Same outfit: black Levi’s, raucous Hawaiian shirt. Same back corner table in the same Herne Bay café. Same paraphernalia: the Herald, a highbrow paperback, a laptop computer, and the red soft-pack, made-in-the-US Marlboros he went through at the rate of one every half-hour. Same air of suppressed amusement, same contemptuous glint in the pale blue eyes, just in case you hadn’t realized he was way smarter than you. His name was Doug Yallop, but most people called him Prof. After doing a Ph.D. at Sydney’s Macquarie University – the subject of his thesis was the life and works of the unfashionable English novelist Henry Green – he became a junior lecturer at the University of Auckland. It was the late seventies and, as was the case with a lot of university types at that time, Yallop’s main priority was ensuring he never ran out of marijuana. Like the man who admired the product so much he bought the company, Yallop went into the dope business. He quickly became the biggest weed dealer on campus, but while word of mouth was good for business, it was bad for security.
