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Photo: Jim Wilson
Photo: Jim Wilson

BooksOctober 14, 2022

‘An interesting sort of junkie’: Jim Wilson’s one-night Dunedin crime spree

Photo: Jim Wilson
Photo: Jim Wilson

In this excerpt from his new memoir, the man behind Phantom Billstickers gives a glimpse into the life of a junkie in the South Island in the 1970s. 

BURGLING A CHEMIST 

In which Jim and an accomplice, hereafter known as ‘The Nark’, have a go at breaking into three chemist shops in Dunedin. 

My first chemist that night was near the Wakari Hospital. I was just wheeling out the cutting gear through the car park when a bread delivery van pulled in. I stood and folded my arms and stared down the driver, the oxy-acetylene gas cutting gear was standing beside me. We had to lift the cutting gear onto the roof of the shop and drop it down through a skylight. This can become complicated. 

The driver of the bread van caught me in his headlights and all around me there were shadows flickering and painting scary images in the dark. But, I’d reached the stage of not caring by then; I’d learned that if you got into the right headspace you could do almost anything and not get arrested. You became the invisible man and no one wanted to acknowledge that you were there. 

This particular chemist, at Wakari, had a Chubb combination safe mounted on a concrete wall. It was small and robust and it just wouldn’t cut open. My off-sider and I felt compelled to melt the combination dial all over the front of the safe so that the chemist wouldn’t have been able to get it open either. This is called a win-win situation. 

I remember there was a bottle of liquid morphine that the chemist couldn’t fit into the safe and so it had just been left on the shelf. We didn’t even take it with us. We just left it there. We did what we could at Wakari and then we left for South Dunedin.   During the process of trying to gain entry to the second shop at Forbury Corner, a taxi driver chased us off. And I guess that’s the way you would want it to be. We were skinny, nervy kids and we scattered. 

Jim Wilson (Photo: Supplied)

The taxi driver had been watching too much Hawaii Five-O on television. It was the third pharmacy, at Musselburgh, that was to be the pay-off. The chemist had put six bolts down either side of the back door and so we went in through the front. The shop was not alarmed but it was extremely well fortified. As we worked on the safe with the cutting gear, it sent sparks, shit, and noise into the air, and the whole shop lit up like a Christmas tree. In the spirit of revenge for the bolts down the back door, we set the shelves on fire with the cutting gear.

At one point a milkman, oblivious to us, delivered some milk outside. We drank that milk. We cut an ugly gash around the lock in the safe and the door swung open on the first try. We left there with more than two big rubbish bags filled with dope to the brim. The Nark was a blond-haired guy and a surfie type. He had a clean way about him and a shining look. It would never have occurred to you that he was a junkie. He always looked healthy. You could quite easily think of him as being at a racetrack with a pencil behind his ear and a ‘Best Bets’ in his mitts. Butter would not have melted in his mouth. The Nark mimicked the behaviour and speech of a good, keen Kiwi bloke. This type is always the most interesting sort of junkie.

He worked in an engineer’s shop, off Manchester Street in  Christchurch, and so he knew how to handle oxy-acetylene gear very well. By the age of 19, he’d already been sent down to Invercargill twice and had finished two Borstals there. By the time we finished at Musselburgh, we were cold and shivering and wanted to throw up. It was now early morning, and we were beginning to hang out because our methadone from the day before was starting to wear off. We were sick and breaking our necks to get better. When The Nark and I got that safe open at Musselburgh, we just looked at each other and laughed.  

Included in the giant haul of dope were about 400 cans of morphine/pethidine and lots of really old vials of syringe tablets, various powders and crystals, and all the other good stuff. There were 1200 Palfium pills and mountains of other tablets. There was also liquid this, liquid that, and liquid the other thing.

The day Jim was first released from prison (Photo: Supplied)

This was the last time I ever saw a bottle of Brompton’s Cocktail. I carry a photograph of that bottle in my wallet to this day right next door to a photo of my dear old mum. The Nark and I walked out the door like we owned the place. We were whistling as we loaded up the car and headed the big old Rover down Andersons Bay Road, over the Kilmog, and up  State Highway 1, headed for Christchurch. 

We didn’t intend to stop for a hit until we got to Oamaru and the road was long and dark as we drove through the Otago hills, and gullies, and along that beautiful coastline with the black sea sparkling on our right. I was driving at around seventy or eighty miles per hour. We were sailing in the poor man’s Rolls Royce and the headlights were cutting out the waves in front of us. The beautiful engine was barely ticking over. 

When we reached Oamaru, we stopped at an old gas station at the very north end of the town and on a bend. We drew up water from a hose and mixed up a hit of Omnopon on the roof of  the car. Given that these were syringe pills, we could practically do it all in the dark. You throw three or four of them into the outfit, add some water, shake it up and it’s ready to go. After we’d mixed up the medicine, we hovered under the wooden dash and squirted it up our arms.  

Omnopon is God’s Own Medicine as everyone knows and after our medication, The Nark and I were feeling more comfortable than we ever had in our lives. We talked for a good thirty minutes about the leather seats in the Rover and about how they had been hand sewn in England and how the quality of English leather was never to be beaten. 

You Can’t Put That There! is being released in honour of Phantom Billstickers’ 40th birthday next year. You can pre-order it online on the Phantom website.

Keep going!
Fake Believe, Conspiracy Theory in Aotearoa, by Dylan Reeve, (Upstart Press), is out today. (Additional image design: Tina Tiller)
Fake Believe, Conspiracy Theory in Aotearoa, by Dylan Reeve, (Upstart Press), is out today. (Additional image design: Tina Tiller)

BooksOctober 13, 2022

Why I wanted to write a book about conspiracy theories in Aotearoa

Fake Believe, Conspiracy Theory in Aotearoa, by Dylan Reeve, (Upstart Press), is out today. (Additional image design: Tina Tiller)
Fake Believe, Conspiracy Theory in Aotearoa, by Dylan Reeve, (Upstart Press), is out today. (Additional image design: Tina Tiller)

When Dylan Reeve set out to write a book on a topic he knows an awful lot about, he imagined the process would be easy. Seventy-thousand words later he is a chastened man. 

I’ve been talking about conspiracy theories and the people that believe them for years, so it seemed natural to bring that together into a book to help others understand a little of what’s been going on.

I don’t know why I thought it would be easy, but somehow, when I first committed to the idea of writing a book — one that required a final word count in the region of 70,000 words — I just assumed, “sure, that should be easy enough.”

It wasn’t. 

And it wasn’t even a book that required me to embark on a massive journey of research or new investigation. I was writing about things I was already familiar with – things I had been talking about and writing about for years. I needed to refresh my memory on some stuff, talk to people to better understand certain subjects, and dig deeper on topics I already knew about, but generally I felt like I was on solid ground. 

Screenshot of agonising process of writing a book: writer’s own.

But, it probably comes as no surprise to most, writing a book was hard. For me the first challenge was finding structure.

If you talk to almost anyone who knows me you’ll learn that I’m very happy to rabbit on for a seemingly limitless time about all sorts of conspiracy theories and adjacent topics. I’ll bounce from one claim to another, and recount inane details and suggestions. I’ll probably pull out my phone and bring up some YouTube video I have saved on one of many playlists. 

That wasn’t going to translate especially well to a book (although the finished product certainly has aspects of that). Instead I needed to think about where I draw my boundaries and what I was trying to say. 

Ultimately what I decided on for Fake Believe was that I wanted to make people (who hadn’t been peering into rabbit holes for two decades like I had) feel like they at least had a handle on what was going on in the world of conspiracy theory belief.

I thought often as I wrote of the many conversations I’ve had with friends, colleagues and relatives who have come to me over the years with some weird website or puzzling Facebook post and asked, “what’s the deal with this?”

During the Covid pandemic, and as I wrote more often on these topics for The Spinoff, this started happening more and more frequently. People suddenly saw old schoolmates and not-all-that-distant relatives posting bizarre claims about vaccines and global politics.

So it was with those things in mind that I set out, one word at a time, to create a book that would help people land in a place of, at least, informed understanding. 

But once I started it was also then a question of when, or where, to stop. One theme I explore in the book is the lack of borders in conspiracy theory. Everything just sort of blurs together. If you pull at strings you often discover that the claims go something like this: Covid was a manufactured crisis to force people to take vaccines, which in conjunction with 5G technology form the basis of a population control plan, that is part of UN Agenda 2030, which is a facet of the globalist agenda to take over the world, including by manipulating world governments through the powers of the Deep State, who are also engaging in ritual child sacrifice, and that’s what Donald Trump and QAnon were fighting against… and so on. 

‘Hutt Valley, Kāpiti, down to the south coast. Our Wellington coverage is powered by members.’
Joel MacManus
— Wellington editor

A real difficulty with communicating the nature of conspiracy theory is actually distilling it and finding clear and concise examples of beliefs and claims. A feature common to so much online conspiracy content is that it is sprawling — videos are often hours long, and many theories are laid out over thousands of words and confusing images across multiple webpages on obscure sites. Other ideas unfold in jumbled threads on web forums and instant messaging apps. It can become a mission to locate succinct examples of widely accepted ideas in order to share. 

Although in some cases you can stumble upon a literal PowerPoint slide that lays one claim out with neat bullet points, so that’s nice.

I was aiming to write mostly about the belief in conspiracy theory as it affects Aotearoa, but these ideas don’t respect geographic boundaries. Believers don’t limit their interests to this country, and the never-ending flow of conspiratorial content is truly international. And so, unavoidably, was much of what I wrote about. 

One challenge I anticipated, but underestimated, was finding believers (and former believers) who would speak openly to me — my general position on this issue isn’t hard to learn by Googling me.

But I did find a few, and among them was Vinny Eastwood, the conspiracy theory YouTuber (well, former YouTuber now, he was banned from the platform) most widely known for his association with Billy TK. He is not quoted extensively in the book, but our frank and open discussion was broadly informative for me. Eastwood is intelligent, logical and analytical – he is a good example of the general fact that conspiracy theorists, despite what many are quick to assume, are not “stupid” or unwilling to think about their beliefs.

Conspiracy theory YouTuber Vinny Eastwood (Image: Supplied)

Politically, Eastwood and I probably have fairly similar views about the world in many ways, but we have reached very different conclusions about what causes the problems we see. I’m still not exactly sure how though. Like, I’m not sure what has led him to trust the sources and ideas he does, and more significantly, I’m not sure what’s prevented me from doing the same. When I stop to think about these ideas, I can very easily imagine an alternative universe, not far removed from this one, where I too am deeply suspicious of the Rothschild family and believe the US government was behind 9/11. 

Ultimately I hope that readers of my book are able to see in themselves many of the same traits, biases and tendencies that have led conspiracy believers to reach the conclusions they have, because I don’t think any of us are immune to the fundamental emotional and intellectual quirks that have created conspiracy theorists out of some of our neighbours and relatives. 

Eventually, after longer than I anticipated (and a little longer than my publisher had hoped) I reached what felt like the end for my book. 

What I’ve written isn’t exhaustive — I’m not sure anything could be, and in the months since I hit save for the final time on my draft there have been countless developments, discoveries, claims and revelations that I’d like to have included — but I hope I have created something that makes readers feel more informed about what sometimes seems like a looming threat to the fabric of reality (spoiler: it probably isn’t as bad as we might assume).

Fake Believe: Conspiracy Theories in Aotearoa (Upstart Press, $39.99) can be ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

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