A Tale of Two Cities (2 page)

When the Browns bought an unfinished fibro holiday shack in the ti-tree behind Rye on the Mornington Peninsula, Mitzy was in her element. There were kangaroos and rabbits to chase, smells to investigate on walks along the tracks winding through the scrub-choked vacant blocks. The only danger was snakes in the grass.

Almost thirty years on, Danny Street is filled with houses, some of them expensive. But in 1978 it was an unmade road with a handful of shacks in it. The Browns were at Lot 55, and the two
blocks to the south were covered in scrub. Dennis kept a few bee hives in the ti-tree and sometimes went shooting rabbits, Mitzy at his side. Man and dog didn't miss much.

Early that year, Brown was checking his hives when he noticed that a long, narrow hole had been dug in the sandy soil under the ti-tree on Lot 59. Intriguingly, it had been covered with scrub. On visits after that, he would glance at the hole. For more than a year, nothing changed. But in April, 1979, he saw that the unknown digger had cleaned out and deepened the hole and covered it again with some fresh scrub.

About five weeks later, on 18 May, a Friday, Mitzy and her master came down early for the weekend. They were going for their usual walk when she stopped where the hole was and started to scratch furiously. Brown realised that the hole had been filled in – and saw signs that foxes and other dogs had already been scrabbling in the freshly turned sand. Whatever was in the hole attracted carnivores.

A less observant man might have missed it. A less curious one might have shrugged it off. Dennis Brown had worked at abattoirs all over Australia, among rough men in a tough business, and his instincts were high. Since he'd first seen it, he had fancied that the long, narrow hole looked a little too much like an empty grave. Now it was filled in, his fancy hardened into suspicion: if it were a grave, maybe it was no longer empty.

He whistled his excited dog away, got into his maroon 1976 Holden Kingswood and drove the four kilometres into Rye to talk to the police about the sandy grave in Danny Street.

At first, local cops thought it might be a cache of stolen property. Then they stuck a probe into the sandy soil and caught a whiff of something that made them feel sick.

The homicide crew came late that afternoon and forensic experts soon after. Portable generators throbbed all night to power the crime-scene lights. Dennis Brown didn't hang around to see
what he had found; he had a pretty good idea it wouldn't be pretty and he was right.

There were two bodies. The first out was a young woman, fully dressed except for one boot – the other was later found on the road nearby. It didn't take ballistic experts to see that she had been shot through the breast and the head. Underneath her was a man of about the same age. He had been shot twice in the chest and once in the neck.

Some distinctive clothing and jewellery – wedding ring, brooch and hair comb – gave the police a lead, but they must have suspected who they were looking for. It took less than 48 hours to identify the dead pair as Douglas and Isabel Wilson. It was, as police were learning to say in the 1970s, clearly drug-related.

The Wilsons were from New Zealand and they had form. The Victorian homicide squad, then headed by the renowned Paul Delianis, were keen to talk to their associates. Especially a Martin Johnstone and one Terry Sinclair, who had recently changed his surname by deed poll from his birth name. Johnstone and Sinclair were also New Zealanders, who had joined thousands of their countrymen to flock to the bright lights of Sydney.

So why had the Wilsons turned up dead outside Melbourne, a full day's drive and almost 1000 kilometres south of where they had been living in Sin City? Delianis and his detectives were determined to find out. Not everyone in other Australian law enforcement bodies seemed to have the same enthusiasm for the task.

THE path that led the Wilsons to a shallow grave in a sleepy Victorian holiday town started on the other side of the Tasman where, a decade earlier, the teenage Douglas Wilson started dabbling in drugs while an above-average student at Auckland Grammar. But when his family treated him to a year in America in his
final year, he developed a taste for drugs, spurning his private-school education and a comfortable middle-class start in life by dealing to support his own growing habit – and his scorn for the workaday world. His slide across the social divide to the dark side continued until he dropped out of a university accounting course and was arrested for trafficking marijuana and LSD in early 1972 when he sold an undercover cop some drugs. This slip earned him a short jail sentence.

Jail hardened Wilson's habits into vices, pulling him further from the life he might have led into the one that would destroy him. By this time, he already knew Isabel, who was a year younger and had been mixing in a group which used drugs after she'd left home at sixteen.

Not long after getting out of prison in mid-1973, Wilson had returned to working as a tiler with his father's business when a small-time crook recruited him to sell Thai ‘buddha sticks' to the university crowd that the middle-class Wilson could mix with more comfortably than working-class criminals could. The man who recruited him was Terrence John Clark, who would use a string of aliases and later change his surname to Sinclair.

Wilson met Clark through a small-time criminal called James McBean, sometimes referred to as ‘Jim the Grammar School man', who had helped Clark sell buddha sticks.

Wilson was good at selling dope: he sold 40,000 of a payload of 200,000 sticks that the edgy Clark and his smooth-talking associate Martin Johnstone had smuggled into New Zealand on a yacht called
Brigadoon
, netting each a million dollars at a time when that was enough to buy a street full of houses. But Clark and Johnstone weren't interested in real estate just yet. They were bankrolling a bigger foray into international drug trafficking.

For all three, this early success was the bait that would lure each to his destruction. As for Isabel, she was fated to hook up
with the drug-dealing, freewheeling Wilson as well as to drugs, and went along for the ride. She married him in 1977, and rarely left his side, but devotion didn't help. It was a fatal attraction. They both ended up with raging heroin habits and clouded judgment. And that would eventually put them in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a ticket to a sandy grave.

THE wrong place and time was the Gazebo Hotel in Brisbane in June, 1978. By then the Wilsons had been in Australia a few months. They were just two of several ‘kiwis' Clark had recruited to distribute heroin in his expanding empire. Douglas Wilson was being paid a retainer of $400 a week by Clark, who had skipped bail and left New Zealand two years earlier, in 1976, after being charged with importing two cigarette cartons full of heroin fetched from Fiji by a woman friend. He had been living in Brisbane and Sydney under a string of aliases, moving from place to place. All the while building the drug running syndicate he liked to call ‘The Organisation', but which would later become tagged by the media as the ‘Mr Asia' syndicate.

Clark had developed a theory of avoiding detection through caution and planning. If he had stuck to the rules he laid down for the rest of the gang, he might have made and laundered millions of dollars and eventually lived the dream of ‘going legitimate' and getting out in time.

Recruiting the Wilsons was an early example of the flawed reasoning and carelessness that would bring him undone. According to his contemporaries, Clark despised drug addicts, almost as if he wanted to ignore the effect of his obscenely profitable trade. But despite this contempt for ‘junkies', he had chosen the Wilsons to work for him as drug and money couriers – and even part paid them in heroin for their own use, as well as the hefty retainer.

In Australia, he favoured using fellow New Zealanders and perhaps saw the Wilsons as more malleable – more reliant on him – because they were slaves to the drug he could supply along with the easy money they needed to support their indolence. Clark came to realise that slaves might obey cruel masters because they have to – but are not loyal to them. He could rule by fear, but fear is a form of hatred.

At first, Clark had encouraged the Wilsons to seek medical help to get ‘clean', by entering a private hospital. When this failed, he turned against them, as he had done before – and would do again – with people that he lured with fast money then ruled by intimidation. So when Clark invited the Wilsons to Brisbane in June 1978 for a boat cruise to help get over their addiction, they accepted the offer at face value, as far as their contemporaries could tell. But – as they would subsequently confide – Clark had started saying things that played on their minds. He had a black sense of humour and made cryptic comments that fed junkie paranoia.

Before the Brisbane trip, talking about the proposed boat cruise, he asked if the couple's dog, a pampered Belgian keeshond called Taj, would get seasick. When Wilson said he didn't think so, because keeshonds were ‘barge dogs', Clark deadpanned: ‘Does he freak out on guns going off?'

As the late Richard Hall observed in his book
Greed: The ‘Mr Asia' Connection
, ‘Whether the plan was to kill the Wilsons or just give them a convalescent cruise will never be clear, for … Clark was about to pay the price for that sense of humour.'

Clark fancied himself as a cool and cautious criminal ‘executive' who made a show of running his drug syndicate on pseudo-corporate lines, but behind the cool mask was a boastful smartarse who couldn't help wanting to show how much cleverer he was than the herd. So when he checked into the Gazebo Hotel he signed the register not with one of his many aliases, some of
them backed with false passports, but with the words ‘J. Petersen, MP'.

He might have got away with ‘Petersen' but adding ‘MP' was stupid for a man with so many reasons to avoid attracting attention. The Hon. Joh Bjelke-Petersen was at the time the longserving Premier of Queensland and a nationally-famous public figure, respectively loved and lampooned by his many admirers and detractors. Using the Petersen name in vain was asking for trouble, and he got plenty.

The worried hotel manager spotted the false name and concluded the hard-partying guests were not only subversives mocking the Premier but running up a huge champagne bill, and so probably were fraudsters who would not pay their bill. He called the police.

Queensland consorting squad detectives of that time were what are now sometimes referred to as ‘old-fashioned' and ‘robust'. When the squad came knocking, they found the sort of evidence that quickened an old-fashioned detective's pulse: $5276 in cash, for a start. After what Clark would later describe as some tough questioning, they searched his Jaguar and found an unregistered pistol which, it would turn out, was probably a murder weapon. Meaning Clark was in big trouble. As were his Brisbane ‘representatives' and his right-hand man, Jimmy Shepherd, also pulled in by the police. More significantly, so were the Wilsons, taken in for questioning after arranging to meet Clark at the Gazebo.

The Queensland police and the Narcotics Bureau soon ran checks establishing that Clark was wanted in New Zealand on heroin charges laid two years before. Clark, a dab hand at corrupting officials, tried and apparently failed to buy his way out, although word might have spread about his almost bottomless financial resources.

A detective sergeant, Ron Pickering, later dutifully reported that Clark had offered $50,000 to obtain bail. The obvious conclusion was that had Clark got bail, he would have disappeared again, using one of his many false identities.

In other circumstances – such as, say, if Clark had been picked up for drink-driving and fingerprinted – the old heroin charge hanging over him in New Zealand might have seemed disastrous. But, given the gravity of the charges he risked in Australia, being extradited to New Zealand might well have been a better bet than facing the music here – a fact that later stuck in the craw of Victorian police investigators who began to question how and why Clark had been released to New Zealand when he was a suspect for so many serious crimes in Australia, including murder.

These accusations came to light within days of the Gazebo Hotel arrests, when the Queensland police interrogated the nervous Wilsons.

‘Still suffering from the long, drawn-out process of withdrawal, frightened of Clark's growing coolness, and finally apprehensive of his growing talk about the sound of guns, they talked. A lot.' writes Hall.

By the end of the week, when the Wilsons (and their pampered pet dog) were turned loose with strict instructions not to bolt, the police – and, by extension, the Narcotics Bureau – had heard a long, rambling story painting Clark as a huge heroin dealer, a callous killer and, significantly, a high-level corrupter. In the 112-page transcript of the tapes the police secretly made over six days, they made some startlingly specific allegations.

One was that Clark had a senior Customs official in his pocket in Sydney – ‘an embittered, cynical old copper' on a $25,000 annual stipend plus bonuses for extra valuable information. They told how Clark and his helpers stashed heroin in Thermos flasks buried in Frenchs Forest in Sydney and that Clark had recently bought blocks of land in Fiji. But, most tellingly, they said that
the purple Jaguar and the pistol Clark had brought to Brisbane were the same car and weapon he used to murder a drug courier known as ‘Pommy Harry'.

It would not have taken much checking, even in the pre-computer age, to reveal that ‘Pommy Harry' was the nickname of one Harry Lewis, who had disappeared in late May 1978, soon after being apprehended at Sydney Airport with some Thai buddha sticks. As would be revealed later, Lewis had been nabbed at the airport on 13 May and released on bail posted by one of Clark's lieutenants, Wayne Shrimpton. On 19 May, just six days later, the Narcotics Bureau opened an individual file on Clark. Clark knew this because his ‘inside man' leaked it to him in return for cash. The fatal conclusion was that Lewis had said too much under interrogation.