Dream Dealer – Greg Newbold

But sometime in the early 1980s, after going to Wellington to meet Les to plan a robbery, Merv disappeared and was never seen again. According to Brian Agnew, a former robber and safe-blower whom I know well and trust, Les told Merv’s girlfriend that Merv had suddenly decided to go to Australia to discuss a heroin deal with Terry Clark.

But that would have been totally out of character, and in fact, Pete told me, it never happened. It is well accepted within the criminal community that Les killed both Merv and Marion. According to an article by investigative journalist Jared Savage in the Weekend Herald (8 January 2022), Les was also probably responsible for the deaths of Bernard Gray and Anna Fiore in Australia in 1984. I knew Les quite well, and he saw himself as an elite criminal whose mission was to eliminate those who, in his opinion, had violated pure criminal standards.

Later in the 1980s he had also planned to shoot Brian Agnew — but Ag was tipped off by Pete Atkinson and thus managed to foil Les’s plan. Pete and Ag both told me this story. Les Green’s activities caused him to be feared and hated by many in the criminal world, but in spite of this he was able to survive until October 2019, when he died of natural causes, aged 82.

From the time I entered A Block, Pete treated me as a friend and that amity expanded as the months passed by. He called me The Dream Dealer, because I’d been jailed for selling ‘powdered dreams’. The name stuck and some old lags still call me that today. In the cell-block dining room everybody always sat at the same seat; you couldn’t just sit anywhere.

But Pete invited me to sit at his table, where there was a spare place among the eight. He also taught me the ropes of the jail, in particular how to smuggle in drugs, which was a major preoccupation of ours. I soon moved from the lower east landing to the upper west so I could be with Pete and his friends and share in the drugs that we smuggled in during Saturday’s visits.

I’ll talk about that presently. According to Justice Department propaganda, Paremoremo had 100% employment.

First published in 2026 Text © Greg Newbold 2026 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Allen & Unwin Aotearoa New Zealand Level 2, 10 College Hill, Freemans Bay Auckland 1011, New Zealand +64 (9) 377 3800 [email protected] www.allenandunwin.co.nz 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia +61 (2) 8425 0100 A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

ISBN 978 1 991142 43 6 eISBN 978 1 92349 256 1 Front cover: A photo of the author taken immediately before sentencing to detention in a Detention Centre, April 1971. © Andrew Ducat All other images © Greg Newbold, unless stated otherwise. Design by Katrina Duncan OceanofPDF.com To Lucy, Deek and Suyan OceanofPDF.com Contents 1.

Baby Boomer 2. Mother’s Ruin 3. Bush Worker to Firefighter 4. Detention 5. Drug Dealing 6. Busted 7. Maximum Security 8. Hautu Prison Camp 9. Adjusting to Freedom 10. Entering Academia 11. Life Beyond the Academy 12. Trials of Professorship Acknowledgements OceanofPDF.com 1. BABY BOOMER In November 1975 I arrived at the maximum security prison at Paremoremo to begin a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.

Thirty-five years later I was awarded a full professorship at the University of Canterbury. Life has its ups and downs, and mine has been a bit of a roller coaster. The year 1951 was near the beginning of the so-called postwar Baby Boom. I was born in July 1951 and thus became one of the approximately two million citizens living in New Zealand then. Peter Newbold, my dad (born 1924), and June Elford, my mum (born 1927), had met during the war while working for Radio Corp in Wellington.

Dad had tried to join the air force after war broke out, but due to persistent migraines he failed the medical and was subsequently deemed to be employed in an essential industry. Thus he was not conscripted into the army. Mum and Dad were both from working-class backgrounds — Dad’s father, Frank, was a farm worker and Mum’s father, Charles, was a carpenter in Motueka and Wellington.

Dad attended Wanganui Tech and left school at fifteen. Mum left at thirteen and went to work without going to high school.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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