Greed the downfall of New Zealand's 'Godfather'

New Zealand's most wanted man has been returned to justice. SCOTT INGLIS examines what turned Brian Curtis from a comfortably off family man into "The Godfather."

Brian Curtis had it all in the 1970s - a loving wife, family, a modest home and a thriving property-development business.

The firm, along with building skills and business prowess, brought in enough money to provide a comfortable lifestyle. But Curtis wanted to become richer faster, and - in hard drugs - he believed he had found the means.

Yet drugs did not bring him a quick fortune, they brought misery. Drugs tore him from his family and put him in prison twice, eventually leading to his escape from tight security at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo and nearly eight years on the run overseas.

There is no evidence that drugs provided the lifestyle Curtis so desperately sought.

At the time of his escape, in 1993, he was nearly two years into an 18-year term for importing LSD. It was his third serious drugs conviction, and he had a reputation as one of New Zealand's most ruthless drug barons - other inmates even nicknamed him The Godfather.

After his escape, police pursued him relentlessly, and on Wednesday last week they found him in Manila, living with a lover and their 3-year-old child.

Curtis, now 67, was brought back to New Zealand to face justice. On Thursday he made his second court appearance, in the North Shore District Court, and was remanded without plea to July 24.

Security was tight - Curtis was handcuffed, flanked by two plainclothes police officers in the dock, and three more guarded the main courtroom door.

He thanked the judge before being returned to Paremoremo prison in a security van, followed by two unmarked police cars.

Whatever Curtis' eventual sentence, it will be about a decade before he is released.

The policeman who tracked him, Takapuna-based Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Bush, is still investigating Curtis' life on the run and has refused to comment on the investigation. Curtis' wife, Georgina, has avoided publicity and others have also refused to talk. But the Weekend Herald has learned enough about Curtis to paint a picture of his life.

He had an unhappy childhood, got into trouble as a teenager and began a life of petty crime. Along the way, he had two families and forged a legitimate career in property development, which earned him reasonable money.

Curtis threw all this away so he could chase his dream of quick wealth from hard drugs.

Brian James Curtis was born in Wellington on September 22, 1933, to Thomas and Cybil Curtis, who also had a daughter, Sylvia.

But his parents split, his father heading for Auckland and his mother staying in Wellington.

A custody battle ensued and throughout his school years, Curtis moved between Auckland and Wellington as each parent in turn won custody.

This turmoil is thought to have been one reason Curtis slipped into bad company. In 1948, aged 15 or 16, he was caught for his first crime, a cheque forgery for which he was understood to have been sentenced to community service.

His life of petty crime continued over the next two decades as he moved around the North Island, doing various jobs, including drainlaying and sewerage work.

After being arrested for burglaries, minor assault and safecracking, Curtis' first jail stint was an 18-month stretch in the 1960s for receiving stolen property.

Then he married for the first time and had three children - his first wife is thought to have since died.

In the late 1960s, Curtis met his second wife, nursing student Georgina, in Auckland, with whom he had a son and daughter.

Curtis has been described as a good husband and father who was a perfectionist, but his yearning for quick money was evident even then.

About the time of his second marriage, he spent time in Tonga, where Georgina was raised, diving for treasure thought to be stashed on a sunken boat. Tongan authorities found out and ordered him to leave the country within 48 hours.

Back in New Zealand, the handyman and competent carpenter moved into property development in the 1970s, buying cheap houses, doing them up himself and selling them.

He built two houses in Glen Eden and the family lived in a pleasant home in the suburb's Woodglen Rd.

Curtis rubbed shoulders with real estate agents and others involved in the property game. His successful business allowed the family to live comfortably, buying a house in Mt Eden for less than $30,000 in 1972.

But at some time in the 1970s, Curtis is believed to have been approached by a person involved in drugs and proved unable to resist the temptation of possibly making big money fast.

Late in 1978, Curtis apparently told people he was going overseas to buy jewellery. His wife, the Weekend Herald has been told, had no idea what he was up to.

The police alleged he sailed to Bali with a hired crew - a young woman, a Tongan navigator and a drug addict - and then went to Bangkok, where he bought top-grade heroin with a street value of $1 million.

The yacht's name was changed and they sailed back to New Zealand, planning to enter the country just north of Wellington. But bad weather forced them south to Karamea, Westland, on March 9, 1979.

Evidence was given later in court that locals noticed the yacht in distress. Curtis and one of his accomplices got into a dinghy with the heroin and were helped ashore.

They were taken to the police station, given warm clothing and refreshments and taken back to the boat by helicopter - the police never suspecting the package inside a plastic bag that Curtis allowed them to see contained heroin.

However, detectives had noticed his drug-smuggling activities and he was later arrested at his Glen Eden home and charged with importing heroin.

During the depositions hearing, associates tried to help Curtis escape custody, but they botched the job, and Curtis became the country's first remand prisoner to be held in the maximum security Paremoremo prison.

Later, at his Auckland Supreme Court trial, he was guarded by the Armed Offenders Squad and the court subjected to unprecedented security.

He was found guilty and sentenced to life, but the term was reduced to 16 years on appeal.

The sentencing judge, Justice McMullin, who described Curtis as one of New Zealand's highest-ranked drug lords, referred to a probation officer's comments in 1974, which said Curtis was "self-assured and industrious, ambitious to succeed financially without questioning the ethics of the means he employs to gain his ends."

In 1980, while serving his sentence, Curtis was convicted of conspiring to import heroin and cannabis from Fiji three years earlier. For this, he was jailed for a total of 11 years and fined $30,000.

Georgina Curtis and the rest of the family were said to have been devastated but they stood by him, and during this time they shifted into their Mt Eden property.

In 1988, Curtis was freed. He returned to property development and resumed family life with his wife.

But any attempt at going straight was short-lived. By 1990, his name surfaced during a three-month drugs investigation, dubbed Operation Patch.

Detectives targeted a man named Alan Nelson Wati, who was found to be collaborating with Curtis to import 35,000 tabs of LSD, worth up to $1.5 million.

The scheme, which involved another associate, David John Squire, was sophisticated and carefully planned.

Curtis had obtained a false passport for Wati, and Squire carried books and glue, which were to be used to bring the LSD into New Zealand. Squire and Wati travelled to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, got the drugs and hid them in two books, which they posted back to New Zealand.

One of the officers who worked on the operation was Detective Sergeant Richard Middleton, now of the Auckland metro organised crime division.

He said Curtis suspected that his house and phone were being bugged and used public phones to call Wati, not realising Wati's phone was also bugged. It appeared he had failed to keep up with technology while in prison.

"The world had moved on a huge amount in that time. I don't think he was that clued up ... in terms of bugging phones in houses. He'd never been caught on what we call an electronic job," Middleton said.

"I'm sure he's cunning but he's a bit of an enigma ... he's not that clever. He has a reputation, I think, that exceeds ... his ability."

Curtis, he said, was never stroppy in police interviews and conversations. Other officers agree, one even describing him as affable.

When asked what he thought motivated Curtis, Middleton said: "Greed - nothing but common old ... greed. He wanted to live a lifestyle that only drugs could give him."

Curtis was found guilty on two charges of importing LSD and also admitted nine charges of false pretences and two of attempted false pretences.

He was jailed for 18 years, narrowly avoiding a life term. Wati and Squire were also jailed.

Justice Smellie told Curtis: "You are a greedy, evil man and a menace to society."

Inside Paremoremo, sources say Curtis kept a low profile and stayed out of trouble. He had climbed to the top of the criminal fraternity and was believed to have had close gang links, especially with the Headhunters. Prison authorities later suspected he had started planning his escape the day he was sentenced.

Again, Georgina Curtis remained loyal, visiting her husband regularly - until he escaped on the night of Wednesday, August 18, 1993.

She had visited him two days earlier, but told police she knew nothing of the escape. It was thought Curtis told her nothing to protect her.

Curtis and convicted murderer Michael Jeffrey Bullock used a cutting wire device to slice through bars in Paremoremo's A block dining room, through which they escaped, before using a homemade ladder made of prison shelving and heavy tape to scale a wall.

They were helped by unknown accomplices: bolt-cutters had been used to cut a 1m-wide hole in a security fence. Clothed dummies were found under the covers of their beds.

Within minutes of their escape, both had vanished in a stolen four-wheel-drive vehicle. They are then believed to have made their way to a boat waiting to take them across the Upper Waitemata Harbour.

A Paremoremo source said investigators were amazed when they discovered how easy it had been for the men to escape. It would have taken a short time to cut through the tempered steel bars in the dining room, but the pair had used toothpaste and paint to cover the cut marks and fool guards.

The escape sparked an inquiry, which resulted in Paremoremo's maximum security wing being surrounded with razor wire.

Exactly how Curtis fled the country is not clear, although it is believed he travelled by boat.

His movements after that are also sketchy, although police believe he spent much of his time in Asia - especially the Philippines - and Europe, and did not hold down any legitimate jobs.

In 1994, in Manila, he met Daisy Ahat, now 32, and started a new life with her. They had a daughter, Loresa, 3, and lived in the San Andres Bukid district - a poorer part of town.

Ahat has told the Herald that Curtis was "a good husband, a good father, and that's why my daughter misses him."

The family was often short of money, but Curtis would sometimes fly to Europe and return with up to $7000 in cash. The last trip he made was last July.

But the money had run out and the rent was five months late. Their lifestyle did not reflect Curtis having made wads of money from drugs.

Ahat also said Curtis was planning to make a secret trip back to New Zealand. But his new life was on borrowed time, thanks to a mistake he made in 1994 in Amsterdam.

Dutch police had caught him with a forged traveller's cheque - they fingerprinted and freed him, but the prints, and the fact that he continued to use a false Irish passport in the name of Peter Coutts, eventually led to his downfall.

Also against him was the tenacity of Bush, now a 23-year police veteran. In 1997, then based at Interpol, Bush sent Curtis' fingerprints to police agencies around the world, and in 1998 a match was returned from Amsterdam.

For the next three years Bush, who picked up the file again when he joined Takapuna CIB, led a painstaking search, sending Curtis' details to hundreds of police forces around Asia and Europe, asking if they had him on their files.

There were dozens of false alarms, but last week Bush's determination paid off when police in Manila matched the Peter Coutts identity and photograph to Curtis. With the immigration authorities, police swooped.

Curtis initially denied his true identity but later said he had had enough of being on the run and having no money. Authorities deported him to New Zealand, into the waiting hands of Bush.

Curtis had kept fit throughout his time on the run and there has never been any evidence he had ever used drugs.

Last week, the Weekend Herald asked Bush what sort of man he thought Curtis was.

He replied: "All I'd say is there are many sides to the man. Some people might say he's a personable, grey-haired gentleman. Some judges might say he's a greedy, ruthless person.

"Someone else might say something else. I'd say they're all right."

As police led a handcuffed Curtis out of the Auckland Airport police station the day he arrived back, he lashed out at the media, punching Herald photographer Brett Phibbs in the mouth and kicking a television cameraman who had tripped and fallen to the ground.

It is certain Curtis will spend a long time behind bars serving his sentence - and the impact of his life and recapture will continue to be felt by those close to him.

A devastated Ahat said she had no money and wanted to come to New Zealand to live. Their child is perhaps her best chance under New Zealand immigration rules, but even if she is allowed in, it is likely she will be able to visit Curtis for only one hour a week under prison regulations.

Meanwhile, she and others caught in the crossfire - including Georgina and their children - are still coming to terms with the latest chapter in the life of Brian Curtis.