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Speaker 1: Hilda.

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Speaker 2: I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the front Page, a

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Speaker 2: daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. For much

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Speaker 2: of the nineteen seventies, Marcy Johnstone operated as one of

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Speaker 2: New Zealand's most notorious drug dealers. Dubbed mister Asia by journalists,

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Speaker 2: Johnstone rose from North Shore menswear salesman to head of

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Speaker 2: a global heroin empire, but his life at the top

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Speaker 2: was short lived. In November nineteen seventy nine, his mutilated

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Speaker 2: body was found in a quarry in Lancashire, England. It

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Speaker 2: was just twenty seven years old when he was murdered,

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Speaker 2: killed by his best friend Andy Mayer. The epic rise

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Speaker 2: and rapid fall of one of the country's most infamous

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Speaker 2: drug gangs is retold in Mister Asia A Forgotten History,

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Speaker 2: a six part podcast series from The New Zealand Herald

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Speaker 2: and Bird of Paradise Productions. Here's a snippet from episode one,

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Speaker 2: when Terry met Marty.

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Speaker 3: Just a warning here. The series features adult language drug

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Speaker 3: use in descriptions of violent crime, including assault and murder.

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Speaker 1: So we're coming down a lane that's called Too Good Lane, and.

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Speaker 4: There's some houses here which look reasonably recently built, and

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Speaker 4: I'm trying to imagine that forty five years ago it

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Speaker 4: would have been quite rural and quite remote. There's no

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Speaker 4: from what I can see, there's no street lights, are

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Speaker 4: very few street lights.

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Speaker 1: It's a very narrow English country road. It's a two

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Speaker 1: lane road.

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Speaker 3: The hours of octoberteenth, nineteen seventy nine, a brown jag

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Speaker 3: Urix J six drove along this road. It's isolated just

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Speaker 3: outside a small town called Truly in the north of England,

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Speaker 3: at least than twenty minutes from the neighboring cities of

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Speaker 3: Manchester and Liverpool. There were two men in the front seats,

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Speaker 3: the driver and this passenger cousins, both British, but in

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Speaker 3: the boot of the car was the body of another

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Speaker 3: man in New Zealand.

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Speaker 5: What's it saying?

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Speaker 6: What scuba diving?

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Speaker 7: Yeah? Got it?

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Speaker 8: That's it?

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Speaker 5: Is it saying del scuba Diving Center?

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Speaker 2: Yet?

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Speaker 9: That's it?

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Speaker 7: Yeah?

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Speaker 1: I thought we were going forever asy center.

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Speaker 2: Well I think they.

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Speaker 5: I mean, they do a bit of leisure here, they

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Speaker 5: do a bit of diving.

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Speaker 1: But it's not really the weather for it is this?

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Speaker 2: Nor What have you got it?

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Speaker 4: I do?

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Speaker 5: I have an umbrella in my bag.

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Speaker 1: Of course I do, but.

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Speaker 9: I came from Ireland, so I start with me, Oh

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Speaker 9: my goodness, it's pouring.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, so we just wait a minute.

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Speaker 5: I'm just going to consult my ma.

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Speaker 1: Instiniches of.

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Speaker 3: The driver and the dead man had first met each

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Speaker 3: other in the early nineteen seventies when they were both

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Speaker 3: around twenty years old. That'd worked together in New Zealand

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Speaker 3: and around the world, run close enough over the years

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Speaker 3: for the driver to name the firstborn child after the

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Speaker 3: man in the boot.

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Speaker 1: Did you ever hear about the poorly handless corpse?

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Speaker 5: So in nineteen seventy nine a body was found.

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Speaker 1: In the Delf by these two recreational divers. These two

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Speaker 1: guys used to dive on the weekend and they thought

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Speaker 1: it was a tailor's dummy sitting on a ledge about

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Speaker 1: twenty feet down, but it was actually a man who

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Speaker 1: had been.

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Speaker 3: Killed earlier that night. The driver, Andy Maher, had shot

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Speaker 3: his best friend, twenty seven year old Marry Johnston twice

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Speaker 3: in the back of the head, killing him. He then

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Speaker 3: stabbed him multiple times in the stomach, looking to prevent

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Speaker 3: jomp then floating up from his watery grave. Then mar

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Speaker 3: cut off Johnston's heads and basted his face with a hemmer,

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Speaker 3: aiming to break his teeth. He'd done this in the

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Speaker 3: hope of avoiding identification of the body. Finally, Andy May

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Speaker 3: had come here with his cousin to throw his friend's

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Speaker 3: corpse into the flooded quarry Edigleston delf.

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Speaker 1: They said they were taking him up to Scotland for

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Speaker 1: a meat with I think a connection in Glasgow who

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Speaker 1: could help him sell heroin, because that's what they were selling.

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Speaker 1: And they killed him on the way, dumped him here.

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Speaker 1: And the thing is, if they had dumped him a

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Speaker 1: meter to the left, it's sixty meters deep there and

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Speaker 1: he never.

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Speaker 9: Would have been so it was kind of bad luck

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Speaker 9: good luck.

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Speaker 5: So I think what I'm going to do is go

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Speaker 5: inside and ask now, just to fact check myself for

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Speaker 5: a second, what I meant to say was sixty feet deep,

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Speaker 5: not sixty meters, And the connection in Glasgow was from

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Speaker 5: marijuana rather than heroine. And look, sorry about the tone here.

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Speaker 5: It feels a bit gleeful listening back. But I've only

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Speaker 5: just met Ben. He's a charter driver. I found him

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Speaker 5: through my cousin who uses him to go to Liverpool matches.

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Speaker 5: I've asked him to bring me here to this random place.

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Speaker 5: And now I'm talking about a handless corpse, but I'm

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Speaker 5: trying to be nice, trying to make it seem normal. Anyway,

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Speaker 5: we're here at Eccleston delf and while it's actually very

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Speaker 5: beautiful birds and trees and water and flowers, it also

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Speaker 5: feels kind of creepy when you know what happened.

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Speaker 9: Okay, So now I'm walking up towards the cliff face,

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Speaker 9: which looks familiar from the Lancashire police photos from nineteen

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Speaker 9: seventy nine of them masked at the spot where the

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Speaker 9: body was found. And remember when the body was initially found,

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Speaker 9: they didn't oh whose it was. It just didn't have

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Speaker 9: any hands and was quite grotesquely wounded, and by all.

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Speaker 3: Accounts back in nineteen seventy nine, this was a dumping ground,

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Speaker 3: a disused quarry that had filled up with water at first.

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Speaker 3: Then old cars and rubbish divers weren't even supposed to

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Speaker 3: be here. The visibility was terrible and it was actually.

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Speaker 5: Dangerous anyway, Heroin or marijuana sixty meters is sixty feet.

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Speaker 5: If the body had missed the ledge that sticks out

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Speaker 5: just at this point it wouldn't have been discovered until

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Speaker 5: years later when they eventually drained Eccleston delf and who

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Speaker 5: knows what that might have.

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Speaker 3: Meant, But they did find it, and when they found

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Speaker 3: out who he was, it standed a manhut that led

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Speaker 3: to one of the biggest cour cases in English history

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Speaker 3: and a Royal Commission of Inquiry of unprecedented scope in

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Speaker 3: Australia and New Zealand, because while the dead man's name

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Speaker 3: was Mailey Johnston, on the other side of the world

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Speaker 3: he was known as mister Asia.

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Speaker 6: It's a tale of killer drugs earning countless millions of

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Speaker 6: pearls for a syndicate whose members had a strange tendency

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Speaker 6: to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes

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Speaker 6: to turn up again in the most brittly circumstances.

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Speaker 5: From Bird of Paradise Productions and the New Zealand Herald,

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Speaker 5: this is Mister Asia, a forgotten history. I'm Noel mccausen and.

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Speaker 3: I'm John Daniel. This is the story of some ordinary

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Speaker 3: Kiwis wanting to make their fortune, and they weren't too

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Speaker 3: fussy about how they did it.

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Speaker 8: I think when the Mister Asa syndicate started, they were

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Speaker 8: very entrepreneurial.

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Speaker 7: As they stepped up, they were the biggest in the world.

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Speaker 5: You know, they had the biggest connections. Their choice of

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Speaker 5: business was always going to be a problem. That last

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Speaker 5: three years of my using was awful because every morning

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Speaker 5: I woke up, I wished I'd died in the night,

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Speaker 5: and I just think, fuck, can you have to start

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Speaker 5: all over again through another day.

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Speaker 3: In the end, trust gave way to greed and the

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Speaker 3: dream became a nightmare of violence and betrayal.

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Speaker 8: Julie was walking ahead, Terry dropped back. Then he just

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Speaker 8: falled out a gun, shut her in the back of

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Speaker 8: the head, and then said to Wayne, you're going to

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Speaker 8: help me burier otherwise you go too, And so Wayne did.

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Speaker 3: Episode one when Terry met Marty. The discovery of Mardie

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Speaker 3: Johnston's body in that flooded quarry in the north of

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Speaker 3: England was the beginning of the end for the Mister

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Speaker 3: Asia Syndicate. They were an international drug trafficking organization who

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Speaker 3: had made tens of millions of dollars in left behind

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Speaker 3: a trail of dead bodies.

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Speaker 5: The syndicate had dozens of affiliated people in different roles

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Speaker 5: across at least three continents, but at its heart was

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Speaker 5: the relationship between Marty Johnston and the man who ordered

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Speaker 5: his murder, another New Zealander, Terry Clark. That relationship changed

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Speaker 5: the face of drug culture in New Zealand. Drugs went

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Speaker 5: from a cottage industry to a multi national business.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, it was absolutely a jump shift and you can

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Speaker 3: still see the effects playing out today. His GREEG Williams,

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Speaker 3: the head of New Zealand Police's National Organized Crime Group,

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Speaker 3: speaking to The Herald in August of twenty twenty three

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Speaker 3: after another huge bust.

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Speaker 10: So we have a large number of these transnational crime

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Speaker 10: quats across the world just wanting to pump drugs like

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Speaker 10: meth and petamine into communities like cows, and they're really

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Speaker 10: targeting New Zealand because we continue to pay some of

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Speaker 10: the highest prices in the world for meth and pedamine

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Speaker 10: and there's just mass of profits for them in this respect.

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Speaker 5: In the years following the unraveling of the Mister Asia gang,

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Speaker 5: the Australian and New Zealand government set up a Royal

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Speaker 5: inquiry into drug trafficking, the focus being Terry Clark and

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Speaker 5: his associates. Over the course of nearly two years, the

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Speaker 5: Commission heard from more than five hundred witnesses, many of

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Speaker 5: them in secret to avoid retribution.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and we'll come back to the inquiry and the

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Speaker 3: unraveling because those huge numbers are important. Marty and Terry

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Speaker 3: are the central characters. But the way it works, it

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Speaker 3: spreads out and touches first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands

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Speaker 3: of people. Today around half of New Zealanders have tried

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Speaker 3: illegal drugs of some sort.

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Speaker 5: Yes, sometimes just a homegrown joint for private use, but

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Speaker 5: often it's a purchase, meaning a dealer and in all

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Speaker 5: likelihood a system behind that out of sight running a

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Speaker 5: long way back through the hands of an organized criminal gang. Now,

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Speaker 5: over the last few decades this has become normalized, but

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Speaker 5: back in the day it wasn't really the case.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so it help us get a hand on how

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Speaker 3: this all worked. We're going to talk to a few

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Speaker 3: Kiwis who will get to know over the course of

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Speaker 3: the series, people who were directly involved with the mister

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Speaker 3: Asia Gain but whose lives thread in and out of

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Speaker 3: that story.

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Speaker 7: And about seventy five seventy six, I remember going and

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Speaker 7: I got involved. I had a store at Cock Street

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Speaker 7: Market and making clothes by that stage, we were making

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Speaker 7: hippie dresses and stuff, and we would sort of go

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Speaker 7: down and pick up some pot to sell at the market.

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Speaker 7: I remember being down there and I was sitting there

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Speaker 7: and I think that's when Marty Johnson, that's when I

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Speaker 7: first met him.

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Speaker 5: This is Malcolm who was running with a counterculture crowd

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Speaker 5: who grew a little dope on the side Dan and Coromandel.

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Speaker 7: He came in with a couple of other guys and

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Speaker 7: they were all with black leather jackets on and shades,

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Speaker 7: and they looked at me and said, who these bunnies?

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Speaker 7: And we were sort of happy.

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Speaker 5: So, you know, Malcolm is the same age as Marty.

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Speaker 5: They're born less than a year apart, in nineteen fifteen,

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Speaker 5: nineteen fifty one. But Malcolm says they had a very

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Speaker 5: different outlook towards selling drugs.

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Speaker 7: They were business. They were doing business. We were just

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Speaker 7: having fun, you know, making enough money to be able

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Speaker 7: to have free drugs. You know, it was a means

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Speaker 7: to an end. These guys were serious. They were buying quantities.

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Speaker 7: They didn't want anyone else to be seen and there,

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Speaker 7: and they resented our presence being there. You know, do

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Speaker 7: they look good? So they look well. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 7: they looked well. I would say they looked like very

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Speaker 7: slick salesman. You know, no, not probably not even very

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Speaker 7: sex They looked like people out of a movie. Really,

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Speaker 7: you know, they just looked a little bit too sharp,

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Speaker 7: a little bit too well dressed, and you know, shiny

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Speaker 7: shoes and flash cars and stuff like that.

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Speaker 3: You know, it's not that surprising that the hippie guy

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Speaker 3: isn't a fan of Marty's look. Before he becomes mister Asia,

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Speaker 3: Marty Johnston is a men's wear retailer on Queen Street

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Speaker 3: in downtown Auckland. That's where he meets Andy Maher. They

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Speaker 3: work together at a place called Collars and Cuffs, and

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Speaker 3: all the way through the nineteen seventies people will be

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Speaker 3: struck by the expensive clothes he wears. The nineties killed,

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Speaker 3: he's wearing a handmade French silk shirt, a very high

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Speaker 3: end watch that costs as much as a car.

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Speaker 5: His dad ran men's wear stores in Auckland. And he's

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Speaker 5: a good looking guy too, quite tall six foot one

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Speaker 5: and a half according to his police file, is hazel build,

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Speaker 5: solid distinguishing marx an appendix scar on his abdomen and

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Speaker 5: a scar on the right side of his head.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and that police file from November nineteen seventy six

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Speaker 3: says those men's wear businesses were successful and quote there

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Speaker 3: is obviously some wealth in the family. Madi Johnson had

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Speaker 3: grown up on a farm just south of Auckland. Then

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Speaker 3: the family had moved into the city and had gone

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Speaker 3: to Takapuna Grammar on the north Shore.

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Speaker 5: This in prestigious alumni from Takapuna Grammar. Sir Peter Bleak

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Speaker 5: of America's cop theme was a couple of years ahead

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Speaker 5: of Marti in school.

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Speaker 3: Yes, and sailing will come into the story in a

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Speaker 3: big way in the next episode. After school, Madey goes

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Speaker 3: into the menswick game, as we mentioned, but he's also

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Speaker 3: doing a little petty crime on the side. Busted in

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Speaker 3: nineteen sixty eight for burglary.

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Speaker 5: Untaffed, but he doesn't go to prison. He's just sixteen

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Speaker 5: seventeen years old.

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Speaker 3: And then he stays out of trouble for a bit

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Speaker 3: before being convicted in nineteen seventy three for possession of

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Speaker 3: a single marijuana plant. It is flat, but again he

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Speaker 3: avoids jail and then doesn't keep busted again at all.

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Speaker 3: He does have a close call in nineteen seventy five.

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Speaker 3: But just looking at this internal police file from late

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Speaker 3: nineteen seventy six, the cops say, quote, it is thought

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Speaker 3: that he is possibly not very bright, but quite cunning.

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Speaker 5: And at this point nineteen seventy five, nineteen seventy six,

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Speaker 5: that's where Malcolm's meeting him at the Cook Street market

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Speaker 5: and Marty Johnston has been running a relatively low level

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Speaker 5: marijuana operation that is starting to ramp up.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, he's clearly ambitious. Police file is standing to get

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Speaker 3: quite thick. They're obviously aware of him in our recording,

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Speaker 3: things like his implications to carry money overseas because they

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Speaker 3: know he's involved in drug dealing, even if they can't

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Speaker 3: pin anything on them.

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Speaker 5: And it's important to note that difference that Malcolm brought

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Speaker 5: up earlier. These guys who were checking him out of

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Speaker 5: the Cook Street market in central Auckland, Marty, probably Andy Maher,

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Speaker 5: one or two others, they're not really part of the counterculture,

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Speaker 5: no doubt they think they're cool, but they also have

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Speaker 5: quite conservative ambitions around respectability, particularly Marty without middle class

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Speaker 5: north Shore grammar school back.

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Speaker 3: Just looking at his business card, he's Mattin Johnson Esquire

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Speaker 3: the Esquire is a bit of an affectation, and that's

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Speaker 3: what his codename or nickname in the organization is Esquire,

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Speaker 3: so other people have noticed.

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Speaker 5: It's also the name of one of his dad's menswear stores.

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Speaker 3: And Maddie yearns for that classic middle class success, the

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Speaker 3: opposite of the Hippi mentra of turn on, tune and

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Speaker 3: drop out. He wants money and power, and so he's

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Speaker 3: really serious about selling drugs in a way that hasn't

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Speaker 3: previously been done here in New Zealand.

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Speaker 5: That's right, they're dealing to make a profit with a

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Speaker 5: sophisticated international supply chain. Anyway, early in the nineteen seventies, Malcolm,

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Speaker 5: the hippie guy from the market who'd been selling grass

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Speaker 5: alongside dresses, he'd been busted trying to sell four tabs

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Speaker 5: of acid to offset costs of a trip to Nelson.

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Speaker 5: He was sent to jail for six months.

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Speaker 7: Terry Clark was in there, and I think he was

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Speaker 7: in there for. I don't think it was a drug charge.

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Speaker 7: I'm not sure what he was in Weetacher for.

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Speaker 5: But can you tell me what your first impressions of

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Speaker 5: Terry Worre? Do you remember when you met him first,

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Speaker 5: what you thought.

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Speaker 7: Used car salesman. That's what I thought. I just thought,

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Speaker 7: I've heard this stack before. This is the used car salesman.

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Speaker 7: He's you know, he just had the stack. He had

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Speaker 7: the rap, he had the rave, but he didn't do drugs,

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Speaker 7: not to my knowledge.

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Speaker 3: So again, unsurprisingly, Malcolm the hippie is not impressed by

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Speaker 3: a guy who's pretty straight and starting to set himself

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Speaker 3: up as someone who thinks he could be a big deal.

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Speaker 7: He just had a swagger about him and that he

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Speaker 7: was he was above us all. He was on some

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Speaker 7: kind of elite level that we couldn't attain. You know.

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Speaker 7: That's what I felt about him, that he just he

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Speaker 7: had tickets on himself.

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Speaker 5: Malcolm's recollections of Terry Clark might be colored by what

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Speaker 5: happened over the coming years, because the innocence of the

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Speaker 5: drug scene would be gone forever by the end of

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Speaker 5: the decades.

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Speaker 7: It changed. And I mean there was a young girl

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Speaker 7: who was a woman who was sort of involved in

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Speaker 7: the commune down in coramand who called the OHU down there,

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Speaker 7: and she was a lovely young thing.

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Speaker 5: Malcolm's talking about a woman called Barbara who used to

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Speaker 5: date his friend Bruce.

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Speaker 7: Anyway, Bruce said, we're going to go and visit Barbara,

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Speaker 7: and I said, oh god, where this is Tokyo bath House.

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Speaker 7: And we went to Tokyo bath House and she was

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Speaker 7: she was a hooker, you know, And I was going,

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Speaker 7: what the hell's going on there? And apparently she lost

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Speaker 7: she had had a bag of drugs and lost it.

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Speaker 7: She had to pay it off on her back and

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Speaker 7: she had to work for this this alway house to

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Speaker 7: pay the money back.

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Speaker 5: And did you know who she was doing that for?

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Speaker 7: It was definitely typed some way, or rather to Terry

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Speaker 7: Clark here. And I met the woman who ran that place,

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Speaker 7: a woman who ran all the girls that owe Terry

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Speaker 7: money there, and she said no, she said, yeah, we're

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Speaker 7: a woman who were victims and there were people like

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Speaker 7: me who were enforcers.

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Speaker 2: That was the first part of episode one of Mister

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Speaker 2: Asia A Forgotten History. All six episodes are out now

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Speaker 2: and available on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 2: The Front Page will be back with a new episode

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Speaker 2: on Monday.