The Underworld Podcast - The Meth SuperCartels Destroying Tropical Paradise

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

For years the Pacific region, and its tiny, tropical nations, steered clear of the global meth and cocaine trade. But politics, war and wild profit margins have pushed ships and planes out from Latin America to Australia across a new ‘drug highway.’ The phenomenon is prompting mass murder, crippling governments, and creating a wave of addiction where none existed. Locals are getting corrupted into becoming cartel ‘doors.’ And local gang underworlds have been upended, uprooted and hunted down like never before. Unless something changes, it'll be Paradise Lost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage

on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theatre.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Yulanda 2 Haver knows something ain't right. It's April 2018, and Yolanda's husband, a stocky 28-year-old Aucklander named Eppala Harme, or Harme for short, has been going on strange trips to far-flung corners of New Zealand. He says on holiday, but she knows better.

See, the couple of move with their young son to Australia in 2014 to seek a fortune in Sydney, its biggest city. But Hame, no stranger to the rough and tumble street crime of Auckland, and got deep into the nomads, an outlaw motorcycle club with connections to cartels fuelling Australia's colossal appetite for drugs. He'd become a patched member, and he was even cosy with the group's hulking-bearded leader, Michael Clark. But the two havers returned to New Zealand in 2017,

and Hame got his head turned by another more fearsome gang. The Comoncheros had been christened in 1960s Sydney and named after a John Wayne Wild West movie. But they'd risen since to become Sydney's most powerful gang, snatching a controlling share in the city's Coke trade, reckoned by some to be the most lucrative per head on earth. Comos, as folks knew them, hung out of the bars of Bangkok and Bataya as Golden Triangle Meth took over the Pacific region.

But more recently, they'd rocked up in Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico, forging ties with Latin American narcos moving more and more dope across a so-called Pacific Drug Highway, stretching almost 10,000 miles from the Americas to Australia and hitting most island nations along the way. New Zealand had been one of these stopovers, and anything that landed on its shores was known by cops as, quote, spillage. But in 2015, Australia's government started deporting thousands of Kiwi-born non-citizens

if they failed a vague and loosely worded character test. Most of these men were gang members, and they had lived their entire adult lives in Australia. Rudderless, with no family or friendship groups for support, these 501s, slang for the section under which they've been deported, began christening chapters in New Zealand, and none were as feared or as flashy as the Comencheros. These were the blinged-up cartel-linked criminals who turned Harme's head upon his return home.

He was, quote, watching these videos of the commos with all these bikes, all these flash things that they had, Yolanda would later testify. He just admired the stuff they had. Early in 2018, a crew of 501s launches the Comencheros New Zealand, chapter. Weeks later, Harme reaches out to a commo named Viliami Tarni, a towering, shaven-headed man who's got links to the right people. Sell a big consignment of meth, Harmei reckons, and he can make it into New Zealand's transformed underworld. Perhaps he'll even patch over. That is, hop from the nomads to the commos. He hasn't told Yolanda this, of course,

but she knows, really. He's been secretive, and there's no way he's making sure. He's not trips to ice-cold Kiwi towns for shits and giggles. The night of April 30, the couple drive to a McDonald's south of Auckland, and they meet Tarnie, his accomplice and a driver. Harmi has packed two sports bags, one with around 35,000 US dollars, the other with another 10K and some meth. Harmi and Tani agreed to meet a little later at a Barron Street near Auckland's airport, beside a shipping container yard.

There they chat for over an hour. laughing and joking. Yolanda checks in the passenger seat the whole time, using her phone as a mirror. Then suddenly, Yolanda looks up, and Hame is throwing the car's door open and flinging one of the sports bags onto its back seat. He turns to face Tani,

is pleading for his life. Yulanda sees that Tani is holding a rifle and he's pointing it straight at her husband. At that moment, Tarnie's accomplice appears at her window and points an antique revolver at her head. He drags her out of the car and the couple of frog march to a roadside fence. It's past midnight.

Yolanda is terrified. She tells the second younger man a lie. She says she's pregnant. He doesn't care. The young man shoots Yolanda twice in the arm. Tani shoots Hamei who screams out in pain. Yolanda limps forward towards her man but she's shot again, this time by Tani in the head.

She forgets how to breathe. Then another ding, as she describes it, a second bullet to the head. Yulanda lies on the street and plays dead. She hears Tani shoot her husband another time, and his screams, fall silent. Yulanda will lie there for another five hours, until a passing motorist sees her, and she's rushed to hospital. She still has a bullet in her brain today. Hamei dies on the spot.

His execution, as a judge will call it, is the terrifying opening scene in a new chapter of crime in New Zealand and the region. And it will pit some of the world's most powerful and violent drug traffickers against fragile and unprepared nations on a Pacific drug highway that's turning tropical paradises into narco nightmares. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hey guys and welcome to the weekly radio show where two cheerful journalists tell you wacky and hilarious tales from the lovely world of glocky.

global organized crime. I'm your host in El Tiroa, New Zealand, Sean Williams, and I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City. That was a hell of a long cold open, guys, and I hope you don't mind. It's actually part of a piece I'm going to publish soon for a local magazine called Folly, and it will be part of a bigger article, hoping to publish in the second half of the year about this thing called the Pacific Drug Highway, and how Mexico's two biggest cartels are Sinaloa and CGA, resh, reshaping not just the Pacific Drug chain, but digging their hands deep into some of the world's most remote and fragile democracies. Yeah, it's, uh, it's pretty disturbing stuff. I think you guys will find with this episode. Yeah, just, uh, otherwise shocking. But also, let me give a correction

for last week, because I got an angry email about it. Uh, I said Northern California when I met Southern California, I, uh, I hope you guys forgive me. That's enough, that's enough to get people uh, typing angrily on their own time. Yeah. Uh, anyway, yeah, doesn't all this stuff sound, uh, fun downfall of democracy lots of murders drug crime you know that's what you're tuning in for now a quick reminder you got to hit the follow button on spotify help us out on patreon if you can or just like and share stuff on our social media account everything helps yeah that's patreon dot com slash general podcast you can also sign up on iTunes or on Spotify right on the page and those bonuses will come right into your feed yeah cool man i uh i actually have a couple of bonuses this week and i'm off on assignment in

Australia in, I think as this is going out, like, less than a fortnight, which is quite exciting. So, yeah, I've been, like, talking to some anti-gang task forces, a couple of bikers there. And I'm even going to go up to the north where they're doing these, like, black flights. I think they call them from Papua New Guinea, which is another part of this Pacific drug highway. So, first-hand reporting right here on the show, you are very welcome. So the thinking goes in podcast that to get a bigger audience, you should try it. time in episodes of big world events news etc so there's a there's a euros championship in

Germany there's wars in the Middle East and Ukraine there's probably an Olympics in France by the time this is going out so uh naturally this show is going to start on a 2018 execution in new zealand and we're going to talk about narco trafficking across the pacific ocean yeah we're definitely going to corner the market and organized crime podcast in uh new zealand in fiji and uh in french polynesian general i think i want to be i want to be number one there yeah we need to check out figures because, oh my God, we better be. Anyway, this stuff is getting really, really big, like addiction, epidemic, mass murder, the fall of government's big, it's really big. Sounds like the kind of thing a big-time magazine could stand to pay someone to report on,

you know, if they could stop doing articles on like a serial killer dentist or whatever culture war nonsense, the New York Times Magazine. It's saving 6,000 words for this week. But anyway, moving on. Yeah, yeah. And if Rachel there is listening, get back to me. The pitch was good. Yeah, let's make it happen. Anyway, you just don't hear about this stuff that much, right? Which is why the magazine should be doing stuff on it, because it's happening in countries that are like the size of tins of tuna,

and they're really, really far away. I mean, let's take in this example, the Federated States of Micronesia. This is a country of around 607 islands. I mean, there might be more. And it covers an area as wide as the continental U.S. is tall. Oh, and the whole thing is home to fewer people than down. town, L.A. But as we're going to get into, that's kind of the point, because here's the thing, or here are the things, I mean, I don't know why I'm saying it like a YouTuber right now,

I'm going to stop, container tonnage because this is largely a maritime drug highway, it is skyrocketing or going at a rate of knots to avoid mixing allegories. In fact, it's estimated to near triple from now until 2030 to around 4.2 million tons of cargo. Now, bear in mind that Rotterdam is consider best practice for the number of shipping containers checked at a port in the world. And that is around 8%. And the Albanians in the Ultra Mafia or whatever that thing is called, they are still doing pretty, pretty well. Yeah, for those of you who don't get the reference, we've talked about this a bit, that there are massive amounts of blow moving through Rotterdam into Europe pretty much every week.

Blow, that's what I've got to call it. I've been calling out of stuff throughout this script. Anyway, yeah, there was like a big bus there in the week that was a cooperation between about 10 different police forces. in Europe. So we should definitely try and cover that at some point. That was really interesting. Anyway, out this way in the Pacific, that figure, the 8% that's just way, way lower. In some places, it's less than a single percentage point of containers getting checked, which is, I don't know, like two a year or something. So finding drugs that way is less like finding a needle in a haystack than finding like a single grain of sand in an Olympic swimming pool or like finding

a brick of powder in the Pacific Ocean, which is exactly what's happening. So there's no real need for a visual metaphor. Anyway, the Pacific Drug Highway goes all the way from the west coasts of Central and South America. So you've got Panama, Baja California, Halisco, Gaiacil, and even lately, Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, which we got into the episode earlier this year on how Ecuador has gone from an ideal to a narco war zone. And these ships, and as we'll later learn, some planes too, they make their way thousands of miles west, usually making their first landfill at the Marquesas, which are a small volcanic island chain in French Polynesia,

before they reach the island nations of Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and others, dog-legging porter starboard for Australia or New Zealand. Sometimes ships meet small in narco yachts out of sea and rip the contraband. Other times they just cruise right into a port. Because prices for drugs are so high in this part of the world, I think here in New Zealand it's around US 300 or something for a lot. a crap gram of a blow or whatever the algorithm wants to call it. Yeah, a custom official told me that the cartels can afford to lose nine out of ten shipments and still make a profit, like the margins

are sky high, which is totally wild, of course. And as you might already guessed, I mean, the cartels are not losing nine out of ten drug shipments across the Pacific drug highway. In fact, Latin American gangsters now call New Zealand the quote golden nugget, which tells you everything you need to know, really. And I'm going to focus on this country in New Zealand for most of the show because I think what's happening here in the past few years has completely upturned the local underworld and really shows how this whole thing has grown. But I'll also talk about Fiji a bit because Fiji, sure, nice water, good rugby team, cocktails on the beach. I'm sure some of our listeners have been there on holiday, very nice place, but it's probably become one of the world's stealthiest narco states.

And where this January, cops busted a meth ring so massive that it might actually still bring down the state. I think we should do, I mean, if someone wants to support us doing that, like a media outlet or whatever, like an on-site recording of this podcast in Fiji. Yeah, I think it's a really pressing issue. And I mean, it's hard to find good accommodation there. So they're going to have to put us up in some sort of four or five star resort. But that's where you meet all the narcos, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's where we have to go. Yeah. Anyway, we're going to begin this story in Fiji too. because there, in June 2004, police near the capital city's Suva, they dismantle a meth factory with enough precursor chemicals to cook over half a billion US dollars worth of the drug. The authorities at the time say it's the largest factory discovered in the southern hemisphere, and it's an international operation, unsurprisingly, with nationals from Fiji, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong arrested during the raids. And the quantities being pumped out are so huge. Cops reckon this thing is producing not just for the Australian and New Zealand markets,

which are the regions big too, but even Europe and the US. This thing is colossal. And it sends shivers down the spines of local law enforcement. Quote, this is a frightening example of transnational organized crime elements using Fiji as a staging ground for their illegal activities, the country's chief cop says. Increasingly, we are seeing this. these elements coming to Fiji and joining up with local organized criminal groups. I mean,

yeah, it's a nice place. But what he means by these elements basically is triads, lots of them. From the turn of the millennium until this point, the lion's share of Asian meth is coming from the Chinese mainland and shepherded by triads from there, Hong Kong and Macau. And just to be clear, triads are the basically organized crime elements of China. And yeah, Hong Kong and Macau and places like that. But they're Chinese or Chinese. organized crime, you know, think the Yakuza for Japan or even just the mafia for Sicily. Yeah, yeah. These guys are huge at this point.

That isn't always going to be the case. But Pacific Island nations are really attractive proposals for these gangsters. All of them have really strong Chinese business communities going back decades, if not centuries. And because these countries are really, really small, I mean, some of them are properly tiny. My other half is on a state trip to Newe this week, if you've heard of that. And it's the size of Brooklyn with a population of large. less than 2000. And that means that the access to government is often just meeting somebody's

dad at the one single bar who also happens to be the prime minister and maybe the chief of police too. A lot of these places have pay-for-play citizenship as well. So you see a lot of Chinese criminals with joints, say, Marshalese or Vanuatu and Nauru Passports. I mean, I'm working on a piece about the Yakuza and Korean missionaries and organized crime right now, and a shocking amount of them are also citizens of Vanuatu, which is very strange. It's not difficult to get a toehold in these places, essentially, and they're pretty poor, so you don't have to launch all-out war on the state to get shipments through. There's no plumber, just a platter, and it doesn't have to be a lot of platter either.

Staying in Fiji, in 2006, authorities there bust another $135 million of crystal meth, which isn't an insane amount, but it just goes to show that whatever they're doing to stem the flow of drugs just isn't really work. working. Yeah, I mean, it's also depressing, right? I guess it makes sense, but the drug tree just destroying these islands, places that are basically metaphors for pristine, like, I don't know, tropics, beaches, like the Galapagos or Fiji. It's just, uh, yeah, man, it's just sad. Yeah, all those giant turtles just getting high on meth. It's a pretty sad state of affairs. But like at the time, this stuff is just going through the countries, right? It's not really

hitting the local population, but that, that is changing now, which is. which is even worse. All this time, patch members of motorcycle gangs in Australia, they're moving up the narco food chain. Clubs like the Bandidos, Hells Angels, Mongols, Finks, Rebels, and of course the Comoncheros, who you've heard about in the Cold Open, they branch out from pure distribution plays and they set up in Hong Kong, Macau and all over Southeast Asia.

These groups are known as the Big Six, actually, and it becomes commonplace to see big bearded bogans, necking beers and getting up to no good. in the bars of Bangkok, Pataya or Kowloon. This migration goes both ways, with Chinese triads using Australia as a base to launder cash, something they're still doing to date in huge amounts, actually. I'm going to try and get into that when I go out there soon.

The main point is that these networks are growing together symbiotically, and they're creating in Australia this wildly lucrative drug market where addiction crises are deepening, and entire cities are falling into meth-fueled violence. Meth isn't the only drug in town, of course. I mean, you have to go all the way back to 2021, I think, for my show on the Melbourne Drug Wars, and that ran from 1998 to 2010, not like a show, although sometimes it feels like it.

And they were full over Coke. It was getting shipped down under courtesy of Italian-Australian Mafia Connections. But in the early 2000, in the Pacific, it is all about triad meth. I'm using a lot of information from Jared Savage's book, Gangsters Paradise, which gets into the transformation of New Zealand's drug scene. And I'm going to interview him soon for the show because it's a really cool book. Around 2009, you start getting Chinese mobsters rocking up in Auckland, the country's biggest city, where they descend mostly on one place, the Sky City Casino. Exema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with ebbglis, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to disappear eczema.

After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in 10 people taking ebb glist achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. Ebglis, Librikizumab, LBKZ. A 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. Ebglis can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to Epglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe.

Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebbglis. Before starting Ebbglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about Ebbglis and visit ebbglis.com or call 1800 LilyRX or 1-800-545-9709. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings. There's a money side to every story.

Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it compliance. Get it?

Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANT. www.com slash com Wait, so hold on. These islands and New Zealand in general too, they were trench shipment points for Coke and now it's meth or it's both?

It's both, but the Coke is like way lower and it's coming from different places. So like I think the Coke is coming mostly from air freight, from like the Italian mafia and like those connections and then the meth is just flooding into the country on the shorelines

and from all over Asia. So, I mean, it's like, Coke is like the pie drug and Australia is still, well, it's only about 20, 25 million people. So it's not a huge amount of cash coming in from Coke. I mean, that's changed now as well, but it's all about meth at this point. Like, meth is taking over the entire continent. If you don't know it, going back to Auckland, the city has this, like, huge TV tower. It looms over the skyline, casino, hoteling it, a bit of a shithole. And that's where the crooks call home.

and they launder millions on the casino floor. Not only that, but they forge ties with local biker gangs and three in particular, you might know them. The mongrel mob, the Black Power and the Headhunters. Very briefly, because we already did a show on this forever ago, the headhunters are a pretty standard drug trafficking biker gang. They're similar to the ones from US and Canada that you heard on last week's show. But the mongrel mob and black power are a little bit different.

The mob is formed by a multiracial collection of Maori, whites and Pacific Islanders, And this whole thing is like a fuck you to society. And that's why you get them wearing swastikas and see highland. I mean, it's not cool. I don't know why it's tolerated. But in the 60s, it was more about embracing the outlaw status. I think that's not unique to them, though, right? That's a thing with U.S. biker gangs too.

But I think they're like, are they actual white supremacists, though, a lot of them? I mean, these guys are just, this is like more about saying piss off to white culture. It's really, it's really weird. I don't know why people don't kick off about it. more anyway. I don't think, I don't know if I, I wouldn't classify them all as, as white supremacist, you know, I think they might have some rules, but like, I don't think you could say, like, the big U.S. biker gangs are technically white supremacists. Yeah, not all, not all bikers are white, no, it doesn't work like that. Doesn't that? Black Power, though, it's formed a little

bit later in the early 70s, and that is kind of a snapback to that so-called mongrelism and the mob. And it's more steeped in liberation and social justice for Māori. But You know, also a bunch of drug dealing and other petty crime too. I think I mentioned this last week, but here's a quote from Black Power Life member Dennis O'Reilly on those early days when I met him at his home a couple months back. It was lewd behavior, outrageous behavior, obnoxious behavior, drunk, violence, hooliganism, just fucking stupid stuff. It was disorganized crime as opposed to organized crime.

By 2009, these guys are deeply baked into their local communities. He's in many towns and villages. They're actually not seen as sort of gangs rather than social movements. So for the triads, they're a perfect distribution network. I mean, that's always a good hustle, right? When you can couch selling massive amounts of drugs and committing violence in the language of social justice. Yeah, yeah, that's what we're doing. By 2013, around 1% of Kiwis of regular meth users, which is quite a high number,

although, you know, relatively there's only 5 million people here. But this whole world is destroyed, and I mean totally and utterly, destroyed in 2013. And that year, the Chinese Communist Party, which is worried about addiction on its own shores, cracks down on domestic meth production. On December 29 that year, 3,000 cops raid the coastal village of Boshe, or Boucher, I don't really know that I say that, population just 14,000, which is known as China's number one meth village, which I hope they got that printed on bunting or something.

The cops arrest almost 200 people, and they seize three tons of meth plus half a ton of ketamine. That is, I mean, who coined China's number one meth village and like what? I just, I want to know more about this village. Yeah, it's pretty nuts. I keep imagining like one of those Japanese game show things like China's number one Met Village. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

But, I mean, you can see, if you look on a map and you type in Bosch, it's B-O-S-H-E, you can see like why this place became such a big production center because it's right on the delta of, I think, the South China Sea. and it's kind of buried between, I guess, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and all these massive cities. So it's all just filtering into this place. And yeah, the cops like take everyone in there. And the so-called godfather of this place, which is not a surprise, is a local Communist Party official. And his life doesn't go that well.

In fact, he is executed in 2019, I think. Anyway, this fires the gun on a war on drugs spearheaded by the new Chinese Premier at the time, Xi Jinping, who calls. drugs are, quote, common enemy to humanity, which is a, you know, he just half means it. This crackdown just means that Chinese producers get shunted across the border into Southeast Asia, and they set up Megalabs in the Golden Triangle. Burma mentioned guys, Burma mentioned, remember those Aussie bikers who's been expanding into the region? Well, this is awesome news for them, and now they're getting even richer of golden triangle meth,

whose billions are being laundered by shiny new casinos popping up all over the place. I mean, you guys know about this. Not least, the King's Romans casino in Lough, where I went and failed to find a billion-dollar meth lab a few years back. Yeah, it's one of our best episodes. I think it's like one of the first 20. You, Sean, were telling that story. And also now something I realize I don't know the answer to, like, if you're making all this meth money in Burma, why do you have to launder it? Like, through a casino.

This isn't the U.S. or South America, right? Can't you just like make something up? Like are these, is there some sort of global tax thing that, you know, or I don't even know, are these citizens of Western countries where they'd have to explain where this massive amount of money came from? I'm going to assume there's a couple things going on because that supply chain is so fragile and brittle that maybe they have to keep the money in a safe place, literally just have a fault knocks where they can stop like the people they don't trust getting their hands in it.

But also maybe the Tatmador in Myanmar, I mean, maybe. the army there, maybe they're trying, I mean, they go around extorting local villages and towns and like different groups, right? So maybe they want to just keep their hands off the cash. But yeah, I mean, also, it's the same thing as I did with the Indian cricket scam. And that was going through sort of online betting casinos, which is if you can basically launder your money, but also drag a bunch of Chinese punters in at the same time to spend millions, then you kind of got a win-win, right? So I think these things are extremely luke. Anyway, the next move that shakes up this underworld, it comes the following year in 2014.

And that's when Australia amend Section 501 of its Migration Act. That allows for the deportation of New Zealand-born non-citizens who failed a new and pretty ill-defined character test. Basically, if you've committed a crime or ever been linked to a criminal organisation, you're out. Many of the guys dispatched to New Zealand, who people simply call the 501s, they're patched members of outlaw motorcycle clubs. And they're used to violence and organized crime on a level. The local gangs they've never really experienced. It's a bit like tossing a barracuda into a tank full of, I don't know,

maybe not guppies, but smaller fish. But also I have teeth guys. So, yeah, they could definitely beat me up if they're listening. I'm the guppy. Sorry, I'm the guppy. Yeah, you're definitely a guppy, yo, weirdo. Thank you. And these new guys, they swallow up turf,

and they start linking up with their powers in Asia, and they bring more and more high-grade gear into the country. I mean, this is not stuff cooked up in some shed in like South Auckland. This is proper ice. I mean, it's not too unlike what happened with MS-13 in El Salvador, right? Here you have these young men, many of whom have been caught up in serious gang crime, and they're deported to a nation they don't really know, despite having been born there. They've got no family or friendship ties.

So what are they going to do? I mean, they're going to christen gang chapters in New Zealand, which is precisely what the 501s do. And no group is more feared than the Comincheros. They launched their own takeover with the murder of Harme Tua Hever from this episode's Cold Open and the attempted murder of his wife, Yolanda. Here's New Zealand customs investigator, Bruce Berry,

who I spoke to for this magazine article. Quote, New Zealand was a stopover point for larger scale shipments that were going to the Big Brother market in Australia, and we were getting what we were called spillage, where small quantities would land in New Zealand and the rest would go to Australia. The 501s have brought quite a different dynamic and threats to the criminals scene here. We're seeing escalating violence. We're starting to see firearms conceal with drugs.

That's a real concern for us. Yeah, I mean, this actually reminds me of the stuff that I did on the gangs and Trinidad and the increasing murder rate, though. I guess it also applies to pretty much on any transshipment point like this, right? You have your local groups who you kind of rely on to help receive it and check it. it on to the main stop, and they usually can get paid in product. And that, of course, leads to, you know, more selling, these gangs getting a lot richer, all that sort of stuff. But then you have the guns that come in as well to help them protect these shipments just in case, and that's going to lead to a whole other mess.

Yeah, in a way, I guess these countries are, like, blessed by geography because there's no, like, land route that people are shipping all this stuff through, and that would make it way more dangerous, like Central America stuff. Make it Mexico, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but it's like, it's still getting pretty bad. I mean, Bruce, he was a pretty cool guy to speak to. He's been busting shipment since the 80s, like pretty Sternfeller, gray-cropped hair, stout.

And it's clear things are spiraling, right, from him since the 501's arrived. Not just in New Zealand, but all over the Pacific Drug Highway. Quote, when I was a young investigator, a kilo was a big thing. Now we're talking tons. Two big differences with these 501 gangsters. First, like I said, their readiness to violence and devil-may-care attitude about ripping territories and rival gangs. The second is more recent. And that's that in the last few years, there are two more key players on the Pacific block. Around 2015, law enforcement starts seeing

an explosion in narco trafficking not from Asia, but the Americas. And they're being quarterbacked by Mexico's two biggest cartels, the Sinaloa and the CJNG. In June 2019, the Guardian produces a big article about this new Pacific drug highway, and I'm reading from it here, quote, of kilograms of cocaine have washed up on remote Pacific beaches. Ships laden with drugs have run aground on far-flung coral reefs, and locals have discovered huge caches of drugs stalled in underwater nets attached to GPS beacons. I mean, this is like the plot of bloodline, right?

And it continues, quote, since 2016, there have been six major seizures of drugs in French Polynesia. In 2017, a yacht was intercepted near New Caledonia, which you might, you guys might have seen from the news recently, with 1.46 tonnes of cocaine hidden in its hole, and another boat was stopped just off Australia's East Coast with more than 1.4 tonnes of cocaine on board. Each of these shipments were worth more than $200 million.

And look, I could go into dozens of specific bus that continue to up the ante across the Pacific, but it's happening pretty much everywhere now. And because these countries are so small and disparate, It's really, really tough for cops to cooperate with their counterparts. And when shipments do get seized, they often just end up going missing or getting explicitly stolen by corrupt officials and police officers. The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board.

They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them. Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. Ministurfer. and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling, true crime story

connected to that exact day in history, from killer cannibal brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes

and a brand new story each and every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. If you want to hear real stories of shocking crime in modern cult history told by the people who survived them,

check out the A Little Bit Coulty podcast. Hosted by Sarah Edmondson and Anthony Nippy Ames, it's a must listen, featuring weekly deep dives with survivors and whistleblowers of culty fiascos like nexium, Scientology and Therunas. It's definitely not your typical cult show. Listen to a little bit culty on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Says Interpol's president in 2019, quote, There is no doubt the Pacific Island countries face a unique set of challenges, caught in the midst of the Pacific Highway, between major subpoise.

suppliers of illicit goods, large demand hubs, and thousands of miles of coastline to monitor. At the same time, some of the Pacific Islands are seeing the transshipments of narcotics through their territories devolve into a growing domestic demand for illicit drugs. So yeah, it's getting worse. Oh, and before New Zealand has started getting cocky and thinking their entire victims in all of this, just getting taken over by all these big bad bikers from Australia, New Zealand has deported its own 501s under similarly vague conditions in the past few years, and that these guys have blooded their own biker gang chapters in, say, Fiji and the Cook Islands and elsewhere,

quote, the outlaw motorcycle gangs are one of the key links between syndicates and cartels and the Australian and New Zealand drug markets. The Pacific is caught right in the middle, so as a security official on the recent Lowy Institute paper. Places like Auckland and Suva now have established networks of Sinaloans and Holiskans marshalling huge shipments of meth and cocaine, and Pacific Island nations now have chronic addiction problems of their own where literally nothing of the salt existed just a few years ago, like absolutely zero.

Major police operations of snag consignments of drugs hidden in heavy machinery and avocado pulp in New Zealand, I mean, guys, if you're going to go subtle, don't do avocados. And customs, as I mentioned, they are really struggling to get a handle on this. In some cases, Asian and Mexican groups have even paired up to form mega cartels in the Pacific, which is definitely something they've done with fentanyl going in the United States. And I guess the precursors for meth are mostly coming from China to Mexico too on boats. And again, there's tons of geopolitics here, but let's just say,

China and Australia are not the best of friends right now. If you don't know it, like Australia is the main country kind of backing up the US in their trade war against Beijing. And if you believe China is trying to destabilize America with fentanyl, well, it's not hard to conclude. They're at least turning a blind eye to narco crime in the Pacific to screw over another enemy. Oh man, dude, that is very depressing and also, you know, it's working for them, right? It's working very, very well. Yeah, we don't bring a lot of optimism on this show.

The world is a broken, dark place. Now, according to sources, I spoke to over the last few weeks, which is something that's fun to say, we are beginning to see the kinds of cases of coercive corruption the cartels used in Latin America to get people to be so-called doors, right? These are port officials, stevedores, baggage handlers, air stewards. These are the people that organised criminal groups really rely on to get stuff across borders. Here's customs investigator Bruce Berry again. New Zealand corruption is normally in the realm of money. I'm paying something to do something, to survive or thrive.

When you look at the Sinaloa, they don't use money. They use intimidation. They use threats. Now, Barry adds, quote, The cartels can control the shore parties, he means biker gangs, much more effectively because they know where your family lives. You don't want to end up hanging from an overpass. Guy's a pretty good quote machine, to be fair.

Coke use is through the roof in Australia. I think Sydney is still the world's most lucrative per capita market for the drug. It's always been super, super rare in New Zealand and even less common across the smaller Pacific nations. But even that is changing. Last year, it's used here, let by 93%. And there was a recent spate of ODs on fentanyl being cutting gear, right here in Wellington, which is pretty alarming. Yeah, I mean, if Fentist don't show up, things are going to get way, way worse.

Yeah, it's like, there's like a real bourgeois attitude to drug crime here. I think they just don't think it can happen, and it's well on its way. Anyway, the Comoncheros are now widely reported to be the most dangerous gang in Australia, which is saying something considering all the crazies over there. And they've pretty much won the top spot here, too, thanks to that ruthlessness and ability to hook up with chapters across the region. And because they live more of a flashy bling cartel lifestyle than the homegrown gangs, young Kiwis who might have otherwise become patched members of the Mongrel mob or black power,

they're trying to go freelance now. They're getting guns on the black market and they're offering themselves up as Sicario's for the Sinaloans or CJNG. Part of the story I'm about to tell you comes from some unverified conversations I've had with gangsters over here. some of it's been reported. But here's an example of how things have escalated so quickly. In 2023, there's a prominent member of the Mongrel mob who dies by suicide. I won't say where. Media reports it that way.

Plenty inside the organisation, just take that as gospel. They hold a funeral. End. Only, I've been told he was forced to shoot himself by members of the Sinaloa cartel when he tried ripping off a shipment of blow or else they'd murder his entire family. The thing is, even though the Mexicans have basically murdered one of their own, Some young mob members think this is all really cool, and they christened something called the Mombal Mob Cartel. And last August, across 24 raids around Wellington, cops arrest 11 people and seize drugs, cars, weapons, cash.

It's a pretty big haul. Now, this night not seemed so mad to someone used to Latin American crime, right? But over here, this is a huge deal. It's anarchy. It's young kids going it alone, shunning the traditional gang ties. I've spoken to elders in these movements who are now trying to take. members of rival gangs like the Black Power of Mongol mob on deep sea dives, hunting trips, trying to sort of galvanize and bring them together against all this outside stuff.

To try to turn the gangs more into social movements that they've kind of claimed to be for decades, but, you know, they're only halfway there. But then I spoke to Jared Savage and let's just say he was a little less optimistic. Quote, I wouldn't want to comment on whether these members are genuine or not, although those who are cynical might think rival gangs banding together to fend them. off an overseas intruder could simply be seen as patch protection. And just to be clear, Jared Savage is the guy who wrote the book about the gangs and the drugs in New Zealand, right?

Yeah, yeah, he's a guy who lives up north and he writes for the Herald, which is like the biggest newspaper here, but he's written a couple of really good books on gang crime here. Expect things to get a lot more wild here very soon. But let's finish this episode over in Fiji because that's where this January, five tons of meth was seized in Nadi, where the country's main airport is. This is not just a massive bust. It is epic. This stuff has an estimated street value of over a billion US dollars. 13 people have been charged since the bus, but it could never have gotten into the country without explicit official backing, and some experts expect government heads to roll pretty soon.

I mean, there are so many things that stink about this case. First, that two of the arrested men were charged with trafficking in 2018, but got off after all the evidence. went missing from a police station two years later. A few weeks ago, New Zealand's One News reported that over a ton from the January bus has already gone AWOL. Says the dealer to the network, quote,

A lot of police are using themselves. They interfere with evidence to lessen charges. To less of the imprisonment, we will call our guys in the police force and we will tell them. Why don't you get the evidence you got last week from the B-grade ones? Switch it up and resell it.

I mean, this is a country whose former PM was sent to prison in May 5th financial corruption. They've had like dozens of coups. It's a really like undersolved mad place. And right now there just seem to be a lot of shrugged shoulders over the fact that Fiji is fast becoming the property of the cartels. So there's one cop quote, there are a lot of dedicated police officers, just a few that have gone the wrong side of the law. Whoopsie.

So anyway, there you have the Pacific Drug Highway guys. That was better than the Eurogroup stage matches, wasn't it? Yeah, I don't know. No, it was good. But shout out to my guys in Slovakia, crushing those Belgians. Yes, that's great. But, yeah, no, that was great, dude. I actually had no idea about any of this stuff.

And it's kind of cool that you're based in this part of the world now. That's becoming, let's just say, topical for what we do. Indeed. Yeah. Hopefully someone will send me to Fiji very soon. Hopefully someone will send all of us to Fiji very soon.