Calabrian crook Mick Sergi lived life murder victim, Donald Mackay, missed out on
Another Sergi from the infamous Calabrian family just died at aged 81, a “nonno” of 15 grandchildren and one great grandchild, reaching all the milestones that their honest victim Donald Mackay didn’t, with the Sergis never charged thanks to the cops and pollies in their pockets.
Andrew Rule
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Another Sergi has just died in Griffith, and this one won’t be missed either. His name was Domenic, but when he was arrested in 1993 on big-time drug and firearms offences, he was known as Mick.
Mick Sergi was closely related, by blood and criminality, to the Godfather’s son Tony Sergi, proprietor of a mysteriously profitable winery.
Angry locals once shot bullets into Tony Sergi’s winery walls but they stopped short of shooting him. That’s where the callous little Calabrian had the edge on his critics; when it came down to tin tacks, they were too law-abiding to be vigilantes.
Tony Sergi might have been a creepy criminal, but he had the nerve to stare down the accusations whispered about him. He had enough bent police and politicians on side to get away with breaking the law — but could rely on the law to protect him from retribution. What a wonderful country for crooks.
Right up until he died peacefully on his 82nd birthday surrounded by people sharing many genes and very few names, Sergi almost looked the world in the eye.
He was a stunted man with blunt features and built-up heels, but when he stood on his wallet he was tall enough to cast a long shadow over Griffith.
He and others in the Calabrian “Honoured Society” ’Ndrangheta poured rivers of black money into the grass castles that rose in the irrigation blocks after the great cannabis boom of the 1970s. Cash is king, no matter how much blood and dirt fouls it.
Tony Sergi, his evil old father Giuseppe, and their dirty dozen “men of honour” got away with murder and everyone knew it.
Sergi laughed it off. He labelled his bulk-produced wines with names like Gossip and Rumours, names that give “goon” a whole new meaning.
He should have called one Alibi.
When Tony Sergi died filthy rich on his birthday on October 29, 2017, a thousand people came to show respect at the big Catholic Church in town, but thousands more stayed away, celebrating good riddance.
It was 40 years since the man lying in the grandiose gold casket, his father and their inner circle had organised the murder of Donald Mackay, a conspiracy that is still an appalling stain on Australian history.
They got away with killing the honest store owner, husband, father and citizen because police and political corruption sheltered the ’Ndrangheta families who bribed and blackmailed officialdom as efficiently as they cultivated “Calabrese corn”.
The Mafiosi groomed Al Grassby, the grubby politician who did things that would make crooks like Russ Hinze and Robert Askin blush. But criminal charges against Grassby melted away and his fellow pollies spent $70,000 of taxpayer money erecting a statue of the mafia’s lapdog in Canberra. Funny, that.
Then there are the corrupt police who stayed in Griffith because they couldn’t afford to take up a promotion. Let’s remember who they were and what they did, which was to provide alibis and inside information for murderers, extortionists and massive drug dealers.
There were many bent cops, all the way up to the commissioner, “Slippery Fred” Hanson, in Sydney, but the three actually jailed were John Kenneth Ellis, Brian James Borthwick and John Francis Robins. A fourth policeman also dined with the two Sergis, Tony and Mick, the night Mackay was killed. Alibi anyone?
Their descendants should know that their granddads connived to kill someone else’s granddad. For what? The price of a car, maybe? A free pass to a mafia-owned brothel? Good one, pop.
There are the families, tied by blood (often literally) to the criminal clans of Plati in Calabria’s bandit-infested hills, where police recently uncovered a rats’ nest of bunkers and tunnels in which mafia bosses hid while running Europe’s biggest drug-trafficking network.
Certain family names have cropped up repeatedly since the 1950s, when Australia let an entire mafia community transplant itself from Calabria to the Riverina. There, it metastasised into the crime organisation that controls more than half the illicit drugs in Australia.
It was the greatest single importation of criminality since the First Fleet, but far more efficient, sinister and incestuous: the bandits, kidnappers and extortionists of Reggio Calabria had their own dialect, were related by blood through arranged marriage, and were bound by fear and tradition to “omerta”, a code of silence much stronger than the jailhouse variety.
A 1993 police report shows that of 250 people arrested over 188 big cannabis crops in Australia from 1974 to 1986, most were connected to 15 families: Sergi, Barbaro, Romeo, Trimboli, Perre, Pelle, Pochi, Cannistra, Catanzariti, Velardi, Agresta, Carbone, Zappia and Alvaro. Only the Alvaros were not related.
Until Singhs arrived, Sergi was the most common name in Griffith. Of course, not all Sergis are Mafiosi. But the Domenic Sergi who died two weeks ago certainly was. Apart from his arrests, he kept a lower profile than cousin Tony, but Griffith people never mistook him for anything but what he was: another snake in the grass. As in the grass racket.
Domenic got to live 81 years, to be “nonno” of 15 grandchildren and one great grandchild. Reaching, in other words, all the milestones that Donald Mackay didn’t, to the enduring pain of the Mackays.
The Sergi bosses are interred in ostentatious family mausolea like the “honoured men” they try to be. The Mackay family, meanwhile, have never known where hired hit man James “Machinegun” Bazley (and a helper) dumped Donald Mackay’s body after executing him in a hotel car park in Griffith’s main street on the evening of July 15, 1977.
Bazley lived to 92 before dying in a suburban nursing home in late 2018. Now and again, detectives would drop in to ask quietly if he could give the Mackays closure by hinting where Donald’s body might be. But the old reptile never did.
Detectives also stay in touch with one-time gun dealer (used by police as well as crooks) George Joseph, who was jailed with Bazley in 1986 for conspiracy to murder Mackay. Joseph arranged for Bazley to meet Robert “Aussie Bob” Trimbole and middleman Frank Tizzoni.
Now frail and old, if he knows any more, he’s not saying.
Fear still hangs over Griffith and places like Mildura and Shepparton, where the ’Ndrangheta has its grip.
Boosters can spruik Griffith all they like. Yes, the town was designed by (Canberra’s designer) Walter Burley Griffin. Yes, it’s the throbbing heart of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, with high employment, new houses and a main street full of shiny cars. Treechangers fleeing big cities can make a life there.
But when visiting media tried to hire local photographers to take pictures of Tony Sergi’s funeral, they got blanked. No go.
“We have to live here,” one twitchy photographer told a journalist. So there is the truth, the worm in the apple: underneath Griffith’s glittering municipal facade and mysterious prosperity is a place of stares and whispers where Australian citizens are as nervous as the peasants of Plati.
But never mind, the coffee is wonderful.
Anyone who believes that good lives matter should tear down Al Grassby’s statue, melt it down and cast one of Donald Mackay.
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