NZH Presents: Mr Asia - A Forgotten History

Hilda.

I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. For much of the nineteen seventies, Marcy Johnstone operated as one of New Zealand's most notorious drug dealers. Dubbed mister Asia by journalists, Johnstone rose from North Shore menswear salesman to head of a global heroin empire, but his life at the top was short lived. In November nineteen seventy nine, his mutilated

Just a warning here. The series features adult language drug use in descriptions of violent crime, including assault and murder.

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

There's some houses here which look reasonably recently built, and I'm trying to imagine that forty five years ago it would have been quite rural and quite remote. There's no from what I can see, there's no street lights, are very few street lights.

It's a very narrow English country road. It's a two lane road.

The hours of octoberteenth, nineteen seventy nine, a brown jag Urix J six drove along this road. It's isolated just outside a small town called Truly in the north of England, at least than twenty minutes from the neighboring cities of Manchester and Liverpool. There were two men in the front seats, the driver and this passenger cousins, both British, but in the boot of the car was the body of another man in New Zealand.

What's it saying?

What scuba diving?

Yeah? Got it?

That's it?

Is it saying del scuba Diving Center?

Yet?

That's it?

Yeah?

I thought we were going forever asy center.

Well I think they.

I mean, they do a bit of leisure here, they do a bit of diving.

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

Nor What have you got it?

I do?

I have an umbrella in my bag.

Of course I do, but.

I came from Ireland, so I start with me, Oh my goodness, it's pouring.

Yeah, so we just wait a minute.

I'm just going to consult my ma.

Instiniches of.

The driver and the dead man had first met each other in the early nineteen seventies when they were both around twenty years old. That'd worked together in New Zealand and around the world, run close enough over the years for the driver to name the firstborn child after the man in the boot.

Did you ever hear about the poorly handless corpse?

So in nineteen seventy nine a body was found.

In the Delf by these two recreational divers. These two guys used to dive on the weekend and they thought it was a tailor's dummy sitting on a ledge about twenty feet down, but it was actually a man who had been.

Killed earlier that night. The driver, Andy Maher, had shot his best friend, twenty seven year old Marry Johnston twice in the back of the head, killing him. He then stabbed him multiple times in the stomach, looking to prevent jomp then floating up from his watery grave. Then mar cut off Johnston's heads and basted his face with a hemmer, aiming to break his teeth. He'd done this in the

They said they were taking him up to Scotland for a meat with I think a connection in Glasgow who could help him sell heroin, because that's what they were selling. And they killed him on the way, dumped him here. And the thing is, if they had dumped him a meter to the left, it's sixty meters deep there and he never.

Would have been so it was kind of bad luck good luck.

So I think what I'm going to do is go inside and ask now, just to fact check myself for a second, what I meant to say was sixty feet deep, not sixty meters, And the connection in Glasgow was from marijuana rather than heroine. And look, sorry about the tone here. It feels a bit gleeful listening back. But I've only just met Ben. He's a charter driver. I found him through my cousin who uses him to go to Liverpool matches. I've asked him to bring me here to this random place.

Okay, So now I'm walking up towards the cliff face, which looks familiar from the Lancashire police photos from nineteen seventy nine of them masked at the spot where the body was found. And remember when the body was initially found, they didn't oh whose it was. It just didn't have any hands and was quite grotesquely wounded, and by all.

Accounts back in nineteen seventy nine, this was a dumping ground, a disused quarry that had filled up with water at first. Then old cars and rubbish divers weren't even supposed to be here. The visibility was terrible and it was actually.

Dangerous anyway, Heroin or marijuana sixty meters is sixty feet. If the body had missed the ledge that sticks out just at this point it wouldn't have been discovered until years later when they eventually drained Eccleston delf and who knows what that might have.

Meant, But they did find it, and when they found out who he was, it standed a manhut that led to one of the biggest cour cases in English history and a Royal Commission of Inquiry of unprecedented scope in Australia and New Zealand, because while the dead man's name was Mailey Johnston, on the other side of the world he was known as mister Asia.

It's a tale of killer drugs earning countless millions of pearls for a syndicate whose members had a strange tendency to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes to turn up again in the most brittly circumstances.

From Bird of Paradise Productions and the New Zealand Herald, this is Mister Asia, a forgotten history. I'm Noel mccausen and.

I'm John Daniel. This is the story of some ordinary Kiwis wanting to make their fortune, and they weren't too fussy about how they did it.

I think when the Mister Asa syndicate started, they were very entrepreneurial.

As they stepped up, they were the biggest in the world.

You know, they had the biggest connections. Their choice of business was always going to be a problem. That last three years of my using was awful because every morning I woke up, I wished I'd died in the night, and I just think, fuck, can you have to start all over again through another day.

In the end, trust gave way to greed and the dream became a nightmare of violence and betrayal.

Julie was walking ahead, Terry dropped back. Then he just falled out a gun, shut her in the back of the head, and then said to Wayne, you're going to help me burier otherwise you go too, And so Wayne did.

Episode one when Terry met Marty. The discovery of Mardie Johnston's body in that flooded quarry in the north of England was the beginning of the end for the Mister Asia Syndicate. They were an international drug trafficking organization who had made tens of millions of dollars in left behind a trail of dead bodies.

The syndicate had dozens of affiliated people in different roles across at least three continents, but at its heart was the relationship between Marty Johnston and the man who ordered his murder, another New Zealander, Terry Clark. That relationship changed the face of drug culture in New Zealand. Drugs went from a cottage industry to a multi national business.

Yeah, it was absolutely a jump shift and you can still see the effects playing out today. His GREEG Williams, the head of New Zealand Police's National Organized Crime Group, speaking to The Herald in August of twenty twenty three after another huge bust.

So we have a large number of these transnational crime quats across the world just wanting to pump drugs like meth and petamine into communities like cows, and they're really targeting New Zealand because we continue to pay some of the highest prices in the world for meth and pedamine and there's just mass of profits for them in this respect.

In the years following the unraveling of the Mister Asia gang, the Australian and New Zealand government set up a Royal inquiry into drug trafficking, the focus being Terry Clark and his associates. Over the course of nearly two years, the Commission heard from more than five hundred witnesses, many of them in secret to avoid retribution.

Yeah, and we'll come back to the inquiry and the unraveling because those huge numbers are important. Marty and Terry are the central characters. But the way it works, it spreads out and touches first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people. Today around half of New Zealanders have tried illegal drugs of some sort.

Yes, sometimes just a homegrown joint for private use, but often it's a purchase, meaning a dealer and in all likelihood a system behind that out of sight running a long way back through the hands of an organized criminal gang. Now, over the last few decades this has become normalized, but back in the day it wasn't really the case.

Yeah, so it help us get a hand on how this all worked. We're going to talk to a few Kiwis who will get to know over the course of the series, people who were directly involved with the mister Asia Gain but whose lives thread in and out of that story.

And about seventy five seventy six, I remember going and I got involved. I had a store at Cock Street Market and making clothes by that stage, we were making hippie dresses and stuff, and we would sort of go down and pick up some pot to sell at the market. I remember being down there and I was sitting there and I think that's when Marty Johnson, that's when I first met him.

This is Malcolm who was running with a counterculture crowd who grew a little dope on the side Dan and Coromandel.

He came in with a couple of other guys and they were all with black leather jackets on and shades, and they looked at me and said, who these bunnies? And we were sort of happy.

So, you know, Malcolm is the same age as Marty. They're born less than a year apart, in nineteen fifteen, nineteen fifty one. But Malcolm says they had a very different outlook towards selling drugs.

They were business. They were doing business. We were just having fun, you know, making enough money to be able to have free drugs. You know, it was a means to an end. These guys were serious. They were buying quantities. They didn't want anyone else to be seen and there, and they resented our presence being there. You know, do they look good? So they look well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they looked well. I would say they looked like very slick salesman. You know, no, not probably not even very

You know, it's not that surprising that the hippie guy isn't a fan of Marty's look. Before he becomes mister Asia, Marty Johnston is a men's wear retailer on Queen Street in downtown Auckland. That's where he meets Andy Maher. They work together at a place called Collars and Cuffs, and all the way through the nineteen seventies people will be

His dad ran men's wear stores in Auckland. And he's a good looking guy too, quite tall six foot one and a half according to his police file, is hazel build, solid distinguishing marx an appendix scar on his abdomen and a scar on the right side of his head.

Yeah, and that police file from November nineteen seventy six says those men's wear businesses were successful and quote there is obviously some wealth in the family. Madi Johnson had grown up on a farm just south of Auckland. Then the family had moved into the city and had gone to Takapuna Grammar on the north Shore.

This in prestigious alumni from Takapuna Grammar. Sir Peter Bleak of America's cop theme was a couple of years ahead of Marti in school.

Yes, and sailing will come into the story in a big way in the next episode. After school, Madey goes into the menswick game, as we mentioned, but he's also doing a little petty crime on the side. Busted in nineteen sixty eight for burglary.

Untaffed, but he doesn't go to prison. He's just sixteen seventeen years old.

And then he stays out of trouble for a bit before being convicted in nineteen seventy three for possession of a single marijuana plant. It is flat, but again he avoids jail and then doesn't keep busted again at all. He does have a close call in nineteen seventy five. But just looking at this internal police file from late nineteen seventy six, the cops say, quote, it is thought that he is possibly not very bright, but quite cunning.

And at this point nineteen seventy five, nineteen seventy six, that's where Malcolm's meeting him at the Cook Street market and Marty Johnston has been running a relatively low level marijuana operation that is starting to ramp up.

Yeah, he's clearly ambitious. Police file is standing to get quite thick. They're obviously aware of him in our recording, things like his implications to carry money overseas because they know he's involved in drug dealing, even if they can't pin anything on them.

And it's important to note that difference that Malcolm brought up earlier. These guys who were checking him out of the Cook Street market in central Auckland, Marty, probably Andy Maher, one or two others, they're not really part of the counterculture, no doubt they think they're cool, but they also have quite conservative ambitions around respectability, particularly Marty without middle class north Shore grammar school back.

Just looking at his business card, he's Mattin Johnson Esquire the Esquire is a bit of an affectation, and that's what his codename or nickname in the organization is Esquire, so other people have noticed.

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

And Maddie yearns for that classic middle class success, the opposite of the Hippi mentra of turn on, tune and drop out. He wants money and power, and so he's really serious about selling drugs in a way that hasn't previously been done here in New Zealand.

That's right, they're dealing to make a profit with a sophisticated international supply chain. Anyway, early in the nineteen seventies, Malcolm, the hippie guy from the market who'd been selling grass alongside dresses, he'd been busted trying to sell four tabs of acid to offset costs of a trip to Nelson. He was sent to jail for six months.

Terry Clark was in there, and I think he was in there for. I don't think it was a drug charge. I'm not sure what he was in Weetacher for.

But can you tell me what your first impressions of Terry Worre? Do you remember when you met him first, what you thought.

Used car salesman. That's what I thought. I just thought, I've heard this stack before. This is the used car salesman. He's you know, he just had the stack. He had the rap, he had the rave, but he didn't do drugs, not to my knowledge.

So again, unsurprisingly, Malcolm the hippie is not impressed by a guy who's pretty straight and starting to set himself up as someone who thinks he could be a big deal.

He just had a swagger about him and that he was he was above us all. He was on some kind of elite level that we couldn't attain. You know. That's what I felt about him, that he just he had tickets on himself.

Malcolm's recollections of Terry Clark might be colored by what happened over the coming years, because the innocence of the drug scene would be gone forever by the end of the decades.

It changed. And I mean there was a young girl who was a woman who was sort of involved in the commune down in coramand who called the OHU down there, and she was a lovely young thing.

Malcolm's talking about a woman called Barbara who used to date his friend Bruce.

Anyway, Bruce said, we're going to go and visit Barbara, and I said, oh god, where this is Tokyo bath House. And we went to Tokyo bath House and she was she was a hooker, you know, And I was going, what the hell's going on there? And apparently she lost she had had a bag of drugs and lost it. She had to pay it off on her back and she had to work for this this alway house to pay the money back.

And did you know who she was doing that for?

It was definitely typed some way, or rather to Terry Clark here. And I met the woman who ran that place, a woman who ran all the girls that owe Terry money there, and she said no, she said, yeah, we're a woman who were victims and there were people like me who were enforcers.

That was the first part of episode one of Mister Asia A Forgotten History. All six episodes are out now and available on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. The Front Page will be back with a new episode on Monday.