Griffith mafia boss Tony Sergi dies without being charged for ordering execution of Donald Mackay
GRIFFITH Calabrian mafia boss Tony Sergi has died without being able to be charged over the death of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay.
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THE Calabrian mafia godfather who ordered the 1977 death of Liberal Party candidate Donald Mackay has died on his birthday without ever being charged.
Police still involved in probing the unsolved murder of the anti-drugs campaigner had hoped to one day see Griffith winery boss Tony Sergi jailed over it.
More: The Donald Mackay murder 40 years on
Those hopes were raised in 2013 when they started searching a farm just west of Hay in New South Wales after a tip Mr Mackay’s body might have been dumped there.
They believed finding the body would lead to other clues implicating Sergi in the Mackay murder.
The tip turned out to be wrong, Mr Mackay’s body still hasn’t been found and Sergi died in hospital on Sunday after attending a Sergi family function to celebrate his 82nd birthday.
Griffith’s Warburn Estate winery has been owned by the Sergi family since the 1950s.
Police chase new leads in Donald Mackay mafia murder
Now dead mafia supergrass Gianfranco Tizzoni told police Tony Sergi held a meeting at his winery in May 1977 to discuss what to do about budding politician Mr Mackay.
Tizzoni told police he was at the meeting, as was now-dead crime figure Robert Trimbole and a Melbourne-based Calabrian mafia figure who is still alive.
Sergi decided during the meeting that the best option to stop Mr Mackay, 43, campaigning against marijuana was to kill him and he gave Trimbole the job of organising it.
That cold-blooded, businesslike decision was taken soon after Mr Mackay was revealed as being the informer who told police about a massive Calabrian mafia marijuana crop in nearby Coleambally.
Sergi found out Mr Mackay was the informer during the trial of those charged over the Coleambally crop after defence lawyers obtained the diaries and notebooks of investigating police, one of which identified Mr Mackay as the man who had given detectives the information about the crop.
Mr Mackay was shot dead on July 15, 1977 — in what was Australia’s first political assassination — just weeks after the meeting at Sergi’s Griffith winery.
Sergi was named in the 1979 Woodward Royal Commission report a being a prominent member of the Griffith Calabrian mafia cell that organised the Mackay murder.
The report said Sergi and Trimbole were “bosses” of the Italian organised crime gang and both were involved in marijuana growing and distribution.
“I lay the blame for Mr Mackay’s disappearance and undoubted death at the doors of that organisation,” Justice Philip Woodward said in his report.
Sergi told the Herald Sun in 1997 he wasn’t involved in the Mackay murder, claiming he was “just a businessman trying to do the best for my family”.
“I’m innocent. Why does my name keep coming up? I didn’t even know Mackay,” he told me during an interview at his winery.
Mr Mackay’s son Paul named Sergi in a 2007 letter to then NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione in an appeal for there to be a full review of his father’s murder by the state’s cold case squad.
“None of the Griffith conspirators identified in the Woodward Royal Commission have ever been charged,” Paul Mackay told Mr Scipione.
“A number of those individuals, in particular Tony Sergi, the winemaker, are still living in Griffith and have prospered to a degree far beyond commercial reality.
“The opinion of most Griffith residents is that these people literally can get away with murder and, to date, they effectively have.”
Former Liberal NSW Premier Nick Greiner also pointed the finger at Sergi over the Mackay murder while attacking former Labor Minister Al Grassby.
“This is not the first occasion on which Mr Grassby has functioned as a propagandist and apologist for the mafia,” Mr Greiner, the then NSW Opposition Leader, told the NSW Parliament in 1986.
“For 20 years, he has befriended and defended senior members of the Griffith mafia.
“Any inquiry into Mr Grassby’s relationship with the mafia must have the power to investigate his friendship with Tony Sergi.
“Honourable members should know that this Tony Sergi, whom Mr Grassby has befriended all these years, was described by Mr Justice Woodward as a principal in the Griffith mafia.”
Mr Greiner told Parliament that Sergi was also named as a mafia boss during the trial of Melbourne hitman James Bazley, who was convicted in 1986 of conspiring to murder Donald Mackay.
“The key Crown witness in the Bazley trial, Frank Tizzoni, described Tony Sergi as being in charge of the growing and supply of the mafia’s marijuana,” he said.
“More importantly, Tizzoni identified Tony Sergi as being present at a meeting to plan the death of Donald Mackay.
“Indeed, according to Tizzoni, the meeting was held at Tony Sergi’s house.”
Being a mafia boss runs in the Sergi family.
Police secretly recorded Tizzoni naming Tony Sergi’s father Giuseppe Sergi as being “the big man” in the Calabrian mafia’s Griffith cell.
On tape, police asked Tizzoni: “Tony’s father, Old Joe (Giuseppe Sergi), is he the boss man there in that area or is it someone else?
Tizzoni nodded and was then asked by police, “and young Tony would have done what the old man said”, to which Tizzoni replied, “What the old man said”.