Chapter 4

Two Dead and a UK Connection

Sydney and London, 1977

CLARK’S FIRST large shipment by boat, in the Konpira, failed when in March 1977 he lost an amount of heroin in rough seas during a transhipment from a boat off Queensland. About the same time a woman courier, a Thai bringing 80,000 Thai sticks out, was arrested at Bangkok Airport. However, in June the Konpira carried out a successful run and 100 kg of heroin were taken off by a motor cruiser north of Brisbane. The Narcotics Bureau had the Konpira under surveillance, but missed the transfer which again took place in bad weather. When the Konpira did put into port at Eden, about 11,500 km south on the NSW coast, the boat was searched but it was too late. The heroin was stashed in Frenchs Forest. Clark was in the Australian heroin business now in a big way. It was from this time that he started to speak of ‘the Organisation’, a tag which its members adopted to the end.

In July Clark insisted to Ollard that he and Theilman should try to ‘dry out’ and he took them out of Sydney to a motel on the NSW North Coast. But on 2 August two members of the Organisation, Mark Fitt and Phil McCartney, were killed in a car accident in NSW while returning from skiing. Clark, Ollard and Theilman returned to Sydney and the couple immediately reverted to their habit. Clark had by now decided that both Ollard and Theilman had to die.

According to the standard story, his reason was that he did not want addicts working for his Organisation, but in fact Clark had a very positive reason for getting rid of Ollard – the Narcotics Bureau were closing in on him and Clark knew it. Agents had carried out two ‘bag jobs’ [illegal break and enters], one on a house Ollard had leased in the suburb of Avalon and the other on a rented room at the Hyatt Hotel at Kings Cross. They had tapped the switchboard at the hotel and, by checking Ollard’s phone calls against their copies of his address book, had cracked his phone code.

In the drug-dealing world phone codes assume a particular importance, for by coding phone numbers, in theory at least, sources and contacts are protected if the Organisation member is picked up by the police or narcotics agents. Most codes employ the device of adding or subtracting numbers, e.g. by adding 1 so that 212 5634 becomes 323 6745. Another type uses ten letters preferably in a word or words. One devised by Clark later was SEIKO WATCH, in which S=1, E=2 and so on. Thus that number 212 5634 would be written as ESEOWIK. The first system is relatively easy to crack, but the second is considerably more difficult.

But not only had the narcotics agents cracked Ollard’s phone codes, they had also obtained the names in which some of his bank accounts were held: Michael Philip Christian, Norman Keith Perkins, Dallas Andrew Wilson, Dallas Andrew Turner-Ford. If, or rather when, the Narcotics Bureau picked up Ollard and Theilman, it obviously wouldn’t take long before they talked. Ollard was not made of stern stuff and both of them without heroin would be pliable wrecks. From his source in the Narcotics Bureau Clark already knew he had to act at once.

Ollard and Theilman told friends they were coming to Auckland to announce their engagement. They never arrived. Mail sent to the GPO box number the nomadic Ollard had given his New Zealand friends came back marked ‘Return to Sender’. The last trace of Ollard was the issue of a passport in the name of Johannes De Haan on 5 September. (The passport was found in a car taken in a drug raid in Brisbane in May 1979. The man owning the car then said he had found the passport in another car, one used by Clark in Queensland in June 1978.)

The bodies of Ollard and Theilman have never been found. According to members of the Organisation, Clark said they had been buried under cement construction work at Sydney’s International Airport. It has never been clear whether he did the job himself or contracted it out; but the Organisation members certainly believe that he was responsible. It was an eloquent testimony to his authority; it doesn’t do a man any harm in the drug trade to have the reputation of one prepared to kill. Now the man who had been a grass himself was prepared to kill to make sure no one grassed on him.

[In 1982 a man who would be known as Witness B, gave information to the Stewart Royal Commission in a secret session. B said he got an early morning call from Clark in mid-September 1977, asking B to hurry to a wharf at Church Point on Pittwater and meet him there. They meet before 8 a.m. and Clark got B to drive him to a dirt road in Ku-ring-gai National Park, explaining that he had shot Ollard dead, but needed B’s help to get Ollard’s body to a grave he’d dug earlier. He had lured Ollard to the spot and uncovered a thermos he’d previously planted there, pretending that he was making a stash, business as usual. Clark shot him in the back of the head. But Clark could not, unaided, move the body to the grave; it was too heavy. They took a watch and a ring off it, buried it, and dragged a branch over it. (Witness B led commission officers to Ollard’s skeletal remains five years after the bush burial.)

The pair drove to Ollard and Theilman’s home on the nearby Barrenjoey Peninsula, at Avalon, where Julie was told Greg had phoned them and he wanted her to meet him in Parramatta. She was incoherent after snorting heroin they gave her and got into the car with them to head west. But they didn’t stop going west until they got to a spot on a dirt road off the Great Western Highway the Organisation used for stashing heroin, deep in the Blue Mountains. Clark shot Theilman in the back of the head, and pulled her by the ankles off the road, behind tree cover. He shot her twice in the chest as she gave some appearance of being alive. The pair covered her body with rocks. (Witness B took commission staff there in 1982. Theilman’s skeleton was disinterred.) Then they headed off to Clark’s place by car, and from Church Point wharf, by dinghy. On the water, Clark dismantled the automatic weapon and threw the bits overboard.

In the next few days, B and Clark packed up the couple’s belongings in the Avalon home, and deposited them with Grace Bros’ storage division under the name ‘M. Johnston’. The next month saw the same hand sign the chattels out in two tranches. Clark told Witness B he’d revisited the bodies and removed the heads to foil identification. The skeletons commission staff uncovered were headless. Witness B was subsequently identified: Wayne Shrimpton.]

While Clark was profitably at work in Sydney, Martin Johnstone, by a happy coincidence, found himself able to build a United Kingdom connection.

It began during the unusually hot English summer of 1976. Andrew Maher and his then Australian girlfriend rented a flat in a block in north-west London. Sharing a common garden, Maher one day fell into conversation with a couple of neighbours, Leila Barclay and Freddie Russell who had lived together for 14 years. Leila was now 47 and Freddie 10 years her junior. She had some private means, profits from years of operating as an abortion broker – arranging connection with co-operative doctors – before the government reform legislation took her income away. More openly, Freddie had been on the wrong side of the law several times. He had been given a two-year suspended sentence for receiving stolen goods and a 21-month sentence for breaking and entering and assault. Freddie was a typical product of North London’s Kentish Town. After leaving school early, he had worked in his father’s scrap metal business and then did a spell at sea in the merchant navy. Back home he slipped easily into the criminal sub-culture, a bit of thieving and bit of receiving. Kentish Town is a rag trade area as well as having a big St Pancras goods yard adjacent. Things, particularly clothes, tended to fall off trucks or, as the local idiom has it, people do ‘jump-ups’ or go in for ‘vandropping’. Freddie was never big time although in 1972 he was hanging around the fringes of a big armed robbery gang. In 1974 he turned to haulage under the name of F.C.R. Transport, handling building, transport, and whatever else offered itself. But for all his diverse activity he had, as his bank manager was to testify later, ‘cash flow problems…’ Indeed, Leila had given a firm token of her affections by allowing her building society account to be used as a security for his overdraft.

That conversation in the summer with Maher was said to have started with talk about billiard tables, with Andrew Maher acting out his role as the UK representative of Milltone, one of Martin Johnstone’s companies. Leila expressed interest in introducing Maher to some of her club contacts. Neither side really believed the billiard table story for long. The going price for a quality, locally made, billiard table around North London at that time was £700–£750, while Singapore tables, given overheads and transport, could never have been a business proposition.

But Maher recognised possibilities in the couple and vice versa. In mid-1977 Leila Barclay went to Singapore and the UK connection really got under way. How many shipments went through in the life of the Organisation is unknown, but Johnstone had drawn 25 kg in credits in the period preceding May 1979. Around that time two additional shipments organised by Clark went through, of about 10 kg in total. The couriers who did those runs were directed to fly to Amsterdam and then change to a Manchester flight: they were assured that the method had been tested before by a husband-and-wife team. At Amsterdam their baggage went to transhipment and then they arrived at Manchester with the luggage carrying tags from Amsterdam.

The English heroin market was smaller than the Australian, the number of licensed addicts ensuring that, but prices were higher. [After more than 40 years of medically prescribing heroin to addicts, the system was made more restrictive during the 1960s and the treatment emphasis shifted to abstinence during the 1970s.] In the last half of 1977 the import price in the UK for a kilo of South-East Asian ‘number four’, the quality handled by the Organisation, ranged from £40,000 to £60,000, about 70 per cent more than in Australia. Thus the Clark 10 kg shipments were worth at least £1.75 million to the importers and the Johnstone 25 kg more than £4 million. The early stages of the UK connection were a Martin Johnstone operation. Leila was put on a payroll of £600 a month and Freddie’s business office in Camden Town, adjacent to Kentish Town, became a clearing house. Martin himself flew into London regularly to get things going, flamboyantly sporting a cowboy hat, a cloak and a cane. While Leila took the messages, it was Freddie Russell who took the consignment and passed it on to the wholesaler. He has remained tight-lipped about his market and, unlike those in Australia, the big men of the London drug world have managed to avoid inclusion even in police intelligence reports. One point is clear: Freddie Russell’s contacts were not with the trendy alternative society drug pushers, they were with the traditional underworld. It was a curious alliance: the New Zealand manic-depressive in a cowboy hat, the Kentish Town wide-boy and the retired abortion broker.