A Tale of Two Cities by John Silvester Read Free Book Online

station it was in – he started to combine receiving with informing. The sneaky, calculating loner convinced of his own superiority soon became a regular police ‘fizz’. Ordinary in so many ways, hewas not quite normal, even for a ‘delinquent’: unlike most young criminals, he wasn’t a tearaway who hung around with his mates, drinking in pubs, fighting and thrashing and crashing cars. He lived quietly with his wife – first in a flat, then in a state-owned rented house.
    Writes Hall: ‘His informer role helped to make him deeply suspicious and cautious. He insisted on meeting his police contacts well away from the suburbs where he lived. The detectives who used Clark remember him with a special dislike … One detective recalls that Clark became so hostile that he had to be passed on to another, the detective deciding that he was too shifty to deal with even as a grass.
    â€˜From time to time Clark undertook regular work, but he always made sure the experience paid an extra dividend. One land sale company that employed him for a short time was burgled five times in the next year.’
    While still living with Sally, Clark had several women friends, several of them prostitutes. One, Norah Fleet, was an early heroin addict in Auckland’s fledgling drug culture. The cold-blooded Clark smelt an opportunity for fast money. In 1969, he bought 24 capsules of ‘heroin’ to re-sell – not suspecting it was a police sting. But fate had another trick in store – when the capsules were sent for testing, they turned out to be codeine and milk powder. Clark, who in the next decade would become one of the biggest dealers on Earth, had been conned. In the process, he had beaten the rap. But, for all his precautions, his luck was running out.
    â€˜As a grass, Clark was getting out of control,’ Hall would write. ‘Some say that when Clark was picked up attempting a safe in the country town of Napier in March 1971, he had been deliberately set up by police to get rid of him.’ Maybe it was because he had aimed too high: ‘lagging’ respected crooks with their own ways of getting back at him. Whatever the reason, they threw the book at him. In March 1971 he was sentenced to five years prison. Proof,perhaps, that no-one likes a rat. Except, it would turn out, several women who should have known better. But that was later, when he had far more money than they had sense.
    WI TAKO prison, at Trentham, north of Wellington, was a minimum-security jail for first offenders. As such, Clark would probably have been sent there automatically. Typically, though, he claimed he had got there through inside influence – a contact at the Justice Department. Although he won a reputation as a jail ‘heavy’, and was twice charged with fighting, he made sure he didn’t do anything serious enough to get him sent to a tougher jail full of hardened offenders. Working in the joinery workshop, he invented a yachting self-steering device. He was keen on boats and read voraciously about them. Mainly, though, other inmates would remember him as a wheeler-dealer with a talent for corrupting people. And for deceiving them. One of his contemporaries recalled him selling dried dock leaves to six other prisoners who thought it was marijuana.
    A fellow prisoner who later wrote a book about prison life describes Clark as having ‘that cold, implacable look that dulled his face when he spoke of dealing it to people.’ He also describes a tense prison visit from Clark’s parents where Clark’s broken-hearted father said bitterly he was prepared to set his son up in any legitimate business when he got out – ‘but no, he doesn’t want my money. He just has to make it himself by being a big-time crook.’
    Clark used to boast that if ‘you have enough bread, you can buy anyone’. About the only person he showed respect was the jail chaplain, for