Greed: The 'Mr Asia' Connection

By Richard Hall

Drugs, wealth, partying - murder. These were the bad habits that brought down the 1970s international heroin empire, the Organisation. Martin Johnstone was murdered under orders of Terry Clark and this is the subsequent account.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Five Mile Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781743004500

Richard Hall

Greetings, most of my working life was spent in the engineering field, setting up quality assurance programs for industry. While working the grind, my beautiful wife Debbie and I raised two children, and we now own a floral shop in Albany, New York. I have enjoyed writing, and, over the years, I have published a few short stories and four novels, Shadow Angels Trilogy and West of Elysian Fields.

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GREED

THE ‘MR ASIA’ CONNECTION

RICHARD HALL

Revised by John Kerr

CONTENTS

Introduction to New Edition

Introduction to 1981 Edition

Prologue Death of a Best Friend

1 Education of a Kiwi

2 ‘Look at the stupid bastards’

3 Towards ‘The Big Time’

4 Two Dead and a UK Connection

5 ‘The whole bloody world’s opening up’

6 Petersen MP Goes to Jail

7 The Wilsons’ Grass

8 Mr Clark Meets Miss Soich, LL.B., and Gets Off

9 Four Couriers Equal $1.5 Million

10 Tidying Up Before a Holiday

11 High Life in London

12 Johnstone Meets ‘The Uncle’

13 The LA Cocaine Caper

14 Enter a Scottish Hit-Man

15 Seven-Day Countdown

16 Sunday Diving in the Delph

17 The Girls Talk

18 ‘I love you, Terry. I have not made any statement’

19 ‘It’s a fooking farce’

20 He Was a Sentimental Guy

Epilogue 30 Years On

Image Section

About the Author: Richard Hall

Publisher’s Note

This book was first published in 1981, only a short time after the conviction of Terry Clark. This 2010 edition has been revised and updated by John Kerr with a view to updating facts where possible, but to retain the original words of Richard Hall. The verb tenses, time references, measurements and exclusivist – and at times potentially offensive – language and stereotypes used in this book represent the original language of the work.

INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION

‘The drug world breeds exaggeration,’ opened Richard Hall’s original 1981 introduction to Greed. He erred on the side of conservatism in quoting figures, particularly sums of money, noting ‘the amounts involved are spectacular enough’.

In the 30-odd years that have passed the Australian dollar has been the subject of 475% inflation, and a 1975 $1 is the equivalent of $5.75 in the late 2000s. Also, a royal commission has uncovered or estimated the value of specific transactions, and their forensic accountants usually come in with higher figures than Hall. Multiplying $A sums by 7 seems a useful rough-and-ready rule of thumb.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking, usually called ‘the Stewart Drug Royal Commission’ after its commissioner, Justice Don Stewart, sometimes the ‘Mr Asia Royal Commission’, sat between 1981 and February 1983, when it delivered its final report. This edition of Greed incorporates the public findings of that report, and developments from later court cases and other sources [square brackets of italic like this]. The Epilogue updates the record, essentially an attempt at a ‘Where are they now?’

The commission came about after the Victorian coroner made very dark comments about the murders of Doug and Isabel Wilson, after a witness (irrelevant to this story) had been murdered, and after the NSW Woodward Drug Commission in NSW reported that corruption and criminal influence among public officials in NSW – something the Mr Asia syndicate seemed well aware of – was a concern. It was also clear that the Federal Narcotics Bureau – by 1981, already wound up and considered a failed law enforcement experiment – had leaked to those who could pay. As Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser put it, these ‘incidents and inquiries have given rise to public concern whether present methods of law enforcement are adequate to deal with … major criminal groups involved in drug trafficking’. The Commonwealth, Victorian, NSW and Queensland governments, and later the New Zealand government, set up the legal machinery for the commission to investigate the world of Mr Asia.

While Richard Hall was in the UK attending the trial that ends this book, he subsisted on a Pan Books Australia advance on royalties. There had been a hiccup: Pan Books UK was to have signed a publishing contract and advanced further monies for the UK edition of Greed but the Commons had passed laws which forbade publication of information on criminal trials in England and Wales until after the appeal period had elapsed. That law was quashed soon after, but too late for Hall. Pan in London withdrew commercial support. Hall’s ‘arse froze’ in a cheap Lancaster boarding house and made buying a pint in a warm pub ridiculously difficult. He shoved some change into a public telephone box and called Sydney. His mates in Sydney held fund-raising dinners at EJs to keep him there to complete this job.

Commission staff visited many European and Asian countries, with access to officials there smoothed via diplomatic channels. Hall depended on his charm, luck, energy and conversation. The commission had coercive powers – if they asked you a question and you refused to answer or got caught telling a lie, you could go to prison. Refusal and lying are criminal offences. Justice Stewart had sharp words to say about some parts of Greed, but the job of updating the book has demonstrated how well the classic has held up. For classic it is: Greed is the first in-depth account of an Australian drug syndicate. Terry Clarks and the black markets they serve are still with us, still going strong.

Hall was quite a guy. During the 1972–75 Labor Government he was Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s private secretary. Before then, he had established himself as this nation’s foremost civilian expert on spooks – ASIS, ASIO, Defence Signals, and the like – and had written The Secret State: Australia’s spy industry. There didn’t seem to be a pub in Sydney where he didn’t know knockabouts, men who described themselves as ‘professional punters’, cops, ex-cops, academics, musicians, rock industry figures, lawyers, journalists and ex-journalists. For a man who prided himself that a wristwatch had ‘never sullied’ his wrist, he was never late, and, though he never drove, acquaintance with Commonwealth drivers had taught him the best way to the airport in most places in Australia. A UK Crown prosecutor entrusted him with the Crown’s files in the UK trial that forms this book’s centre.

Richard died in 2003 leaving many of us with memories of much laughter and much wisdom delivered with no seam between. Of Terry Clark, the major player here, he felt too much had been made of the man’s cleverness, and felt Clark was no genius, just ‘a methodical sort of a prick’.

John Kerr

2010

INTRODUCTION TO 1981 EDITION

The drug world breeds exaggeration. In this book I have endeavoured to be as accurate as possible in figures, preferring to err on the side of conservatism. Even so the amounts involved are spectacular enough.

The Organisation members who tended to be imprecise about money tended to think in Australian dollars, and I have followed this in the book, except where it has been necessary to indicate US, NZ, or Singapore dollars.

I am indebted to many people, both metaphorically and literally, who have assisted me in working on this book. In Australia, I am grateful to the New South Wales and Victorian police. The New Zealand police and prison staff have also been able to extend their co-operation. In England, the Lancashire police and Scotland Yard, within the limits necessarily imposed while a trial is in progress, have been most helpful and hospitable, as well as my colleagues in the English press.

Richard Hall

1981

Harry took a look at the toy landscape below and came away from the door. ‘I never feel quite safe in these things,’ he said. He felt the back door with his hand, as though he were afraid that it might fly open and launch him into that iron-ribbed space. ‘Victims?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,’ he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving – forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money – without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.’ He gave his boyish conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s the only way to save nowadays.’

Graeme Greene, The Third Man

Prologue

Death of a Best Friend

Leyland, Lancashire

9 October, 1979

THEY WERE laughing and joking as they carried the luggage out to the car, Julie remembered later. The garage mechanic who came round eventually with the spare wheel that Tuesday night, 9 October, simply recalled that they were obviously in a rush. The car’s owner, Andrew Maher, had rung the mechanic three times to hurry along delivery of the wheel, explaining that he had to leave for Glasgow immediately, a drive of some 200 miles from Leyland. While waiting they had sat around watching television and drinking German wine.

Four people finally got into the car, an old Jaguar XJ6.

There was Julie Hue, tall with blonde hair. Born into a Jehovah’s Witness family, she had longed to escape into a modelling career, but third prize in a Miss Blackpool beauty contest heat was as far as she got. Twenty-two years old, but looking about 16, she had already been deserted that year by her West Indian builder’s labourer husband. Broke and unemployed two months later, she met one of the car’s other passengers, Martin Johnstone, a fast-talking, rich New Zealander. For Julie it was love at first sight; for Johnstone, she was the latest in a chain of attractive women – dumb, his business associates like to joke, so that he didn’t have to explain business to them. For the Lancashire small-town girl Johnstone was magic. He gave her money and clothes, took her to the Cumberland Hotel in London’s glamorous West End, and then charmed her with phone calls from his business headquarters in Singapore. Unable to be without her, he returned to take her back with him to Singapore. Johnstone knew quite a lot about passports and was such a big spender that he was able to pay cash for the airline tickets. Before he brought her back to England, Julie had six weeks in Singapore and two trips to Bali. When he returned to Singapore, he phoned her every day. In August she went back to Bangkok and then on to Singapore, returning to England again early in October, now an international jetsetter with plenty of money in her purse. That Tuesday night she was to be dropped at her mother’s house, also in Leyland, before the three men set off for Scotland.

‘Andy’ Maher, the owner and driver of the Jaguar, had grown up in nearby Preston, a substantial Lancashire city, one railway station away from Leyland. He had been born, in fact, in Wales in 1933, lived there for four years, then for five in Glasgow, before his father brought the family to Preston. After dropping out of school he tried various jobs – van boy, furniture shop salesman, even the Royal Marines – with no success. He was to say after 9 October: ‘I was in the Marines but I left after three months. This is going to sound funny coming from me – all they wanted to do was to kill … they’re a load of psychos and they get medals for it’. So he tried another way out – emigration. He sailed to Australia in 1971. In Sydney he worked as a bus conductor and shop assistant before he moved on to New Zealand where he worked in an Auckland menswear shop, an incongruous occupation for a hulking six-footer. At the shop he met Johnstone for the first time. Five years later Maher was back at his parents’ Preston terrace house working as the ‘English connection’ for Johnstone’s Singapore business enterprises, vaguely tagged ‘import-export’, with talk of tropical fish and billiard tables. Maher wasn’t short of money, but he didn’t overdo the spending, and he kept quiet about the flat he had in Finchley. If people might have questioned why he had returned to Lancashire, by 1979 he had acquired two reasons for living locally: Barbara Pilkington with whom he was living, and their 14-month-old daughter, Marti. Part Chinese, Barbara had had an unfortunate life until she had met Maher. When she became pregnant in 1978, Maher decided they should live together, and late that year they managed to rent a Corporation house on the Robin Hey estate, in Leyland.

‘Jamie’ Smith, the fourth member of the party, who was riding in the back seat, was referred to as ‘cousin’ by Maher, although strictly speaking he was Maher’s father’s cousin. The families had friendship links going back to Maher’s five years in Glasgow. Jamie had grown up in the ‘tougher than the Gorbals’ East End Glasgow suburb of Calton, and then taken the escape route of thousands of other slum boys, the army, in his case the Scots Guards. He served seven years which included two spells in Belfast [fighting the semi-clandestine Irish Republican Army in the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ of the 1970s] before buying himself out to marry his childhood sweetheart, Isobel. After living in Glasgow, he and his wife moved to a new town, Livingstone, about halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Ex-regular army men have a good reputation with employers and Smith was no exception, working as a pipe fitter at British Steel in nearby Addiewell. But he still liked the company of his old army comrades, and spent some time with Kingsley Fagan, a man who in the Guards had been best recruit in his intake year and was made a sergeant after only four years. The restlessness that came with talking of the old days did not reveal itself to Smith’s employers who were surprised when he resigned, saying that he was going to work with a nephew as ‘a courier in the travel business, the Far East’. It was, some might have thought, an odd time to switch jobs; Isobel, his wife, was in the late stages of pregnancy.

To any stranger there would be nothing unusual about Maher or Smith, but that was certainly not the case with the man in the front passenger seat, Martin Johnstone. Well-dressed, Martin was wearing a pair of blue cord drainpipe trousers, a beige V-neck pullover with blue stripes down the sleeves and tan sandals with navy socks. He sported a couple of rings on his left hand, one made from the end of a spoon, one a blue-stone signet ring. Around his neck was a Chinese medallion bearing the characters for ‘long life’. For the trip to Glasgow, Johnstone had packed his brown zip-up suitcase with a navy-blue double-breasted pin-stripe suit, a dark blue Italian silk shirt, another pair of white cord trousers, a red cashmere polo-neck jumper, light blue shorts, black shoes and training shoes as well as appropriate socks and a squash racquet. He carried a trendy executive attaché case, burgundy with brass combination locks. But what really marked Martin as a rich man was his watch: the £3,000 plus white-gold Patek Philippe. Johnstone certainly gave the appearance of a successful businessman without a care in the world, except how to spend his money. But on that Tuesday night Martin Johnstone was in severe financial difficulties. One of his markets had been snatched away from him and even for a man with a large income he had lived far beyond his means. Only weeks previously, when he had attempted to restore his fortunes with a big brokerage deal for one of his associates, Johnstone had been cheated, losing not only the prospect of a percentage but also his associate’s money.

Now, after they had dropped Julie, he was heading north to Glasgow to the prospect of a deal which would launch his finances onto a new footing. It was Andy Maher, Johnstone’s best friend, who had set up the meeting for him. So close were they, that Maher and Barbara had named their daughter Marti after Martin. They had known each other since the days when they had worked behind the counter at that menswear store in Queen Street, Auckland. Johnstone so trusted Maher’s word that he had flown from Singapore after being told that the principals in Glasgow demanded a face to face meeting. Scotland was a new market for Martin. The right connection could mean money, big money.

If Johnstone had known Lancashire as well as he did Singapore, he might have been puzzled when, on leaving Preston, Maher turned onto the A6, the old slow highway running first through Lancaster, then through other towns and villages. Maher, who drove north often, that night gave a show of uncertainty by stopping to ask a taxi driver the way. Moving on, the car passed through a number of villages before Carnforth was reached – about 12 km out of Lancaster. The lights of the Carnforth Hotel came up on the right and, after the car had hurried through the village, the Carnforth Ex-Servicemen’s Club signalled the village’s end. Afterwards, understandably, Maher and Smith were vague as to where the car stopped. It was, they said, at a lay-by just out of Carnforth. The first lay-by is well-lit, but the second is on a divided road and sheltered by a railway embankment on the right and a straggling hawthorn hedge on the left.

Maher pulled the car in and asked Johnstone if he wanted to drive. As Johnstone signified assent by opening the door and swinging his legs out, Maher shot him in the back of the head with a .38 revolver. Johnstone fell out of the car. Maher opened his door and ran round to Johnstone who, as he said later, was making a kind of gurgling noise. So he shot him in the head again. Smith got himself out of the car in a state of shock and the two of them dragged the body back into the car and laid the passenger seat back. All the while Johnstone was still gurgling.

Maher screamed: ‘Shut the cunt up’.

Smith exclaimed, ‘He’s fucking dead, man’.

In a frenzy of panic Maher repeated ‘Shut the cunt up’, to which the Belfast veteran, who had seen men die, shouted again ‘He’s fucking dead, man’.

But Maher was beyond reason and, snatching a knife from the dashboard, stabbed Johnstone in the stomach. For the present, their luck held. No other car passed. So they drove off, back towards Lancaster, with the body laid back in the front passenger seat.

Within a few miles the car turned off from a roundabout down a dirt track, so that they could get the body into the boot. But Maher panicked and drove off again. ‘We went up and down the country lanes,’ he later said. ‘We didn’t know where we were going. If it hadn’t been so gruesome, it would have been like a Groucho Marx film. In fact we saw a couple of police cars and Martin’s body was still in the front of the car.’ At last they found a quiet lane where they transferred the body to the boot and headed back to Robin Hey. The lights were still on at the back of the house, so they dumped the body in the garage and drove around until they thought Julie would be in bed.

Barbara Pilkington, who knew Johnstone was to be killed that night, had met Julie at her mother’s and the two women had come home by car. Julie was to sleep in the front of the house but she decided to stay up for a goodnight call that Johnstone had promised as soon as he arrived in Glasgow. When the phone rang at 12.30 a.m. Barbara took it and spoke to Maher who told her to say that Johnstone couldn’t come to the phone because he was ‘talking’. Barbara, who knew that Johnstone was dead, persuaded Julie to go to bed.

Maher rang again half an hour later and got the clearance to come back to the garage. Barbara, who didn’t sleep at all that night, heard the garage door open and shut shortly after. People must have been sleeping soundly in Robin Hey that night since no one heard any of the comings and goings in that cramped housing block.

In the garage, in the muted light of a paraffin mantle lantern, first they stripped the body of clothes, the rings, and the watch. They left the Chinese good luck charm around his neck. Then to hamper identification, Maher chopped off both hands – the axe blows were so hard that they chipped the concrete floor. The hands were put in an envelope. Despite his Belfast experience Smith was not much use and when Maher told him to smash in Johnstone’s teeth to hamper dental identification, he baulked. So Maher covered the face with a jumper and set to with a lump hammer. That wasn’t all. They were to sink the body. Somewhere, Maher had read that after death internal gases could inflate the stomach and bring a submerged body to the surface. He tried to open the stomach with a spade and failed before succeeding with the axe. All the time Maher was retching. The two men then lashed two 25 kg weights, two 6 kg weights and a lorry bottle jack onto the body (the jack had come cheaply at 30–40 pence, but the weights had cost £5). It was still dark when they finished. Barbara was still awake, and she heard them drive off.

They had to travel several miles to reach the village of Eccleston, and the Eccleston Delph – the Delph, as it is known locally – an abandoned stone quarry partially filled with water, at its deepest some 25 metres. It was well known as a dumping ground for stripped and stolen cars. Local fisherman frequented it. Beside it, there was a sign forbidding sub-aqua diving except for the members of a particular club. On the western side was a farm, but that night Maher drove to the eastern bank and the two of them rolled Johnstone’s naked body into the water. Then the two men returned to the Robin Hey garage, changed their clothes and headed north for Scotland. But Smith remembered suddenly that he had left a brief case containing £4,000 in the garage and they had to return yet again. In the front room of the terrace house Julie still slept, but Barbara, lying awake, heard them come and go again.

At last Maher and Smith hit the road, driving fast for Scotland. Maher had the blue stone signet ring in his pocket for a particular purpose. In the car they also had the hands, the revolver, the knife and the hammer, as well as the watch and the attaché case. The clothes had been left behind in the garage, together with the axe and the shovel. The two men were both still in a state of high tension when they stopped, just before dawn, at