Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age
Keystone Krooks
THE BADDIES always seemed to outwit the Keystone Kops in the silent movie era, but the Far North's latest claim to crime fame was more a case of Keystone Krooks, judging by the evidence so far.
District police commander Superintendent Russell le Prou has heaped praise on the people who fed information to the police over several weeks, and the "diligent sergeant" who put that information together, culminating in three arrests, quickly followed by two more late last week. And perhaps there was an element of serendipity, in that the 4WD that was of extreme interest just happened to trundle down 90 Mile Beach as officers were in the process of retrieving an abandoned boat at Hukatere.
The extraordinarily ambitious endeavour of those behind the biggest methamphetamine haul ever recorded in New Zealand quickly began to unravel after that, but in hindsight the final outcome had an air of inevitability.
That's not to say there wasn't some extremely good police work, not to mention some good old-fashioned public vigilance.
One thing some members of the criminal fraternity do not seem to have worked out is that small communities tend to notice suspicious behaviour. Unfamiliar vehicles, strange faces and suspicious activity will always stand out like an organ stop in rural New Zealand, but even so we should be impressed, and grateful, that a number of Ahipara folk not only watched and observed but recorded vehicle registration numbers, and passed their suspicions on to the police.
One thing that apparently led to the offenders' downfall was the offering of money, and plenty of it, to anyone who might have helped with the launching of a very large, distinctive boat in adverse conditions, an enterprise made all the more problematic by the perpetrators' obvious lack of experience and skill, aided and abetted by the apparent fact that nothing went right for them. Had they asked for help without offering a reward they might not have attracted quite so much attention to themselves.
Whoever they were, these blokes were clearly not the brains of the outfit, but now we can sit back and watch the detail of this doomed venture unfold as the investigation continues and eventually plays out in court.
The unanswerable question some are asking now is whether this attempted importing of half a tonne of meth was the first of its kind on 90 Mile Beach. One suspects that it is - the Far North's west coast might be relatively remote, and unguarded by authorities, but it is not always hospitable. And as we now know, the population might be sparse but the locals aren't silly, or afraid to tell the police about strange goings on.
We will never know if this endeavour was the first of its kind, but we do know that this was not the first time that the Far North has been involved in a major drug importation. Nor was it the first time that the criminals displayed a distinct lack of nous, even if the trailblazers got away with it.
It was in 1975 that Martin Johnstone, whose taste for the high life was to prove fatal, set out to import 450,000 cannabis 'Buddha sticks,' with a New Zealand street value of $3 million, from Thailand, using the 18-metre yawl Brigadoon. She made a relatively uneventful voyage from Auckland to Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia, but it all started going wrong after that.
Police and Customs in New Zealand had their eye on the Brigadoon, but so protracted was the voyage that they eventually lost interest, and when she arrived off the Far North's east coast, running aground at Taemaro Bay, the locals, reinforced by Mangonui's sole police officer, pushed her back into the water and waved her crew farewell with no inkling that they were up to no good.
Before that the police in New Zealand had prevailed upon their counterparts in Noumea not to charge the crew with shoplifting - they had run out of food on the way north, and were hungry. They followed that brush with the law by trying to extricate themselves from a maze of reefs, not without numerous contacts between hull and rocks, then struck more trouble on the way back from Thailand when two of the crew went down with malaria. They were taken to Indonesia for treatment, and were eventually abandoned there. (They established a pub band in a bid to earn their air fares home).
The cannabis was recovered from the uninhabited island where it had been stashed before heading for Indonesia, but then the Brigadoon's engine broke down. She was finally towed back towards New Zealand, for a fee of $30,000, making landfall, literally, at Taemaro Bay, where Martin Johnstone suffered the final indignity when he toppled out of the tender, having abandoned the tow at sea (according to the skipper of the boat that did the towing). By then the police and Customs had given up their surveillance, and by the time the Brigadoon was presented to Customs she was as clean as a whistle.
Johnstone went on to gain criminal notoriety as the founder of the Mr Asia syndicate, until he was murdered, on Terry Clark's orders. His body, without its hands, was recovered from a flooded quarry in Lancashire in 1979.
Terry Clark was jailed for that and other murders, dying of a heart attack in an English prison in 1983, although not before the gang had imported millions of dollars' worth of heroin into New Zealand, Australia and the UK.
The drug trade has come a long way since a menswear shop assistant with a taste for the high life went in search of instant riches 40 years ago, but Marty Johnstone, Terry Clark and co were ahead of their time. The violence they used (more so Clark than Johnstone, who was generally regarded as something of Flash Harry, arrogant and handsome, a burglar in his early life and an inveterate womaniser, the first of the metrosexuals) was unheard of in this country in the 1970s, and thankfully has never been seen again, at least not on the same scale.
The massive wealth to be gained from drug running remains as alluring as ever though, obviously, and it is unlikely that the seizing of $500 million worth of meth in the Far North will deter others. Whether or not anyone tries to import drugs on such a scale in the Far North again remains to be seen, but Ahipara might well have gained sufficient reputation as a community not to be messed with to preclude another shot there for at least some time to come.
There is one more well known link between Mr Asia and the Far North, in the house that Clark built at Okiato Point, in the Bay of Islands, although he never lived there. The two-storey, six-bedroom main house, which has changed hands a number of times over the years, features what is widely believed to have been designed as an escape passage leading from a wardrobe down to the water. It was also built with a helicopter pad, although that might have had a less nefarious purpose.
Early last year the property had a rateable value of $2.35 million, much less, even without allowing for inflation, than the cargo of cannabis that founded the short-lived Mr Asia empire. Not as short-lived as last week's bid to kick-start a drug dynasty, but its longevity owed more to good luck than initial good management.
News snippets from the Far North.