Paul Little: Unorthodox but pure of heart

Lorraine Cohen outside the Auckland District Court after she pleaded guilty for possessing heroin. Photo / Dean Purcell

Lorraine Cohen died as she had lived - confounding predictions of her imminent demise.

On Saturday, doctors said she had just 12 hours to live. However, on Sunday she was still joking with visitors.

But on Tuesday the woman who had survived cancer more than once, atrocious conditions in Penang Prison where she and her son Aaron did time for drug smuggling, a sentence of death by hanging and a heroin intake that would make Keith Richards think twice slipped peacefully out of this life in an Auckland Hospital bed.

Her years of hard living finally caught up with her, and that system whose seeming invulnerability had astounded numerous doctors over the years finally decided enough was enough.

She had even outlived Karpal Singh, the Malaysian lawyer and politician whose unpaid efforts on her behalf helped gain her a pardon and who was killed in a car accident in April.

She was a direct link to the bohemian underground Auckland of the 1950s, a milieu that gives the lie to the cliche of that decade as drab and monotonous. Its surviving members include the diehard eccentrics Anna Hoffman and Billy Farnell.

There was nothing in Cohen's background to suggest a life of notoriety. She was the child of conservative parents and attended Catholic school.

But central to her make-up was a love of fun and a need for excitement, which was met by men, and the more dangerous the men the more exciting she found them.

One of those men was Danny Cohen and eventually the two would become addicted to heroin and, like so many addicts, dealers themselves, low-level functionaries in the Mr Asia organisation.

Somewhere in her orbit was also a man whose parents, unlike hers, were criminals but who would follow a very different path - future MP John Banks who, during the Penang years, would become a harsh public critic of Cohen at the same time as he worked to support her son. Neither mother nor son had any time for the MP and Cohen would have relished the irony that as she lay dying Banks found himself where she had been so many times before - in a court, on trial.

Her experiences with Sydney police during her years there did little to improve her respect for those on that side of the law, but Cohen was proof there is honour among thieves.

She was the most loyal of friends and the most implacable of foes.

Her greatest contempt was reserved for those who dogged - sold out fellow reprobates to the law in return for favours.

Had she been willing to bend this principle, she might not have spent as much time in jail as she did.

But she would always have got attention of one kind or another. Petite, buxom and possessed of spellbinding brown eyes, she had charisma to spare and a husky laugh that was the only really wicked thing about her.

In a room full of people, all eyes and attention would be drawn to her, often as she was sounding off on the failings of the world in general and certain individuals in it.

From her outsider's perspective, the logic that supported her personal morality could not be faulted.

She had a cutting wit and a gift for candour, whether you were ready for it or not. She was inappropriately flirtatious well into her 60s. She still liked men enormously even if - justifiably, from her experience - she had little respect for us as a species.

There was no malice or violence in her character. She was a criminal only because of our misguided drug laws.

Her life serves to remind us that a true heart is to be treasured wherever it is found and that goodness can often be encountered in the unlikeliest places.