The Underworld Podcast - How Meth Turned New Zealand's Biker Gang Scene Upside Down: Mongrels, Black Power and Killer Beez

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

For decades, New Zealand's biker gangs fought each other for turf, cash and kudos. Violence between its two biggest outfits, the Mongrel Mob and Black Power, often turned deadly, and acts of cruelty shocked the public. Then, in the mid-90s, a new, potent drug worth billions arrived on the country's pristine shores - and with it a wave of foreign narcos looking to take control of what might be the world's most profitable black market. The gangs gave thousands of disaffected Maori and Pacific Islanders an identity. Meth—known locally as P—changed everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One, two, a one, two, three, four. Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar. Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar. That chocolate, crispy taste, gonna be a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. Have a break. Have a Kit Kat. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another. place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and

shows and they were all free. The truth is our city. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N-EX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. It's November 22nd, 2003, in a town of Wairoa on New Zealand's North island. It's a sleepy place on the wind-swept beaches of Hawkes Bay, a surfers' paradise full of pretty art deco, home to a few thousand people. It's also a flashpoint for the country's underworld, a disputed territory between its two biggest gangs, the mongrel mob and the black power. 70 gangsters meet after a hearing outside Wairoa's pokey white wall courthouse.

It's on. There's a massive street brawl, fists, bats and brass knuckles. For a good 10 minutes before the cops arrive and everybody scatters. In days gone by, that might have been the end of it. But in 2003, seven years into a meth epidemic and just months after New Zealand's biggest gang bust, violence is through the roof. A convoy of black power members heads off from Waroa to a meeting spot five miles inland.

But two mumbral mobsters have waited in the bushes, dressed in camo gear and carrying rifles. One of them fires at the convoy, hitting a 29-year-old man, Henry William Whitehapé, killing him on the spot. Then they flee into the greenery. Extreme violence isn't new to New Zealand's biggest outlaw gangs, but murder is something that used to only happen rarely. Now it's in the news every other week.

This is what happens when you throw millions of dollars and a potent new drug at bikers who've been causing mayhem for decades. And it's not just the locals in charge anymore. There are former Yugoslav hipmen, Vietnamese money launders, triads, Burmese meth lords, and even South American narcos. And that's filtering directly out onto the streets of snoozy little Wairoa. Two are charged with Whitehappies murder. Cops declare their investigations of success.

But this is just the beginning of a fearsome escalation of New Zealand's organised crime trouble. And in the years to come, this Pacific Island Paradise will witness gang violence. the likes of which it's never seen before. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hi guys, welcome to the show that teaches you how to get swastikas tattooed all over your face and you can just pass it off as a joke. I'm your host, Sean Williams and I'm joined by my Brooklynite buddy and investigative journalist co-host Danny Gold, who, I believe, has spent most of the last week jumping for joy about

the Staples Center getting this name changed. Definitely not a pyramid scheme, you know? Never. And I just, Christmas has really come early this year. We have two Sean episodes in a row. Everyone who appreciates jokes about cricket and weird British slang. Just, it's thrilled right now. You know, I managed to shoehorn some shit cricket joke into a show about Guinea Bissell.

And I've done a show about New Zealand and I don't think it's got to mention, which is nuts. So as ever, we've got the Patreon going strong. We've got interviews going up there pretty much all the time. Get your Q&A questions in soon too, because we're going to do that. episode before long. We've got merch. Anything else I'm missing, Danny? Patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. You know, holiday season's coming up. If you're bored of the conversations you're having with your loved ones, why not get the membership so they can talk about something interesting? Or Underworldpod.com, you go there, click on the merch,

get them a t-shirt. You know, make it happen. Make us happy. Yeah. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. to give it its full name. So that's this stunning place, Lord of the Rings. It's rich. You've got Taika Waititi, the All-Blacks. My partner's a Kiwi, actually, I've spent a bunch of time there this time last year. I think we recorded a couple of shows from out there. It's amazing. It's easily as beautiful as people say, many ways, a little utopia. And it's pretty safe too. Everyone I've ever met from New Zealand when traveling has been just completely insane, but, you know, like in a good way. That's really all the inside I have into the country. Yeah, I think they like to think of themselves as like the Canada to America, but them to Australia.

But I'm probably going to piss off about all of our Australian listeners by saying that. But anyway, you know, to dump on them for a second, there's a huge dirty underbelly in New Zealand. Drug use through the roof. And the markups are insane. And they've attracted some of the world's worst crooks. A kilo of meth that costs 1K in China can fetch 180K in New Zealand. And that's this high grade so-called P, the locals call it, which has become the country's jug of choice since its own Walter White made his own stuff in the mid-90s.

Is P like a type of meth? Is it just slang short for anything? It's slang. And the funny thing is I went out with a guy, I'm going to get into this in a bit, but I went out with a guy and I was asking him, why is it called P? And he's like, I have no idea, mate. I completely don't know why it's called that. It's meth, basically, but it's pretty high grade because it's a rich market.

but we'll get into the water white stuff in a bit. But first, I'm going to take you all the way back like we enjoy doing here to the 1950s. And this is when New Zealand's gangs first begin to take shape. And it all starts at a place called the Majestic Theatre in Auckland, which is by far the biggest city, by the way. And I'm going to use a lot of information from two books for this show. One's called Patch the History of Gangs in New Zealand by Jared Gilbert.

And the other I got for Christmas, and it's called Gangland by Jared Savage. great read fully recommend as always it's on the reading this guys go to the website and actually we haven't done this before but i want to warn listeners there are some pretty graphic episodes of sexual violence in this episode and there's language people might well actually they definitely should find it offensive so you've been warned i think it's our first trigger warning and it should probably be our last like people you guys know what you're getting here sean we don't we don't need to we don't need to take it there yeah i know i know i know maybe we can end it by after this

But anyway, it's the 50s. It's 1955, to be precise. Elvis Presley's career is taking off. That's not the offensive part. And so is New Zealand's economy. The Korean War means there's actually way more need for Kiwi products like wool and meat. And the wages there shoot up by 50% until the mid-1960s. Why is that a thing? For like American troops, is trade disrupted or something? Why do we need more Kiwi products? Yeah, because they're not coming from the area. I think it mostly probably is because of like Japan and parts of Korea and China where everything's on fire at that time. So people look at a bit further afield for their, I don't know, woolly jumpers and cows. And there's plenty of both of those in New Zealand. So times are good in this early moment. And a bunch of young white guys are hanging outside the majestic and they're just shooting the shit.

They call themselves the Milk Bar Cowboys, which is not cool, and they love riding around town on Triumphs, Norton's, BSAs, matchless ears, in leather jackets, just messing around. One of these guys, he's got a bit of an artistic flair, and he paints an eagle on the back of his pal's jacket. Soon, there are ten guys with the eagle on their back, and one of them names this group the Auckland outcasts, connected by their love of bikes and mischief.

At night, the outcast speed up and down the Auckland streets, grinding their steel toe caps against the tarmac, showering the streets in sparks. I mean, there's nothing much separating these kids from bikers all over New Zealand or even the world at this time. Also, I'm going to say, it sounds pretty cool to do that

with your boot on the streets. I mean, it's a lot cooler than like a PSP or just playing on your phone, isn't it? Yeah. But one night of the Majestic in 1960, this all changes. The outcasts are doing their usual collar up bad boy stuff.

When they meet up, a Californian by the name of Jim Carico. Carico starts telling them stories about a US group called the Hells Angels, badasses, big reps, the outcasts are hooked. Soon, the Hells Angels opens a New Zealand chapter, and for a while it's the only outfit in town. And like Carico will argue to a judge, it's really more than a club than a gang at this point, although that is going to change. And just like other parts of the West, the 1960s transforms youth culture in New Zealand. England. In 1960, protests break out when the country sends an all-white or pakeha to use the Maori term for whites, All-Black's rugby team on a tour of apartheid South Africa, prompting protests

across the country. And if you know about rugby these days, you'll know that All-Blacks is like pretty much a symbol of Māori and Pacific Island culture in the country. It's like their biggest sport. But then later on, it's Wellington sending its first troops to Vietnam in 1967 that really pisses off the locals. And that's the first time in modern history people really rally against the state. Throughout the decade, writes Jared Gilbert, quote, there seemed to be a super abundance of causes that would bring people out onto the streets. I think you have to clear up some stuff because, you know, Americans aren't super tuned into rugby and you're calling a team the all blacks, but then it's, but it's an all white team that's called the all blacks, right?

That's a good point. Yeah, the New Zealand rugby team, they play an all black, they're called the all Blacks. I mean, they might be the most famous rugby team in the world. These days, they're very famous for being kind of, I guess they kind of sum up the so-called diversity of the country. But back then, I mean, and you see them doing the Haka, which is a famous Māori like warrior pre-battle dance, kind of like this right of passage. But back in a day, you see all these white guys playing for the All Blacks and they're doing it pretty half-assed. It's quite embarrassing. If it's not only that, but they're also going to apartheid South Africa. That kind of takes the piss a bit

and I can see why people are out on the streets. So in this 1960s, crime soars by almost 60%, especially violent offences. By 1969, you've got Easy Rider raking in at the box office. There's a ton of offshoot biker gangs and they've pretty much all got names

like 80s heavy metal bands. You've got Satan slaves, Epitaph riders, road runners, devil's henchmen, coffin cheaters, lone legion, Magogs, nomads. Oh yeah, and Shin Fane, which is weird.

Actually, there's a 90s women's gang called the DFBs or the deadly fucking bitches, which I reckon is a late contester for gang name of the year. Yeah, that's pretty solid. I mean, every now and then you see these, in like the local New York papers, you see these

write-ups of like various gang names and who controls what territory. It's usually just like block crews, but they're always like the stack money gang, the goonie goo-go. You know, there's some classic names there, but The FB is pretty solid in its own right. I like it, yeah. A lot of this stuff, by the way, for this episode,

it's focused on the Hawks Bay that I mentioned before. And this is a sweeping 62-mile bay on the east side of the North Island. There are two islands in New Zealand, or two main ones, north and south. And the North Island is home to about two-thirds of New Zealand's 5 million people today. And the Hawks Bay's biggest city is Napier,

and one of its biggest suburbs is Hastings. And sometime in the 60s, so goes the myth. A group of young guys are on trial when a local magistrate calls them, quote, mongrels. Well, Jared Gilbert reckons it never happened because according to the timing, these guys would have had to be in about 10 years old when it's supposed to have happened. But, you know, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. I've always said that. And this becomes the founding legend of the mongrel mob.

And that becomes New Zealand's biggest gang, arguably still its biggest gang today. Wait, so it's interesting. I thought the name Mangrel Mob was like a tongue-in-cheek reference to their ethnic makeup, like reclaiming the N-word sort of thing. You know, I didn't realize that it started as an all-white gang. Yeah, it did. I thought that as well, actually, before I researched this episode. But as we're about to learn, it kind of clouds the war a little bit.

So at first, the mob is Pakeha or white gang. But in the late 60s and 70s, more Māori and Pacifica folks, that's people from islands like Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, They move from rural areas, mostly in the country's far north, into cities like Auckland and the capital of Wellington. And soon enough, a rival gang called the Black Power pops up. We're going to dive into them a lot more soon, but at this point, in the early 70s,

it's pretty much still all about the mongrel mob. Goes the so-called mongrel mob ditty, quote, born in a brothel, raised in a jail, proud to be a mongrel, SIG-fucking Hale, or Hile. I don't know, it's pretty bad rhyming. Anyway, you know, it's anything weird about that? Yes, the Mongols adopt Nazi salutes, the swastika, and their logo is a British bulldog wearing the German Wehrmars Schaulheim.

That's like the steel helmet. And they get tats of these things on their faces, which is supposed to be like a fuck you to all establishment. But as Māori, when your culture's been flattened by Brits and white supremacy over the years, I guess I would say it's a pretty massive cell phone. So wait, was the Nazi thing, was the, the gang was all white then, or did they have Maori and Pacific Islanders in them too? So at this point, there's more Māori and Pacific Islanders, like getting into the gang

because they're kind of, they're in this urban drift from the, from the rural regions of the north. So more and more Māori people are in the gang at this point. And I think it's like some of it, I think, is to do with that feeling like an outsider racially, but it's more to do with just fuck everything to. do with society. And this Nazi stuff, it's not even confined to them. Black Power, that other gang I told you about, that uses it too.

As does a Pacific Island gang called the Storm Troopers who take it like a couple of, well, more than a couple of steps further. Like, not just in the name, but they actually wear Nazi war helmets. And there's this really weird TV interview from 1970 I watched where this guy's like, isn't that about white supremacy guys? And the gang members like, yeah, but, quote, we're just changing the situation. We're wearing it to be different.

We don't want to comply with rules or anything like that, which is, I mean, given following orders and all that, that's kind of ironic. Says Newsweek at the time, quote, they have since embraced symbols associated with Hitler, insisting that this was an anti-establishment rather than an anti-Semitic practice. These include wearing patches of allegiance

that feature a swastika and a British bulldog wearing a German military helmet. I think this was pretty common in biker gangs in the U.S. too around the same time. Like, you know, they even used to do stuff, like make out with each other just to mess with the squares, you know? That reminds me of story I heard about a football tour. But yeah, yeah, it's just banter, right? So this is a gang member, by the way, called Tehaheira Ferro Weroa, speaking to the mag. That's Newsweek.

Quote, I didn't really look at it in depth with Hitler and all that sort of stuff. I just grew up knowing it was mongrel mob, but it's positive as. It's come away from fuck the society and all that kind of stuff. And in 2011, this stuff actually makes headlines again when a gang member is arrested for shouting

Zieg Heil, a police on New Year's Eve. Don't do that, guys. When a judge asks him what it actually means, he says it's, quote, just another way of saying hi to the bros. Yeah, that's such a good excuse for anything right there. That is the ultimate banter defense. I'm really like this is about as being as offensive and outside society as it's possible to be.

Same goes for this barking the mongrel mob do to greet each other. I mean, just about everything else they do really. In the early days it turns from a rowdy drinking club to something way more sinister. Here's an early member called Gary Gerber's quote, we would fight people wanting to join the gang ourselves and see what they could do. Or else we would send them in against terrible odds. wait a while and then go in and smash them. That's the other guys they're sending these recruits in the fight.

It was all about muscle. We hated bikers and the only other gang were the hell's angels. No, he uses the M word here, and that's to describe black power. No, nothing. We just developed utter strength. We built strength. Our other hate was boat people, overseas ships, and we specialized going out and wiping pubs out, about eight of us, tough cunts.

and we established such a strong name. If anyone says anything wrong about the Mongrels, I'd just smash them. Wait, I'm like still confused on this end, right? So the Mongols at this point, are they all white or are they mixed and they're mixed and they just hate other Pacific Islanders that are coming in, like newer immigrants? Like, I'm not clear. When they say boat people, they literally mean like seamen getting off the boats at ports in New Zealand.

Yeah, so they're just, I thought it was a derogatory term for like, for people coming into the country. No, no. So at this point they're like a really mixed racial group. They just love. They hate sailors. They just hate sailors. And they still,

I guess they're still making the sparks fly with their little boots and everything. Anyway, we just developed utter strength. That's like pretty red pill milady kind of speak. But, you know, you get it. These guys are enjoying a scuff or 10 and they're building a rep as a neighborhood monsters.

And in case you're not fully getting that message, there's another scene where a woman at a hotel bar, she talks down to our Gary, that's the guy from the previous quote. So he says, so he grabs her, hangs her upside down by her ankles, and rips her panties off with his teeth.

And when he sees she's on her period, he pulls her tampon out and licks the blood off his face. This is him again. Most people would go like it was yuck, but these are the sort of stunts we used to pull. The sort of things we used to do because we were mongrels.

It was just a thing of class. Our law was our law. It was bad law. It was dumb law. Actually, maybe not bad law. It wasn't bad then, but it was just a law all of his own. I mean, that is a pretty concise philosophy from Gary there. One reason to say for this kind of abuse is that a lot of the founding mongrel mob come out of social care across New Zealand, where violence and sexual abuse is rife at the time. And as Gerbers has told the British show, Ross Kempong gangs, quote, we just shit right back. So the mongrels love singing and barking about honour and respect and brotherhood in their clubhouses all over the country. And these rules, they certainly do not extend to women. And they can't be members and they're expected to be entirely subservient to men. The worst is this practice called The Block, which is when a woman enters a mongrel mob clubhouse, she's put over the block, which means she's literally gang raped.

The last prosecuted case of this is in 2008. And the most infamous episode comes in 1987, when a 16-year-old girl named Colleen Burrows is heading to get fish and chips for her family in Napier in the Hawks Bay. But she takes a detour and she goes drinking with some family members at a hotel bar in the city instead. There she meets two mongrel mob members, Sam Taha and Tad Sullivan,

who try raping her in their van on the way back. When she fights them off, they punch and kick her nearly to death on the road out of town. Then when they see she's still moving, they back up and run over Killeem multiple times. So, so much for your gang values. Bruno Isaac, a former mongrel mob member, describes the gang's attitude in the 1980s like this. If it was considered evil, bad and lawless, we embraced it as good. Everything was backward or ironic.

The mystery of the gang was that we were right even if we were wrong. We were good, even if we were bad. We embraced a living context. contradiction. And he goes on, quote, the mob psyche might have made no sense to outsiders, but everything made perfect sense to us. Being a mongrel meant being able to do anything your mind could conceive. Any form of fantasy or debauchery you were able to dream up was acceptable. Kind of sounds like the MO for a lot of, you know, biker gangs and street gangs in general. I guess I'm not so well versed on the biker gangs, but I mean, this stuff just kind of shocked me.

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Basically, yeah, like a lot of these guys are just fucking scumbags and they've sworn enemies or a rival gang called the Black Power. These guys are founded in 1970 as the quote, Black Bulls by Maudie youth in Wellington. to counter the mongrel mob and other gangs running right at the time. The gang really doesn't take off until 1975, and it takes cues from the US Black Power movement.

Members salute each other with a clenched fist, and their greeting cry is, yo, fuck yo. It's honestly kind of amazing to see the cultural influence of America with these things and how they sort of spread, you know, whether it's like northern Europe, biker gangs as well. You know, I'm looking into a situation in Belize with bloods and crips and all that. Definitely not a good cultural influence, you know, but it's out there.

I mean, I guess it's that 60s and 70s kind of racial awakening, you know, that was kind of seeping into other countries and it definitely did go to New Zealand. Dennis O'Reilly is an early member of Black Power. I'm hoping to get him on this show, actually. He says, quote, whenever you ask why a particular chapter of the Blacks started, it's generally because they didn't want to be the mob, because they were getting bashed by the dominant crew. And the Black Power, they've got a looser structure than the Mongrels.

And they try and imbue their group with a closer connection to Māori culture, a kind of revolutionary spirit. They openly call for a so-called Fano-based approach to a gang. Fano is a Māori word meaning an extended family or culture. It's a very important concept in Māori culture, as is that of Faka Papa, which is more like ancestry or lineage. If you speak to a Māori about themselves, they'll bring both these things up for sure. It's really a beautiful language. I'm lucky to learn a bit of it. but I mean, race is a very big factor in all of this.

Māoridom is a warrior culture. It's bound by a dogmatic set of customs and beliefs. And they were considered fearsome fighters in the early years of colonialism. Before the Waitangi Treaty of 1840, which, I'll be careful how I word this, either brought peace between the British crown and indigenous population or fooled Māoridem into accepting Western concepts of land ownership. Māori iwi or tribes fought each other bitterly with fighting staffs called Tayaha and later muskets. Māori are also among the first people in the British Empire to volunteer to fight Nazism,

with the Māori battalion gaining legendary status on the battlefields of Greece and elsewhere that helped turn a tide for the Allies. Five of every seven Māori soldiers didn't even make it back to New Zealand, which is, you know, ironic given the Nazi regalia. So after the Second World War like I've touched on earlier in the show, Māori and Pacific Island Kiwis, they move into the country's major cities. But there are tons of friction points, and 85% of young Māori leave school before getting any qualifications at all. Their language is being squashed in society, and government attempts to quote,

Pepper Pot, Maori and white homes among each other in the 60s, fall flat, when neither ethnic group wants to live with the other. So you begin to get these ethnic enclaves like Porolua in Wellington and Altara in Auckland. It's interesting to see that. Like they tried the reverse of what happened in so many manufacturing centers in America around that time, you know, post-great migration, which is basically, you know, codifying ways to get away with segregated neighborhoods. Yeah. Racial discrimination when it comes to housing.

Like, you know, white people essentially making sure that black people were corralled into like, you know, not good neighborhoods. And they tried the reverse there and it ended up with the same sort of situation. Yeah, it's like an anti-redlining and it just didn't work because people didn't really know each other back then. So they didn't really trust the other group

and it didn't work. And these two places, Porirua and Otara, they're still hotbeds of crime today. I mean, there's this image outside of New Zealand, I think, of indigenous rights being way better than they are in, say, the state or Australia.

And that's definitely true. but obviously it's a pretty low bar and Māori and Pacifica people are way overrepresented in social care, child poverty, drugs, all of that shit stuff. The American psychologist David Asabel once said that while race relations in New Zealand are

generally better in the United States, they are not nearly as good as people think or claim they are. And I reckon I could testify to that. It's not that great. This January I actually spent a day riding around Wellington with Eugene Ryder, who's a former black power

leader, joined the gang when he was 15. Now he's studying law and he's working with the state to get people off drugs and out of the gangs. He told me about how a lot of the early drive for him was that he had no connection to his culture, like a generational schism. And this is what a lot of experts say still drives ethnic Māori and Pacific mobs in New Zealand today. It's this like whole generation of young men which drilled into an inherently criminal. I mean, we've done this drill with the the Turks, the Kurds, the Irish, the Russians, the Jews, black, Sicilians, Chinese. I mean, it's no different in New Zealand. And a lot of what drives these gangs, like I mentioned, is a lack of Faka Papa.

What, what now? That's Faka Papa, which is kind of a Māori term meaning lineage or like ancestry. It's like really, really sort of coveted in the culture. And it all goes back to Taiwan, apparently. And it's a lot in common with Hawaiian culture. I'm sure we'll get people telling me I'm talking. shit, but I'm pretty sure that's true. Anyway, back to the 80s.

New Zealand's going for an economic downturn. Jobs are disappearing. More young men are joining the mongrel mob, black power, and other patched outfits. Some of these say you need a motorcycle to be a member, and some just use bike it imagery. There are pretty frequent brawls, but instances of terrible violence

like the murder of Colleen Burroughs that I mentioned before, they're rare. The founders are getting a bit older, They're having families of their own, simmering down and the scene just mellows out a little. So were they involved in like drug dealing and more organized crime before then or around this time at all? I mean, they're involved in weed dealing, definitely. Like there's a lot of that going on. They're kind of supplementing a lot of these clubhouses with weed.

But not a huge amount. They're more kind of biker clubs at this time. And actually to tell you about how these gangs changed, I'm going to tell you about the life of one of the members. and this is a guy called Abe Fadawaka, and he's the former president of black power and the so-called grandfather of New Zealand's underworld. Abe comes of age in the 1980s, and he models himself on the Māori Warlord Hongi Hika,

who blagged his way to a stash of guns in the early 1800s and blew his rivals away. And bear with me, because this is great. Here's Abe talking to a journalist at Stuff Magazine, quote, He got on a ship to England all those years ago and met the king, who gave him some money, armor. He stopped off in Sydney on the way back and sold it and bought all these guns instead.

Then he came back here and he smashed every cunt over. He killed them all. All these Nati fatua. That's another tribe. Bang, bang, bang. That's gangster. I mean, he's not wrong. It is very gangster, but also Stuff Magazine, man. What a throwback. Oh, yeah. That's not the stuff magazine we know. That's actually the biggest magazine in New Zealand, which is completely different, which is weird. Okay, no matter what they call it stuff. Yeah. I can't. I can't. of want abe to do history lessons like Dan Carling's history, but through Abe where everyone smash his cunts.

And this story goes on, quote, Fadawaka is the eldest gang leader in the country, the grandfather of New Zealand's underworld, an avid reader, globe trotter, an entrepreneur, variously fuelled and hobbled by his unremitting appetites for methamphetamine and prostitutes.

Fadihuacca has been to the top and he's lost everything. Sounds a bit like you, mate. This guy has I mean, this guy is a nutcase, basically, and he's spent ages behind bars for all kinds of offenses, including drugs, of course. He grows up in a massive family post-World War II,

when Māori leave the northern landscapes, and they move down into the cities. He drops out of school after a couple of years because he can't afford a uniform, and he works a bunch of dead-end jobs before starting a so-called Cindy, or a syndicate of pool players, who gets in a ton of fights

before teaming up with black power and becoming key members. That's the syndicate. In the 70s and 80s, there's a political drive in New Zealand to bring the gangs on side. And Abe works with the government to get his boys into work, built in a 3,000 square foot complex in Auckland called The Factory, and that employs 200 people and trains them up in a bunch of different trades. Allegedly, Abe gets a ton of cash from the state after a late-night face-to-face drinking session

with then Prime Minister Rob Muldoon. This seems successful, you know, integrating the gangs into trade. skills and real jobs. Yeah, it does, it seems that way. And says Jared Gilbert, quote, for a while, Abe Fadawaka was the most successful gang boss in the country. He built a fairly phenomenal empire. They weren't just reliant on government contracts. They had all sorts of schemes running. By this point, it's the late 80s and Abe's being hailed as a champion of the Māori people. He's on regular trips to the Beehive, that's the Parliament building in Wellington, and he even publishes a Tehral language newspaper, that's the Māori language.

Everybody loves this guy. And that means cash. Unheard of for a local crook at that time. Abe jets off on holidays in Asia, splashes six figures on LA shopping trips, and he owns a collection of 18 Harleys, a purple caddy and a stretch limo. But shock horror, it's all going to come crashing down. First is the 1980s financial crash, which hits New Zealand a little late at the night. other countries. I think we've mentioned it like all over the world. Gangs just like shot up in the

mid-80s. That dries out the public's appetite for the work schemes in New Zealand. And then it's discovered that Abe's being duke in the system all along, getting loan on top of loan, paying phantom employees and overcharging for work. And he's never officially caught for that. But with the work schemes gone, black power has to look for other ways to make money. So Abe and his boy has turned to the black market, of course, pimping, selling weed and other drugs out of so-called tinny houses. He called the house he ran his drug empire from the Marai, which is a Maori meeting spot, a kind of a town hall. You see them all over New Zealand. And he's making five figures daily throughout the 90s. Abe's getting into meth at this time, and in 2003, people raid the Marai.

Abe is off his head smoking a pipe, and he gets eight years prison time. Says Abe, quote, I'm not a person to cry of a spilt milk. Those three years I had that parlor, that's the mud eye, I had the best time of my 60 years. Abe Hefner, that's who I thought I was. This guy's incredible. Yeah, he's pretty mad. And here's Dennis O'Reilly, the other Black Power member.

Quote, maybe back in the 70s, black power was 80% about social justice and 20% criminal. Then in the 80s, it was 6040. I don't even think it's 100% criminal even now. There was a real consciousness there, he adds. If you go back to Abe's newspaper, I think those aspirational things were quite real, you know. It wasn't just juice, it wasn't PR.

It may have been naive, and at the end of the day, there was obviously some criminality, but we were earnest people who were trying to do with what seemed to be an unfair social situation. And Abe, he actually dies in 2017, age 74, but as you've heard, his life kind of epitomizes this huge change

within the New Zealand underworld. And this massive change, like it all kicks off with a guy named William Wallace. No, not that one, Dale, cut the bagpipes. This one is a chemist who, in 1994, age 54, is let go from his job at Air New Zealand, the national carrier. It's a crushing blow to Wallace. And as Jared Savage writes in Gangland, quote, Wallace suddenly found himself on the scrap heap. I mean, does this sound a bit Walter White to you?

Very much so. Yeah, and it's going to get more so. I mean, first, Wallace opens an electroplate in shopping, Atahoooo-Othahu, South Auckland. I'm really struggling with the Maori names. And he works long, long hours to support his family. Four years later, and hey, Presto, Wallace sells the business, and he starts splashing the cash.

There's 40,000 US dollars on a sports car, 100 grand up to do some Italian race cars up, 70 grand on an industrial unit, another 70 grand on a stone wall around the Wallace family home and holidays paid in cash. I mean, that's pretty decent going for a four-year electroplating firm, right? And by the way, electroplating is just a process of putting metal coverings on stuff chemically. But you knew that. Anyway, Wallace is on a role.

So he buys another industrial spot, bigger this time, in the western suburb of New Lynn. And it's kitted out, three-phase electricity, massive extractor fans, desiccator jars and other stuff used in. high-end chemistry. Then there are shells all over the place and they're full of chemicals like effigrine, hydrochloric acid, red phosphorus. None of it's got anything to do with electroplating on the earth. By 1996, cops have been getting wind of a new substance in town. Kids are calling it pee and it's causing all kinds of mayhem among New Zealand's biker gangs. But there's absolutely no clue where this stuff is coming from. Soon enough, however, informants' pass on the name of a middle-aged chemist working out of a nondescript shack outside town,

and police launch Operation Surf, hooking cameras up to the new Lynn address and listening in on phone calls. It turns out Wallace is making high-grade P or meth, and his plan is to make just enough to retire on before he gets out of the game. It's always good to set your targets, but I feel like anytime anyone makes that plan, you know, they just kind of let it run afterwards, like me with shit coins. then you lose it all. How many you got these days?

Have you lost it already? Let's not talk about that. But patreon.com, that's the Underworld podcast. Make it happen. So similarly for Wallace, he gets no such luck. In 1997, cops raid the joint, turning it upside down, and finding, among other things, almost 100 grand stuffed into a biscuit tin and a book called Secrets of Meth Manufacture, which is quite damning, I'd say. There's enough precursor drugs in the lot to make two million bucks of pee.

Savage goes on in his book, quote, there would be some dispute among detectives as to whether Wallace's was the very first clandestine meth lab uncovered in New Zealand. But its sophisticated setup certainly marked a turning point for the local drug scene. A new drug had arrived and it was here to stay. It's really hard to underestimate how meth has completely changed New Zealand. I mean, not just it's gangs. By some estimates, there are up to 140,000 people using this stuff regularly,

which, I mean, remember, this is a country of 5 million people, and it's got perhaps the highest street prices in the world. So it's a big draw for anybody wanted to get stuck into the underworld. Remember the shooting at the top of the episode? That comes at a time when meth is just taking over the mongrel mob and the black power. And leaders are getting deeper into drugs, fucking each other over, fighting, getting nasty, for sure. In 2001, Copse in Christchurch, the country's third biggest city, launched something

called Operation Crusade, putting undercover officers among the gangs, tapping wires, carrying out surveillance, the lot. And what they find is staggering. Every single gang in the city is smuggling meth, taking it just like Abe did, imploding and getting more and more violent. In the Hawks Bay, there's a succession of attacks and murders, and the cops are up on the lot. By 2002, police bring charges against 16 gang members at mass trial in Christchurch, which is the biggest in Kiwi history, and they get sent down for over 70 charges, including drugs, firearms, violence. Were they in drugs at all before this?

Like, was there cocaine, heroin, anything like that? Or was meth really just this thing that completely changed the makeup of these gangs? how they operated. As far as I can tell, like I said before, like the weed was really big with the gangs. There was some coke floating around, but not much. It's really like that mid-90s switcheroo that's just like changes the whole face of the gang culture in New Zealand and the country really. Like every gang went from zero to 100 and they were all dealing meth within like a year or two. So this giant Christchurch court case, it's big news. And as you'd expect, it causes chaos among the gangs.

That year, in the Auckland suburb of Otara, one of those depressed neighbourhoods I spoke about before, a street gang called the Killer Bees is christened by a well-known local kickboxer called Josh Masters. And he breaks off from the larger tribesman motorcycle club, which is a big Māori outlaw biker gang. Masters, he's a bit of a street entrepreneur. And he's a big scary fella too.

Born in 1978 in Atara, he's a good rugby player. I mean, for American listeners, rugby is like American football, but without all the body armor and family annihilators. Like, he's really good at that. And by 21, he's a patched-up tribesman gangster. And at this time, in the late 90s,

there's a growing discontent with the old guys who've carried these clubs for so long, with their rules and regs and whatnot. And kind of taking their cue from the LA race riots and West Coast rap, a bunch like these guys split off into smaller mobs. Masters raps under the same. pseudonym gravity. According to Jared Savage, quote,

Masters was tough, strong and fearless. He was also handsome and charming, and had genuine leadership and business savvy. Only, Master sees a bit more than that. He sets up something called Colorway Records and he raps himself. He's charismatic and youngsters flock to him. Media start worrying about all these kids getting a so-called master's degree. Oh, that is solid. I mean, whatever editor or writer coined that, that is like give them a raise it takes a lot to get an okay from you and stuff like that as well so

we need to reach out to that guy that's just good then in 2008 Josh Masters heads with a bunch of his boys to a showdown with tribesmen in South Auckland over you guessed it meth shipments and this ends in a shootout and two people injured

little does Masters know but Kiwi cops are already onto him as part of Operation Leo which sees his hundreds of thousands of messages until May 2008, when it swoops, arresting 43 of his killer bees members, half a million drugs, cash, stolen property and bikes and cars. By 2010, age 30, Masters is sentenced to 10 years on money laundering and drugs charges. I wrote a little song to remind you, choice hotels, get you more of the experiences you value.

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What about remarkably adaptable vehicle because of its versatile cargo space? Or really admired vehicle? Oh, or really awesome vehicle. It really is the recreational activity vehicle. The stylish 2026 Toyota Rav4 Limited. What's your Rav for? On April 26th, 2019, Masters is riding his Harley by a dealership when a former friend, a giant guy called Ocasatino Taya,

who is now a member of the tribesman outfit himself, shoots Masters in the arm with a 9mmy at semi-automatic pistol. The bullet ricochets off Master's bones and lodges in his spine, paralysing him. He crashes and the bike falls on top of him, nearly killing him. Taya just walks to Walls, Master's, pointing the gun at his head. When he's right in front of his old pal, Ty pulls back the slide and squeezes the trigger,

but nothing happens. Ty's forgotten the gun automatically loads another bullet into the chamber, and he's jammed it. He tries again. Again, nothing. Finally, Tay walks up to Masters, and he aims the barrel directly at the fallen gang leader's temple. But the gun just keeps on jamming.

Tai calmly heads back to his car and drives off. But he meets with senior members of the killer bees and tribesmen that evening. evening to make sure there's not a war. And he turns himself into cops later on. Last May, that's May 2020, a judge sentences take to seven years in prison. That's it, huh? They really don't do the whole send criminals the prison thing there. No, I mean, they've got prisons, unlike Guinea-Bissau, but I think they're on the, I think they're on the softer side of the sliding scale that we normally look at. So we're really up to speed now. And we've got old patched gangs like the mob, black power, street gangs like the killer bees, and there's a whole shitload of

meth. And this is the point when the Australian government does something amazing, and it decides to take a massive dump on its neighbor and strip 501 convicted criminals of their Aussie citizenship and deport them back to New Zealand when they either grew up or have family heritage. This is like the genesis of MS-13 becoming massive all over again, you know? man, I didn't even like draw that line and it's almost entirely the same. Well, I guess in the U.S., a lot of them didn't have citizenship. So they, but they were, I mean, some of them had, you know, barely spoke Spanish or grown up mostly in the U.S. They were come over when they were babies and became these gangsters that they just shipped back to El Salvador when the country couldn't handle what was going on.

And, you know, that's how the gangs grew immensely, shipping out gang members from America into El Salvador, just like they did here. shipping out gang members from Australia and to New Zealand. Yeah, I mean, Australia and New Zealand are like super tight as you'd imagine politically, but this move from Australia has really put a fire up the New Zealanders. They really don't like it. And I mean, it's obviously bad diplomacy. And there's this amazing video. I've put it on the reading list like it's worth checking out where just Cindy Rardin and Scott Morrison,

the two leaders are just standing there at a press conference, shitting on each other, not looking at each other. not looking at each other once and saying how bad this movie is. And these guys, like these guys, the 501 that are deported, these aren't just small-time crooks. These are proper gangsters. They're leaders of Aussie biker mobs like the rebels and worse, the Comonchero MC.

These lot, they're a 1% to outlaw motorcycle gang at war with fellow Aussie outfit the banditos. It's most notorious to Comon Cheros for a 1984 Father's Day massacre in Sydney that left seven dead including one innocent bystander. These guys are deep into the international meth trade out of Burma and will definitely cover them at some point. Basically, these guys are not local gangsters. They're a well-oiled mafia with ties to Asian and South American cartels. The Comancheiros officially opened a New Zealand chapter in 2018 and they get to work supercharging the domestic drug trade.

The Comancheiro New Zealand President Pasolika Nofahu was jailed for 10 years this February for his role in a massive drugs and money laundering scheme. Nofahoo, whose Tongan by heritage, was sent, inverted commas, back under the 501 scheme in 2016. Says the judge at his sentencing, quote, Mr Nofarhu's resurrection of his gang affiliations and his result to offending in Auckland was virtually guaranteed when he was deported to New Zealand. The Comancheros even command a special wing at Auckland's Mount Eden Prison. The Comancheros are an exclusive club. They're very picky about who can join them outside prison, an employee tells the New Zealand Herald.

They wear flashy suits and they drive nice cars. They don't necessarily do all the dirty work, but they have a lot more money than other gangs. So I was kind of picturing, you know, dirty leather vests and hand of our mustaches, but this seems quite different than that. Well, they kind of are that as well. It's really weird. They combine so many different aesthetics of different gangs. We'll definitely do an episode on these guys because they're, I mean, they're dark motherfuckers, but they're interesting. And as if they've been listening to this pod, No Farhoo and his boys, they're busted when cops get into Instagram posts of them with stolen bikes.

Oh, it's cash. I know, I know, right? You name it. These guys use their social media wealth to attract new recruits, especially so-called clean skins. That's guys without criminal records who can help ship product, of course. So them, the rebels, bandidos and Mongols, that's a biker gang that started in California. They all, like, do their thing hanging out in casinos in Penhompin or go-bars in Pataya, liaising with cartels like that of Seychilop Syndicate, which is the biggest drug empire in the world by an absolute mile. Apparently some of these groups also use ethnic Vietnamese money laundering gangs out of Australia to wash their money. Like I said, it's a well-oiled machine and it's making millions of dollars.

According to Jared Savage, quote, police call these independent operators international cash controller networks. Their presence in New Zealand in 2017 was a new development and a stark illustration of the growing, cunning and sophistication of the country's latest organised crime evolution. So now you've got a global menagerie of dickheads arriving mostly in Auckland to ship great quantities of meth and cocaine. You've got former Yugoslav paramilitaries, Chinese triads, Vietnamese money launders, Australian bikis, Colombian narcos. And the mob and black power, they're just sort of existing as a parallel, lower level gang network these days. I mean, they've definitely got their own small distribution and sometimes even production, but not on the

levels of the folks coming in via Auckland's international airport, which has seen tons of activity in recent years. This year alone, Corrupt baggage handlers are suspected to have brought in 250 kilos of meth from the airport on cargo flights, alongside cash and small arms. So they're importing it now, before they were manufacturing and now they've turned into an importing economy? Yeah, pretty much. Like with the advent of these international gangs that are coming in that are basically like bigger and badder than the locals, they can bring the stuff in from South East Asia instead. And as 5 million people, like that's a big enough market to make it worth it? Apparently so. I mean, the markups are just gigantic.

Like the profits are so huge that people are just getting into it from all over the world. Says Customs Manager of Intelligence, Bruce Berry, it shows that organized crime in New Zealand is becoming more sophisticated in subverting systems at the border. This was a transnational job. The traditional higher volume markets are now well saturated and the organized crime groups they are looking for their share in a lucrative market. That's New Zealand, of course. And I mean, the stuff that's coming in now is coming in from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A 10-kilow shipment was allegedly brought in from L.A. this July.

So cocaine is also making its way to New Zealand in greater quantities, of course. A decade ago, the total amount of COPE seized in the country was just three kilos. Now, consignments of dozens of kilos are being picked up all over New Zealand. And I mean, this is pretty small fries still compared to other parts of the world, of course. But with street prices up to four times that of the US, Mexican cartels have entered the fray, working with the Comincheros to flood New Zealand with high-grade South American cocaine. In 2016, police sees a three-foot-tall Diamante horses head. I can't even say that straight face.

Stuff with 77 pounds of Coke that's come in from a plane from Mexico to Auckland. and that's the biggest cocaine empowerment on New Zealand's history, but it's just a taste of things to come. As recently as this June, a Kiwi sting called Operation Trojan Horse, very sly, arrests 35 people for a massive meth smuggling ring, and all of them, every single one, is a recent deportee from Australia.

I mean, that's how big the problem of these 501 is. The meth the Comincheras are dealing comes from the Sinaloa cartel, one of New Zealand's top copse has claimed. The bikers have bought five kilos for free grand in Mexico, with a potential 300 grand profit in New Zealand. The Sinalowans of Slash Local Prices too, and that's concerning, says the cop, quote,

because it means that retailers can lower the price at the retail point, thus expanding their markets to include lower socio-economic areas and vulnerable communities. And guess who they're most likely to be? Yep, it's milder. and Pacifica. The CJNG are now supposing the iron up New Zealand, and the Kiwis are working way closer with the DEA and their Five Eyes intelligence partners. And for those who don't know, the Five Eyes is this like really important intelligence sharing network. That's the US, UK, Canada,

Australia and New Zealand. Says Kevin Merkel, the DEA attache for Australia and New Zealand, quote, the same people that are pumping drugs out to the United States are the same ones that are pumping out drugs here. If they see potential to make more money, they're going to do it. And extra money has brought corruption. Kiwi law enforcement calls this insider threats. For example, an entire shipping container went missing off the back of a truck in 2019. And that same year, a cop named Vili Tokolo used his access to search a national crime database and feed it back to gangsters. I mean, honestly, if you type Mexican cartels New Zealand into Google, you're going to find a steady supplier seizures, arrests,

violent incidents. It's really swelling up in the country. The cartels really take the expansion game seriously, especially with new markets that are, you know, opening up. It's the ultimate form of capitalism, the cartels. And this has done something pretty crazy to

the local biker gangs, right? They've kissed and made up. So gang leaders have already come together to show solidarity with Muslims after the 2019 Christchurch massacre, which was also carried out by an Aussie, studied hate in the US, by the way. And last year, the mongrel mob and black power

officially joined powers to try driving out the Comoncheros. They show this by performing a joint hacker. That's the Māori war dance you might know from the All Black's rugby team that I mentioned at the start at the funeral of Black Power President Fenu Sarge McKinnon. Says McKinnon just before his death, quote, I no longer see the mongrel mob as my enemy. I see you fellas as my brothers.

everyone is coming against us. Everyone that is not black power or mongrel mob, we have to consider to be against us. Are they doing more than these like united dances? I mean, are they teaming up? Is there violence with them against these international crews that have come in? I mean, as much as I can tell, not a great deal. But, you know, it's lockdown.

So maybe once it all goes, all govi goes away, then they'll start kicking off. But there you have it. I mean, it's kind of a mad cycle of gang crime where once again, almost two centuries later, Māori are clubbing together to fight an invading force. Only this time, it's not the whites and their land, but the Comoncheros and the Latin American narcos.

And it's all over meth, Coke and the future of the Kiwi underworld. Nicely wrapped up right there, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, I hope that was interesting. Yeah, patreon.com, so that's the Unworld podcast for more. And I don't even know what we're going to have next week. but it'll be good. I promise you that. Some follow the noise.

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