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.
Th
e 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.
3
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
HOW BOB TRIMBOLE BEAT THE ODDS
‘The Commonwealth, New South Wales, Victorian and Queensland Governments have established a judicial inquiry into the possible drug trafficking and related activities of Terrence John Clark and other persons associated with him. It will be headed by His Honour Mr Justice Donald Gerard Stewart of the New South Wales Supreme Court …’
WHEN the Stewart Royal Commission was born on 30 June 1981, the words were formal but the meaning was as plain as the plot in any western: a new sheriff had been handed a badge and a posse to round up the bad guys.
The Stewart inquiry had many fathers – its birth was announced by the acting Prime Minister, Doug Anthony, and the premiers of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. It was rigorous, vigorous and blessed with many investigators – detectives, lawyers and accountants. But a Royal Commission is not born overnight. There had been a long gestation. Since the arrest of Clark and his lackeys for Martin Johnstone’s murder, and the inquest into Douglas and Isabel Wilson’s murder in 1979, it had been inevitable the authorities would be forced to shine light in dark places, to ask questions dodged too long, to break what a family friend of the murdered Donald Mackay called ‘the appalling silence’ about the drug lords who corrupted police, politicians and the judiciary.
Long before Judge Stewart’s posse started knocking on doors, dragging in witnesses and asking them tough questions under their draconian powers, the dogs had been barking about the new inquiry. And no one knew more dogs than ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole, a man whose adult life had been spent cultivating contacts as skilfully as his Calabrian cousins cultivated cannabis among the rows of irrigated grape and tomato vines and citrus trees around Griffith, Mildura, Shepparton and South Australia’s Riverland.
The racecourse members’ bar and betting ring is where the social and professional barriers of the outside world can be broken down by a powerful lubricant – the desire to back a winner. In Sydney, especially, it was routine that judges, lawyers, politicians, captains of industry and senior police rubbed shoulders with ‘colourful racing identities’ whose sources of income were a mystery or an open secret, depending on who was asking.
In this group, a powerful currency is The Tip – inside information that this horse will win or that favourite won’t. That such ‘certainties’ can hardly be predicted without some form of conspiracy has never stopped otherwise honest people from falling under the spell of those who regularly tip winners – and losers.
The organised crime figure who uses punting to launder black money can buy influence beyond the crude buying power of the tainted cash he uses to bribe jockeys, stablehands and trainers, to pay doping gangs or to pay criminal race-fixers, perhaps even to ‘sweeten’ racing officials. Not only does bribery improve the odds of achieving his main aim of laundering black money by landing winning bets – but in the case of the gregarious Trimbole, fixing races gave the opportunity to claim acquaintance with and influence powerful or useful people otherwise beyond his reach. How? Because people that would not dream of accepting a bribe will scramble for a tip like children for lollies. They will blithely – and blindly – bet on ‘sure things’ that common sense suggests are probably the fruit of organised race rigging. This gives the tipper, if he uses his corrupt inside information carefully, a hidden power, just as effective but far less risky than the blackmail racket of setting up targets with illicit sex and threatening or implying exposure, as the sinister Abe Saffron did for decades to compromise those in power. Whereas many people secretly disliked or feared Saffron, most people who knew Bob Trimbole liked him. He loved racing and a lot of racing people returned the compliment. The most common phrase used about him was that he was ‘a good bloke’, a view some people stuck to even after he was exposed as a mobster with a murderous streak.
What was the secret to Trimbole’s appeal? That question teased Carl Mengler, a senior officer in the Victoria Police in the early 1980s who would head a task force on the recommendation of the Stewart Royal Commission when it made its report in early 1983. Mengler would spend years dissecting Trimbole’s public and private life, reading documents and interviewing scores of his associates, and probably knows as much about him as anyone alive.
It was Mengler who told crime reporter Keith Moor a story that captured the deft way Trimbole got to people who were useful to him and, by extension, to the Calabrian crime family he belonged to and to other crime outfits he knew.
‘There was this quite prominent chap interviewed about his association with Trimbole,’ said Mengler. ‘He said he hadn’t wanted anything to do with Trimbole at first, but they had become friends over time. Now this bloke was a racing man, frequently at the track, as of course was Trimbole, and that’s how they met. This man was of high social standing and in a position of being able to influence a lot of prominent people; he was from a very respected family.
‘He recalled this untidy little man often being near him. Now, Trimbole was an expensive dresser, but never quite looked the part. His belly was hanging over his trousers and the trouser bottoms were just that bit long that they hung over his dirty shoes, not the sort of man our influential friend would normally associate with, him being a real toff and mixing in all the right circles.
‘The toff started to take notice of this man being around him wherever he went. He would look along the bar and this bloke would nod at him. After a while Trimbole got to saying hello to the toff. The toff said he hadn’t wanted to talk to this “little scrag” and had more or less told him to “piss off”. A week or so goes by and the toff sees Trimbole, again at the races, and the toff has a guilty conscience about having been rude to Trimbole, so this time when Trimbole says hello the toff has a brief chat with him.
‘A week later the toff was at the bar and the waiter brought a drink over and said it was from the bloke at the other end of the bar, and of course the bloke was Trimbole.’
And so the story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion, as the patient Trimbole, the onetime mechanic who shouted the bar when he won on the punt, played the ‘mark’ like a fish. As the casual race-day conversations moved naturally from small talk to the real business of the day – punting – Trimbole wormed
his way into the other man’s estimation with the one thing that’s at a premium at the track: inside information.
The toff fancies himself as a racing man, on first-name terms with owners and trainers, and one day he suggests Trimbole back a particular horse. It so happens that Trimbole knows something about that particular race and suggests that a different horse, at longer odds, will win. The toff shrugs – but can’t help being puzzled and impressed when Trimbole’s tip romps in and his own doesn’t. This is the bait. He takes the hook the following week, when Trimbole tips him a winner, which he backs. Trimbole doesn’t have to tip many – but when he does, they mostly win. And the toff puts plenty on them. So he starts seeking Trimbole out, inviting him to lunch and dinner regularly. It is a complete role reversal, so that in the end Trimbole calls the shots because he is owed the favours and still supplies the ‘mail’.
Call it the power of ten to one.
TRIMBOLE might never have needed to call in a favour from that particular man but the toff was only one of many he had cultivated and compromised. And many of them knew people in high places: state and federal police, politicians, lawyers and public servants. Some were actually paid for favours done – to have charges dropped or sentences made lighter. Others were befriended, just in case. For Trimbole and the shadowy people behind him, this was like an insurance policy. In early 1981, it was time for Trimbole to make a claim.
The international publicity surrounding the Mr Asia trial had exposed the network of corruption that Terry Clark had exploited, and posed questions that Trimbole and others would find difficult to answer. Despite Trimbole’s ability to foil the law, it was becoming obvious to some of his well-placed contacts that the looming Stewart Royal Commission would make him too ‘hot’ to be around. After years of his acting with relative impunity, there would be nowhere to hide … at least, not in Australia.
A Tale of Two Cities Page 7