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.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 5