April 17, 2025 • 19 mins
For much of the 1970s, Marty Johnstone operated as one of New Zealand’s most notorious drug dealers.
Dubbed ‘Mr 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 1979, his mutilated body was found in a quarry in Lancashire, England. He was just 27 when he was murdered, killed by his best friend, Andy Maher.
The epic rise and rapid fall of the country’s most infamous drug gang is retold in Mr Asia: A Forgotten History, a new six-part podcast series from the New Zealand Herald and Bird of Paradise Productions.
Here’s a snippet from episode one, 'When Terry Met Marty'.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hilda.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
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
(00:28):
a global heroin empire, but his life at the top
was short lived. In November nineteen seventy nine, his mutilated
body was found in a quarry in Lancashire, England. It
was just twenty seven years old when he was murdered,
killed by his best friend Andy Mayer. The epic rise
and rapid fall of one of the country's most infamous
(00:50):
drug gangs is retold in Mister Asia A Forgotten History,
a six part podcast series from The New Zealand Herald
and Bird of Paradise Productions. Here's a snippet from episode one,
when Terry met Marty.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Just a warning here. The series features adult language drug
use in descriptions of violent crime, including assault and murder.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So we're coming down a lane that's called Too Good Lane, and.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
It's a very narrow English country road. It's a two
lane road.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
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
(02:23):
the boot of the car was the body of another
man in New Zealand.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
What's it saying?
Speaker 6 (02:28):
What scuba diving?
Speaker 7 (02:30):
Yeah? Got it?
Speaker 8 (02:31):
That's it?
Speaker 5 (02:32):
Is it saying del scuba Diving Center?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yet?
Speaker 9 (02:34):
That's it?
Speaker 7 (02:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I thought we were going forever asy center.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well I think they.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
I mean, they do a bit of leisure here, they
do a bit of diving.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But it's not really the weather for it is this?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Nor What have you got it?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
I do?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
I have an umbrella in my bag.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Of course I do, but.
Speaker 9 (02:51):
I came from Ireland, so I start with me, Oh
my goodness, it's pouring.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, so we just wait a minute.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
I'm just going to consult my ma.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Instiniches of.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Did you ever hear about the poorly handless corpse?
Speaker 5 (03:27):
So in nineteen seventy nine a body was found.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
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
(04:04):
cut off Johnston's heads and basted his face with a hemmer,
aiming to break his teeth. He'd done this in the
hope of avoiding identification of the body. Finally, Andy May
had come here with his cousin to throw his friend's
corpse into the flooded quarry Edigleston delf.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (04:59):
Would have been so it was kind of bad luck
good luck.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
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
(05:25):
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.
And now I'm talking about a handless corpse, but I'm
trying to be nice, trying to make it seem normal. Anyway,
we're here at Eccleston delf and while it's actually very
(05:46):
beautiful birds and trees and water and flowers, it also
feels kind of creepy when you know what happened.
Speaker 9 (05:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (07:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:31):
From Bird of Paradise Productions and the New Zealand Herald,
this is Mister Asia, a forgotten history. I'm Noel mccausen and.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
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.
Speaker 8 (07:55):
I think when the Mister Asa syndicate started, they were
very entrepreneurial.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
As they stepped up, they were the biggest in the world.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
In the end, trust gave way to greed and the
dream became a nightmare of violence and betrayal.
Speaker 8 (08:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
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
(09:25):
from a cottage industry to a multi national business.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
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
(11:05):
back in the day it wasn't really the case.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 7 (11:22):
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
(11:43):
first met him.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
This is Malcolm who was running with a counterculture crowd
who grew a little dope on the side Dan and Coromandel.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
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.
Speaker 7 (12:16):
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,
(12:38):
they looked well. I would say they looked like very
slick salesman. You know, no, not probably not even very
sex They looked like people out of a movie. Really,
you know, they just looked a little bit too sharp,
a little bit too well dressed, and you know, shiny
shoes and flash cars and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
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
(13:21):
all the way through the nineteen seventies people will be
struck by the expensive clothes he wears. The nineties killed,
he's wearing a handmade French silk shirt, a very high
end watch that costs as much as a car.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
Untaffed, but he doesn't go to prison. He's just sixteen
seventeen years old.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
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
(15:00):
that he is possibly not very bright, but quite cunning.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
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
(15:58):
north Shore grammar school back.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
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.
Speaker 5 (16:13):
It's also the name of one of his dad's menswear stores.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
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.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
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.
(16:58):
He was sent to jail for six months.
Speaker 7 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
But can you tell me what your first impressions of
Terry Worre? Do you remember when you met him first,
what you thought.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Malcolm's talking about a woman called Barbara who used to
date his friend Bruce.
Speaker 7 (18:20):
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
(18:42):
pay the money back.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
And did you know who she was doing that for?
Speaker 7 (18:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
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.
Hilda.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
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
(00:28):
a global heroin empire, but his life at the top
was short lived. In November nineteen seventy nine, his mutilated
body was found in a quarry in Lancashire, England. It
was just twenty seven years old when he was murdered,
killed by his best friend Andy Mayer. The epic rise
and rapid fall of one of the country's most infamous
(00:50):
drug gangs is retold in Mister Asia A Forgotten History,
a six part podcast series from The New Zealand Herald
and Bird of Paradise Productions. Here's a snippet from episode one,
when Terry met Marty.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Just a warning here. The series features adult language drug
use in descriptions of violent crime, including assault and murder.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So we're coming down a lane that's called Too Good Lane, and.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
It's a very narrow English country road. It's a two
lane road.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
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
(02:23):
the boot of the car was the body of another
man in New Zealand.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
What's it saying?
Speaker 6 (02:28):
What scuba diving?
Speaker 7 (02:30):
Yeah? Got it?
Speaker 8 (02:31):
That's it?
Speaker 5 (02:32):
Is it saying del scuba Diving Center?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yet?
Speaker 9 (02:34):
That's it?
Speaker 7 (02:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:36):
I thought we were going forever asy center.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Well I think they.
Speaker 5 (02:40):
I mean, they do a bit of leisure here, they
do a bit of diving.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
But it's not really the weather for it is this?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Nor What have you got it?
Speaker 4 (02:48):
I do?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
I have an umbrella in my bag.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Of course I do, but.
Speaker 9 (02:51):
I came from Ireland, so I start with me, Oh
my goodness, it's pouring.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, so we just wait a minute.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
I'm just going to consult my ma.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Instiniches of.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Did you ever hear about the poorly handless corpse?
Speaker 5 (03:27):
So in nineteen seventy nine a body was found.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
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
(04:04):
cut off Johnston's heads and basted his face with a hemmer,
aiming to break his teeth. He'd done this in the
hope of avoiding identification of the body. Finally, Andy May
had come here with his cousin to throw his friend's
corpse into the flooded quarry Edigleston delf.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
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.
Speaker 9 (04:59):
Would have been so it was kind of bad luck
good luck.
Speaker 5 (05:03):
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
(05:25):
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.
And now I'm talking about a handless corpse, but I'm
trying to be nice, trying to make it seem normal. Anyway,
we're here at Eccleston delf and while it's actually very
(05:46):
beautiful birds and trees and water and flowers, it also
feels kind of creepy when you know what happened.
Speaker 9 (05:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
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.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:53):
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.
Speaker 6 (07:12):
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.
Speaker 5 (07:31):
From Bird of Paradise Productions and the New Zealand Herald,
this is Mister Asia, a forgotten history. I'm Noel mccausen and.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
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.
Speaker 8 (07:55):
I think when the Mister Asa syndicate started, they were
very entrepreneurial.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
As they stepped up, they were the biggest in the world.
Speaker 5 (08:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
In the end, trust gave way to greed and the
dream became a nightmare of violence and betrayal.
Speaker 8 (08:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (09:04):
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
(09:25):
from a cottage industry to a multi national business.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:44):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
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.
Speaker 5 (10:44):
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
(11:05):
back in the day it wasn't really the case.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
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.
Speaker 7 (11:22):
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
(11:43):
first met him.
Speaker 5 (11:47):
This is Malcolm who was running with a counterculture crowd
who grew a little dope on the side Dan and Coromandel.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (12:03):
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.
Speaker 7 (12:16):
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,
(12:38):
they looked well. I would say they looked like very
slick salesman. You know, no, not probably not even very
sex They looked like people out of a movie. Really,
you know, they just looked a little bit too sharp,
a little bit too well dressed, and you know, shiny
shoes and flash cars and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (12:57):
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
(13:21):
all the way through the nineteen seventies people will be
struck by the expensive clothes he wears. The nineties killed,
he's wearing a handmade French silk shirt, a very high
end watch that costs as much as a car.
Speaker 5 (13:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
Untaffed, but he doesn't go to prison. He's just sixteen
seventeen years old.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
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
(15:00):
that he is possibly not very bright, but quite cunning.
Speaker 5 (15:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
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.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
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
(15:58):
north Shore grammar school back.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
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.
Speaker 5 (16:13):
It's also the name of one of his dad's menswear stores.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
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.
Speaker 5 (16:36):
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.
(16:58):
He was sent to jail for six months.
Speaker 7 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
But can you tell me what your first impressions of
Terry Worre? Do you remember when you met him first,
what you thought.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
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.
Speaker 7 (17:40):
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.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
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.
Speaker 7 (18:03):
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.
Speaker 5 (18:15):
Malcolm's talking about a woman called Barbara who used to
date his friend Bruce.
Speaker 7 (18:20):
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
(18:42):
pay the money back.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
And did you know who she was doing that for?
Speaker 7 (18:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
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.
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