One mild May day in 1984, a fisherman trying his luck in the Murrumbidgee River near Griffith in southern NSW hooked a lot more than he could have anticipated.
It happened that I took some interest in these events. I interviewed Don Mackay two days before he disappeared, and I was in Griffith reporting on an unrelated story on the day the bodies of Medici and Furina were discovered in the Murrumbidgee. The ritual hacking of ears had its beginning in Australia in 1934 during violence in north Queensland among members of what was known at the time as The Black Hand.
My colleague, John “Sly of the Underworld” Silvester, has compiled a long and detailed timeline of the mayhem as criminals fought to control Victoria’s markets. The background to the shootings was a power vacuum that followed the death in December 1962 of the man reputed to have been the godfather of the society in Victoria, Domenico Italiano.
Polcie divers surface during the search for the bodies of Rocco Medici and Giuseppe Furina in the Murumbidgee River in May 1984.Almost exactly one year later, on May 6, 1984, the bodies of Medici – his ears and honour removed – and the unfortunate Furina were retrieved from the Murrumbidgee.