CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The "Mr. Asia" Murders
The Stewart Royal Commission said it agreed with the conclusions of the Joint Task Force and Corporate Affairs Commission about the role Nugan Hand played in the drug business. Then it proceeded to misstate those conclusions. The Stewart commission referred to "allegations of drug trafficking in Australia," and then said the Joint Task Force and Corporate Affairs Commission had found "that the allegations were not correct except to the extent that drug funds were being deposited with [Nugan Hand affiliates] from time to time."
That statement was seized upon by former Nugan Hand staffers, and government officials interested in papering over the embarrassing facts, as evidence that Nugan Hand was clean on the drug issue. In fact, both the Joint Task Force and the Corporate Affairs Commission had placed Nugan Hand in the critical role of surreptitiously transferring drug income overseas, where it obviously could be reinvested in more illegal drugs.
The Stewart commission itself, in its text, accepted that Nugan Hand performed exactly this function. Moreover, it agreed that Michael Hand and George Shaw, at least, knew very well that ,they were handling dope money. But the commission didn't seem to want to face the implications of this.
As it did in several sections to make its investigation appear more thorough than it was, the Stewart commission devoted a lot of space to shooting down fringe allegations that had little credibility to start with-for example, a charge that Nugan Hand officials had attended a farewell luncheon for a dope dealer and later gave $25,000 to his wife. (The luncheon, reported only in the Communist newspaper Tribune, probably never took place, and the $25,000 went to another woman with a similar name.)
After devoting seven paragraphs to repeating and analyzing these two shaggy-dog stories, the Stewart commission tossed off in a mere two paragraphs Nugan Hand's undisputed involvement with a group of people so vile they make Murray Riley look angelic by comparison: The "Mr. Asia" gang.
***
Early on a Monday afternoon, March 26, 1979-while Admiral Yates was hopping continents seeking deals as president of the Nugan Hand Bank, and General Cocke was lending his luster to the office Nugan Hand would occupy in Washington, and General Black was fishing for business in the Pacific Basin, and U.S. intelligence veterans Mike Hand, Dale Holmgren, Doug Sapper, and George Farris were baiting their own hooks here and there -- the telephone rang on the desk of George Shaw at Nugan Hand headquarters in Sydney.
The caller was John Aston, a Sydney lawyer who specialized in criminal defense work, particularly drug cases, and who was a frequent Nugan Hand client himself. By his own admission, [1] Aston let his office be used frequently by Nugan Hand as a pick-up point for various parcels. He says his law clients wanted to protect their confidentiality, and so didn't themselves want to be seen in Nugan Hand's office. Therefore, he says, they left the parcels with him for pick-up by Nugan Hand. But Aston says he was never aware of the contents of the parcels, including the ones of March 26, 1979.
Shaw has testified under a grant of immunity from prosecution [2] that the parcels Aston asked him to pick up that March 26 were two overnight bags, containing about $300,000 cash. A cousin of Shaw's and another man, a Nugan Hand client, both have testified that they drove with Shaw to Aston's office, where Shaw entered alone, then returned with the two bags.
Shaw testified that Aston told him, "I have some clients who want some money moved overseas without any fuss. There is $285,000 in those bags, plus some extra to cover your costs. We don't want this money to show up anywhere on the records."
According to Shaw's testimony, Aston told him to cable instructions to Nugan Hand's Singapore office that a man named Choo Cheng Kui be authorized to pick up the $285,000. Choo was to identify himself with his passport, with a given number. [3] Helping Shaw carry the money-laden bags to the car was Aston's law partner [4] Brian Alexander-the same lawyer police found with Ken Nugan at Frank Nugan's house the night Frank Nugan died.
Shaw drove the bags back to the Nugan Hand office, where he met Steve Hill, who also testified, providing additional verification for the story from this point. Both men say they opened the bags and counted Australian bills in $10, $20, and $50 denominations. But they were disconcerted to see that a lot of the money was marked with purple dye, and they remarked to each other that this meant it might have come from a bank robbery. They immediately reported this to Frank Nugan, who they say told them not to worry about it. Nugan ordered the money put in the safe-routine procedure when clients brought in cash deposits.
The next day, there was more routine procedure. Frank Nugan had bought a soft-drink distribution company called Orange Spot, and he used its heavy daily flow of small-bill cash to launder funds that came in to the bank. That's what he did with the Aston money.
Calls were made to the Orange Spot manager, and to an armored car service. Shaw then delivered the money from the Aston pick-up to the Orange Spot office, where it was turned over to the armored car service as if it were soft-drink receipts. The armored car service gave its check to Shaw in exchange. Thus the funds were laundered- accounted for as legitimate business receipts. [5]
The trail then leads to Singapore. Telexes have been found from Frank Nugan in Sydney to Mike Hand in Singapore, directing Hand to payout the $285,000 to Choo when he showed up with the passport that Aston had described. As in most Nugan Hand telexes, the message was conveyed in the code Mike Hand had devised. But with the help of employee manuals, the code has been broken. The telex identified the payer of the money as "our friendly solicitor John," which authorities have taken as a reference to John Aston.
The next day, March 28, 1979, the money was laundered again. Mike Hand instructed Wing-On Bank in Hong Kong to forward $300,000 from Nugan Hand's account there to its account at Irving Trust Company in New York. The next day, Irving Trust was instructed to transfer the money to Nugan Hand's bank in Singapore, Inter-Alpha Asia (Singapore) Ltd.
On April 12, Inter-Alpha was told to transfer the funds from its Nugan Hand account to an account in the name of Dong Xaoi Ltd., a Singapore company controlled by Nugan Hand. Its name may be familiar: Dong Xaoi was the name of the Vietnamese town where Mike Hand in 1965 won his Distinguished Service Cross for bravery. A mere fourteen years later it had been transformed into the name of the company he used to launder drug money.
Hand's assistant in the Singapore office, Tan Choon Seng, was signatory on the Dong Xaoi account. On what he has testified were Hand's orders, he wrote out five checks in Singapore dollars, on April 12, 1979, in amounts totaling $285,000 in U.S. currency. It was the exact amount Shaw had picked up at the Aston & Alexander law office, except for Nugan Hand's fee.
That same day, April 12, Michael Hand delivered the checks to Choo. Documents found later in Nugan Hand's Singapore office completely corroborate Shaw's testimony about this. Mike Hand had even made Choo sign a statement that "receipt of these funds by me does not constitute any breach of law or illegal activity in any country."
The original $285,000 apparently never left Sydney. Exchange control authorities weren't ever notified. The money being paid out to dope-dealer Choo in Singapore was money that unsuspecting depositors had left with the Nugan Hand Bank in Hong Kong -- Admiral Earl Yates, president.
***
All this might have appeared to be one more routine Nugan Hand money-laundering deal had it not been for a coincidence that occurred halfway around the world. Because of that coincidence, Australian police were able to see a terrible significance in George Shaw's story about the $285,000.
Six months after Choo picked up the $285,000 from Hand, a man named Errol Hincksman was arrested for drunk driving in the county of Lancashire, England. While booking Hincksman, the bobbies of Lancashire found in his pocket a passport in the name of Choo Cheng Kui. The bobbies, of course, didn't know Choo from Adam. But why, they demanded to know, was the drunken Hincksman carrying the passport of some other person-a Chinese?
Well, Hincksman explained, he was on his way to meet Choo at the home of a mutual friend. And who was the mutual friend? Terry Clark.
The police pursued the matter to the house where Clark was staying, and hauled him in, but it was still a while before they realized that in Clark they had their hands on one of the most wanted men on earth. Terence John Clark, a native New Zealander, was believed to be the number two man in the "Mr. Asia" heroin syndicate, one of the world's biggest. Actually, he had become the lead man in the syndicate-having one week earlier successfully plotted the murder of Christopher Martin Johnstone, the man known as "Mr. Asia."
For several days, though they didn't know it, the police had also had their hands on Johnstone himself, or most of him, in the form of an unidentified corpse that had been found in a quarry. Terry Clark had taken every precaution he could think of to prevent the identification of Johnstone's body. Johnstone's hands had been cut off, his teeth smashed and his guts ripped open. A multinational burial was arranged; Johnstone's severed hand would eventually be found in the Almond River in Scotland, and fingerprinted.
So slow were police to recognize what they had that they allowed Choo to pick up his passport and proceed back to Singapore. It took some time for Johnstone's body to be pieced together and identified by forensic experts. Eventually, some members of the syndicate were persuaded to testify for the Crown, against their colleagues, and in 1981, a trial was finally held.
It came out that Johnstone had been attracting so much interna tional newspaper publicity with his colorful "Mr. Asia" alias that Clark and others in the syndicate feared their business was being endangered. It was a business that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars. So they killed Johnstone. (The testimony that the gang had been endangered by constant publicity is further evidence, if any is needed, that Nugan Hand had every reason to be aware of who and what it was dealing with when it washed money for the "Mr. Asia" gang.)
Clark and several others were sentenced to life imprisonment for Johnstone's murder. Hincksman was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment on various drug charges.
British police couldn't touch Choo, who was back in Singapore. But they filed a report on the affair stating that "during our enquiries, it has become clear that Choo, known as 'Jack,' was responsible for running the Singapore end of (Clark's) business." They also said Choo's passport showed he had been in Sydney March 16 through 25, 1979 -- right up to the day before Shaw picked up the $285,000 from the Aston & Alexander office.
Given all this evidence, it would certainly appear that Nugan Hand was consciously laundering $285,000 in money used for drug purchases. Because the "Mr. Asia" syndicate dealt with Aston & Alexander for a much longer period, and Nugan Hand executives regularly laundered money picked up at the Aston & Alexander office, one might legitimately assume that Nugan Hand laundered far more than just the $285,000 Shaw picked up on March 26. Of course, Aston says he didn't know there was money in all the parcels he routinely laid out for Nugan Hand pick-up. But Nugan Hand certainly found out what was in them, and to whom they were going.
Nugan Hand dealt in dope money, all right. But there is still more evidence, and it points to worse conclusions even than that.
***
In May 1978, almost a year before the $285,000 Aston pick-up, two couriers from the "Mr. Asia" syndicate had been arrested in separate incidents at Sydney Airport. One, known as "Pommy Harry" Lewis ("Pommy" is a mildly derogatory reference to a Britisher), had some marijuana on him. The other, Duncan William Robb, was carrying an airgun and traveling under an assumed name; when police searched his home, they found heroin.
Both Lewis and Robb were subjected to long questioning by narcotics agents. Both broke down. Both mentioned the names of Johnstone and Clark, and provided other names and details.
They didn't know that the Sydney narcotics bureau was a den of corruption. They didn't know that the two narcotics officers who were hearing their stories were also in regular contact with the Aston & Alexander law office, which seemed to quickly find out everything the narcotics bureau did.
Two members of the "Mr. Asia" syndicate, including the woman Terry Clark lived with, later testified for prosecutors in: England and Australia, and said the syndicate got its information about the narcotics bureau from Brian Alexander-Aston's law partner and the lawyer who was in Frank Nugan's house the night he died.
The witnesses from inside the syndicate testified that Clark had told them that a senior Australian narcotics official was on retainer to the "Mr. Asia" group for $22,000 a year. They testified that Clark instructed various other syndicate members to get information about drug enforcement activities from Alexander, and that these syndicate members were given code names to use when calling Alexander. The code names they remembered matched names found in the Aston & Alexander telephone logs.
One of the witnesses, Allison Dine, Clark's common law wife, testified [6] that Alexander's source in the narcotics bureau "had access to a computer which was daily fed with information such as people the Narcotics Bureau knew were involved with the importation and trafficking of narcotics.... When any information came up that involved Terry Clark or any of the people who were said to be known associates of his ... the narcotics officer would then pass this information on to Brian Alexander and Brian would ring Terry to tell him that he had information."
At any rate, the syndicate knew within hours what Pommy Harry Lewis and Duncan Robb had told the police. Dine, Clark's common law wife, testified that Clark was in Singapore at the time of the Harry Lewis arrest, and ordered another syndicate member, Wayne Shrimpton, to go to Sydney to bail Lewis out.
Shrimpton testified, "I was told by Terry that I was to ask (at the court building] for Brian Alexander and he would know what I was there for.... Alexander came out and asked me how much money I had. I had a briefcase with the money in it in bundles. I opened the briefcase to show him and he said to me to close it up. He basically said, 'Don't let anybody see it.'"
Alexander then instructed Shrimpton to use a false name in filing the bail, according to Shrimpton's testimony, which was accepted as fact by the Woodward Royal Commission on Drugs. Shrimpton bailed Lewis out under a false name and immediately delivered him to Terry Clark, who within hours murdered Lewis, cut off his hands, bashed in his teeth and hid his body.
Unaware of all this, Robb began telling his story, begging the narcotics officer he was talking to for assurances that the story wouldn't get back to other members of the syndicate. According to the testimony of Allison Dine, Clark's common law wife, the story was delivered to Clark the very next day-May 29, 1978. Dine said she and Clark flew to Sydney, and Clark telephoned Alexander from the airport.
"The lawyer told Terry that it was urgent that Terry went to see him, that he had some information for Terry," Dine testified. "We caught a taxi into town, into the city.... After speaking to the lawyer, Terry came back to the taxi with the news that Duncan Robb had been leaking information about the organization and naming people in it to the police.... Terry said, 'I think we'll have to teach him a lesson.'"
Dine testified that the "information cost Terry $10,000, which Brian Alexander split with the narcotics officers."
***
Why Clark didn't eliminate Robb as thoroughly as he did his other victims isn't known. But Clark and two others in the syndicate settled for beating Robb 'unconscious with ball bats. Robb was found and treated at a hospital for several broken bones and multiple bruises.
Soon afterward, two other syndicate members, Douglas and Isobel Wilson, were arrested in Queensland, Australia. The Wilsons were a married couple who carried drugs for the group. In doing so they had become regular users of heroin themselves. In the deteriorating mental state that heroin reliance induces, the Wilsons broke down and gave long, tape-recorded interviews, telling the police all they knew. Included was the fact that Terry Clark had murdered Harry Lewis.
The Wilsons were released -- and nothing happened. Apparently no one had gotten around to bribing the narcotics office in distant Queensland. The office was so lethargic, perhaps no one had seen a need to. The Wilson tapes apparently were left sitting on a shelf for the better part of a year, and no one paid any attention to them.
Then, on March 15, 1979, Pommy Harry Lewis's mutilated body was identified in New South Wales. The Australian press was extravagant with lurid details about his heroin dealings and murder. (This is still more evidence that eleven days later, when the money was picked up, Nugan Hand management was well advised of its clients' narcotics trafficking.) Reading the papers, and apparently realizing the importance of what they had, the Queensland cops suddenly turned over the nine-month-old Wilson tapes to the New South Wales police, who were investigating Lewis's murder.
Within a week, the confidentiality of the tapes had been so widely shattered that their contents was in the hands of the press. Newspapers, eager for ways to follow up on the juicy Harry Lewis murder, ran accounts of the tapes in great detail in the editions of March 25. The stories didn't contain the Wilsons' names; apparently the cops who leaked the tapes thought they could protect the Wilsons by concealing their identity. But there was plenty enough detail in the stories for Terry Clark and those close to him to make an educated guess about who the mystery squealers were.
The next day, March 26, was when George Shaw picked up the $285,000 at the Aston & Alexander office. That was in the afternoon. Aston's calendar for that day, eventually confiscated by police, showed a mid-morning appointment with Jim Shepherd, "Mr. Asia's" principal Australian heroin dealer. [7]
Allison Dine and Wayne Shrimpton, the two witnesses from inside the "Mr. Asia" syndicate, testified that at that time, Clark received actual copies of the Wilson tapes. Dine said he bought them for about $275,000. [8] "I assume he got them through Alexander," she testified. "The tapes were long, two hours or so, apparently describing everything Doug knew," she went on. "Terry mentioned to me several times that he could not believe Doug had talked.... It was the obvious reason why he purchased the tapes, to satisfy himself that they had talked."
Dine also testified that Clark told her he paid the same amount to a hit man to kill the Wilsons. It is possible Dine confused the two, or that Clark, in talking to his moll, simply noted how much the Wilson episode had cost him in sum total, and was inconsistent or imprecise about exactly how the expenses were allocated between the tapes and the murder. In other words, there is a real possibility that the money Shaw picked up on March 26, and that Mike Hand paid out in Singapore April 12, wasn't dope money, but blood money.
On about April 13, 1979, Clark lured the Wilsons to Melbourne from Brisbane, Queensland, where they had been in a drug drying out program. They were met by a hit man, who took them to a house and shot them to death. According to Allison Dine, the hit man had promised "that there would be no traces of their bodies ever found because he was going to put them through a mincer."
***
The hit man had lied. A month after the killing, on May 18, 1979, a meat inspector taking his dog for a walk stumbled on the Wilsons' poorly buried bodies in a vacant lot.
Later, already in jail for the Johnstone murder, Clark himself talked to a Detective Piper of the Lancashire, England, police. He admitted that he had bought the Wilson tapes, though he was less precise than Dine and Shrimpton had been in their testimony.
"They have a narcotics squad out there," Clark explained in reference to Australia. "I have my contacts amongst them. They have got computers and telex machines which I have got on tap."
Asked why the Wilsons were murdered, he replied, "They were grassing. They even said I had murdered Harry Lewis. They made a tape to the police."
"How do you know that?" asked Detective Piper.
"I've had the tape," Clark replied.
"Who was the contact?"
"No names, I just paid the money."
Piper then asked him directly about Alexander, his solicitor. Clark replied, "Jeeze, the money I've paid him. That shit. He was doing well out of me."
"So if any of your people got into trouble, he would act for them?" Piper asked.
"Yeah, that's right. He would let me know what was going on." Alexander was called to testify at the inquest into the Wilsons' murder in August 1980. He refused, on the ground that his testimony might incriminate him.
The coroner accused Clark and "persons unknown" of the murders, and said he was "satisfied" that Alexander, had he testified, could have named other guilty parties. Without such testimony, however, and with Clark's only life already under sentence for another murder, no charges were filed in the Wilson case.
At the inquest, Aston testified that neither he nor Alexander had ever had clients named Terry Clark or Jim Shepherd. Asked how Shepherd's name came to appear in Aston's own handwriting in Aston's diary, Aston replied, "I have no idea in the world how that came there." He said that despite all, he trusted Alexander "implicitly."
The coroner said in his findings, "The answers given by Mr. Aston are not accepted by this court. Notwithstanding the serious allegation made against Alexander, Aston has made no effort to inquire into the truth of the matter raised." He also ridiculed Aston's attempt to reconcile Alexander's meager salary of $118 to $145 a week with his duties as "a first-class criminal lawyer." The implication was that Alexander was maintaining his handsome lifestyle with money derived from other means.
Alexander and the two narcotics officers who interviewed Lewis and Robb -- Wayne John Brindle and Richard John Spencer-were charged with conspiring with Clark to obstruct the course of justice. Magistrate C. A. Gilmore in the Court of Petty Sessions, Sydney, ruled, in May 1980, that there wasn't even enough evidence to bring the charges to trial, and threw them out. His decision was, at least, controversial.
J. R. ("Rod") Hall, the Victoria police commissioner, had been appointed by the federal minister in charge of the narcotics bureau to investigate the case. Hall publicly vented fury at Magistrate Gilmore's decision. "It was obvious Clark was tied up with Aston and Alexander," Hall says. "Could people remain naive about Aston and Alexander? I'd be surprised."
Hall notes that three times -- on June 21, 1978 (shortly after the Lewis and Robb arrests and the Lewis murder), and on March 28 and March 30, 1979 (the week the Wilson tapes were turned over to Clark) -- $11,000 was withdrawn from John Aston's account at a private bank and deposited there in another account, opened in the name of Spencer, the senior narcotics bureau official charged in the case.
The bank in which these transactions occurred was Nugan Hand.
"One of the things we couldn't understand," says Hall, "was that if the narcotics people had been getting money, what were they doing with the money. Then we found out that Spencer was depositing the money in Nugan Hand."
Aston said he thought the withdrawals from his account were to pay for some real estate that Nugan Hand was helping him buy. He acknowledged that Spencer, the narcotics officer, was a client "in several matters," but says he didn't know how Spencer's name got on the accounts. Spencer said he didn't know either, and denied receiving the $33,000. Still, the names of Spencer and Brindle, the other narcotics officer charged, appear copiously in Alexander's diary.
Aston stresses [9] that except for the one diary entry for Jim Shepherd, all connections with the dope dealers were through Alexander. "Not one of those persons have said they ever met me," he insists. "I gave Shaw one briefcase at the request of Frank Nugan. I never looked inside it. Nugan was in the habit of having things dropped at my office for delivery to him. I would phone him when they arrived. Of course, they could have contained money. I didn't look."
***
Justice Donald Stewart, the same man who later headed the Stewart Royal Commission on Nugan Hand, in 1983 headed another royal commission into drug trafficking and the "Mr. Asia" affair. That commission looked long and harshly at the way the Alexander-Brindle- Spencer obstruction of justice case had been dismissed.
Over several pages, Stewart laid out the prosecution case in a favorable light. He went out' of his way to' cite strange dealings between Spencer and Brindle on the one hand and the Wilsons on the other, and said Spencer had intentionally given false information to other officers in an apparent effort to exonerate Clark in the Harry Lewis murder.
Echoing charges made earlier by Police Commissioner Hall, Justice Stewart said several of Spencer's and Brindle's colleagues in the narcotics bureau changed their previous testimony during the hearing before Magistrate Gilmore. These other officers had stunned the prosecution by suddenly declaring that information given by informants to Spencer and Brindle had been discussed at a meeting in the bureau. This meant that others, not just Spencer and Brindle, might have leaked the names of the squealers. Stewart expressed doubt that such a meeting really took place.
Faced with these new assertions that the leaks could have come from anywhere, and not yet knowing about the Nugan Hand account in Spencer's name, Magistrate Gilmore was justified in freeing Brindle and Spencer, Stewart said. But he made plain that he believed crimes had gone unpunished.
"The evidence points strongly to Spencer being one source" for the leaks, Stewart declared. "After Spencer took over the Clark ... investigation a great deal of information" appears to have been passed on to Clark and associates through Alexander." He also accused Spencer and Brindle of a "lack of concern" for the welfare of informants. "The Commission has evidence that Spencer rang Alexander's office on 12 April 1979 and said he was coming over. On 13 April 1979, Good Friday, the Wilsons travelled to Melbourne where they were murdered," Stewart wrote.
The Alexander case, he said, was worse. Here, the magistrate had based the dismissal on his belief that testimony from Dine and Shrimpton, the two "Mr. Asia" group members, was unbelievable. Magistrate Gilmore declared that Dine "is an evil woman" and that Shrimpton's word "is suspect, if not worthless."
Said Stewart, "The Commission doubts that the decision" by Gilmore "was a proper exercise of magisterial function in a committal hearing. Unfortunately it would appear that at times the magistrate lost control of his own court."
Though Aston and Alexander had asserted they never heard of Clark, and couldn't identify photographs of Clark that were shown to them, Stewart noted that Alexander's own mother had testified that her son and Clark were associated, and that Clark sometimes picked Alexander up late at night for mysterious trips.
***
Brian Alexander, who was supposedly employed by Aston at a salary that finally peaked at $9,500 a year, had upped his bank deposits from $5,100 in 1975 to $70,000 in 1978. The next year, he shelled out $121,000 cash for a new house. That, too, is subject to a possible innocent explanation, but no such explanation has been forthcoming.
In December 1981, Alexander disappeared. Authorities presume he was murdered, though a body hasn't been found-or at least identified.
In July 1979, shortly after the Wilson murders, Aston and a friend traveled to Hawaii. Their hotel reservations were made, and the $1,600 bill paid, by General Edwin F. Black, U. S. Army, retired. General Black said [10] he didn't remember Aston, and must have paid the bill on instructions from Sydney. It was paid from the Nugan Hand Hawaii bank account, on which General Black was sale signatory.
_______________
Notes:
1. Interviews with the author.
2. In various proceedings, including before the Joint Task Force and Corporate Affairs Commission.
3. Originally, the money was to be picked up by Choo half in Singapore and the other half in Germany, but this part of the plan later changed.
4. By American terminology, Alexander was effectively an associate in the firm Aston & Alexander, of which Aston was effectively the sole partner. They were the only two professionals in the firm. In Australia, Alexander was what is known as Aston's "law clerk." That term has a very different meaning in the United States, however, referring to an intern who cannot represent clients in court and who often has not even passed the bar examination. Alexander was a fully licensed solicitor.
5. The careful reader may detect an apparent flaw in this system. By recording the money as income to Orange Spot, Frank Nugan would appear to have acquired a substantial income tax liability. This was solved, however, by having Orange Spot then issue a check to Yorkville Nominees, the Nugan Hand affiliate, with a concocted explanation for the payment that would allow it to be deducted as a business expense to Orange Spot. In the end, the money just wended its way back to Nugan Hand without ever having shown up as income to anyone.
Yorkville's only apparent purpose was to disguise the source and destination of the millions of dollars that flowed through it every month. A myriad of phony loan accounts veiled the passage of money from Yorkville to Nugan Hand and back. All this is confirmed by the records of the companies involved, and by the testimony of those concerned, including the Orange Spot manager.
6. The testimony quoted here from Dine and from Wayne Shrimpton, another syndicate member, was given at the coroner's inquest into the deaths of Douglas and Isobel Wilson. That case will be discussed later in the text, as it comes up chronologically; the inquest took place in Melbourne, Australia, in August 1980. The testimony, however, is consistent with testimony Dine and Shrimpton gave at various other proceedings in England and Australia.
7. When the calendar was seized in a police raid in March 1980, the March 26 page was mysteriously cut out. But police, using scientific means, showed by impressions on the page under the missing March 26 page that Shepherd's name had been written there in Aston's handwriting.
8. The amount that Allison Dine said Clark had paid for the tapes was 250,000 Australian dollars -- about $275,000 in U.S. currency at then-current exchange rates. Shaw reported picking up 260,000 Australian dollars, plus an undefined fee, from the Aston & Alexander office. For convenience and clarity, this sum has been convened in this book to a rounded-off $285,000 in U.S. money, at then-current exchange rates. The reader can judge how easy or difficult it would be for Dine to have confused the numbers 250,000 and 260,000.
9. Interview with the author.
10. Interview with the author.