How mafia supergrass Gianfranco Tizzoni was found by journalist Keith Moor after the Mackay murder case
After Gianfranco Tizzoni turned on the mafia, he fled Australia and laid low in fear. But it wasn’t a mob hitman that tracked down one of the country’s biggests supergrasses, it was journalist Keith Moor.
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IT’S difficult to imagine an Australian supergrass choosing Italy as the place to hide from the Mafioso who want to kill him … yet that’s exactly what Gianfranco Tizzoni did.
While the Calabrian mafia didn’t find him, I did.
Tizzoni was the man who squealed to Victoria Police about who organised and committed the 1977 murder of anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay.
He did so because he wanted police to drop the drug charges laid against him after he was nabbed with a car boot full of marijuana.
The commonly held believe at the time Tizzoni fled was that Australian authorities provided him with a new identity and helped him and his family to get established in an overseas country of his choice in return for dobbing in his mafia mates and others.
But Tizzoni, much to his annoyance, never was helped in the way he claims police promised he would be.
When I tracked him down to the small town of Foligno in the Umbria region of Italy in December, 1987, he had his original Victorian driving licence in his pocket and had left Australia using the only passport he possessed and it was in the name he was given at birth.
As a man on the run from those he informed on he was naturally not especially pleased to have been found by me, a lone journalist who knocked on lots of doors to come face-to-face with the man the Calabrian mafia wanted to murder.
His first words to me were “spread them”. He then subjected me to a very intimate frisk for weapons and listening devices.
Tizzoni used to be a private investigator in Melbourne and I discovered that was the only reason he agreed to talk to me.
He said knew from experience what was involved in trying to find somebody that didn’t want to be found and that he appreciated the fact I had knocked on lots of doors and asked lots of questions before being able to track him down.
What I didn’t tell him then was that I had been arrested at gunpoint and thrown in jail in his home town of Nettuno, an hour south of Rome, after being found going through a garbage bin in the middle of the night to try to find letters that might link him to the property.
KEITH MOOR EXPLAINS HIS NETTUNO GUNPOINT ARREST ON LIFE AND CRIMES: iTUNES | SPOTIFY | WEB
Tizzoni agreed to be interviewed by me only after I promised him I would not reveal where he was living or how I had found him.
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My promise need no longer be kept because Tizzoni died of natural causes six months after I interviewed him and his family have moved well away from Foligno.
Originally published as How mafia supergrass Gianfranco Tizzoni was found by journalist Keith Moor after the Mackay murder case
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