Marty Johnstone (left) and Terry Clark ran the Mr Asia heroin syndicate, which transformed the New Zealand drug scene from the 1970s onwards.
Composite photo / NZME
Marty Johnstone (left) and Terry Clark ran the Mr Asia heroin syndicate, which transformed the New Zealand drug scene from the 1970s onwards.
Composite photo / NZME
The six-part podcast series Mr Asia: A Forgotten History tells the inside story of New Zealand’s most infamous drug syndicate. Hosts John Daniell and Noelle McCarthy introduce the opening episode and the odd couple at the heart of the story.
They were the two men whose ambition and greed changed the face of drug culture in New Zealand. And they were both on the police radar from the beginning.
Marty Johnstone, the ex-Takapuna Grammar menswear salesman turned drug baron and Terry Clark, the Gisborne boy who went from petty crime to the big time, were the leaders of the Mr Asia gang, which rose and fell over a few short years in the 1970s.
Episode 1 of Mr Asia: A Forgotten History begins with the brutal murder of Johnstone in a remote English quarry on Clark’s orders and reveals how their rocky relationship began years earlier in the emerging Auckland drug scene.
The two photographs above – among a trove of previously unpublished pictures sourced from people on both sides of the law that you can see on the podcast’s home page – were taken by a police officer who we caught up with just days before the series launched.
While the shot of Terry Clark was fairly straightforward because it was taken from a car on Karangahape Rd, the one of Marty Johnstone demanded more skill.
“I hid in a broom cupboard in the Auckland arrivals hall,” he told us. “Photo technology’s advanced a lot since then. The camera was a Minolta with a 300 mm lens. Lighting was poor in the arrival hall. The broom cupboard allowed me to open the door partially – I wasn’t backlit, so I was standing in darkness. I had to hand hold it at a 15th of a second. And I was always proud of the fact that it was pin-sharp.”
The police surveillance photograph of Marty Johnstone.
Like many of the former police officers we spoke with, he didn’t want to go on tape or have his name used but told us the shot was part of the work of a newly formed Special Investigations Unit, which had both Johnstone and Clark in their sights well before the gang collapsed in betrayal, murder and lengthy prison sentences.
“Terry Clark and Marty Johnstone couldn’t have been more different,” he recalled.
“Clark’s closest associate was [convicted drug dealer] Peter Fulcher. They were just thugs.
Peter Fulcher was notorious as a bat-wielding enforcer for drug lord Terry Clark.
“Marty Johnstone, in many respects, was a middle-class businessman – a smooth guy, a ladies’ man.”
Terry Clark’s old cellmate and friend, speaking on the podcast for the first time, says that Clark’s jealousy of Johnstone was one of the reasons he would go on to order Johnstone’s murder.
“It wasn’t really a friendship with Marty. It was kind of climbing on to his back, like those parasites that lay their eggs.”
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.
