGregor, telling him Clark was in New Zealand and under surveillance. But ten days later the homicide squad got a fax from New Zealand police informing them that Clark was in Australia. Notwithstanding this, the police did not put the Wilsons in protective custody, or even contact them.

  It was odd. Somehow, the Wilsons’ story was not considered strong enough to hold Clark and investigate him for murder and serious trafficking. And yet someone, somewhere – perhaps in the Narcotics Bureau – thought the Wilsons’ story was strong enough to sell. And Clark certainly thought it strong enough to buy. He complained later that he’d had to pay $250,000 for the Wilson tapes. And another $250,000 to have them killed.

  To do that he needed local talent – a trusted middleman who could arrange a hit.

  Enter ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole.

  FOR a Calabrian peasant’s son raised in the secretive ways of the sinister mafia organisation known as N’Dranghita, Robert Trimbole was different from most of his contemporaries. His parents and many of his relatives had come to Griffith in boatloads, migrating en masse from the poverty and crime-ridden town of Plati in Calabria before and after World War II. They left the grinding poverty behind but brought the crime with them: relatively humble members of the so-called ‘Honoured Society’ established themselves high in a new pecking order in the new country. And because they came in such numbers, and stuck together so strongly, in some ways they still lived in the village their parents had left behind in southern Italy.

  But Trimbole, born in Griffith in 1931, showed the ability from an early age to get along with people outside the tight circle of what the Griffith Calabrians called, among themselves, La Famiglia – The Family – the local cell of N’Dranghita. While the clannish Calabrians didn’t all share Trimbole’s gregarious nature and easygoing engagement with the wider world, the senior figures in the secret society recognised his potential usefulness and would exploit it. Unusually, Trimbole married outside the Calabrian community – where cousins often married each other – when he wed Joan Quested, an Anglo-Australian secretary he met while working in Sydney in 1952. They would have several children, all with ‘Australian’ Anglo names – one son was called Craig – and Trimbole did not follow his parents onto the irrigation block. A talented mechanic, he did his apprenticeship in Sydney with Pioneer Tours and later ran a garage in Griffith. But he was always a punter and, inevitably, he lost more than he won in the 1950s and 1960s, although he was well-known for shouting the bar at the local club when he’d had a good win. And although he was good ‘on the tools’, the garage barely supported his growing family and his punting. In 1968, he was declared bankrupt.

  ‘His trouble was he wanted to be a mate to everybody and never charged enough for the work he did,’ a former garage employee said of his former boss to journalist Keith Moor in the late 1980s.

  ‘Customers took advantage of his good nature and he was always a soft touch for a hard luck story. He accepted all sorts of things in payment for work done, even down to race tips. He was always a gambler – bet on anything, he would. He was forever nipping away from the garage to put a bet on and racing broadcasts were a constant background noise at work.’

  To the outside world, the young Trimbole was a battling small businessman, a mug punter, a loving father and a good mate. The description ‘good bloke’ was often used about him, even after he was disgraced. But no matter how well Trimbole got on with outsiders, he was still connected by birth, geography and instinct to the shadowy organisation that flourished in the irrigation districts of Griffith, Mildura and Shepparton, and whose tentacles reached the fruit and vegetable markets in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

  For decades, the Family hierarchy extorted money from fellow Italians by standing over growers and stall holders. But by the early 1970s, there was a new cash crop in town: marijuana.

  As proved in the Prohibition era in America in the 1920s, the banning of a substance that was impossible to stamp out and easy to supply created a multi-million dollar black market, created and enriched a criminal class, and corrupted police, politicians, public servants and the judicial system. Not to mention jockeys, horse trainers and racing officials because, one way or another, black money tends to find its way to the racetrack as well as to casinos. Crooks, with rare exceptions, are gamblers by both nature and nurture. More importantly, gambling is a swift and relatively simple way to launder the proceeds of crime.

  Marijuana produced mountains of black money that had to be filtered some way before it could be spent on visible assets. Trimbole was
never the ‘Godfather’ of the Griffith Family, but he was its most active operator – a fixer whose main task was to handle the marketing of marijuana and the laundering of cash. Punting was in his blood. Now he could attempt to rig races himself or to buy information from race-fixing gangs who bribed or intimidated jockeys and trainers and had horses doped.

  As Moor outlines in his book Crims in Grass Castles, the first known turning point in Trimbole’s fortunes came in 1971 when the manager of a local club, Archie Molinaro, suggested he might be interested in taking over a business selling, leasing and repairing pinball machines throughout the Riverina. Trimbole had the necessary mechanical skill to repair the machines, and so he took it on in partnership with Molinaro – and with a Melbourne man called Gianfranco Tizzoni, a onetime debt collector with interesting contacts.

  Tizzoni, three years younger than Trimbole, was also Italian but not a Calabrian and, although he was an associate of the Griffith crew, he lived in suburban Melbourne and was never an insider like Trimbole. It was an association that would make them both rich, eventually, and then infamous. But it wasn’t the pinball machines that made the big money. It was the new crop being grown under cover in the middle of the irrigation blocks. Local wags called it ‘Calabrese corn’ and there were stares and whispers around the Riverina as battling ‘blockies’ suddenly accrued the trappings of wealth on irrigation blocks that had been hard pressed to support a family for decades.

  Tizzoni would later tell police that it began in 1971, when Trimbole said to him that he had to raise some money for an operation on the eyes of a friend’s son – and that he proposed to sell marijuana to get the money. Whether the story of the eye operation was true is debatable, but Tizzoni agreed to arrange marijuana distribution in Melbourne.

  ‘He told me there was an endless supply from the Griffith area, and that Tony Sergi was organising the growing part of it and the supply part of it,’ Tizzoni told police.