THE RISE OF TERRENCE CLARK, DRUG DEALER
When a hit man was sent after him, Clark sat the gunman down, opened a bottle of wine, lit him a cigar and cleared up the misunderstanding. He was carrying a vintage Luger pistol and his associates had no doubt he would use it.
LATER, when his world had crashed around him, Terry Clark would sit in court reading Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, the true story of a death row prisoner who chose to be executed. A decade earlier, as a small-time crook with big ideas, Clark would have seen The Godfather, a film classic that inspired a generation of would-be gangsters. More literate than the usual run of thieves – he fancied himself as an artist – Clark most likely also read the Mario Puzo novel that inspired the Godfather films. And if he ever read Puzo’s pithy line about what drives men to compete, he would have understood it, because it fitted him.
Men compete to succeed, Puzo said, so that beautiful women will love them. When detectives asked Clark about photographs of his beautiful lawyer girlfriend Karen Soich rolling naked in money he replied: ‘Women like money, don’t they?’ Money was a means to an end, and for Clark a potent attraction was the power it gave him over women. It meant he could buy them, use them and discard them, often brutally.
After the author Richard Hall investigated Clark’s background in New Zealand, he painted a picture of a small town loner – a skinny kid with a chip on his shoulder, without the physical or mental gifts to put him above his peers. There was nothing about him that marked him as special, except for the most important thing of all: an ego that drove him to do whatever it took to feel superior to the common herd. He wanted to be number one. To do that, he turned to crime the way some turn to sport and others to study or music. Unlike most people raised in relatively normal family circumstances, he showed no inhibitions about breaking the legal and moral rules.
Terrence John Clark was born in Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s north island – the first city in the world to see the rising sun each day. When Clark was born on 13 November 1944, the biggest business in town was the abattoirs and freezing works, where his father, Leo, worked when Terry was young. ‘Good old Leo’, as locals called him, was from a farming family and was a sportsman, a surfer and a founder of a local surf lifesaving club.
But while the father was a public-spirited sportsman in a sports-mad community, Terry wasn’t. Not big or strong, he soon developed into a loner at school. He affected being a rebel without a cause. In that time and place, that meant being a ‘bodgie’, with a Cornell Wilde haircut and a roll-your-own cigarette hanging from his lip. Whereas his younger brother Paddy was good at school and at sport, Terry went the other way: he played tough guy.
But there was ambition and a shrewd streak of business sense in the family. In the early 1950s, while Terry was in primary school, Leo bought the local pie-cart – a caravan that sold pies, sausages and bacon at night. Soon after, he bought a better house. And by 1957 he set up the first driving-school in the town. Leo the farmer’s son was not content to be an abattoir worker all his life. But while his family was bettering itself, Terry Clark was going the other way: he was unusually aggressive in schoolyard fights and so determined to be seen as tough he talked about carrying a knife and being prepared to use it.
Like a lot of kids from provincial towns, Terry Clark got out as soon as he could. By 1962, he was in Auckland working as a welder’s assistant. He fancied something that paid better than handing welding rods to a tradesman but he wasn’t going to follow his father into a life of hard work. He wanted short cuts.
It didn’t take him long to collide with the law. The police picked him up for interfering with a car. He was given probation. Other youngsters in the same boat might have ‘pulled up’ but Clark wasn’t other youngsters. He was drawn to the dark and dirty side. In Auckland in the 1960s, that meant thieving. Illicit drugs were still almost unknown, armed robberies were rare. Burglary, theft and receiving were what Kiwi crooks did. Top of the pecking order were the safecrackers.
In 1963, Clark had begun what would become a habit: acquiring women. That year, while still on probation, he married a girl called Sally R. They moved into a flat. Meanwhile, Clark combined panel beating with minor rackets: stolen cars and shop breaking. But, already, he was receiving stolen goods from other thieves, which meant they did the dirty work and took the bigger risk. This set a pattern.
After a farcical foray into safe blowing – he left the gelignite on top of the safe, instead of drilling it, and blew up half the service station it was in – he started to combine receiving with informing. The sneaky, calculating loner convinced of his own superiority soon became a regular police ‘fizz’. Ordinary in so many ways, he was not quite normal, even for a ‘delinquent’: unlike most young criminals, he wasn’t a tearaway who hung around with his mates, drinking in pubs, fighting and thrashing and crashing cars. He lived quietly with his wife – first in a flat, then in a state-owned rented house.
Writes Hall: ‘His informer role helped to make him deeply suspicious and cautious. He insisted on meeting his police contacts well away from the suburbs where he lived. The detectives who used Clark remember him with a special dislike … One detective recalls that Clark became so hostile that he had to be passed on to another, the detective deciding that he was too shifty to deal with even as a grass.
‘From time to time Clark undertook regular work, but he always made sure the experience paid an extra dividend. One land sale company that employed him for a short time was burgled five times in the next year.’
While still living with Sally, Clark had several women friends, several of them prostitutes. One, Norah Fleet, was an early heroin addict in Auckland’s fledgling drug culture. The cold-blooded Clark smelt an opportunity for fast money. In 1969, he bought 24 capsules of ‘heroin’ to re-sell – not suspecting it was a police sting. But fate had another trick in store – when the capsules were sent for testing, they turned out to be codeine and milk powder. Clark, who in the next decade would become one of the biggest dealers on Earth, had been conned. In the process, he had beaten the rap. But, for all his precautions, his luck was running out.
‘As a grass, Clark was getting out of control,’ Hall would write. ‘Some say that when Clark was picked up attempting a safe in the country town of Napier in March 1971, he had been deliberately set up by police to get rid of him.’ Maybe it was because he had aimed too high: ‘lagging’ respected crooks with their own ways of getting back at him. Whatever the reason, they threw the book at him. In March 1971 he was sentenced to five years prison. Proof, perhaps, that no-one likes a rat. Except, it would turn out, several women who should have known better. But that was later, when he had far more money than they had sense.
WI TAKO prison, at Trentham, north of Wellington, was a minimum-security jail for first offenders. As such, Clark would probably have been sent there automatically. Typically, though, he claimed he had got there through inside influence – a contact at the Justice Department. Although he won a reputation as a jail ‘heavy’, and was twice charged with fighting, he made sure he didn’t do anything serious enough to get him sent to a tougher jail full of hardened offenders. Working in the joinery workshop, he invented a yachting self-steering device. He was keen on boats and read voraciously about them. Mainly, though, other inmates would remember him as a wheeler-dealer with a talent for corrupting people. And for deceiving them. One of his contemporaries recalled him selling dried dock leaves to six other prisoners who thought it was marijuana.
A fellow prisoner who later wrote a book about prison life describes Clark as having ‘that cold, implacable look that dulled his face when he spoke of dealing it to people.’ He also describes a tense prison visit from Clark’s parents where Clark’s broken-hearted father said bitterly he was prepared to set his son up in any legitimate business when he got out – ‘but no, he doesn’t want my money. He just has to make it himself by being a big-time crook.’
Clark used to boast that if ‘you have enough bread, you can buy anyone’. About the only person he showed respect was the jail chaplain, for whom he drew the head of Christ in black ink, a picture the chaplain would hang in his office for the rest of his career.
By the time he was released in 1974 he had divorced Sally R and married his heroin addict prostitute, Norma Fleet. It is hard not to conclude he saw her as a way into the heroin dealing world. If so, he was on the money. In just a few years, drugs had taken over from the traditional forms of crime. The old underworld hierarchy of thieves was irrelevant. Norma was to die the following year from an overdose of Mandrax. Clark went to work dealing Thai ‘buddha’ sticks. Where other dealers flashed their money by buying big American cars, Clark stuck to a battered old English car, which blended in. He behaved himself – and he was no longer an informer.
Careful as he was, Clark bumped into some high-living drug dealers. One of them was Martin Johnstone.
Johnstone, younger than Clark, had been born in 1951 in a farming district near Auckland. He had a brother and a sister and their parents were a successful, hard-working business couple. After dropping out of a private school, he’d soon got into trouble for theft and burglary. Then he worked in an Auckland menswear shop – Collar’n’Cuffs – where he met an Englishman called Andrew Maher. By 1973 Johnstone was dealing in marijuana, but very small time. He was arrested that June in possession of two plants and told police he had developed an interest in horticulture because he was too poor to buy his own grass. The arresting detective described him as ‘a friendly, easy-to-approach person who would readily admit to offences.’
But Marty Johnstone had no intention of remaining small time. While he and Clark were almost opposites in character they shared one personality trait – ambition. First it was local leaf then he moved up to imported Thai sticks. He bought the sticks from a connection on the Royal Dutch Orient Line, which sailed from Asian ports and whose Chinese crewmen easily outwitted New Zealand’s crude customs regime, mainly by tossing contraband overboard at pre-arranged spots to be picked up by small craft. The middle man on the Dutch boats was Choo Cheng Kui, known as ‘Chinese Jack’.
Johnstone and Clark did shady ‘business’ together but there was always an underlying tension. Clark had done time and was street smart, but the younger Johnstone was tall, dark and handsome and had the insouciance of the well-dressed, private-school dandy he was. Charming and gregarious, he was also prone to melancholy – and not as ruthless and resilient as Clark. One thing they had in common, besides a taste for easy money, was a love for boats. Johnstone owned a speedboat he used to pick up contraband. Clark bought a 51-foot sloop, a symbol of success.
Johnstone loved playing the prosperous businessman. A confidential New Zealand police report said, ‘He was becoming noted for his flamboyant lifestyle and jetset image.’ While Clark worked in the shadows, Johnstone sought the spotlight. It was another reason the two men were not destined to be long-term partners.
Johnstone set up a group of companies and used one of them to buy a 36-foot boat, the Brigadoon, captained by one Peter Miller, who had been a member of the Exclusive Brethren religious sect. Johnstone put together a syndicate of backers to finance a voyage to buy half a million buddha sticks from Thailand – a plan police and customs soon got to hear about on the grapevine. Clark didn’t invest but became ‘wholesaler’ for the operation, agreeing to pay $3.50 per stick.
The voyage of the Brigadoon was more Marx Brothers than mastermind. After a series of minor disasters, an Australian trawler skipper called John Chatterton agreed to tow the Brigadoon from Indonesia to near New Zealand, where police and customs had heard long before that a shipment of marijuana was on the way. But the Brigadoon was running so late that the surveillance had been eased. Even then, the syndicate speedboat had broken down and the cargo of 36 bags of Thai sticks had to be ferried ashore by rowing boat.
Clark took delivery of 458,000 sticks. Johnstone cleared about $1 million plus the yacht. Eventually, Clark cleared about $1 million, too, retailing the sticks at $7 each over the following year. Two other partners – a local solicitor and a Greek businessman – made a handsome profit. At a time when people worked for $10,000 a year, it was enough money to set up a legitimate business and go straight. Clark, however, was already moving into heroin. In late 1975 he persuaded a woman called Valerie Kairua to smuggle some back from a Fiji holiday. But the two fell out, police raided Clark and he was charged with trafficking offences that carried ten years jail. Clark had no intention of going back inside. Instead, in the new year of 1976, he jumped bail and headed to the bright lights of the big city most New Zealanders go first … Sydney.
IN Auckland, Clark had befriended several fellow inmates of Wi Tako prison, which was probably the single worst decision any of them ever made. One was Greg Ollard, by this time also in Sydney. Another was Wayne Shrimpton. Another was Errol Hincksman. Then there was Douglas Wilson, who had ‘moved’ $200,000 worth of buddha sticks for Clark. And, of course, the urbane Martin Johnstone. Ollard was already in Sydney when Clark got there, and the rest would follow.
The attraction towards Clark and ‘Sin City’ was a dangerous one. No-one, even Clark in his darkest moments, could have guessed then that soon he would have arranged the murder of three of his old Auckland ‘mates’ (plus two women associated with them), stolen the girlfriend of another, and caused Errol Hincksman to be charged with one of the murders.
Ollard was Clark’s first contact in Sydney. He stayed with him in King’s Cross when he got there. Unlike Clark, who despised addicts, Ollard used heroin as well as dealing in it. He had worked for the EMI record company and hung around with rock groups, including Rose Tattoo and the New Zealand band Dragon, which by 1977 would be Australian Rolling Stone magazine’s ‘Band of The Year’. Ollard was a groupie; he loaned the band members money and picked up bills in return for reflected glory. Dragon’s drummer, Neil Storey, died of a heroin overdose in June 1976, most likely because of the free ‘smack’ Ollard handed out at parties.
Meanwhile, Johnstone was living high on the $1 million he’d made selling the buddha sticks wholesale to Clark, whose ‘representatives’ in New Zealand were steadily ‘retailing’ them for him. Johnstone settled in Singapore and made his name as a profligate party-giver and ladies’ man. He once boasted of spending US$11,000 on one long weekend party.
New Zealand police were still tracking him. ‘Johnstone lives in Singapore, again leading a lavish lifestyle, allegedly living in an expensive apartment, driving an XJ6 Jaguar car and creating the impression that he is a successful businessman. It is known he has spent vast amounts of money on purchasing ocean-going vessels in Singapore and has also spent a great deal of money in Auckland,’ they wrote.
While the New Zealand police could see that Johnstone was moving onto the world drug stage, international authorities did not seem to grasp the size of the operation. They did not understand that the former shop assistant was positioning himself to wholesale the deadly white powder. On 23 December 1977 Johnstone was seen walking through Sydney airport with an Australian woman. Both were stopped and searched. The woman was found to have heroin valued at $1.5 million strapped to her body. She was arrested. He was released.
Meanwhile, Clark was busy. He now had a third wife, Maria Muahary. On a visit to Malaysia and Singapore later in 1976 he renewed acquaintance with ‘Chinese Jack’ and did some business: sending two couriers back to Australia with heroin strapped to their bodies. While Johnstone dreamed of setting up a big-time legitimate business, Clark was setting up a big-time illegitimate one, which they called The Organisation. While Johnstone postured outrageously in Singapore’s expatriate social scene, Clark moved around quietly under a string of aliases: John Templar, Phil Scott and Phil Perkins were three of many he would use over the next three years. Not standing out from the crowd was now useful for the former nondescript kid from Gisborne: for the time being, Clark was a shadowy figure on the fringe, under the radar while others attracted attention. But he showed some nerve. There was a claim he had cheated someone, and a hit man was sent after him. Clark sat the gunman down, opened a bottle of wine, lit him a cigar and cleared up the misunderstanding. At the time, he was carrying a vintage Luger pistol and his associates had no doubt he would use it.
By the end of 1976 the man who had made his first million wholesaling buddha sticks in New Zealand had switched to being a heroin importer. The potent and fabulously expensive powder could be smuggled in relatively small amounts and sold on for instant profit, leaving the ‘dirty work’ of selling it on the streets to others down the food chain. As usual, he separated himself from unnecessary risk – and from being close to the addicts that were the end result of his immoral trade. He prided himself on selling ‘Number One Chinese White’, which was around 90 per cent pure. Much later he was to tell police: ‘I know it sounds funny, but people in the game think I’m honourable.’ In a twisted way, the heroin dealer had a little of his father ‘good Old Leo’ in him: he valued his reputation for square dealing because it was good for business. This would explain, later, why he was so angry when Johnstone hurt The Organisation’s reputation by ‘cutting’ a batch of heroin.
There was no single ‘Mr Big’ running drugs into Australia, but by 1977 Clark’s organisation was certainly one of the bigger syndicates operating. He had five main competitors, the most significant of which was run by a bent businessman, William Garfield Sinclair, who used drunken footballers on sex tours of Thailand to act as ‘mules’. Sinclair would be arrested in Bangkok along with Warren Fellows and rugby player Paul Hayward. But there were always others. And, in Australia and New Zealand, there were wholesalers who stood to make millions. Not all of these shadowy figures belonged to the traditional underworld, although they were as amoral as any bank robber. Clark’s biggest wholesaler, for instance, was a supposed property dealer from Brighton, Melbourne’s premier bayside suburb, and he dominated the Victorian market. He sent his sister to Sydney to sell heroin into the expanding market of addicts in the western suburbs, and regularly flew north to keep an eye on things. In Sydney, he stayed at the Crest Hotel in King’s Cross, and Clark would meet him there to share fine wine and cigars. The slaughterman’s son from Gisborne had come a long way in a short time.
It was inevitable that Clark’s drug running brought him into contact with the vice empire run by Abe Saffron, Sydney’s ‘Mr Sin’.
Saffron, nephew of a judge, had expanded from sly grog in pubs and clubs to pornography, extortion, prostitution and drugs. Many of the prostitutes who worked from his premises were addicts, and there was no way the greedy Saffron and his parasites were going to let anyone else profit from supplying them. It was an evil vertical monopoly – paying prostitutes at inflated street prices in heroin bought wholesale from Clark and others. The supremely corrupt Saffron kept clear of handling drugs himself. Not that it mattered – he had a network of corrupted or compromised senior police, judges, politicians and public servants who would protect him all his life. Those he didn’t bribe he could blackmail with photographs of them indulging their favourite sexual vices in Saffron’s premises, which were fitted with one-way mirrors and a camera.
In the 1970s, most of Saffron’s dirty work in Sydney was done by James McCartney Anderson, who would later turn against him. According to Saffron’s son Alan, Anderson had arranged the murder of wealthy Sydney heiress Juanita Nielsen, who had opposed Saffron-backed development of King’s Cross. It was Anderson – who later gave evidence against Saffron – that handled the heroin for Saffron’s organisation, allowing the hookers to stash their personal supplies in his nightclub safe.
But the canny and clannish Clark decided to hedge his bets. In 1977 he asked another New Zealander, ‘Diamond’ Jim Shepherd, to come from Auckland to act as a heroin wholesaler exclusively for The Organisation. Shepherd, a gregarious man who loved the racetrack, bought heroin wholesale and sold it down the line to middlemen and street-level dealers.
The authorities could not keep up with this runaway drug culture. An early and ultimately unsuccessful attempt was the formation of the Federal Narcotics Bureau in 1969. Because it was difficult to prove drug-trafficking conspiracies, the bureau (like its state police equivalents) tended to gather much intelligence. This created a de facto market for information. The danger, of course, was that markets attract buyers as well as sellers. Clark became an early buyer. The onetime informer had reversed roles completely – and he had deep pockets.
Starting in 1976, the bureau had been gathering intelligence about New Zealanders under the code name Operation Tuna. Exchanges with the New Zealand authorities led to clandestine raids on Sydney addresses, and agents started to put together a list of names. One was Martin Johnstone. Another was Greg Ollard, the man who supplied rock bands with heroin. And the agents found out that another Kiwi had arrived: he used the name Wayne Shrimpton, and his girlfriend was Allison Dine.
Clark, meanwhile, was still known only by aliases that meant nothing to the bureau. And he knew it, because his sources were impeccable.
What vaulted Clark to become Australia’s biggest heroin importer was one massive shipment brought in by trawler, the Konpira. With nearly 100 kilos of heroin in more than twenty old square kerosene tins on board, the trawler skipper John Chatterton made his way down the east coast in June 1977.
Chatterton was quick to spot the surveillance plane that appeared on the horizon every day so at night he would speed up, giving him time to stop if he needed.
During a storm he took the trawler to the safe side of an island off the coast where the heroin was unloaded. But during the cargo drop in rough seas two of the drums were lost.
Eventually a motor launch was despatched to the island and the heroin taken to the mainland. By the time suspicious customs officers searched the trawler at Eden, the heroin was buried in thermos flasks in the bush at Frenchs Forest in outer suburban Sydney. When customs officers checked the remaining cargo, one accidentally smashed a large terracotta pot, slicing his arm and requiring him to be taken by ambulance to hospital. The remaining officers soon lost interest in continuing the search. Blood on the decks will do that.
It is believed some of the syndicate returned to the island and recovered at least one of the lost drums.
While the syndicate continued to import heroin, using couriers, it was the Frenchs Forest stash that made Clark Australia’s biggest heroin distributor long before police grasped the fact he was a major player. And it was when that stash ran out and police started to close in that Clark sold his Australian interests to Bob Trimbole. ‘Aussie Bob’ didn’t realise he was being taken for a ride.
Within weeks of the trawler heroin shipment, Clark insisted that Ollard and his girlfriend Julie Theilman – both addicts – should ‘dry out’ by going to a motel on the northern New South Wales coast. But when the pair returned to Sydney that August and got back on ‘the gear’, Clark decided they had to die. He knew the Narcotics Bureau was closing in on Ollard. Agents had secretly broken into two premises used by Ollard and cracked his telephone codes and the false names in which he held bank accounts. As soon as the agents brought Ollard and Theilman in for questioning, Clark knew they would not stay silent for long. There was another, deep-seated reason why he wanted Ollard out of the way: Ollard had refused an offer from Clark to buy him out of his heroin dealing business. Clark knew that Ollard was capable of competing with him – and competitors can be dangerous in criminal circles. They have a motive to inform on each other. Ollard knew far too much about Clark’s operation. This was fatal for his girlfriend, Julie Theilman, because she would have to go, too.
Julie Diane Theilman, born in 1956 in New Zealand, had developed bad habits early. Arrested for ‘keeping a brothel’ at the age of eighteen, she had to give up being a nurse because of the hepatitis she had contracted from intravenous drug use. She and Ollard often travelled back to New Zealand from Sydney. Once, they left a small suitcase in Theilman’s room at her parents’ house. Her mother later opened it and found it was full of money, wrapped in brown paper. She shut the case, put it back and never talked about it. Perhaps she should have.
The odd thing is that before they disappeared in September 1977, Ollard and Theilman told friends they intended to go overseas on a long trip and not to worry about their whereabouts. They told other friends they were returning to Auckland to announce their engagement.
They never arrived.
When one insider, who took over Ollard’s role on The Organisation, asked where they had gone, Clark replied: ‘I have retired Greg and Jules’, a clear hint that they had been killed. Others were told they had ‘gone east’ – overseas – but Clark started dropping hints to insiders that they were buried under concrete construction work at Sydney airport.
Typically, it was only a half-truth, calculated both to instil maximum fear and to lay a false trail. The truth was revealed when the bodies were located five years later, in late 1982, as a result of information received: Ollard’s remains were found in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park near Sydney, three days after Theilman’s were dug up at Mt Victoria in the Blue Mountains.
A secret witness told the Stewart Royal Commission that Clark had called him in mid-September 1977 and asked for his help. The witness drove Clark to a dirt track in Ku-ring-gai National Park. On the way Clark told him he had killed Ollard earlier that day, then he led the way to Ollard’s body, lying off the track. It had been too heavy for Clark to lift into a hole he had dug earlier. They buried the body and put a branch over it. Clark said he’d lured Ollard there on the pretext of hiding a stash of heroin. Later the same day Clark and the witness picked up Julie Theilman from the house she shared with Ollard at Avalon. They gave her two ‘snorts’ of heroin and said they were going to Parramatta to meet Ollard. They drove to the Blue Mountains and down a dirt road between Blackheath and Mt Victoria, to a place where they had hidden heroin in the past. Clark shot the drug-affected woman in the head, then twice in the chest. They dragged her body behind a tree and covered it with rocks.
Less than two years before, Clark had stayed with Ollard when he first arrived from New Zealand. But he could buy inside information and he was prepared to kill to ensure silence, to punish leaks or to remove those he saw as weak links or likely competition: a deadly combination for those close to him.
CLARK already had two children in New Zealand. On Boxing Day, 1977, Maria Muahary gave birth to his son, Jarrod. But Clark, always the opportunist, was already eyeing another conquest: he wanted Allison Dine, girlfriend of his old jailmate (and employee) Wayne Shrimpton. It was partly to cut his reliance on Shrimpton that he recruited yet another Kiwi to run errands for him – the ill-fated Douglas Wilson, who had sold 40,000 buddha sticks for him in Auckland a couple of years before.
Meanwhile, Clark was making passes at Allison Dine who, at 23, was bored enough with Shrimpton to be up for a fling with the boss. Born in Rotorua, Dine had trained as a kindergarten teacher but had dropped out to work as a waitress in Auckland. She’d met Shrimpton in 1976. He offered excitement – or, at least, life in Sydney, where they arrived on New Year’s Eve. Later she would claim she didn’t know Shrimpton was involved in anything illegal but if that were true, she was a fast learner. By the following August, she broke the law for Clark, carrying $10,000 to Singapore for Johnstone. It was the start of a year or two of living dangerously for the girl from Rotorua. Clark showed her a good time whenever Shrimpton wasn’t around, which was whenever Clark could arrange it. If she were unavailable, it didn’t worry Clark much. While his woman, Maria, looked after the baby, he would go into the city on business, and pick up women. He said that if you kept yourself fit – which he did, working out at a gym in Crows Nest each morning – then handling a couple of women a day was no problem. Despite this narcissistic streak, he was careful not to make a splash: he had no favourite restaurant, and was careful not to tip too lavishly. Unlike Jimmy Shepherd, who ate most days at Tati’s in Oxford Street with other racing identities, and threw money around like a flash gangster. Shepherd was a huge punter, which Clark then thought was ‘a mug’s game’. But it was how Shepherd came to be friendly with another big gambler, Bob Trimbole, a fixture at city race meetings in the late 1970s.
Clark drew Allison Dine closer into The Organisation by asking her to recruit another courier. She came up with Kay Reynolds, a strapping redhead who had learned to live hard and fast since leaving her home district of Barcaldine in Queensland. Reynolds, who worked in Sydney massage parlours, was keen on what looked like ‘easy money’ to be made from being a drug mule.
Clark went to the west coast of the United States to sound out his grand scheme for a global drug network: running heroin to the west coast and cocaine back to Australia and New Zealand. But he had not dropped lusting after Allison Dine. He stopped over in Singapore to meet her secretly, having previously arranged for her to courier $25,000 there from Australia. But after just four days, he got news of trouble back in Sydney: ‘Pommy Harry’ Lewis had been sprung at Sydney Airport with a load of Thai sticks. Clark had to interrupt his romantic interlude to fly back and kill him.
It was May 1978. Clark’s growing reputation for ruthlessness was becoming self-fulfilling. But reputations are dangerous things, as many a tough guy has found too late: the fear he struck in the people around him did not breed loyalty. Like Macbeth, he had so much blood on his hands he had to keep going because, as he saw it, retreat was becoming impossible. He had created a vortex of violence that could end only with his own destruction. But not soon enough to save several others.
ON Sunday 28 May, another New Zealander who thought Sydney was New York arrived at Kingsford-Smith Airport with a false passport and an unregistered pistol in his luggage. It was a .38 replica modified by some backyard gunsmith to fire .22 rounds: crude but effective and highly illegal. The surname in the passport was Andrews, but when the customs officers seized the pistol and started asking lots of personal questions, they were interested to find that the name on the supposed Mr Andrews’ driver’s licence was Duncan Robb. This was his real name but it did not satisfy their curiosity. They took him on a tour of the addresses he claimed to be using in Sydney. One flat would not open because his key did not fit the door, but the next one Robb took them to, in Mosman, did open. In it they found five grams of heroin. The customs men grew more interested. Robb’s nerves frayed fast, as he was a heroin user hanging out for a fix, and he wasn’t going to get it any time soon.
Robb was an old friend of the ‘vanished’ Greg Ollard and another Organisation runner called Mark Fitt, who had been killed – in a genuine traffic accident, amazingly enough – not long before. Douglas Wilson had been using him to run money and drugs interstate and across the Tasman and Robb knew all the names – including Terry Clark’s. So when a shrewd narcotics officer called Graham Brindle took him along to his superior, the calculating Richard Spencer, Robb rattled off a dozen names – and details of phone codes and numbers used by The Organisation. The trafficking charge against him could be reduced to ‘possession’ if he helped set up Clark. Which might have seemed like a good deal for a desperate man, except that was playing against a stacked deck: Clark’s contacts high in customs, the Narcotics Bureau or police immediately told him that Robb had rolled over. In fact, they sold the tip-off to Clark for $10,000, as would later be revealed.
The Stewart Royal Commission would later find that corrupt narcotics officers provided Clark with confidential information, using crooked law clerk Brian Alexander as a go between. Alexander worked for Sydney solicitor John Aston, whose trust account was used to launder the syndicate’s turnover.
Alexander was laundered in a different way. He was thrown from a boat with a gas stove attached to him. His body was never found. Nor was the cooker.
What happened next was described a couple of weeks later by Douglas Wilson in Brisbane after the Gazebo Hotel debacle. Wilson told police and, interestingly, a Narcotics Bureau member that a ‘guy at the top of the customs in Sydney … actually met Terry and played him the tape of the conversation (with Robb).’
On Friday 1 June, Robb was ‘taken for a ride’ by Clark, Andrew Maher and another of their gaggle of itinerant Kiwi crooks, Patrick Bennett. They took him north to Frenchs Forest, where Clark raved at Robb in what must have seemed like the last words he might ever hear. Two things Clark said would stick in his mind: that he had ‘a little bird in the office’ who leaked information; and that he already knew Robb had given the gang’s phone code to the interrogators.
At some point Robb must have decided he wasn’t going to be killed, as he asked to urinate so he would not wet himself during the bashing. Clark agreed then methodically belted him with a baseball bat, breaking his fingers and one arm. When they left, Clark told him to lie still for ten minutes or he would be shot. Robb was lucky Clark wanted him to be a walking, talking example of what happened when you crossed The Organisation. As opposed to being the other sort of example: corpses like Greg Ollard, Julie Theilman and ‘Pommy Harry’ Lewis. Robb repaid this ‘mercy’ by going straight to the Narcotics Bureau investigators and telling them about the beating, but he did nothing about setting up Clark. The latter, meanwhile, underlined the ‘lesson’ by taking his baseball bat and a knife to Robb’s Mini Cooper – slashing the upholstery, denting every panel and smashing the windows. Days later, a public-spirited neighbour reported the state of the car to the police, who traced the registration to Robb, who said he wanted no action taken.
Meanwhile, Allison Dine was becoming Clark’s favourite both in and out of bed. Apart from her assignations with him in luxury hotel suites, he used her flat to break up and bag the imported rock heroin, and she did a couple of cash runs overseas and would soon take twenty five bags of heroin to New Zealand strapped to her waist. She had also recruited her friend Kay, the massage parlour girl, to run drugs and money. But Clark had more on his mind than sex and money: he was already making plans for his old ‘mate’ Douglas Wilson, whose heroin addiction Clark saw as a fatal flaw. Douglas and Isabel had gone to hospital that May ‘to dry out’ but Clark doubted the effectiveness of the cure. He suggested they might like a boat trip, and invited them to the fateful meeting at the Gazebo in Brisbane. Which, of course, would end up destroying them all, as the betrayers themselves became the betrayed. But whereas the Wilsons were already teetering towards a shallow grave, Clark was still flying high. Too high.
WHEN Clark’s fingerprints were taken in Brisbane in June 1978, they were automatically cross-checked on the national register, which flagged that he had jumped bail in Auckland in 1976. That much was routine. But the fact he was let out of Australia, given Douglas Wilson’s statement linking him to serious crimes, did not appear routine to everyone, although a later review by Justice Donald Stewart absolved police of any deliberate wrongdoing. Clark would later claim that he had not offered Detective Sergeant Ron Pickering $50,000 to get him bail, and accused Pickering of soliciting a bribe, but the Stewart investigation found nothing to support Clark’s contention. As Pickering said, and other police agreed, the allegation about Harry Lewis’s murder was unsupported – there was no body and no evidence. And they had been assured by New Zealand police that Clark was certain to get twelve years jail on the old heroin charge. ‘We knew where to find him,’ one policeman said.
In any event, after a rough few days in custody that left him battered and bruised, Clark was sent to New Zealand to lick his wounds and face the heroin import charges.
Despite the New Zealand police’s confidence that they had Clark stitched up, it was like letting Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. On his home turf, Clark bought the best legal talent that massive drug money could buy, something that would later tarnish the reputation of at least two legal professionals seen to have ‘crossed the line’ of ethical behaviour. One of these was Karen Soich, who would cross the line several ways, mostly with her clothes off.
At 23, Soich was a confident only child of doting and prosperous parents. From the best-equipped rider at the Kamo pony club near Whangarei to the law student whose fond father handed her the keys of her own MG sports car, she had always been able to get what she wanted, particularly from men. By the time Terry Clark turned up, wallet in hand, Karen Soich was an assistant in the office of New Zealand’s then top criminal advocate, Peter Williams. Although male prisoners are famously fond of female lawyers who visit them in jail, not everyone loved Karen Soich. But she hit it off with Terry Clark almost from the moment she was first sent to see him on remand after his extradition.
Clark was still showing signs of a ‘robust’ interview when Soich was ushered into a prison room to see him. But, despite his own woes, she would say later, he charmed her by jumping up and clearing a spot for her to sit. He had learned a few tricks and was moving up from the fringe-dwelling women of his earlier days – those who, if not hookers and drug addicts, were at home in such circles.
Clark had always been attracted to women with a hard edge, but to him the attractive young woman with the law degree, educated voice and string of show ponies was ‘classy’. She stirred something in him. Likewise, he apparently stirred something in her: as a young female lawyer with ability and ambition in New Zealand at the end of the 1970s, she had nowhere to go without someone to bankroll the trip. A generation, or even a decade before, she might have resigned herself to the dull certainties of a ‘good’ marriage. But it was 1979, and Soich was up for skating across the thin ice of the permissive age. To her, the cool villain with the icy blue eyes and bottomless pockets must have looked like excitement. The combination of adrenalin and money could be addictive, especially if spiced with cocaine. The torrid affair would last only eleven weeks but it would forever link her with the drug syndicate. She would later say Clark would never swear in front of her and had impeccable manners. He may have been a drug dealer but at least he didn’t burp at the table.
Soich was soon using her professional visits to take letters from Clark out of prison and handing them to a female who took them to Australia to the rest of the gang. While Clark was away, Dine had become head of couriers and Jimmy Shepherd handled most of the Sydney wholesaling, although Clark was suspicious of Shepherd’s freewheeling ways.
Clark drew up a drug-smuggling blueprint: rules to reduce the risk of arrest. Couriers were never scruffy or ‘hippy’ looking, should pay all hotel bills in cash (leaving no record of their real identity), should do no more than two trips, and should take a Valium tranquiliser an hour before landing to keep calm while clearing customs.
Later, when giving evidence, Allison Dine would outline some of this elaborate courier code. For instance, in Singapore, the courier would be met by ‘Chinese Jack’ or another trusted contact at a hotel. Jack would take the courier’s suitcases away and arrange to meet the courier a few hours later. In that time, he would transfer the courier’s clothes into new (but similar-looking) suitcases – false-bottomed ones with up to 7.5 kilograms (but usually less) of compressed and sealed heroin hidden in disguised panels. He would then drop the courier and the bags to a new hotel for the rest of the courier’s ‘holiday’. Before the courier (usually an attractive young woman) flew out, Dine would visit and check that dirty underclothing was packed at the back near the false bottom. This was to discourage zealous searching by customs officers. Finally, she would wipe down the entire bag with a damp cloth to remove any stray fingerprints.
‘As the courier was checking her bags in at the Singapore airport Jack would hover in the background, to see that everything went all right,’ Dine described in her statement. ‘They usually had to pay excess baggage … due to the weight of the suitcase and the heaps of clothes that had to fill such large bags. Bags had to be full to look good. Jack would go out and buy some easily breakable toys to put amongst the clothes and they would normally break or he would break one before he put it into the bag, the reason for this being … the broken toys would take the attention of customs officials and make the courier feel more relaxed having something to talk about … The customs officer would always feel sorry and would let the courier through without further ado.’
Clark was behind bars for four months. In that time the Auckland Star ran an expose stating that a two-year police investigation to smash New Zealand’s biggest drug syndicate had been derailed because two witnesses refused to testify against the gang’s leader – an Aucklander living in Asia that the paper dubbed ‘Mr Asia’. That was, of course, Martin Johnstone. The story proved to Clark that his own rank in The Organisation was still little-known – he was still one name among many – but that the careless playboy Johnstone was dangerously exposed.
The first thing Clark’s big-time barrister Peter Williams did to earn his fee (reportedly $56,000) was to get his trial switched to Wellington on the grounds of possible prejudice. When the trial began, Williams used all his court room tactics to sway the jury. Meanwhile, if Clark’s boasting were to be believed, Clark was doing all he could to sway certain witnesses, some of whom were not as positive as they had been during the committal. Whether this is true is hard to say, but Clark often claimed later that the acquittal cost him $250,000. When the jury returned the ‘not guilty’ verdict Karen Soich raised eyebrows by embracing Clark in court, a gesture more courtesan than counsel. French champagne flowed in a hotel room that night; next day Clark bought a new Jaguar to celebrate. He drove it to visit a friend in his old ‘boarding school’, Wi Tako Prison. The message, to warders and prisoners alike, was clear. While they were stuck inside, Terry Clark was conquering the world. It was a long way from the shifty thief and informer he’d been only a few years before.
Clark was juggling women as well as risks. Allison Dine flew from Australia to ‘celebrate’ with him. They celebrated their brains out in a luxury hotel suite in the daytime before Clark would return to Maria for the night. When Dine returned to Sydney, Clark followed, heavily disguised. He told everyone he was going by ship, and then flew, to buy himself three secret days in Sydney with Dine. For the moment, his budding relationship with the glamorous Soich was on hold. But each had baited a hook. For her, it was Hollywood meets Chicago. She was going to play a part in a real-life drama – a bigger role than she would get in the law.
Meanwhile, Martin ‘Mr Asia’ Johnstone was sinking into a marijuana-induced haze that pushed him steadily lower in Clark’s bleak estimation. ‘Chinese Jack’ reported that Johnstone was too stoned to do business properly, that he was taking shortcuts, doing deals on the side to cut out The Organisation, and short changing people who were owed money. These included the crew of a trawler called Konpira and a couple of other boats, which were supposed to be ‘legitimate’ fronts but which Johnstone neglected: the boats deteriorating and the crews idle and unpaid. Clark saw all this as risky.
By the new year of 1979, Johnstone had joined the Wilsons on Clark’s list of things to do. He had enlisted the aid of the English knockabout Andy Maher, who had worked with Johnstone at an Auckland menswear shop in the early 1970s but had returned to Northern England, where he was a useful member of The Organisation as it spread into the UK. By the time the Wilsons were killed in April 1979, Clark was quietly planning Johnstone’s demise – and Maher was part of the plan. It would be a classic set up: to use someone close to Johnstone to destroy him.
A week before the Wilsons’ decomposed bodies were found at Rye, Clark flew to London with Maria and their baby son, Jarrod. He booked into a suite at the London Hilton and bought a Mercedes, but left the hotel on 20 May – straight after the Wilsons’ bodies were found – and moved into an expensive Mayfair flat, rented by Jim Shepherd in a false name. They hired a woman called Argentino Colaco as a nurse to look after the baby Jarrod, and a chauffeur, Sylvester Pidgeon, who had in fact lost his driving licence for drunk driving. The man driving a big international drug smuggler around London had no licence – a huge risk if the car were stopped by an inquisitive policeman.
BACK in Australia, the syndicate was starting to fray. The same week that the police pulled the Wilsons’ bodies out of the sandy soil at Rye, one of the syndicate’s new couriers, a woman called Joyce Allez, codenamed ‘Buckteeth’, was arrested at Sydney airport bringing in heroin from Singapore. It was a random arrest: an alert customs officer had noticed that the tartan suitcases were unusually thick at the bottom. Allison Dine and her friend Kay Reynolds had been waiting for Allez and panicked when they saw her arrested. They were even more alarmed when police spoke to Allez’s workmates at the Chinatown massage parlour where they had recruited Allez. The courier had not revealed where she got the heroin, insisting it had come from an unknown stranger in Singapore. The police soon caught up with Dine and Reynolds but they, too, said nothing. Dine got in touch with Clark in London and he called on Trimbole to help, proof that the friendly Godfather from Griffith had effectively taken over the Australian end of The Organisation.
Trimbole shifted the two women to a flat he owned in Sydney’s western suburbs. They moved on swiftly, with investigators tailing them. After seven days of pressure Dine ‘cracked’ and persuaded a friendly doctor to commit her to a psychiatric hospital. It was not a mad idea. When Trimbole contacted her with an escape plan the over-stretched Bureau of Narcotics wasn’t watching. Trimbole told her to slip out of the hospital and get a passport photograph taken, wearing a wig and glasses. He handed her a blank passport application form and told her to fill it out in the name ‘Royda Lee Blackburn’. Two days later, she met him at the gates of Centennial Park in Sydney – a spot from where it would be easy to see if she were being followed. She wasn’t being tailed; the ‘narcs’ were too busy. Dine flew to London to join the entourage, chaperoned by an Argentinian called Roberto Fionna, a punting mate of Trimbole’s and Shepherd’s and the nominal owner of their favourite Sydney restaurant, Tati’s.
In London, The Organisation was in trouble, but no one realised yet. The crew lived hard – partying like those with much to forget. Which, especially in Clark’s case, was true.
Within weeks the inveterate gambler Shepherd had persuaded Clark (under the name ‘Sinclair’) to join Ladbroke’s private casino. And Trimbole soon flew in and joined them at the West End gaming tables, setting the scene and making the contacts – although he might not have known it then – for the fugitive life he would be leading within a couple of years. The group lived high and fast, their days revolving around manic spending sprees with the endless supply of cash Clark kept in bundles around the apartment. The others had always been punters – like most criminals – but heavy gambling was a new vice for Clark, who had always seen betting as a mug’s game.
Now, instead of playing his cards close to his chest, he played them recklessly – dropping tens of thousands of pounds on the gaming tables. He had boasted he had so much money he ‘couldn’t spend the interest’ and his housekeeper would later paint a bizarre picture of a man who had money to throw away – literally.
She would see him scrunch up new banknotes, put some in his pocket, drop some on the floor and throw others in the waste paper bin. He was also drinking heavily and early in the day and no longer worried about physical fitness the way he had in Sydney.
Interestingly, given his father’s stern opposition to his early criminal tendencies, his own family seemed to have turned a blind eye to the possible source of his astonishing wealth. Clark led an outing to the countryside outside London for the wedding of his sister, who lived on a farm. The entourage was growing. Some found the lure of the high life hard to resist, and were willing to make compromises.
But the danger of being close to Clark was that eventually he would turn on you. And they all knew – or feared – what that could mean. After another courier, Carolyn Calder, was picked up in Sydney, Allison Dine felt a chill from her sometime lover, who blamed her for recruiting Calder through Kay Reynolds. Clark still had the contacts to know that Calder had told the police too much. Calder and Reynolds were so nervous they flew out from Sydney to London – without telling Clark – on the theory that it might be safer there than Sydney. Dine knew this but would not tell the suspicious Clark when he questioned her about her friends’ whereabouts. Eventually, he told her to go back to Australia – promising her he would send $25,000 so she could set up a beauty salon. But she didn’t like the way he said goodbye.
‘I did not like the look he had in his eyes … his look was very final,’ she would later state. ‘I did not know whether he meant his goodbye just like that or whether he intended to have me shot.’
It got worse. Back at Dine’s Neutral Bay flat, six Narcotics Bureau officers arrested her. After getting $5000 bail, she fled on a false passport – to the USA, via London. But she did not tell the increasingly-erratic Clark where she was. She sensed murder in him. She knew his form.
IF Martin Johnstone was not already a dead man walking by mid-1979, he sealed his death warrant with an abortive heroin-buying trip to Thailand in August, around the same time Dine was arrested in Sydney.
He went to Bangkok with a woman called Monique and his sometime friend Andy Maher, the Englishman he’d met in Auckland years before. Ostensibly keen to salvage his standing with Clark by pulling off one big deal by himself, Johnstone negotiated to buy several kilograms of heroin direct from Thai gangsters – three armed men who insisted that they be paid in full as they handed over the drugs.
Johnstone was armed with a .45 revolver but it seemed the playboy dealer was no match for tough Thais on their home territory. He was driven along a lonely jungle road with the cash to meet the gangsters and do the switch. When the gangsters appeared they opened the door of their van and showed him the package of heroin. Then they took the money from him to count it – but slammed the doors of the van as Johnstone went to take the heroin, and drove off. He wasn’t up to shooting at them, he said later. With odds of three to one, he might have lost his life as well as the money.
Johnstone was desperate. He took a 700-gram sample of the heroin he had been given and cut it with castor sugar and sent it to the UK with a courier. It was suicidal stupidity. Clark knew of the debacle within days; apart from anyone else, Johnstone’s alarmed friend Andy Maher had told him. Maher knew it would be better to tell Clark first rather than to let him discover it when the complaints started to flow from angry wholesalers duped into buying castor sugar.
Clark was furious. One of the cornerstones of The Organisation was its reputation for delivering near-pure heroin. Maher was convinced that he himself was lucky not to be partially blamed for Johnstone’s debacle. It meant that when Clark asked him to kill Johnstone, he agreed. The combination of fear and greed was potent.
Johnstone deluded himself he could recoup the loss – of about $250,000 – by selling 15,000 Thai sticks in the UK. He was trying to ignore other problems: he owed Clark about $2 million; various ‘front’ businesses had gone bad, wages bills were outstanding for the crews of the syndicate’s three unused boats.
Maher was now a double agent. When he told Johnstone he had buyers for his Thai sticks in Scotland, Johnstone fell for it. Clark sealed the set-up with a long telephone call to Johnstone in which he acted friendly and forgiving. Maher, meanwhile, was recruiting help: his father’s cousin James Smith, an ex-soldier who had seen action in Northern Ireland. Smith, in turn, recruited two more Scots, another ex-Guardsman called Kingsley Fagan, and a neighbour called Gerard Keegan. Clark reinforced Maher’s willingness to do the deed by telling him he had ordered the death of a woman and her child for crossing the syndicate. Maher took this as proof that if he didn’t do what Clark wanted, his own wife and baby daughter could be killed.
As well as the implied threat, Clark duchessed Maher: inviting him and his wife Barbara to a two-day cocaine party at the London flat on the last weekend of that September. Johnstone flew into London a week later. He had $200 in his pocket and owed $2 million. When Maher told him he had buyers in Glasgow with plenty to spend on his Thai sticks – but that the Scots insisted on talking to Johnstone personally – it wasn’t hard to persuade him to drive north.
Earlier that week one of Maher’s mates in the Lancashire town of Preston went around buying a motley collection of hardware – an axe, a rope, a lorry jack and several weights. Maher got a sheet of polythene and some sawdust. They had everything but a gun. Clark took care of that, getting a London underworld contact to buy a .38 pistol, parcelling it up and paying his chauffeur’s teenage daughter to take the parcel on the train north.
Johnstone and his latest girlfriend, a former local beauty contestant called Julie Hue, visited Maher and his wife in their house at Leyland, near Preston. Hue noticed ‘a bad atmosphere’ and Johnstone told her later it was because Maher had told him he wanted to settle down and no longer wanted to work for him. Martin Johnstone even ‘cried a little’ about losing his friend of seven years. This was Maher and Barbara’s Judas moment. The couple had been so close to Martin Johnstone they had called their baby ‘Marti’ after him. Now they were plotting his murder.
Johnstone took Julie Hue back to London to go shopping, then returned to Lancashire ready to do the supposed big Scottish deal. He had a drink with Maher and his ‘mates’, the ex-Guardsmen Smith and Fagan.
They set off in the evening, laughing and joking as they carried luggage out to the old Jaguar bought for the job. Fagan stayed behind, and they dropped off Julie Hue at her mother’s and drove north. But not for long. Maher turned onto an old highway, then through several towns until the village of Carnforth, where he pulled over into a lay-by on a quiet section of road and asked his friend if he wanted to drive. As Johnstone got out, Maher shot him in the back of the head. Then, over the next few hours, it got unspeakably worse as they butchered the body to make it unrecognisable before disposing of it.
It was 9 October 1979.
CLARK got the call from Maher next morning. It was at least the sixth murder he’d organised or done. ‘Good one,’ he grunted.
Four days later, on Sunday morning, two novice scuba divers went diving in the Eccleston Delph, a flooded quarry known for the number of stolen and wrecked cars dumped in it. The pair swam around underwater until they noticed what one thought was a shop dummy on a rock shelf about 25 feet down. Then he saw ‘the squiggly tubes and mess coming from the vicinity of the stomach’ and ‘the severed wrists’.
It was one of the biggest cases the Lancashire police had seen in years, and 60 detectives would be assigned to it. Their difficulty was to identify a body with no hands and whose face and teeth had been smashed beyond recognition.
In the end, it would not be the power of forensic investigation but the weight of guilt that would bring the killers undone. And, by extension, bring down Clark’s evil empire.
For almost two weeks Maher’s de facto, Barbara Pilkington, had distracted Johnstone’s girlfriend, Julie Hue, by telling her Johnstone had been called away on business. Barbara took Julie to Spain, where Maher’s father had a bar on the Costa Brava. Julie wasn’t a big reader but on 21 October, nearly two weeks after the murder, she saw a newspaper story about the body in the quarry near her home town in Lancashire. Barbara broke down and told her the truth, explaining how Maher had been forced into killing his friend. The two distraught women attempted to commit suicide with sleeping tablets, but it didn’t work. After a long sleep and big talks, they flew to London. Barbara called Maher (who was by then in Singapore) and blurted out that she didn’t love him any more. He suggested the two upset women go to Lancashire. For him, it wasn’t good advice. As soon as they got there, Julie Hue told her devout Seventh Day Adventist mother the truth. The shocked and pious woman called the police.
CLARK fiddled as his empire burnt. With Allison Dine hiding in America, Karen Soich had arrived from Auckland to join the party in London. Clark’s long-suffering wife Maria had also left, so Soich had Clark to herself, accompanying him to casinos and parties. Most days, she rode a hired grey hack along Rotten Row, a pampered pet in a fool’s paradise.
Maher was arrested as he stepped off a plane at Heathrow. Early next morning Scotland Yard police avoided the fortified entrance door to Clark’s apartment, instead forcing the back door. They found Clark and Soich in bed together. Soich yelled at the police: ‘Get out of the room and let me get dressed. What is going on? I am a lawyer!’ She told Clark not to tell them anything except his name and address and she demanded to see a warrant. Police were to accuse her of trying to kick a diary under the bed.
Soich claimed she did only the washing and cooking. This did not tally with the evidence: police found photographs Clark had taken of her rolling naked in hundreds of banknotes on the double bed. The pictures were ‘art’, Clark told detectives. Asked about it later, he said: ‘Well, women like money, don’t they?’
After that it all unravelled. Police made arrest after arrest, each leading to the next. Eventually, most of them ‘rolled over’, telling various versions of the truth: that they’d been pawns in Clark’s murderous game. Oddly enough, it was the seasoned Clark who talked a lot – boasting about his feats as a drug dealer in Australia and New Zealand but insisting unconvincingly that he had come to England to retire. Inevitably, he made a mistake, telling the police he had supplied the pistol to Maher, which he claimed was for Maher’s protection. For a man who had spent millions on lawyers over the years, it was a foolish slip. He was charged with Johnstone’s murder and several other serious charges, as were Maher and Smith and two other men who had helped them. Karen Soich and six others were charged with conspiracy. By 5 November they had all been remanded without bail.
They buried Johnstone’s desecrated remains a couple of weeks later in Lancashire. Only his mother, Julie Hue and Barbara Pilkington mourned the foppish rogue who had once thrown the biggest parties in Singapore. The only other person at the gravesite was Detective Superintendent Phil Cafferky of the Lancashire police.
The police soon traced Allison Dine in the US. She was travelling under a false identity and might never have been found except that she had picked up an American boyfriend in Sydney and someone knew that he came from Orlando, Florida. When he visited his mother in Orlando, the local police identified Dine’s Celica car. She was soon traced to the west coast, and offered a deal to give evidence against her former lover and his organisation. Her old boyfriend Wayne Shrimpton would do the same.
Dine would be a star witness in four proceedings – including the Clark committal, the Wilsons’ inquest in Melbourne and a conspiracy case against three suspect Narcotics Bureau officers accused of selling information to Clark. In return, she went free – returning to the anonymity she’d had just three years before.
The trial took 115 days, fourteen of them summing up the evidence of 175 witnesses. It took the jury another week to deliver a verdict. Clark was guilty on three counts of murder and two drug conspiracies. All the co-accused were found guilty except a minor player called Jack Barclay … and Karen Soich, who walked away.
Clark was sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty years, and ordered to pay a million pounds towards the cost of the trial, the highest ever in England. It was barely seven years since he’d come out of a New Zealand prison with nothing but the ruthlessness to succeed in an evil trade. Now he was going back. It is said that after the sentence was passed, the sardonic Clark said to Soich’s mother that she had got both things she wanted: her daughter’s acquittal and Clark locked up for twenty years.
Meanwhile, two big players in The Organisation were absent. Jimmy Shepherd slipped away to America and disappeared into the huddled masses of the great republic, not heard of again for a long time. That left ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole in charge of the tattered remains of The Organisation. He had returned to Australia. But he, too, would soon be on the run.
TERRY Clark died in Parkhurst Prison in August 1983. Officially, he died of a heart attack, an unusual fate for a 39-year-old prisoner. But in his Royal Commission into drug trafficking tabled in Australia that year, Mr Justice Stewart suggested that Clark was smothered by several other prisoners. A likely explanation is that Clark the onetime ‘grass’ merely fell foul of the violent code of behaviour inside – making the fatal mistake of offering to inform on fellow prisoners. Unless, of course, there was an even more sinister explanation … a long-range conspiracy to silence him to prevent any chance of his revealing which police, public servants and lawyers had been on his payroll in Australia.