Speaker 1: Hilda.
Speaker 2: I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the front Page, a
Speaker 2: daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. For much
Speaker 2: of the nineteen seventies, Marcy Johnstone operated as one of
Speaker 2: New Zealand's most notorious drug dealers. Dubbed mister Asia by journalists,
Speaker 2: Johnstone rose from North Shore menswear salesman to head of
Speaker 2: a global heroin empire, but his life at the top
Speaker 2: was short lived. In November nineteen seventy nine, his mutilated
Speaker 2: body was found in a quarry in Lancashire, England. It
Speaker 2: was just twenty seven years old when he was murdered,
Speaker 2: killed by his best friend Andy Mayer. The epic rise
Speaker 2: and rapid fall of one of the country's most infamous
Speaker 2: drug gangs is retold in Mister Asia A Forgotten History,
Speaker 2: a six part podcast series from The New Zealand Herald
Speaker 2: and Bird of Paradise Productions. Here's a snippet from episode one,
Speaker 2: when Terry met Marty.
Speaker 3: Just a warning here. The series features adult language drug
Speaker 3: use in descriptions of violent crime, including assault and murder.
Speaker 1: So we're coming down a lane that's called Too Good Lane, and.
Speaker 4: There's some houses here which look reasonably recently built, and
Speaker 4: I'm trying to imagine that forty five years ago it
Speaker 4: would have been quite rural and quite remote. There's no
Speaker 4: from what I can see, there's no street lights, are
Speaker 4: very few street lights.
Speaker 1: It's a very narrow English country road. It's a two
Speaker 1: lane road.
Speaker 3: The hours of octoberteenth, nineteen seventy nine, a brown jag
Speaker 3: Urix J six drove along this road. It's isolated just
Speaker 3: outside a small town called Truly in the north of England,
Speaker 3: at least than twenty minutes from the neighboring cities of
Speaker 3: Manchester and Liverpool. There were two men in the front seats,
Speaker 3: the driver and this passenger cousins, both British, but in
Speaker 3: the boot of the car was the body of another
Speaker 3: man in New Zealand.
Speaker 5: What's it saying?
Speaker 6: What scuba diving?
Speaker 7: Yeah? Got it?
Speaker 8: That's it?
Speaker 5: Is it saying del scuba Diving Center?
Speaker 2: Yet?
Speaker 9: That's it?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I thought we were going forever asy center.
Speaker 2: Well I think they.
Speaker 5: I mean, they do a bit of leisure here, they
Speaker 5: do a bit of diving.
Speaker 1: But it's not really the weather for it is this?
Speaker 2: Nor What have you got it?
Speaker 4: I do?
Speaker 5: I have an umbrella in my bag.
Speaker 1: Of course I do, but.
Speaker 9: I came from Ireland, so I start with me, Oh
Speaker 9: my goodness, it's pouring.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we just wait a minute.
Speaker 5: I'm just going to consult my ma.
Speaker 1: Instiniches of.
Speaker 3: The driver and the dead man had first met each
Speaker 3: other in the early nineteen seventies when they were both
Speaker 3: around twenty years old. That'd worked together in New Zealand
Speaker 3: and around the world, run close enough over the years
Speaker 3: for the driver to name the firstborn child after the
Speaker 3: man in the boot.
Speaker 1: Did you ever hear about the poorly handless corpse?
Speaker 5: So in nineteen seventy nine a body was found.
Speaker 1: In the Delf by these two recreational divers. These two
Speaker 1: guys used to dive on the weekend and they thought
Speaker 1: it was a tailor's dummy sitting on a ledge about
Speaker 1: twenty feet down, but it was actually a man who
Speaker 1: had been.
Speaker 3: Killed earlier that night. The driver, Andy Maher, had shot
Speaker 3: his best friend, twenty seven year old Marry Johnston twice
Speaker 3: in the back of the head, killing him. He then
Speaker 3: stabbed him multiple times in the stomach, looking to prevent
Speaker 3: jomp then floating up from his watery grave. Then mar
Speaker 3: cut off Johnston's heads and basted his face with a hemmer,
Speaker 3: aiming to break his teeth. He'd done this in the
Speaker 3: hope of avoiding identification of the body. Finally, Andy May
Speaker 3: had come here with his cousin to throw his friend's
Speaker 3: corpse into the flooded quarry Edigleston delf.
Speaker 1: They said they were taking him up to Scotland for
Speaker 1: a meat with I think a connection in Glasgow who
Speaker 1: could help him sell heroin, because that's what they were selling.
Speaker 1: And they killed him on the way, dumped him here.
Speaker 1: And the thing is, if they had dumped him a
Speaker 1: meter to the left, it's sixty meters deep there and
Speaker 1: he never.
Speaker 9: Would have been so it was kind of bad luck
Speaker 9: good luck.
Speaker 5: So I think what I'm going to do is go
Speaker 5: inside and ask now, just to fact check myself for
Speaker 5: a second, what I meant to say was sixty feet deep,
Speaker 5: not sixty meters, And the connection in Glasgow was from
Speaker 5: marijuana rather than heroine. And look, sorry about the tone here.
Speaker 5: It feels a bit gleeful listening back. But I've only
Speaker 5: just met Ben. He's a charter driver. I found him
Speaker 5: through my cousin who uses him to go to Liverpool matches.
Speaker 5: I've asked him to bring me here to this random place.
Speaker 5: And now I'm talking about a handless corpse, but I'm
Speaker 5: trying to be nice, trying to make it seem normal. Anyway,
Speaker 5: we're here at Eccleston delf and while it's actually very
Speaker 5: beautiful birds and trees and water and flowers, it also
Speaker 5: feels kind of creepy when you know what happened.
Speaker 9: Okay, So now I'm walking up towards the cliff face,
Speaker 9: which looks familiar from the Lancashire police photos from nineteen
Speaker 9: seventy nine of them masked at the spot where the
Speaker 9: body was found. And remember when the body was initially found,
Speaker 9: they didn't oh whose it was. It just didn't have
Speaker 9: any hands and was quite grotesquely wounded, and by all.
Speaker 3: Accounts back in nineteen seventy nine, this was a dumping ground,
Speaker 3: a disused quarry that had filled up with water at first.
Speaker 3: Then old cars and rubbish divers weren't even supposed to
Speaker 3: be here. The visibility was terrible and it was actually.
Speaker 5: Dangerous anyway, Heroin or marijuana sixty meters is sixty feet.
Speaker 5: If the body had missed the ledge that sticks out
Speaker 5: just at this point it wouldn't have been discovered until
Speaker 5: years later when they eventually drained Eccleston delf and who
Speaker 5: knows what that might have.
Speaker 3: Meant, But they did find it, and when they found
Speaker 3: out who he was, it standed a manhut that led
Speaker 3: to one of the biggest cour cases in English history
Speaker 3: and a Royal Commission of Inquiry of unprecedented scope in
Speaker 3: Australia and New Zealand, because while the dead man's name
Speaker 3: was Mailey Johnston, on the other side of the world
Speaker 3: he was known as mister Asia.
Speaker 6: It's a tale of killer drugs earning countless millions of
Speaker 6: pearls for a syndicate whose members had a strange tendency
Speaker 6: to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes
Speaker 6: to turn up again in the most brittly circumstances.
Speaker 5: From Bird of Paradise Productions and the New Zealand Herald,
Speaker 5: this is Mister Asia, a forgotten history. I'm Noel mccausen and.
Speaker 3: I'm John Daniel. This is the story of some ordinary
Speaker 3: Kiwis wanting to make their fortune, and they weren't too
Speaker 3: fussy about how they did it.
Speaker 8: I think when the Mister Asa syndicate started, they were
Speaker 8: very entrepreneurial.
Speaker 7: As they stepped up, they were the biggest in the world.
Speaker 5: You know, they had the biggest connections. Their choice of
Speaker 5: business was always going to be a problem. That last
Speaker 5: three years of my using was awful because every morning
Speaker 5: I woke up, I wished I'd died in the night,
Speaker 5: and I just think, fuck, can you have to start
Speaker 5: all over again through another day.
Speaker 3: In the end, trust gave way to greed and the
Speaker 3: dream became a nightmare of violence and betrayal.
Speaker 8: Julie was walking ahead, Terry dropped back. Then he just
Speaker 8: falled out a gun, shut her in the back of
Speaker 8: the head, and then said to Wayne, you're going to
Speaker 8: help me burier otherwise you go too, And so Wayne did.
Speaker 3: Episode one when Terry met Marty. The discovery of Mardie
Speaker 3: Johnston's body in that flooded quarry in the north of
Speaker 3: England was the beginning of the end for the Mister
Speaker 3: Asia Syndicate. They were an international drug trafficking organization who
Speaker 3: had made tens of millions of dollars in left behind
Speaker 3: a trail of dead bodies.
Speaker 5: The syndicate had dozens of affiliated people in different roles
Speaker 5: across at least three continents, but at its heart was
Speaker 5: the relationship between Marty Johnston and the man who ordered
Speaker 5: his murder, another New Zealander, Terry Clark. That relationship changed
Speaker 5: the face of drug culture in New Zealand. Drugs went
Speaker 5: from a cottage industry to a multi national business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was absolutely a jump shift and you can
Speaker 3: still see the effects playing out today. His GREEG Williams,
Speaker 3: the head of New Zealand Police's National Organized Crime Group,
Speaker 3: speaking to The Herald in August of twenty twenty three
Speaker 3: after another huge bust.
Speaker 10: So we have a large number of these transnational crime
Speaker 10: quats across the world just wanting to pump drugs like
Speaker 10: meth and petamine into communities like cows, and they're really
Speaker 10: targeting New Zealand because we continue to pay some of
Speaker 10: the highest prices in the world for meth and pedamine
Speaker 10: and there's just mass of profits for them in this respect.
Speaker 5: In the years following the unraveling of the Mister Asia gang,
Speaker 5: the Australian and New Zealand government set up a Royal
Speaker 5: inquiry into drug trafficking, the focus being Terry Clark and
Speaker 5: his associates. Over the course of nearly two years, the
Speaker 5: Commission heard from more than five hundred witnesses, many of
Speaker 5: them in secret to avoid retribution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we'll come back to the inquiry and the
Speaker 3: unraveling because those huge numbers are important. Marty and Terry
Speaker 3: are the central characters. But the way it works, it
Speaker 3: spreads out and touches first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands
Speaker 3: of people. Today around half of New Zealanders have tried
Speaker 3: illegal drugs of some sort.
Speaker 5: Yes, sometimes just a homegrown joint for private use, but
Speaker 5: often it's a purchase, meaning a dealer and in all
Speaker 5: likelihood a system behind that out of sight running a
Speaker 5: long way back through the hands of an organized criminal gang. Now,
Speaker 5: over the last few decades this has become normalized, but
Speaker 5: back in the day it wasn't really the case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it help us get a hand on how
Speaker 3: this all worked. We're going to talk to a few
Speaker 3: Kiwis who will get to know over the course of
Speaker 3: the series, people who were directly involved with the mister
Speaker 3: Asia Gain but whose lives thread in and out of
Speaker 3: that story.
Speaker 7: And about seventy five seventy six, I remember going and
Speaker 7: I got involved. I had a store at Cock Street
Speaker 7: Market and making clothes by that stage, we were making
Speaker 7: hippie dresses and stuff, and we would sort of go
Speaker 7: down and pick up some pot to sell at the market.
Speaker 7: I remember being down there and I was sitting there
Speaker 7: and I think that's when Marty Johnson, that's when I
Speaker 7: first met him.
Speaker 5: This is Malcolm who was running with a counterculture crowd
Speaker 5: who grew a little dope on the side Dan and Coromandel.
Speaker 7: He came in with a couple of other guys and
Speaker 7: they were all with black leather jackets on and shades,
Speaker 7: and they looked at me and said, who these bunnies?
Speaker 7: And we were sort of happy.
Speaker 5: So, you know, Malcolm is the same age as Marty.
Speaker 5: They're born less than a year apart, in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 5: nineteen fifty one. But Malcolm says they had a very
Speaker 5: different outlook towards selling drugs.
Speaker 7: They were business. They were doing business. We were just
Speaker 7: having fun, you know, making enough money to be able
Speaker 7: to have free drugs. You know, it was a means
Speaker 7: to an end. These guys were serious. They were buying quantities.
Speaker 7: They didn't want anyone else to be seen and there,
Speaker 7: and they resented our presence being there. You know, do
Speaker 7: they look good? So they look well. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: they looked well. I would say they looked like very
Speaker 7: slick salesman. You know, no, not probably not even very
Speaker 7: sex They looked like people out of a movie. Really,
Speaker 7: you know, they just looked a little bit too sharp,
Speaker 7: a little bit too well dressed, and you know, shiny
Speaker 7: shoes and flash cars and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not that surprising that the hippie guy
Speaker 3: isn't a fan of Marty's look. Before he becomes mister Asia,
Speaker 3: Marty Johnston is a men's wear retailer on Queen Street
Speaker 3: in downtown Auckland. That's where he meets Andy Maher. They
Speaker 3: work together at a place called Collars and Cuffs, and
Speaker 3: all the way through the nineteen seventies people will be
Speaker 3: struck by the expensive clothes he wears. The nineties killed,
Speaker 3: he's wearing a handmade French silk shirt, a very high
Speaker 3: end watch that costs as much as a car.
Speaker 5: His dad ran men's wear stores in Auckland. And he's
Speaker 5: a good looking guy too, quite tall six foot one
Speaker 5: and a half according to his police file, is hazel build,
Speaker 5: solid distinguishing marx an appendix scar on his abdomen and
Speaker 5: a scar on the right side of his head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that police file from November nineteen seventy six
Speaker 3: says those men's wear businesses were successful and quote there
Speaker 3: is obviously some wealth in the family. Madi Johnson had
Speaker 3: grown up on a farm just south of Auckland. Then
Speaker 3: the family had moved into the city and had gone
Speaker 3: to Takapuna Grammar on the north Shore.
Speaker 5: This in prestigious alumni from Takapuna Grammar. Sir Peter Bleak
Speaker 5: of America's cop theme was a couple of years ahead
Speaker 5: of Marti in school.
Speaker 3: Yes, and sailing will come into the story in a
Speaker 3: big way in the next episode. After school, Madey goes
Speaker 3: into the menswick game, as we mentioned, but he's also
Speaker 3: doing a little petty crime on the side. Busted in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty eight for burglary.
Speaker 5: Untaffed, but he doesn't go to prison. He's just sixteen
Speaker 5: seventeen years old.
Speaker 3: And then he stays out of trouble for a bit
Speaker 3: before being convicted in nineteen seventy three for possession of
Speaker 3: a single marijuana plant. It is flat, but again he
Speaker 3: avoids jail and then doesn't keep busted again at all.
Speaker 3: He does have a close call in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: But just looking at this internal police file from late
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy six, the cops say, quote, it is thought
Speaker 3: that he is possibly not very bright, but quite cunning.
Speaker 5: And at this point nineteen seventy five, nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 5: that's where Malcolm's meeting him at the Cook Street market
Speaker 5: and Marty Johnston has been running a relatively low level
Speaker 5: marijuana operation that is starting to ramp up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's clearly ambitious. Police file is standing to get
Speaker 3: quite thick. They're obviously aware of him in our recording,
Speaker 3: things like his implications to carry money overseas because they
Speaker 3: know he's involved in drug dealing, even if they can't
Speaker 3: pin anything on them.
Speaker 5: And it's important to note that difference that Malcolm brought
Speaker 5: up earlier. These guys who were checking him out of
Speaker 5: the Cook Street market in central Auckland, Marty, probably Andy Maher,
Speaker 5: one or two others, they're not really part of the counterculture,
Speaker 5: no doubt they think they're cool, but they also have
Speaker 5: quite conservative ambitions around respectability, particularly Marty without middle class
Speaker 5: north Shore grammar school back.
Speaker 3: Just looking at his business card, he's Mattin Johnson Esquire
Speaker 3: the Esquire is a bit of an affectation, and that's
Speaker 3: what his codename or nickname in the organization is Esquire,
Speaker 3: so other people have noticed.
Speaker 5: It's also the name of one of his dad's menswear stores.
Speaker 3: And Maddie yearns for that classic middle class success, the
Speaker 3: opposite of the Hippi mentra of turn on, tune and
Speaker 3: drop out. He wants money and power, and so he's
Speaker 3: really serious about selling drugs in a way that hasn't
Speaker 3: previously been done here in New Zealand.
Speaker 5: That's right, they're dealing to make a profit with a
Speaker 5: sophisticated international supply chain. Anyway, early in the nineteen seventies, Malcolm,
Speaker 5: the hippie guy from the market who'd been selling grass
Speaker 5: alongside dresses, he'd been busted trying to sell four tabs
Speaker 5: of acid to offset costs of a trip to Nelson.
Speaker 5: He was sent to jail for six months.
Speaker 7: Terry Clark was in there, and I think he was
Speaker 7: in there for. I don't think it was a drug charge.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure what he was in Weetacher for.
Speaker 5: But can you tell me what your first impressions of
Speaker 5: Terry Worre? Do you remember when you met him first,
Speaker 5: what you thought.
Speaker 7: Used car salesman. That's what I thought. I just thought,
Speaker 7: I've heard this stack before. This is the used car salesman.
Speaker 7: He's you know, he just had the stack. He had
Speaker 7: the rap, he had the rave, but he didn't do drugs,
Speaker 7: not to my knowledge.
Speaker 3: So again, unsurprisingly, Malcolm the hippie is not impressed by
Speaker 3: a guy who's pretty straight and starting to set himself
Speaker 3: up as someone who thinks he could be a big deal.
Speaker 7: He just had a swagger about him and that he
Speaker 7: was he was above us all. He was on some
Speaker 7: kind of elite level that we couldn't attain. You know.
Speaker 7: That's what I felt about him, that he just he
Speaker 7: had tickets on himself.
Speaker 5: Malcolm's recollections of Terry Clark might be colored by what
Speaker 5: happened over the coming years, because the innocence of the
Speaker 5: drug scene would be gone forever by the end of
Speaker 5: the decades.
Speaker 7: It changed. And I mean there was a young girl
Speaker 7: who was a woman who was sort of involved in
Speaker 7: the commune down in coramand who called the OHU down there,
Speaker 7: and she was a lovely young thing.
Speaker 5: Malcolm's talking about a woman called Barbara who used to
Speaker 5: date his friend Bruce.
Speaker 7: Anyway, Bruce said, we're going to go and visit Barbara,
Speaker 7: and I said, oh god, where this is Tokyo bath House.
Speaker 7: And we went to Tokyo bath House and she was
Speaker 7: she was a hooker, you know, And I was going,
Speaker 7: what the hell's going on there? And apparently she lost
Speaker 7: she had had a bag of drugs and lost it.
Speaker 7: She had to pay it off on her back and
Speaker 7: she had to work for this this alway house to
Speaker 7: pay the money back.
Speaker 5: And did you know who she was doing that for?
Speaker 7: It was definitely typed some way, or rather to Terry
Speaker 7: Clark here. And I met the woman who ran that place,
Speaker 7: a woman who ran all the girls that owe Terry
Speaker 7: money there, and she said no, she said, yeah, we're
Speaker 7: a woman who were victims and there were people like
Speaker 7: me who were enforcers.
Speaker 2: That was the first part of episode one of Mister
Speaker 2: Asia A Forgotten History. All six episodes are out now
Speaker 2: and available on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: The Front Page will be back with a new episode
Speaker 2: on Monday.