Free A Tale of Two Cities by John Silvester

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    Clark had always been attracted to women with a hard edge, but to him the attractive young woman with the law degree, educated voice and string of show ponies was ‘classy’. She stirred something in him. Likewise, he apparently stirred something in her: as a young female lawyer with ability and ambition in New Zealand at the end of the 1970s, she had nowhere to go without someone to bankroll the trip. A generation, or even a decade before, she might have resigned herself to the dull certainties of a ‘good’ marriage. But it was 1979, and Soich was up for skating across the thin ice of the permissive age. To her, the cool villain with the icy blue eyes and bottomless pockets must have looked like excitement. The combination of adrenalin and money could be addictive, especially if spiced with cocaine. The torrid affair would last only eleven weeks but it would forever link her with the drug syndicate. She would later say Clark would never swear in front of her and had impeccable manners. He may have been a drug dealer but at least he didn’t burp at the table.
    Soich was soon using her professional visits to take letters from Clark out of prison and handing them to a female who took them to Australia to the rest of the gang. While Clark was away, Dine had become head of couriers and Jimmy Shepherd handled most of the Sydney wholesaling, although Clark was suspicious of Shepherd’s freewheeling ways.
    Clark drew up a drug-smuggling blueprint: rules to reduce the risk of arrest. Couriers were never scruffy or ‘hippy’ looking, should pay all hotel bills in cash (leaving no record of their real identity), should do no more than two trips, and should take a Valium tranquiliser an hour before landing to keep calm while clearing customs.
    Later, when giving evidence, Allison Dine would outline someof this elaborate courier code. For instance, in Singapore, the courier would be met by ‘Chinese Jack’ or another trusted contact at a hotel. Jack would take the courier’s suitcases away and arrange to meet the courier a few hours later. In that time, he would transfer the courier’s clothes into new (but similar-looking) suitcases – false-bottomed ones with up to 7.5 kilograms (but usually less) of compressed and sealed heroin hidden in disguised panels. He would then drop the courier and the bags to a new hotel for the rest of the courier’s ‘holiday’. Before the courier (usually an attractive young woman) flew out, Dine would visit and check that dirty underclothing was packed at the back near the false bottom. This was to discourage zealous searching by customs officers. Finally, she would wipe down the entire bag with a damp cloth to remove any stray fingerprints.
    â€˜As the courier was checking her bags in at the Singapore airport Jack would hover in the background, to see that everything went all right,’ Dine described in her statement. ‘They usually had to pay excess baggage … due to the weight of the suitcase and the heaps of clothes that had to fill such large bags. Bags had to be full to look good. Jack would go out and buy some easily breakable toys to put amongst the clothes and they would normally break or he would break one before he put it into the bag, the reason for this being … the broken toys would take the attention of customs officials and make the courier feel more relaxed having something to talk about … The customs officer would always feel sorry and would let the courier through without further ado.’
    Clark was behind bars for four months. In that time the
Auckland Star
ran an expose stating that a two-year police investigation to smash New Zealand’s biggest drug syndicate had been derailed because two witnesses refused to testify against the gang’s leader – an Aucklander living in Asia that the paper dubbed ‘Mr Asia’. That was, of course, Martin Johnstone. The story proved