Hitman James Bazley claimed corrupt cop Fred Krahe murdered Donald Mackay for the mafia

HITMAN James Bazley claimed corrupt NSW cop Fred Krahe murdered Donald Mackay for the Griffith cell of the Calabrian mafia in 1977. But privately he told a different story, writes Keith Moor.

HITMAN James Bazley publicly blamed crooked Sydney cop Fred Krahe for murdering anti-drug campaigner Donald Mackay.

But Bazley privately confessed to a trusted associate that it was actually him who executed Mr Mackay after the Calabrian mafia paid him $10,000 to do so.

That trusted associate — who was sworn to secrecy until after Bazley died — claims Bazley also told him what he did with Mr Mackay’s body after shooting the whistleblower at a pub carpark in the New South Wales city of Griffith.

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Anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay with wife Barbara and son James, 3, in a photo taken the week before he was shot dead by Melbourne hitman James Bazley in 1977.

Hitman James Bazley just weeks before he recently died in a Melbourne nursing home at the age of 93.

The 1977 murder of Liberal Party candidate Mr Mackay, 43, was Australia’s first political assassination.

As the Herald Sun revealed last week, following Bazley’s recent death in a Melbourne nursing home at the age of 93, police are hoping the trusted associate will tell them what Bazley revealed to him — which they expect will spark a new search for Mr Mackay’s body.

Police have been unable to speak to the trusted associate since Bazley died as he is overseas and they want to have a face-to-face conversation with him.

I twice visited Bazley in Pentridge prison in 1987 and during our interviews he protested his innocence and pointed the finger at Krahe, who died six years before Bazley claimed the notoriously bent NSW detective was the real killer.

Bazley also sent several handwritten letters to me from behind bars in which he again blamed Krahe for the Mackay murder.

Corrupt NSW detective Sergeant Fred Krahe was accused of murdering anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay.

Despite his verbal and written claims of innocence, there is ample evidence it was Bazley who executed Mr Mackay.

That evidence convinced a Victorian Supreme Court jury to find Bazley guilty of conspiring to murder Mr Mackay.

Bazley couldn’t be charged with murder in Victoria as the shooting took place in NSW — but the planning took place in Victoria, hence the conspiracy to murder charge laid by Victoria Police.

The evidence led at Bazley’s 1986 trial was that it was Bazley that ended Mr Mackay’s life.

Griffith-based Calabrian mafia figure Robert Trimbole was so impressed with the way Bazley disposed of Mr Mackay that he organised to hire him again two years later to murder Mr Asia drug gang couriers Douglas and Isabel Wilson.

Mr Asia drug gang murder victim Douglas Wilson.

Mr Asia drug gang murder victim Isabel Wilson.

Trimbole wasn’t so impressed when, unlike in the Mackay murder where the body still hasn’t been found 41 years later, the bodies of the Wilsons were discovered in a shallow grave at Rye on May 18, 1979, less than a month after Bazley shot them dead.

That burial site led police to a damning piece of corroborating evidence that Bazley was responsible for the double murder.

Bazley was having an affair with a much younger woman and he used to secretly meet her at a holiday house in Danny St, Rye, that she had access to — and which was just 12 metres from where the bodies of the Wilsons were found by a man out walking his dog who went to investigate after noticing animals had been digging around what looked like a filled in hole.

Victorian detectives later tracked down Bazley’s mistress. She admitted her affair with Bazley and confirmed their sex trysts happened at the Rye holiday house.

Detectives unearth the bodies of murdered drug couriers Douglas and Isabel Wilson in 1979 from a shallow grave at Rye.

Bazley claimed during our prison chats in the gardens at Pentridge that Krahe was paid by the Griffith cell of the Calabrian mafia to murder Mr Mackay because Mr Mackay was standing for parliament on a platform of cracking down on the Italian organised crime syndicate’s domination of Australia’s booming marijuana market.

“I will not mince words. The mafia do not use outsiders in contract killings,” Bazley said in one of his letters to me.

“It can be established Fred Krahe had on other occasions worked for the Griffith people.”

It is almost certainly correct that Krahe associated with the Calabrian mafia — but so did Bazley.

After his release from jail on parole in 2001, after serving 21 years over the Mackay and Wilson murders and an armed robbery, Bazley often spent time with Victorian Calabrian mafia heavyweight Mario Condello and other members of the Carlton crew, including Mick Gatto.

Condello was gunned down in the garage of his Brighton East home in 2006, in what is still an unsolved murder, on the eve of his Supreme Court trial over his plot to kill Carlton crew rival and drug boss Carl Williams.

Hitman James Bazley (left) with Calabrian mafia and Carlton crew member Mario Condello (right).

While Bazley repeatedly told me he wasn’t responsible for the Mackay or Wilson murders he did confess to an armed robbery in Greensborough which netted $270,000.

“Keith, my return from the robbery was a six figure sum,” Bazley said in admitting he committed the 1978 robbery he pleaded not guilty to at the same time he pleaded not guilty to murdering the Wilsons and conspiring to murder Mr Mackay.

“The Crown then expected the jury to believe that four months later I killed Douglas and Isabel Wilson for twenty thousand dollars.

“Keith, I may be silly, but I am not stupid.

“No, I did not kill the Wilsons nor did I kill Donald Mackay.”

An extract from one of the letters hitman James Bazley wrote to Herald Sun journalist Keith Moor.

Bazley also wrote to me about a 1988 newspaper article which reported on Sydney Long Bay jail prisoner John Adrian Knight’s claim that he had proof of where Mr Mackay’s body was.

Knight said he would reveal where the body was if either police or a journalist helped him prove he had been framed over the assault and other charges he was behind bars for.

“If that person in the NSW gaol, John Knight, knows the whereabouts of where Mackay’s body happens to be he would be well advised to have his life insurance payments in order,” Bazley told me.

“The persons so responsible would not want it made known.”

Bazley used one of his letters to me to discuss his adherence to at least one of the Ten Commandments.

“One subject I have not broached with you is my religious beliefs,” he said.

“I was brought up a Catholic in a strict sense, though in latter years my dedication may have waned from the earlier teachings.

“A confession to you no, it is not.

“I have not broken that Commandment ‘thou shall not kill’. In the eyes of God, I have no fear of eternal damnation.”

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Originally published as Hitman James Bazley claimed corrupt cop Fred Krahe murdered Donald Mackay for the mafia