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was a masterstroke which has created enough fear to keep people’s mouths shut for the next ten years.’
    More than thirty years later, mouths are still shut. After thousands of hours and millions of dollars being spent on investigation, the truth behind a crime that shamed Australia is as elusive as it was the night Don Mackay was killed.
    AROUND the race tracks and clubs and restaurants favoured by the big spenders they called Trimbole ‘Australian Bob’, later contracted to ‘Aussie Bob’. It was part of the casual criminal slang favoured by people who liked the quasi-anonymity of using nicknames and aliases rather than the surnames on their birth certificates. Not that they had any trouble, in the 1970s, getting fake birth certificates, driver’s licences and passports. Trimbole had a book of 100 birth certificate blanks filched from a public building in Griffith. Nothing was a problem to Aussie Bob. He was everybody’s mate, because he never knew when they might come in useful.
    One of the people Trimbole knew from the racetrack – and from eating in Tati’s restaurant in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst – was Jimmy Shepherd. They had much in common: both were huge punters who laundered – or sometimes just lost – drug money at the races. Clark met Trimbole through Shepherd in the Sydney scene. As the Griffith marijuana business got a little ‘tropical’ after Donald Mackay’s murder in 1977, the two grew closer. Outwardly dissimilar, they had interests and abilities in common.
    Trimbole, the bridge builder, started playing an active part in Clark’s organisation and would eventually pay, on behalf of his Griffith principals, some $30 million to take over the Australian end of what the media would later call the ‘Mr Asia’ syndicate – Clark’s Organisation – while Clark stayed overseas. He, too, by mid-1978 was getting ‘tropical’.
    On appearances and background, the scruffy, big-bellied Italian racing identity and the flinty, physically fit and impeccably-dressed Clark, who despised punting as a mug’s game, had little in common except an aversion to honest work and access to obscene amounts of black money. The first real test of their fledgling business relationship was when Clark asked Trimbole to solve a problem for him. He wanted Douglas and Isabel Wilson killed.
    His instructions were chillingly specific: he wanted the pair to disappear, as if they might have done a runner and changed their identities. Knowing how devoted they were to their dog, he wanted it killed, too; presumably because anyone who knew the Wilsons knew they wouldn’t leave the dog. And, just before they were killed, they were to be told why: ‘You get this for talking to the police in Queensland.’
    Trimbole was keen to please. He said he had just the man: one who had done another ‘job’ for him. He meant the middleaged painter and docker James ‘Iceman’ Bazley.
    According to ‘Frank’ Tizzoni, who would later testify against Bazley, Trimbole called him on 27 March 1979, and asked him to pick him up at Melbourne Airport. When Tizzoni did, they went to a hotel car park, where Trimbole told him Clark wanted to get rid of two people who had talked to police in Queensland. Tizzoni said he would find out if the hit man who had killed Mackay was available. Trimbole relayed the instructions about killing the dog, and about leaving the Wilsons’ car in the long-term car park at the airport to make it look as if they had fled using false identities.
    Tizzoni, himself a middle man, called the shifty Melbourne gun dealer, George Joseph, who by virtue of his occupation had friends on both sides of the law – criminals, police and security guards. Joseph had set up a meeting between Bazley and Tizzoni two years earlier at Trimbole’s request.
    The meeting took place at the same spot: in a car parked in the