Heroin addicts have often been the forgotten voices in the Mr Asia story. Montage / Paul Slater
Heroin addicts have often been the forgotten voices in the Mr Asia story. Montage / Paul Slater
The six-part series Mr Asia: A Forgotten History tells the inside story of New Zealand’s most infamous drug syndicate. Hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy reflect on stories they learned from the often-forgotten voices recovered in the podcast – people addicted to heroin.
The French Connection was an interesting choice: of all the books Marty Johnstone could have picked for the crew of the Brigadoon, a true crime story about an international heroin trafficking ring being picked apart by police wasn’t the obvious one. Yet there it was, part of the dozen or so paperbacks that made up a kind of library for the four men whose trip from Auckland to Thailand and back again he had financed, planned and overseen.
There would be plenty of downtime on the trip, and plenty of moments of sheer panic as well. Ultimately, the success of the voyage – landing 450,000 Thai sticks, leading to a profit of over $10 million in today’s money for both Johnstone and his main distributor, Terry Clark – would set the Mr Asia gang up for their own spectacular entry into heroin trafficking.
The Brigadoon, used to smuggle drugs from Thailand directly into New Zealand.
Even if the story of the French Connection (turned into an Oscar-winning film starring Gene Hackman in 1971) hadn’t turned out so well for the crims involved, Johnstone was seduced by the idea of the big time. Within a few months he would be on the front page of police intelligence reports; in just three years he would be on the front page of the newspapers. And 50 years on we’re still talking about the story of his eponymous gang, a tale that culminated in his own murder on the orders of Clark.
And it’s clear that the story still resonates with Kiwis – there’s been a huge response to the podcast series that we’ve put out through the Herald over the last few weeks. We’ve heard from the Brigadoon’s new owners, usually moored on Great Barrier – she’s in Whangārei getting some work done. It made us laugh to hear that after her drug-running adventures, she ended up the property of a Lieutenant Commander of the NZ Navy who sailed her around the world for seven years. Vast numbers of listeners have got in touch with more information, tips and corrections and questions (“Was the anonymous guy ‘Nick’ a guy called Dean? Oh s***, I probably shouldn’t have said his name…” For the record, it wasn’t Dean).
Still, when we interviewed Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, head of NZ Police Organised Crime group, he asked us why we were doing Mr Asia at a time when he says he sees drug gangs the size of the Mr Asia syndicate cycling through every three or four months.
Greg Williams, head of the Organized Crime Group at NZ Police during an interview at Police HQ in Wellington. Photo / Marty Melville
It’s a fair question, particularly from someone on the front lines of the meth crisis: but the series we wanted to make wasn’t just about murder, drugs, and money, although there’s plenty of that happening. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, we also wanted to hear from a group whose stories are so often ignored or reduced to walk-on parts as victims, yet whose individual lives inevitably underpin any story about drug trafficking – the people who get addicted. Because anyone who went through the Mr Asia years as an addict and is still around today got themselves into a hole back then and then got themselves out of it.
One of these people was that guy we called Nick, who was Terry’s cellmate, friend and flatmate. This is what he said when we asked him about his first time using heroin:
“I remember thinking at the time, that is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt. That’s me now, that’s my purpose. I’m just going to keep chasing this stuff. It’s so nice.”
Nick’s been clean now for more than 30 years, but he was an addict back when he was sharing a cell with Terry. We wanted to know, what drew him to heroin?
“I think the fact that it was thought to be the most evil drug on earth, that was part of the attraction for me.”
Was Terry in any way curious about his using?
“Not about any aspect of addiction, or what it feels like. It was more: there’s money in this. Here’s a guy who had 100 pots on the boil, and he was establishing connections everywhere he could.”
Terry Clark didn’t like junkies. That’s a detail you come across early on when you’re researching Mr Asia. It’s true a lot of the people he murdered, or had murdered were heroin users, some were addicts by the time they died. But Terry was also married to an addict at one point: Norma Fleet, his second wife. Nick was living with Terry and Norma after he and Terry got out of Wi Tako. He says although their relationship had its ups and downs, the bond between them was real.
“With Norma, he could tell her to go and pick up A and take it to B, which she’d adore, because that meant she was part of the deal and doing something. She was almost like a loyal puppy.”
Terry and Norma got married in Wi Tako in 1973. We had another stroke of luck while the series was in production, thanks to legendary publisher Roger Steele and his friend Keith Stewart. Roger was editing Salient magazine at the time and as mates of Norma’s, the pair used her wedding as a chance to go and get some photos behind the prison gates. Keith sent us the photos, many of them never seen before.
Terry Clark and Norma Fleet on their wedding day in Wi Tako prison 1973 with Errol Hincksman and Sue Nunes. Photo / Roger Steele
Looking at the negatives was a complicated mix of sensations. On the one hand, you can’t help but be happy for Norma. Though clearly out of it, she has a bride’s radiance. Terry too looks chuffed, if a bit bashful in an embroidered hippie shirt that really doesn’t suit him.
On the other hand, remembering what Nick said at his kitchen table, about Terry seeing the money to be made in heroin, gives these photos another, far more sinister cast: what you’re looking at in Wi Tako that day is a marriage of drugs, and crime that would define Mr Asia.
“Heroin was the thing, if you’re into money,” Nick said.
Terry saw that. And a few years later, Norma was dead.
One of the stories you read – and stories and legends are a big part of Mr Asia – is that Terry gave her a too-big dose of heroin.
But Nick calls this the “TV version” of Norma’s death, the truth as he reveals it in the podcast is far more prosaic, and sadder.
The death certificate of Norma Fleet, wife of Mr Asia boss Terry Clark.
By the time Norma died, in the mid 70s – her death certificate said barbiturate overdose when we sent for it – Terry was already well engrossed in building his empire. His initial lightbulb moment, that drugs equal money, was proving to be true.
“Heroin creates its own market," Jim Mahony explained.
Sitting in the front seat of the taxi he drives on Waiheke, footsteps from the beach, he laid it out for us.
“Heroin acts like a form of plague. You don’t need to market it. It’s screamingly contagious.”
Jim should know. A newspaperman for decade, like his father before him, Jim did a long stint as a sub on the Sydney Morning Herald. Before that, as a young man, Jim was addicted to heroin.
At his lowest point he said: “I thought I had a plastic lid over my head, and that people could see the maggots crawling about in my brain, you know, the maggots of self doubt and low self-worth.”
Jim hurt himself badly in the period when he was using: a skull fracture from a gangland fight in Melbourne, a near-death experience falling three floors out a window onto concrete.
“I ended up in hospital and double traction with one arm strapped up, staring at the pegboard-style ceiling, in a considerable amount of pain and getting only about a sixth of the amount of morphine that I’d been using for fun.”
Trying to come off methadone a few years later was worse than the fall he says.
“You can’t sleep and your legs sort of kick and jerk and if you do get a bit of sleep there’s all sorts of really terrible dreams and strange images in your head.
“And the feelings of inadequacy – I thought I was a really confident person. I was when I was full of drugs.
“Take the drugs away and it was a different story.”
Jim was also in Wi Tako with Terry. He said there was nothing that marked him as a master criminal – in fact, he wasn’t even a very good safe blower. But Jim agrees with Nick that Clark saw his chance with heroin.
A police surveillance picture of Terry Clark.
“He had huge ambitions. And he came along at a time when you could get away with that sort of stuff. When, you know, customers and policing weren’t as sophisticated as they are today.”
The point Jim makes about not needing to market heroin is an important one.
“Somebody gets addicted. They give it to somebody else."
Suzy tried heroin for the first time with her friends when she was living in Australia.
“I just saw this neon light say ‘This is it.’ I had been waiting for something my whole life. And that was it. So I went out and bought some the next day.”
Suzy grew up in a small town in New Zealand. She travelled the world while she was using, first Australia and then along the hippie trail through Southeast Asia, all the way to Nepal.
For her, and for others of the Mr Asia vintage on the podcast, their coming of age coincided with a shift in NZ culture, away from the traditional rugby, racing and beer as the preferred, socially-sanctioned ways of spending time together into something more youth-focused, more expansive.
Malcolm was a teenager who tried to get into the Air Force after he left school, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough so he ended up studying to be a surveyor in the small town of Turangi. He made some new friends and tried some pot and LSD. He ended up in Auckland, where he had his first taste of hard drugs.
“A guy upstairs was doing heroin. And I chased the dragon with him up there. And I just looked at him and looked at that whole scene and suddenly I was no longer listening to Neil Diamond and Beach Boys, I was listening to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and down the rabbit hole I went.”
One summer, Mal and his friends tried to sell four tabs of acid in The Occidental pub to get a train fare to Nelson. His friend was picked up by police and gave Malcolm’s name as a supplier, which was how he found himself doing six months in Wi Tako for four tabs of acid.
Even the police officer who came to visit him in prison said that was a bit harsh.
More so when you consider that Terry stayed out of prison at the height of his million-dollar drug-dealing business and none of the top people in the gang went to jail – at least not for any real length of time – while the syndicate was at the peak of its powers, in that second part of the 1970s.
Rhys was another New Zealander whose life intersected with hard drugs in the 70s. A young violin protege, the son of Jewish refugees from the Nazis, he was so talented that as a young teen his parents had a fundraiser so he could take up an invitation to study with Yehudi Menuhin. He smashed his violin on stage and never picked it up again.
When he was 17, on his way back from an anti-apartheid protest, he ended up in a Wellington opium den.
“I never stopped,” he says, when you ask him about it. "I’d found God."
Rhys' life took all manner of turns, including a spell in James K Baxter’s Jerusalem commune and a stint in a kibbutz. In Auckland, he went on to deal with Peter Fulcher Clark’s notorious enforcer.
“I stillremember him driving around in that convertible Mustang with, you know, 100g in the back to bring me stuff. And he’d have a bucket of petrol in the middle of his car. In case he got pulled over by the police. He’d just chuck a match into it.”
Rhys got clean nearly 40 years ago. The biggest drama in his life now is if the Warriors are losing. Back in the day, he had a ringside seat for what happened when Terry and Marty’s high-quality heroin flowed everywhere.
“(People) got addicted pretty quickly. And all of a sudden criminal networks were building up, because people needed the money to buy it.
“Back in the day we were just knocking off chemist shops, you’d take what you could get. This was something else, this was on a different level.
“Marty and them, they were dealing to absolutely anybody, they were creating a heroin problem, creating a criminal underworld around it.”
Sitting in her kitchen on a winter’s day, with a mosaic in the shape of a flaming heart on the wall and a grey cat called Dot sitting in a patch of sun, Suzy says, in retrospect, she feels lucky she was out of the country during the peak years of the syndicate.
“That was the only time when all of that stuff was free flowing. I missed out on it, you know, and I was not happy about that.
“I am now of course – thank God, I missed it. Because I know what I’m like, and I would have been in there.”
Suzy describes herself as an addict in recovery. She works in addiction services and she hasn’t taken heroin for decades.
From what we’ve heard, Terry did a bit of acid in Wi Tako. Later on, when the syndicate was really cranking, he got into a lot of cocaine, which had the effect you’d expect on his decision making. But he didn’t mess around with heroin.
As Nick told us: “He was kind of adverse to syringes, needles and spoons. When Norma was trying in vain to hit a vein, and getting herself into a state, Terry wouldn’t oblige, he always delegated to someone with a more practised hand.”
The bit of the Mr Asia story we were always the most interested in was the people in need of the needles, spoons and syringes. The young people who were using Terry’s high-quality heroin on the streets of Sydney, Auckland and Wellington.
We never felt we heard enough about them when we read the books about Mr Asia, or watched the TV adaptations. There was reference to drug addiction, always in a general, abstract way. More as a concept than anything.
Yet here they were; Nick – a young man turning up for his Wi Tako lag, Terry looking after him – Suzy and her neon light, Jim the son of a journalist who went on to become one, Malcolm who couldn’t become an air force pilot because of his bad eyesight. Rhys and his violin, on track to go and study with Yehudi Menuhin. Norma in her big white hat and lacy dress on her wedding day.
One of us has already heard parts of the Mr Asia story, without necessarily grasping the bigger picture. Noelle’s been in recovery from alcohol and other drugs for a while now.
John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy, hosts of the upcoming podcast series Mr Asia: A Forgotten History. Photo / Dean Purcell
When you get sober the way she did, in groups that meet for support and fellowship, one of the first things you learn is how useful, crucial even, other people’s experiences can be as a tool to help you cope when the prospect of having to find a new way to do pretty much everything in life gets overwhelming.
Coming into recovery 15 years ago, Noelle saw the ways the addicts of the Mr Asia generation were blazing a trail, sharing their recovery with a new generation.
The drugs were different – newcomers were more likely to be grappling with meth than Terry Clark’s heroin, but the fundamental experience of addiction: the hollowing ravages of dependency, all the misery it wrecks on families, relationships, psyches, bank balances, none of that has changed much in the time since Mr Asia minted a brand-new addict generation.
In the last episode of the podcast, Noelle talks about a woman called Janet C who encouraged her in early sobriety. She knows she’s not alone in this – if you got sober or clean in Auckland in the last 40-years, odds are you knew Janet too. Great style, all-black ensembles, red lipstick, big laugh, a penchant for cigarillos. Janet got a Queens Service Medal for Services to Health in 2011 for her work helping alcoholics and addicts.
Noelle tells the story of Janet’s friends, Doug and Izzy Wilson. They were addicts like Janet, who had to get clean in Sydney, because there were no rehabs in New Zealand back then.
Noelle McCarthy's friend Janet (centre) with Doug Wilson (background) and Isabel Wilson shortly before the Wilsons were murdered in 1979 on the orders of Terry Clark.
Doug and Izzy died in 1978, murdered by a hitman. Their bodies were discovered in a shallow grave in a coastal town in Australia. Terry paid extra so Doug Wilson would be told at the end who was paying to have him killed. The man was given instructions to shoot Izzy first.
Janet got out of rehab in Australia and came back to New Zealand. She helped set up Higher Ground, a treatment centre where thousands of addicts have been helped over the years. She died unexpectedly in 2022. The plaque on the wall in the Janet Colby Memorial Hall in Higher Ground reads; “He maumaharatanga e te Rangatira. In memory of our leader.”
The story of Mr Asia has been told many times and will continue to be – last we heard, there’s a new book in the works, to add to all the dramas, documentaries and books already written. You can see why. It’s a yarn with everything – murder, glamour, a great soundtrack.
But it was the voices of people in this series who used to be addicts, and are clean today – Rhys, Suzy, Jim, Nick, Malcolm and the legacy of Janet – that were the most important part of the story as we wanted to tell it.
Their experiences are consequential, part of a significant cultural shift. Their memories of addiction and recovery are woven through the extraordinary era of Mr Asia, and the story of a small group of people who changed drug culture in New Zealand forever.
Mr Asia–A Forgotten History is a six-episode true crime series. Follow the series on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released on Wednesdays.
The series is hosted and produced by John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy of Bird of Paradise Productions in co-production with the New Zealand Herald.
