Growing up in 1950s Auckland, Greg Newbold's early years were marked by order and chaos in equal measure, as his stable childhood later became transformed by his mother's alcoholism. After leaving school at 17, he entered university in 1970 and soon became immersed in the drug-fuelled hedonism of the era. Always a risk-taker, he began dealing in the drugs he was using until he was arrested in 1975 and charged with offering to sell 34 grams of heroin to a police informant. Convicted and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years imprisonment, he spent the first half of his sentence in the maximum-security prison at Paremoremo before being transferred to a prison camp.
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