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

whom he drew the head of Christ in black ink, a picture the chaplain would hang in his office for the rest of his career.
    By the time he was released in 1974 he had divorced Sally R and married his heroin addict prostitute, Norma Fleet. It ishard not to conclude he saw her as a way into the heroin dealing world. If so, he was on the money. In just a few years, drugs had taken over from the traditional forms of crime. The old underworld hierarchy of thieves was irrelevant. Norma was to die the following year from an overdose of Mandrax. Clark went to work dealing Thai ‘buddha’ sticks. Where other dealers flashed their money by buying big American cars, Clark stuck to a battered old English car, which blended in. He behaved himself – and he was no longer an informer.
    Careful as he was, Clark bumped into some high-living drug dealers. One of them was Martin Johnstone.
    Johnstone, younger than Clark, had been born in 1951 in a farming district near Auckland. He had a brother and a sister and their parents were a successful, hard-working business couple. After dropping out of a private school, he’d soon got into trouble for theft and burglary. Then he worked in an Auckland menswear shop – Collar’n’Cuffs – where he met an Englishman called Andrew Maher. By 1973 Johnstone was dealing in marijuana, but very small time. He was arrested that June in possession of two plants and told police he had developed an interest in horticulture because he was too poor to buy his own grass. The arresting detective described him as ‘a friendly, easy-to-approach person who would readily admit to offences.’
    But Marty Johnstone had no intention of remaining small time. While he and Clark were almost opposites in character they shared one personality trait – ambition. First it was local leaf then he moved up to imported Thai sticks. He bought the sticks from a connection on the Royal Dutch Orient Line, which sailed from Asian ports and whose Chinese crewmen easily outwitted New Zealand’s crude customs regime, mainly by tossing contraband overboard at pre-arranged spots to be picked up by small craft. The middle man on the Dutch boats was Choo Cheng Kui, known as ‘Chinese Jack’.
    Johnstone and Clark did shady ‘business’ together but there was always an underlying tension. Clark had done time and was street smart, but the younger Johnstone was tall, dark and handsome and had the insouciance of the well-dressed, private-school dandy he was. Charming and gregarious, he was also prone to melancholy – and not as ruthless and resilient as Clark. One thing they had in common, besides a taste for easy money, was a love for boats. Johnstone owned a speedboat he used to pick up contraband. Clark bought a 51-foot sloop, a symbol of success.
    Johnstone loved playing the prosperous businessman. A confidential New Zealand police report said, ‘He was becoming noted for his flamboyant lifestyle and jetset image.’ While Clark worked in the shadows, Johnstone sought the spotlight. It was another reason the two men were not destined to be long-term partners.
    Johnstone set up a group of companies and used one of them to buy a 36-foot boat, the
Brigadoon
, captained by one Peter Miller, who had been a member of the Exclusive Brethren religious sect. Johnstone put together a syndicate of backers to finance a voyage to buy half a million buddha sticks from Thailand – a plan police and customs soon got to hear about on the grapevine. Clark didn’t invest but became ‘wholesaler’ for the operation, agreeing to pay $3.50 per stick.
    The voyage of the
Brigadoon
was more Marx Brothers than mastermind. After a series of minor disasters, an Australian trawler skipper called John Chatterton agreed to tow the
Brigadoon
from Indonesia to near New Zealand, where police and customs had heard long before that a shipment of marijuana was on the way. But the
Brigadoon
was