A Tale of Two Cities (7 page)

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.

At some point Robb must have decided he wasn't going to be killed, as he asked to urinate so he would not wet himself during the bashing. Clark agreed then methodically belted him with a baseball bat, breaking his fingers and one arm. When they left, Clark told him to lie still for ten minutes or he would be shot. Robb was lucky Clark wanted him to be a walking, talking example of what happened when you crossed The Organisation. As opposed to being the other sort of example: corpses like Greg Ollard, Julie Theilman and ‘Pommy Harry' Lewis. Robb repaid this ‘mercy' by going straight to the Narcotics Bureau investigators and telling them about the beating, but he did nothing about setting
up Clark. The latter, meanwhile, underlined the ‘lesson' by taking his baseball bat and a knife to Robb's Mini Cooper – slashing the upholstery, denting every panel and smashing the windows. Days later, a public-spirited neighbour reported the state of the car to the police, who traced the registration to Robb, who said he wanted no action taken.

Meanwhile, Allison Dine was becoming Clark's favourite both in and out of bed. Apart from her assignations with him in luxury hotel suites, he used her flat to break up and bag the imported rock heroin, and she did a couple of cash runs overseas and would soon take twenty five bags of heroin to New Zealand strapped to her waist. She had also recruited her friend Kay, the massage parlour girl, to run drugs and money. But Clark had more on his mind than sex and money: he was already making plans for his old ‘mate' Douglas Wilson, whose heroin addiction Clark saw as a fatal flaw. Douglas and Isabel had gone to hospital that May ‘to dry out' but Clark doubted the effectiveness of the cure. He suggested they might like a boat trip, and invited them to the fateful meeting at the Gazebo in Brisbane. Which, of course, would end up destroying them all, as the betrayers themselves became the betrayed. But whereas the Wilsons were already teetering towards a shallow grave, Clark was still flying high. Too high.

WHEN Clark's fingerprints were taken in Brisbane in June 1978, they were automatically cross-checked on the national register, which flagged that he had jumped bail in Auckland in 1976. That much was routine. But the fact he was let out of Australia, given Douglas Wilson's statement linking him to serious crimes, did not appear routine to everyone, although a later review by Justice Donald Stewart absolved police of any deliberate wrongdoing. Clark would later claim that he had not offered Detective Sergeant Ron Pickering $50,000 to get him bail, and accused Pickering of soliciting a bribe, but the Stewart investigation found
nothing to support Clark's contention. As Pickering said, and other police agreed, the allegation about Harry Lewis's murder was unsupported – there was no body and no evidence. And they had been assured by New Zealand police that Clark was certain to get twelve years jail on the old heroin charge. ‘We knew where to find him,' one policeman said.