A Tale of Two Cities (5 page)

One of the people Trimbole knew from the racetrack – and from eating in Tati's restaurant in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst – was Jimmy Shepherd. They had much in common: both were huge punters who laundered – or sometimes just lost – drug money at the races. Clark met Trimbole through Shepherd in the Sydney scene. As the Griffith marijuana business got a little ‘tropical' after Donald Mackay's murder in 1977, the two grew closer. Outwardly dissimilar, they had interests and abilities in common.

Trimbole, the bridge builder, started playing an active part in Clark's organisation and would eventually pay, on behalf of his Griffith principals, some $30 million to take over the Australian end of what the media would later call the ‘Mr Asia' syndicate – Clark's Organisation – while Clark stayed overseas. He, too, by mid-1978 was getting ‘tropical'.

On appearances and background, the scruffy, big-bellied Italian racing identity and the flinty, physically fit and impeccably-dressed Clark, who despised punting as a mug's game, had little in common except an aversion to honest work and access to obscene amounts of black money. The first real test of their fledgling business relationship was when Clark asked Trimbole to solve a problem for him. He wanted Douglas and Isabel Wilson killed.

His instructions were chillingly specific: he wanted the pair to disappear, as if they might have done a runner and changed their identities. Knowing how devoted they were to their dog, he wanted it killed, too; presumably because anyone who knew the Wilsons knew they wouldn't leave the dog. And, just before they were killed, they were to be told why: ‘You get this for talking to the police in Queensland.'

Trimbole was keen to please. He said he had just the man: one who had done another ‘job' for him. He meant the middleaged painter and docker James ‘Iceman' Bazley.

According to ‘Frank' Tizzoni, who would later testify against Bazley, Trimbole called him on 27 March 1979, and asked him to pick him up at Melbourne Airport. When Tizzoni did, they went to a hotel car park, where Trimbole told him Clark wanted to get rid of two people who had talked to police in Queensland. Tizzoni said he would find out if the hit man who had killed Mackay was available. Trimbole relayed the instructions about killing the dog, and about leaving the Wilsons' car in the long-term car park at the airport to make it look as if they had fled using false identities.

Tizzoni, himself a middle man, called the shifty Melbourne gun dealer, George Joseph, who by virtue of his occupation had friends on both sides of the law – criminals, police and security guards. Joseph had set up a meeting between Bazley and Tizzoni two years earlier at Trimbole's request.

The meeting took place at the same spot: in a car parked in the leafy residential street running behind Kew Cemetery. Tizzoni relayed the orders but Bazley resented the order to kill the Wilsons' dog, Taj. ‘Why do the dog? Dogs don't talk,' he said, in a bizarre display of compassion.

Tizzoni shrugged it off, and told Bazley the Wilsons would drive down from Sydney, expecting to meet a person at a Seymour motel (north of Melbourne) that they had been told they
were ‘taking over from' in Melbourne. Bazley would pose as that person. He suggested the following Sunday, 8 April, and asked for $10,000 for each victim. Tizzoni readily agreed, as Trimbole had made it clear there was much more money available than that. He agreed to drop the Wilsons' car at the airport and to ensure the bodies would never be found.

‘There's no worry about that; I'll put them through the mincer,' Bazley promised. These barbaric details were music to Clark's ears when later relayed to him by Trimbole.

When Trimbole heard Bazley was reluctant to kill the Wilsons' dog, he remonstrated and Tizzoni spoke to Bazley, who reluctantly agreed.

The Wilsons left Sydney that Sunday and drove south down the Hume Highway to Seymour, an hour north of Melbourne's suburbs. But Bazley had to cancel at the last minute because he had hurt his arm, which was in a sling. It was too late to head off the Wilsons. Trimbole flew to Melbourne and Tizzoni drove him to the Seymour motel the Wilsons had booked into, to make sure they were there, and had not suspected anything was amiss.

The Wilsons returned to Sydney, their lives spared for five more days. Two days later, Bazley told Tizzoni his arm was better and suggested the ‘job' go ahead that Friday. This was proof, if nothing else, that Bazley was neither religious nor superstitious.

It was Friday the 13th, and also Good Friday.

This time Bazley was waiting for the unsuspecting couple. No one knows exactly where he asked them to follow him, but it was most likely to a suburban house with a garage somewhere close to the airport. He told them why they were to die and shot Wilson first, then his wife. But he did not shoot the dog.

Taj the keeshond was found wandering the streets in the northern suburbs on Easter Monday, and was taken in and cared for by a man who later handed him in to police. Like Bazley, the Wilsons and Dennis Brown, the man who found their bodies a
month later, he was a dog lover – which was more than could be said of Terry Clark. He loved only himself and money – or, rather, the power it bought him over others.

Clark couldn't resist boasting about the murder to his third wife Maria Muhaury, mother of his son, Jarrod. During an argument, he threatened to get the same hit man to kill her if she caused any trouble. This might explain why she had no qualms about testifying against him later. But it doesn't explain why so many women threw themselves at Clark. His own theory was that it was the money.

THE RISE OF TERRENCE CLARK, DRUG DEALER

When a hit man was sent after him, Clark sat the gunman down, opened a bottle of wine, lit him a cigar and cleared up the misunderstanding. He was carrying a vintage Luger pistol and his associates had no doubt he would use it.

 

LATER, when his world had crashed around him, Terry Clark would sit in court reading Norman Mailer's
The Executioner's Song
, the true story of a death row prisoner who chose to be executed. A decade earlier, as a small-time crook with big ideas, Clark would have seen
The Godfather
, a film classic that inspired a generation of would-be gangsters. More literate than the usual run of thieves – he fancied himself as an artist – Clark most likely also read the Mario Puzo novel that inspired the Godfather films. And if he ever read Puzo's pithy line about what drives men to compete, he would have understood it, because it fitted him.

Men compete to succeed, Puzo said, so that beautiful women will love them. When detectives asked Clark about photographs
of his beautiful lawyer girlfriend Karen Soich rolling naked in money he replied: ‘Women like money, don't they?' Money was a means to an end, and for Clark a potent attraction was the power it gave him over women. It meant he could buy them, use them and discard them, often brutally.

After the author Richard Hall investigated Clark's background in New Zealand, he painted a picture of a small town loner – a skinny kid with a chip on his shoulder, without the physical or mental gifts to put him above his peers. There was nothing about him that marked him as special, except for the most important thing of all: an ego that drove him to do whatever it took to feel superior to the common herd. He wanted to be number one. To do that, he turned to crime the way some turn to sport and others to study or music. Unlike most people raised in relatively normal family circumstances, he showed no inhibitions about breaking the legal and moral rules.

Terrence John Clark was born in Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand's north island – the first city in the world to see the rising sun each day. When Clark was born on 13 November 1944, the biggest business in town was the abattoirs and freezing works, where his father, Leo, worked when Terry was young. ‘Good old Leo', as locals called him, was from a farming family and was a sportsman, a surfer and a founder of a local surf lifesaving club.

But while the father was a public-spirited sportsman in a sports-mad community, Terry wasn't. Not big or strong, he soon developed into a loner at school. He affected being a rebel without a cause. In that time and place, that meant being a ‘bodgie', with a Cornell Wilde haircut and a roll-your-own cigarette hanging from his lip. Whereas his younger brother Paddy was good at school and at sport, Terry went the other way: he played tough guy.

But there was ambition and a shrewd streak of business sense in the family. In the early 1950s, while Terry was in
primary school, Leo bought the local pie-cart – a caravan that sold pies, sausages and bacon at night. Soon after, he bought a better house. And by 1957 he set up the first driving-school in the town. Leo the farmer's son was not content to be an abattoir worker all his life. But while his family was bettering itself, Terry Clark was going the other way: he was unusually aggressive in schoolyard fights and so determined to be seen as tough he talked about carrying a knife and being prepared to use it.

Like a lot of kids from provincial towns, Terry Clark got out as soon as he could. By 1962, he was in Auckland working as a welder's assistant. He fancied something that paid better than handing welding rods to a tradesman but he wasn't going to follow his father into a life of hard work. He wanted short cuts.

It didn't take him long to collide with the law. The police picked him up for interfering with a car. He was given probation. Other youngsters in the same boat might have ‘pulled up' but Clark wasn't other youngsters. He was drawn to the dark and dirty side. In Auckland in the 1960s, that meant thieving. Illicit drugs were still almost unknown, armed robberies were rare. Burglary, theft and receiving were what Kiwi crooks did. Top of the pecking order were the safecrackers.

In 1963, Clark had begun what would become a habit: acquiring women. That year, while still on probation, he married a girl called Sally R. They moved into a flat. Meanwhile, Clark combined panel beating with minor rackets: stolen cars and shop breaking. But, already, he was receiving stolen goods from other thieves, which meant they did the dirty work and took the bigger risk. This set a pattern.

After a farcical foray into safe blowing – he left the gelignite on top of the safe, instead of drilling it, and blew up half the service 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, he
was 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.

‘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.

‘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 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.