Dark times for 'Mr Midnight'

Darryl Sorby was last month sentenced to 21 months for money laundering. He was also given a reduced sentence of 9 months (to be served concurrently) for assault after paying his victim $50,000. PATRICK GOWER investigates 'Mr Midnight'.

At first Darryl Leigh Sorby seemed small-time, a fruitpicker who skipped bail after a pub brawl in Motueka in 1997.

Then, after four years in hiding, he turned up again. This time, Auckland detectives investigating an alleged ecstasy ring last year caught him with drugs, $320,000 in cash and a loaded Beretta pistol.

And even this haul is minor league compared with the record that came to light. Sorby was a leading light in the Mr Asia drugs syndicate in the 1970s when he ran with some of New Zealand's most notorious criminals.

Then known as "Mr Midnight", he was said by police to be responsible for handling $10 million in heroin sales on Australian streets.

It took Australian police five years to snare him, and his case is now noted as one of the first examples of the extraordinary lengths the Australians were prepared to go to prosecute the so-called "Mr Bigs" of organised crime.

The 21-month jail sentence the 52-year-old was given last month, with the recommendation it be served as home detention, compares with 23 years Australian authorities gave him for his drug dealing, of which he did half in their toughest prisons.

Police say there has been no organised drugs syndicate since to rival the size of the Mr Asia syndicate, mainly set up and run by New Zealanders, and linked with at least six execution-style killings.

Sorby did deals for its boss, Terry Clark, who died in an English prison in 1983. He was friends with the Picton-born "Diamond" Jim Shepherd, another big-time heroin dealer in Australia given a 25-year sentence in the mid-1980s.

Sorby's role was such that it earned him a chapter in the book Big Shots II, about scandalous Australian crimes.

It details his spectacular success: a lavish lifestyle of the best hotels, a swag of cars both new and vintage; marlin fishing off the Queensland coast in a 13m boat with a gold-plated fishing rod. He bought land at Surfers Paradise, talked of building a hotel and proposed a residential development on the Gold Coast ringed by canals. He flirted on the gold and silver markets and dealt in krugerrands and spent days on end at Melbourne's stock exchange eyeing the market.

Born in Auckland and raised in Westport, Sorby had been a coalminer and was in both the New Zealand and merchant navy travelling the world before he arrived in Australia as a 27-year-old with just some traveller's cheques to his name.

But he soon hooked up with Shepherd, gaining access to heroin from Southeast Asia mainly brought in by the syndicate's female couriers using false-bottomed suitcases.

Sorby was dubbed "Mr Midnight" because of his habit of making drug deals in the middle of the night, which were arranged by phone with his number given out in code. Big Shots II details how he often cut and weighed heroin at home using the dining room table, packing it in bags bearing the bold red stamp of a horse, the symbol of the gang signifying 1978, the Chinese year of the horse.

Despite the flood of money, Sorby was supposedly miserly, insisting on doing the grocery shopping with his wife to keep an eye on costs.

The good times came to an inglorious end in 1983 when police found Sorby buried under a pile of mud in a Brisbane bog. Asked why, he reportedly replied: "I saw you driving down the road, I knew you were after me."

It had taken police five years to build their case and his trial ran for three months, costing millions of dollars.

Witnesses were flown in from around the world, given police protection and many received immunity from prosecution. Sorby's explanation of his wealth was the old criminal standby - he was the champion punter, the great backgammon player and the great card player.

His 23-year sentence - then the second-longest imposed in Australia for a drug offence - was upheld by the Court of Appeal, which cited the drug's devastating effects and the way Sorby was not a user but an exploiter of others' addictions.

The judges said: "The extent to which [Sorby's] conspiracies have corrupted heroin users, if not led to their premature death, may never be known."

Much of his jail term was spent in Melbourne's notorious Pentridge prison, since closed. He spent several years in its maximum security section called Jika Jika.

The modern part of the century-old prison, Jika Jika was an "electronically operated space station" designed for minimal contact between guards and inmates - with concrete beds and wire exercise cages. As a result of his prison experiences, Sorby is said to suffer post traumatic stress disorder.

Despite an 18-year non-parole period, Sorby was released after about 12 years and deported to New Zealand.

Like his life here since, the exact date of his arrival is a mystery - newspaper records say it was in 1995, but Sorby has claimed it was Christmas 1996.

The Victorian Police Association fumed about the "ridiculous" decision to release him, according to a report in the Melbourne Age, and Sorby, like other New Zealanders released from overseas prisons, arrived here with no parole conditions to meet, no supervision and no rehabilitation.

Herald inquiries show he first seems to have settled in Christchurch, where he was involved in a company called C.O.D.I.T. that has since gone under.

Then he broke surface in Motueka, where bad blood developed between him and a local man ending in a brawl and the man receiving cuts to his head, wrist and fingers before he ran away with Sorby screaming, "I'll kill you".

Sorby's defence was that the attack was partly a result of "automatism", lashing out in what, given his prison experiences, was a normal reaction.

He turned up to a preliminary court hearing, where witnesses say he "just did not want to be there". They were right, and he disappeared soon afterwards.

At some point he assumed the alias Jim Kennedy, living on a schooner called Sun Dune and turning up in Auckland.

People who had dealings with him say he had lost none of his "Mr Midnight" ways, shrinking into the background in public, or asking for late-night meetings in empty carparks with easy access to motorways.

Police are reluctant to disclose their involvement with him, although it is known that their renewed interest began in at least April last year when they issued his picture and asked the public for sightings.

They found him in Helensville the next month, at about the same time as a shipment of 36,000 ecstasy tablets was intercepted.

He had the loaded pistol - apparently for rabbit shooting - a small amount of ecstasy and 15 ounces of cannabis.

Police also seized $320,000 cash, over which he did not face any charges, although it is understood the lion's share was kept by the tax department. He was charged with laundering $400,000 the year before - delivered in suitcases in $100,000 lots mainly in $20 notes - through solicitor Dinesh Patel's trust account, but did not face any serious drugs charges.

Sorby admitted the money laundering, saying it came from the sale of diamonds sourced in South Africa, but his sentencing judge linked it to serious drug offending in sentencing him to 21 months in prison. It will be served at the same time as the nine months he received this year for the assault after eventually fronting up in court.

Sorby's friends give him credit for "rehabilitating himself" and he has undergone treatment for problems with alcohol and drugs.

Two judges have accepted that he has a new direction in life, through a new partner and two children and he has bought a block of land near Kaipara.

Sorby himself is said to have an "impoverished view of the world ... a significant unfortunate legacy of his imprisonment" and sees his future as limited to caring for the children.

* Sorby has declined to speak to the Herald despite several approaches in person and via intermediaries throughout this year.

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