The Merchants of Menace | Peter Butt
Detective Sergeant Clive Small probed Bernie Houghton’s early years in Sydney: Houghton was one of the most mysterious characters that you would meet in Kings Cross in those days. He set up his business effectively in the months before approval was given for US military resources to come to Australia on R&R from the Vietnam War. You could be forgiven for suspecting that he knew something in advance and was taking advantage of it.13 With Bernie’s blessing, Mike and Bud based themselves at the Bourbon & Beefsteak and started selling slices of paradise to young, impressionable GIs fresh from a war zone. The blocks on offer were part of a large coastal development in subtropical northern New South Wales, called ‘Ocean Shores’. The scheme was bankrolled by a big American tycoon and boasted popular singer Pat Boone as its figurehead. The genius of working out of the Bourbon was that fresh groups of GIs and navy guys were arriving in Kings Cross every week. With every sale Mike and Bud earned a tidy 25 per cent commission. In December 1968, Bud King returned to Laos and flew back two weeks later via Darwin in a Piper Apache aircraft he’d just purchased from Continental Air Service, a CIA airline. Bud figured that if any potential buyer proved a hard nut to crack, he would fly them up to Ocean Shores to seal the deal. A few weeks later, his Thai housekeeper, Arina, flew in from the Laotian capital, Vientiane, to help cater for buyers and dignitaries visiting Ocean Shores, including Pat Boone and Hollywood actor William Holden. In 1970, Doug Sapper and an army buddy flew from Saigon to Sydney on R&R: We went down to Kings Cross — well of course everybody 18