True crime: Saxon, drugs & rock’n’roll
The Saxons mixed with rock stars like Bon Jovi and Lonnie Mack, until a huge hashish shipment landed the brothers in jail, where their social circle included a granny killer and Ivan Milat. Now, they are living vastly different lives in Auckland. Tony Wal
Lloyd Saxon rummages through memorabilia in his van: the briefcase busted open by police when he was arrested 26 years ago; a Penthouse magazine featuring a spread on his drug-smuggling exploits with his brother; a giant-sized reward poster in his brother’s name.
Finally he finds the document he’s looking for, one he’s kept close for a quarter of a century – a ledger, neatly written in black biro with a list of names and numbers next to each.
It was written by his brother, music tour manager Ian Hall Saxon, and produced at trial as evidence of what happened to one of Australia’s biggest ever hashish shipments.
Lloyd still can’t believe his brother didn’t destroy the list. ‘‘That’s everything – the breakdown of the 10 tonnes, who got what, in his handwriting. Having that piece of paper in his possession, he’s guilty, he’s given us up. It’s a hangman’s noose.’’
Twenty-five years after the brothers were arrested, and 17 years after Lloyd was released from prison, he still seethes at Ian’s carelessness.
For a few months in 1989, after the pair were part of an operation to bring $96 million worth of hashish from Pakistan’s Swat Valley into their adopted homeland, they were rolling in money.
When police raided a Sydney garage rented by Lloyd Saxon, they found $7.13m in $100 bills as well as 6kg of hash.
How much did Lloyd make? ‘‘A f ..... lot,’’ he says. ‘‘I was a millionaire.’’
But it all came crumbling down when an associate gave them up to police. Ian Saxon escaped from Sydney’s Long Bay prison in a laundry van before he could stand trial, and fled to the US.
This denied Lloyd the chance to call his brother to give evidence that he, Ian, had placed the drugs and cash in the garage and Lloyd knew nothing about them.
Even now he can’t bring himself to say his brother’s name, preferring to call him by his prison number, P305.
Lloyd is convinced that his brother wanted him dead – ‘‘I’m the only one who knows everything about that piece of s...’’ – and claims Ian was behind several attempted hits on him. ‘‘I had people trying to stab me quite often.’’
He now sleeps in his late-model van, parking up in Parnell and Auckland Domain and driving around the country attending music festivals as an ‘‘itinerant bum’’.
It’s a long way from his 1980s heyday when he helped look after visiting rock acts. His yarns are peppered with great quotes: ‘‘I snorted coke with Herbie Hancock’’; ‘‘Jon Bon Jovi had a bit of an ego when I first met him’’; ‘‘Dizzie Gillespie was a pleasure, he brought his own hash with him.’’
Lloyd is 62 but looks younger, and continues his passion: running. Most days he can be seen jogging around Auckland’s trails, often with his shirt off. He was pretty good in his day too – he was intermediate cross-country champ at Manurewa High School the year John Walker was senior champ, he says.
‘‘It’s the best feeling, I’m on it now,’’ he says, wiping himself down after a morning run. ‘‘I’ve got endorphins pouring down my spine.
‘‘The difference between that and the artificial stimulants – artificial stimulants you can’t hide the shake. I’m much higher sometimes just thinking about a run.’’
At a lifestyle block on remote Awhitu Peninsula south of Auckland, owned by concert promoter Brent Eccles, lives a 73-year-old man and his dog. You wouldn’t know from looking at him that Ian Saxon was once Australia’s most wanted man.
‘‘I live quietly out here in the country, and I want to keep it that way,’’ he says.
Ian was an apprentice jockey before moving into show business in the 1960s as a singing compere with acts like Howard Morrison and Dinah Lee.
Wellington promoter Ken Cooper says Ian was always well dressed. ‘‘His hair was always perfect, the ladies liked him. He was always looking to make a quid.’’
In the 70s Ian spent a few years in the US, where he met drug contacts, Lloyd says. ‘‘He was a cocaine and pot smuggler in America. He liked the thrill of the chase.’’
But an attempt to bring several kilos of Peruvian cocaine to Australia with smuggling partner Gary Morton in 1978 failed when they were caught at the airport in Tahiti, Lloyd says, and they spent 51⁄2 years in a Tahitian prison.
Lloyd, a decade younger than his brother, had left school at 15 to join the army, where he did his carpentry apprenticeship. Blows during a sparring session and a rugby match shattered his eardrums and he was pensioned out of the army after four years.
He moved to Sydney in 1977 and became a ‘‘gun for hire’’ carpenter, and also started writing to Ian in jail, getting to know him again.
When Ian was released in the early 80s the brothers teamed up in Sydney, Ian working as a freelance tour manager for his friend Michael Chugg’s Frontier Touring Company and Lloyd helping out as a driver.
One of Lloyd’s favourite stories is the time in 1986 when Jon Bon Jovi, at the height of his Slippery When
Wet fame, decided to go for a run in Sydney’s Centennial Park.
Lloyd, the runner, was tasked with joining the security team.
‘‘We were 100m behind him, Jon’s out there with hair flowing in the wind . . . but the girls had recognised him and started to gather.
‘‘I just did a Peter Snell, changed gears, next thing I’m up alongside him. I said ‘there’s a lot of girls starting to gather Jon, the boys wondered if you want to get in the bus’. The reason he decided not to run any more was he was embarrassed because I showed him up.’’
During this time, Lloyd says, he was an ‘‘extremely loyal little brother. I knew the payback was either going to be, one day [Ian]
I’m the only one who knows everything about that piece of s***. I had people trying to stab me quite often.
was just going to give me a lot of money, or I was going to have to help with something to do with marijuana.’’
He was offered a spot crewing a drug boat from Thailand. ‘‘He said ‘you’d have weapons, there’s pirates’. I said ‘f... that’.
‘‘Finally in ’89 he told me they [Ian and smuggling partner Morton] had something coming, they didn’t know when it would arrive, but they had to have everything ready to go.’’
The ‘‘something’’ was an enormous load of high-quality hashish, or cannabis resin, from north-west Pakistan’s frontier district, packed in 500 ammunition bags left behind when the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan.
‘‘P305 got got the call . . . that the stuff’s going to cross this point 100 miles to sea off the coast of New South Wales and it will keep crossing that point for a week.’’
Ian had bought a Shark Cat to fetch the drugs, as well as a house boat, to which the hashish was transferred.
Lloyd didn’t go to sea with Ian to collect the drugs, but he did help unload the shipment, weigh each block and repackage.
Everything went smoothly, and within six months most of the hash had been sold, including five tonnes to the Rebels motorcycle gang.
If he hadn’t been arrested, Lloyd says, Ian would have pocketed $20m. Lloyd won’t say exactly how much he got.
‘‘I just carried on living a normal life, but without the stress of worrying about paying the mortgage. I got to enjoy a lot of [the money] but then a lot of it got stolen by the scumbag lawyers and P305.’’
Lloyd was watching the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990 when he got a call from Michael Chugg saying Ian had been arrested in Sydney.
A heroin user associate who’d gone to sea to help fetch the drugs had blabbed, and Ian had been put under surveillance.
So had Lloyd, and officers had watched as he went to Kings Cross to pick up $362,000 from the same nark.
He went to Waiheke Island to tell their elderly mother the bad news, and as he was walking back to the ferry he passed a couple of blokes who looked suspiciously like undercover cops. He called a lawyer and was told warrants were out for him, too.
‘‘I still had a little bit of money on me, I got a few of the relatives together and we went to Cin Cin [restaurant] on the wharf and I treated them all to Dom Perignon.
‘‘The day I flew back and handed myself in, Waitangi Day, was the worst day of my life.’’
Lloyd pleaded guilty to receiving the $362,000 of drug money but was adamant he knew nothing about the drugs, cash and $100,000 worth of gold Krugerrands found in the Coogee garage he rented from an old lady to store his builder’s gear.
But the jury at his 1993 trial didn’t believe him and he was found guilty of conspiracy to import 10 tonnes of hashish, among other charges, and jailed for 13 years, to serve a minimum of 81⁄2.
After his release in 1999, he bumped into the prosecutor at his trial on Waiheke Island. ‘‘He made the inference clear to me that if Ian had of thrown up his hands, I was free, because they had no direct evidence on me.’’
Ian, meanwhile, had entered Australian criminal folklore by escaping from prison in a laundry van. He was on the run for two years, a $250,000 bounty on his head, before he was recaptured in San Diego alongside a Colombian drug lord.
Ian told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph he escaped because Long Bay was ‘‘just bloody horrible, I saw people killed, I saw the worst of everything’’.
But he didn’t mind serial killer Ivan Milat, he told the paper, who was friendly and polite. ‘‘We got on well.’’
Lloyd also spent time in Long Bay, but was moved around various jails. He says prison authorities went hard on him because he wouldn’t say where his brother was, not that he knew, and he did seven years in maximum security.
He was popular with other inmates, who would thank him for the hashish shipment. ‘‘They said ‘the product is so good’ . . . these guys wanted to buy me things, I was getting Coca-Cola and lollies.’’
He served time with notorious ‘‘granny killer’’ John Wayne Glover, and was present when other inmates poured a bucket of urine over him.
‘‘He said ‘how dare you do that to me’. I just said, ‘how dare you take away all those kids’ grandmothers’.’’
Ian surprised everyone by pleading not guilty to the escape, claiming he’d been ‘‘kidnapped’’ by corrupt guards who demanded money.
The jury was hung, but eventually he pleaded guilty. He received a hefty 16-year sentence for the drugs conspiracy.
In 1998 Ian was stabbed and was later moved to the prison’s Special Purpose Centre.
Lloyd believes this shows that his brother had become an informant.
It was no coincidence that Mark Standen, a senior organised-crime investigator who arrested Ian twice, was himself arrested as part of a $120m drugs importation conspiracy just a day after Ian was released early from prison in 2008, Lloyd reckons.
The pair had become matey, he says, pulling out a letter Standen wrote to Ian when the latter was incarcerated and Standen was still a cop.
Ian laughs at his brother’s claims. He confirms he was in the special unit and effectively disappeared from the system, known only by a number, but says that was part of his ‘‘savage treatment’’ by prison authorities.
‘‘Please, I wouldn’t have done 16 years and eight months if I’d been an informant. I was P305 because that’s where they put me in solitary.’’
He was released a few months early on compassionate grounds because he’d suffered a stroke and had bladder cancer, he says.
Ian believes Lloyd came back from Australia ‘‘institutionalised’’ and is ‘‘very bitter with the whole family, not just me’’.
Lloyd’s claims that he tried to have him killed are delusional, he says.
Although he is mostly retired, Ian has done some liaison work for his friend Andrew McManus, the promoter of the Ragamuffin festival who was arrested last year in Australia in connection with a 300kg cocaine importation.
He’s also worked for old mates Chugg and Eccles.
‘‘I worked on Kiss for a few days and Robbie Williams.
‘‘They’d call me up because certain artists would come in and ask for me.
‘‘Like Billy Idol, I was his tour manager back in the 80s, so when he came here last year he said ‘I want Ian to look after me’.
‘‘I’m really not interested any more, I live pretty simply. We’ve got avocado trees and a bunch of chooks, I potter around with those things.’’
He says that although Lloyd was a talented builder, he wasn’t much good at the tour business, claiming he was spotted backstage at a Bon Jovi gig with a beer when he was supposed to be driving the band.
‘‘You’re driving around a $40m a year enterprise, you can’t be doing that.’’
Does he ever see Lloyd? ‘‘I see him on occasion at a rock’n’roll concert. I’ll see him go by, and I’ll know he’s seen me.’’
Lloyd has sold properties he owned on Waiheke and can’t work full-time as a carpenter because of shoulder problems.
He lives ‘‘frugally’’ and says he’s never needed a lot of money. ‘‘I’m living as good as I’ve ever lived.’’
Graham Hooper, a photographer friend, says: ‘‘Lloyd’s had an amazing life, the things he’s got up to, the musicians he’s met.’’
Strangely, given that it ruined a chunk of his life, Lloyd remains proud of the drug importation.
‘‘I’m proud that we did that without anyone getting hurt. The stuff’s nearly legal now. I’m not a drug smuggler, I’m a herb smuggler.’’
The stuff’s nearly legal now. I’m not a drug smuggler, I’m a herb smuggler. Lloyd Saxon