Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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with his wife and children from Plat, a Newcastle fitter and
turner named Len Mackay decided to try his luck in the
new township on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River. No
farmer himself, Mackay knew there was money to be made
from selling farmers the things they needed. He opened a
furniture store on the southern side of the main irrigation
canal, one of thousands of kilometres of water supply
channels snaking across the flat landscape. The channels
carrying water from the Murrumbidgee had already begun to
turn virgin bush into lush orchard, and Len Mackay found
a ready market for his pots, pans, kitchenware, household
gadgets and furniture. At weekends Mackay turned bus
driver, screwing garden seats onto the tray of his delivery
truck to carry groups of picnickers down to the shady river.
After a fire burnt down his original shop, Mackay
built a larger one on the western side of the expanding
township. Three children were born, the youngest, Donald,
on 13 September 1933. As Griffith developed into one of the
principal towns in the new foodbowl of the Riverina, Len
Mackays furniture store thrived.
The plan had always been for Don and his elder brother,
Bill, to take over the family business from their father, and by
the mid-1950s both brothers were working in the store. Don
was the more outgoing and he became actively involved with
local sporting groups and church and community organisa-
tions. Public services that were taken for granted in the cities
barely existed in Griffith and Don became a driving force
behind the establishment of a support group for children with
disabilities. It was through his involvement with the church
that he met his future wife, Barbara Dearman, a dental nurse
who was studying in Sydney to be a physiotherapist. They
married in 1957 and soon afterwards Barbara found a job at
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A new crop
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a flat fee, with organisers picking up the tab for input costs
(seeds, water, fertiliser etc), living expenses and, if they were
unlucky enough to be arrested, legal fees.
Trimbole looked after wholesaling with help from his
lieutenant and confidant Winery Tony Sergi in New South
Wales, and from Gianfranco Frank Tizzoni in Victoria.
Trimbole had met and befriended Tizzoni while working
for Atlantic Amusements. Like Trimbole, Tizzoni had a job
supplying and servicing amusement machines. It did not
take the pair long to realise that, while supplying machines
to pubs and clubs, they could also cater to the burgeoning
cannabis market; it seemed like a logical progression.
La Famiglia established a legitimate fruit and vegetable
business, Trimboli, Sergi & Sergi, at Sydneys Haymarket
and Flemington markets as a means to transport and distrib-
ute cannabis and to funnel cash back to members of the
syndicate in Griffith. Huge sums of money would be paid
by Trimboli, Sergi & Sergi for phantom farm produce for
which no records could be traced.
Bob Trimbole studied the development, harvest, prepa-
ration and packaging techniques used in the Riverinas fruit
and vegetable industry and applied the same quality controls
to the cultivation and trafficking of cannabis.
But growing cannabis was not like growing cauliflowers.
Trimbole knew that the police had an eye-in-the-sky search-
ing for cannabis crops. Landsat satellites were used by the
agricultural industry to measure areas sown to rice crops
and to estimate the volume of irrigation water required each
season from the Murrumbidgee and Murray River systems.
These satellites could pinpoint and identify legitimate and
illicit crops grown throughout the Murrumbidgee, Coleam-
bally and Murray Irrigation Areas.
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