A Tale of Two Cities (8 page)

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.