Corrupt cops, it's addictive TV crims and a heroin kingpin

FOR CRIMINALS and corrupt police, the 1970s were the best of times. When Terry Clark, alias Alexander Sinclair, landed in Sydney from New Zealand in 1976, he didn't even need a passport.

Clark was a small-time crook with big dreams. In Auckland, he'd been a police informer. Here, he would become a millionaire drug trafficker.

To women, until he turned nasty, Clark came across as a charming big spender. But to his enemies, he was evil: prepared to kill, then chop off hands and heads, all in the name of business.

Clark's generation of criminals was the first to systematically exploit the permissive society's taste for drugs. This is the backdrop to the events depicted - with some dramatic licence - in Underbelly: A Tale Of Two Cities, the television series starting tomorrow night.

Melbourne and Sydney underworlds were changing violently. Melbourne was the home of old-fashioned gunmen. Sydney criminals were just as ruthless but had learnt early the way to easy money was to have police onside.

Sydney had been corrupt since the Rum Corps, but in the 1970s, it exploded. Corrupt detectives franchised crime using "pet" criminals. Lennie McPherson, a safebreaker but no mastermind, became Mr Big after police gave him the "green light". Thug Arthur "Neddy" Smith became a protected mob leader. George Freeman made millions, brazenly. He was even photographed at Randwick races with Chief Magistrate Murray Farquhar.

The few honest police began illegally tapping gangsters' phones, producing what would later be known as "The Age Tapes". They recorded Freeman, drug syndicate boss "Aussie Bob" Trimbole and others.

Police, politicians and legal figures were recorded talking to crime bosses. It confirmed that in Sydney, everything was for sale.

Protected criminals thought they were untouchable. When the Griffith arm of the Calabrian mafia tired of local businessman Donald Mackay, who blew the whistle on the lucrative local marijuana racket, they ordered his execution in 1977.

They thought they could get away with murder. They were wrong.

At first politicians - except Al Grassby, who tried to sabotage the investigation - did little to assuage public outrage. But Mackay's murder was a new low: honest police investigating it were betrayed by corrupt colleagues. For a while, the crooks still believed they could do anything - such as shooting NSW undercover policeman Mick Drury to stop him giving evidence in a Melbourne drug case in 1984.

Judi Kane, for example, was a good woman who married a bad man. Husband Les was one of the most dangerous men of his generation until he was machine-gunned at their Wantirna home.

Judi would bravely testify against the three gunmen charged with the murder and became a close friend of Pat Hunter, the policewoman assigned to protect her.

Allison Dine became Terry Clark's lover and expert heroin courier. She would give evidence against him and disappear with a new identity.

Karen Soich was a young lawyer who fell in love with Clark and was once photographed rolling naked on a bed of banknotes. Clark was jailed for murder but Soich was acquitted and returned to New Zealand to build a career as an entertainment lawyer.

While the crooks in Melbourne and Sydney carried on killing each other over a shrinking empire, Clark was making a fortune in the shadows. Corrupt officials told him when any of his team were talking and he would have them killed. It would ultimately be his downfall.

When the bodies of two of his couriers, Isabel and Douglas Wilson, were found at Rye, Victoria, in 1979, it became a major homicide investigation. Paul Delianis, head of the Victorian homicide squad, realised the Clark syndicate had infiltrated the Federal Narcotics Bureau and declared war.

Delianis's initial investigations, followed by the creation of a taskforce headed by Carl Mengler, exposed the syndicate and finally revealed who had murdered the Wilsons and Donald Mackay.

Their investigations succeeded despite widespread corruption, police jealousies and political indifference. It was a long road but the Mr Asia syndicate was finally smashed. Terry Clark died in an English jail in 1983.

Trimbole was a likeable racing identity with a vicious streak and friends in high places. When the Stewart Royal Commission was set up, he was tipped off and left Australia secretly. He died in Spain in 1987, on the run but still a rich man.