Me & the drug dealers
Award-winning journo Jim Mahoney’s memoirs cover heroin addiction, prison brawls, and his associations with infamous Mr Asia gang dealers Terry Clark and Errol Hincksman. He talks to Helen King.
Sitting in a cafe in Auckland’s upmarket suburb of Remuera, neatly dressed in a woollen pull-over and khaki slacks, Jim Mahoney doesn’t look like a man with a past.
On paper, the 67-year-old’s life is somewhat unremarkable – middle-class Pa¯keha¯ boy, grew up in Remuera, went to university, marriage, children, successful career in journalism. It’s the gaps in time during the 1970s where the cracks in the facade start to show.
Driving through his childhood stomping ground, past the grand old homes nestled between newer architecturally designed creations, Mahoney remembers the first time he heard of opiates.
He’d been to a film at the old Tudor theatre in the Remuera shops, the imperial era Smiley, some time in the late 1950s, maybe early 1960s. Smiley, a nice Australian boy, discovers an evil publican is selling opium to Aborigines. Mahoney went home and asked his mumwhat opium was.
‘‘She explained it gives you beautiful dreams and makes you feel good but then you get addicted and you can’t do without it.’’
He didn’t hear the last part, fixated on the part of feeling good. He laughs thinking about it, wonders if he’d listened whether his life trajectory would have been different.
Meeting Sin
Mahoney is in his element spinning a yarn, and that’s in evidence in his just-completed autobiography Sin, which weaves together his tales of drug-induced debauchery.
Synonymous to the 1970s drug scene was the Mr Asia gang, which first imported heroin on a large scale into New Zealand.
Marty Johnstone, who earned the tag ‘‘Mr Asia’’, was murdered on the orders of his business partner, Terry Clark, nicknamed Sin by fellow crim Errol Hincksman.
‘‘He used to call him Mr X and Mr Sin because he was a wannabe king of crime. And, of course, he became what he wanted to be, very briefly.’’
Mahoney was doing time for robbing a chemist’s shop when he first met Clark in Wi Tako (now Rimutaka Prison).
‘‘He was, as I suspected, very keen on the world knowing what a big man he was, but I soon lost that notion.’’
And so Mahoney was distinctly unimpressed by the television version of Clark’s life, the series Underbelly – A Tale of Two Cities.
Clark isn’t the only colourful character brought back to life in Mahoney’s autobiography; others who cross his pages including the Symonds St prostitute he bought heroin from, and the acid-taking partner who gave birth to their first child while tripping.
A life less ordinary
While his stories are often humorous accounts of the dysfunction of drug addiction, they also serve as a cautionary tale.
‘‘No one expected a nice middle-class boy who grew up in Remuera to be a heroin addict but that’s the thing about addiction, it doesn’t discriminate.’’
Mahoney’s rock bottom came when he realised his liver was failing and he was going to die. He was 31.
But it would take close to a decade for the former junkie to get clean.
Mahoney – who would go on to a successful career in journalism, including a Canon Media Award for feature writing last year – finishes the last of his latte as he ponders whether he has any regrets. He’s pragmatic about the damage caused by his addiction. ‘‘The past is in the past. You can’t change it.’’
I met Clark at a house in one of the hillside suburbs to the west of the Hutt Valley that belonged to a friend of Norma. i was on weekend leave. A couple of days earlier i’d read in the morning paper that one of my Wellington mates, Johnny, had been busted for supplying morphine. It looked very much like he’d been dobbed in.
I rang him. ‘‘Who’s this guy Eric Long?’’ I asked. ‘‘Did he nark on you, because it certainly seems like it from the story in the Dom?’’
‘‘Yeah, he did,’’ said Johnny. ‘‘Where does he live?’’ He gave an address in Glenmore St, Wellington.
‘‘You’re not going to do anything, are you?’’ ‘‘No.’’ Clark and I sped into Wellington in his paroler’s car and I jogged to the front door of the house, then knocked loudly. Bass barking came from inside. I imagined bitten legs or worse. The door opened and a skinny junkie with shoulder-length greasy hair and pimples poked his head out the door. ‘‘I’m looking for Eric Long.’’ ‘‘That’s me.’’ I hit him with a weak left followed by a right cross that whistled over his head because he’d already fallen straight back onto the floor, not from the first punch, I suspected, but through pure cowardice. The dog, a black Labrador, ran howling up the corridor to the back of the house, ducked into a room and stayed there, whimpering occasionally.
I took a couple of perfunctory kicks at the nark but couldn’t bring myself to hurt him badly – he was so obviously terrified, physically feeble and incapable of defending himself. It was like beating up a child or handicapped person.
‘‘You dirty, gutless little shelf,’’ I told him, then headed back to the car as Clark ran in and kicked him in the head repeatedly. ‘‘Ha, ha,’’ said Clark when he hopped back in the driver’s seat. ‘‘I told him to be very careful of what he said to the cops or the big guy would come back and next time he’d give him a proper hiding.’’ Johnny got two years. Some time after I got out, John ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/STUFF arrived on escort from Crawford and was ushered into wing 4.
‘‘Which one of you’s JD,’’ he heard someone call out. He froze when he saw what he described as an evil-looking little guy heading his way. ‘‘Me.’’ ‘‘Hi, I’m Terry,’’ said Sin. ‘‘You’re a mate of Jim Mahoney, aren’t you?’’
They became friends along with Irish Joe, a chum of Hincksman who was imprisoned after my release and naturally gravitated to Terry. When, Joe, JD and Terry were released about the same time they started a small drug importing business.
They were busted early in their association on a relatively minor marijuana possession charge. While they were in Auckland lawyer Eb Leary’s waiting room they struck up a conversation with a farmer’s wife whose husband had been jailed for cultivating dope. The crop had been harvested and stashed but not sold.
‘‘Can you get rid of 100 pounds of marijuana?’’ she asked. ‘‘Sure,’’ said Clark. the trio took turns picking up the dope, which was stashed in 10lb lots in culverts or under bushes on a rural road in Northland.
JD reckoned the dope seemed to run out well before they’d got through 100lb. Terry arranged to pick up the last 30lb in one load. He returned empty handed, saying there’d been nothing but a bare hole at the pick-up spot. He called the farmer’s wife and told her they’d either been ripped off or the dope had never been there.
‘‘Of course I didn’t sweat over it. It was a cheap way to find out why it was a good idea never to get too close or in too deep with him,’’ JD said.
They took separate paths not long after, although JD and his brother-in-law later distributed Terry’s heroin in Auckland.
I got sick of dad’s pestering and agreed to go with him to Porirua Hospital, just outside Wellington. his friend, classical music buff and fellow drunk Dr David Clouston, the deputy superintendent, was willing to run another ECG on me, he said.
After the long trip from Auckland I was again subjected to the indignity of jelly being pasted on my head and electrodes attached to it so my brain could be scanned. When it was over I asked where I was staying that night.
‘‘Here in the ward,’’ a male nurse replied. ‘‘Where’s Dad?’’ ‘‘He’s at the deputy superintendent’s house but there’s no room for you.’’
I slept in a room – more like a bare cell – in Male 9 ward, then asked for my father when I woke the next morning. ‘‘He’s not here yet,’’ I was told. I asked again around morning tea.
‘‘Actually, he’s gone already,’’ was the response.
‘‘What do you mean he’s gone?’’ ‘‘He’s gone back to Auckland.’’ ‘‘So how am I getting back?’’ ‘‘You’re not. You’ve been committed under the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act.’’
In the early 20th century a correlation was discovered between epileptic fits and subsequent recovery from depression in those unfortunate enough to have both conditions.
The scientists of the day set about finding a way to induce epilepsy. They settled on hooking patients up to the national grid and firing an electric shock through their brains to simulate epilepsy. ECT, or shock treatment, is apparently still used in some places. The persistence of such a cruel, primitive and stupid regime is mind-boggling. It erases memories, has never been shown to effect anything other than brief remission from depression and is known to be useless in the treatment of addiction. Deputy superintendent Clouston apparently believed my underlying depression would be cured by this electroconvulsive ‘therapy’ and that I would then be free from addiction. He had convinced my father to abandon me to his treatment. It wouldn’t have been hard. They were both alcoholics and would almost certainly have been p...ed that night, although my fate had been decided well before, I suspect.
My father was desperate to find a cure for me and saw my addiction in terms of a mental