How Meth Turned New Zealand's Biker Gang Scene Upside Down: Mongrels, Black Power and Killer Beez
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's November 22nd, 2003 in the town of Wairoa on New Zealand's North Island.

It's a sleepy place on the windswept beaches of Hawke's Bay, a surfer's 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.

Seventy 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 ten minutes before the cops arrive and everybody scatters. In days gone by, that might have been the end of it.

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 Wairoa to a meeting spot five miles inland.

But two mumble mobsters are waiting 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 Waihape, 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 hitmen, Vietnamese money launderers, triads, Burmese meth lords and even South American narcos. And that's filtering directly out onto the streets of snoozy little Wairoa.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hi guys, and 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 its name changed.

Definitely not a pyramid scheme, you know? Never. And I just thought, 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 is 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 a 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. So Aotearoa, New Zealand, 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, in 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 insight 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 pee, 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 pee 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 pee? And he's like, I have no idea, mate. I've like 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 list, guys. Go to the website.com.

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 need to, we don't need to take it there. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. Maybe we, maybe we can end it by after this, but anyway, it's the fifties. 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? Like, why, 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 are looking 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, Nortons, BSAs, matchlesses, in leather jackets, just messing around. And 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 10 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 outcasts 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 at the Majestic in 1960, this all changes. The outcasts are doing their usual collar up bad boy stuff when they meet a Californian by the name of Jim Carrico. Carrico 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 Carrico 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. In 1960, protests break out when the country sends an all-white, or pakeha to use the Maori term for whites, all-blacks 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 the all-blacks is like pretty much a symbol of Maori 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 I, 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 in All Black. They're called the All Blacks. I mean, they might be the most famous rugby team in the world, but,

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 Maori like warrior pre-battle dance, kind of like this rite of passage. But back in the day, you see all these white guys playing for the All Blacks and they're doing it pretty half-assed. It's quite embarrassing. Yeah.

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 the 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 Sinn Fein, 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 Goo. You know, there's some classic names there, but the FB is pretty solid in its own right. I like it. Yeah. I

A lot of this stuff, by the way, for this episode, it's focused on the Hawke's 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 five million people today.

And the Hawke's 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 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 mongrel 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, all-white gang. But in the late 60s and 70s, more Maori 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, 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 hail or hile. I don't know. It's pretty bad rhyming. Anyway, you notice anything weird about that? Yes, the mongrels adopt Nazi salutes, the swastika, the

And their logo is a British bulldog wearing the German Wehrmacht's Stahlheim logo.

And 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 Maori, when your culture has been flattened by Brits and white supremacy over the years, I guess I would say it's a pretty massive cell phone. So was the Nazi thing, was the gang was all white then? Or did they have Maori and Pacific Islanders in them too? So at this point, there's more Maori and Pacific Islanders involved.

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 Maori 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, it's more to do with just fuck everything to do with society. Yeah.

And this Nazi stuff, it's not even confined to them. Black Power, the other gang I told you about, that uses it too, as does a Pacific Island gang called the Storm Troopers who take it 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 member's 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, it'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 US 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 a 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 Tehaya Ferro-Werowa, 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 Sieg Heil, a police on New Year's Eve. Don't do that, guys. When a judge asked him what it actually means, he says it's, quote, just another way of saying hi to the bros.

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 to fight.

It was all about muscle. We hated bikers and the only other gang were the Hells Angels. No, he uses the N 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 specialised in 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 just smash them.

Wait, I'm like still confused on this end, right? So the Mongrels 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. Oh, okay. 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 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 m'lady 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.

uh 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 and one reason sorry 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 kemp on 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 Hawke's 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 Tahai 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 Colleen 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 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. I mean, they, they just have it as part of their kind of rights. It's mad.

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Basically, yeah, like a lot of these guys are just fucking scumbags and they've sworn enemies of a rival gang called the Black Power. These guys are founded in 1970 as the, quote, Black Bulls by Maori youth in Wellington to counter the mongrel mob and other gangs running riot 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. Yeah.

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 whānau-based approach to a gang. Whānau is a Māori word meaning an extended family or culture. It's a very important concept in Māori culture, as is that of whakapapa, 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 Maori-dom into accepting Western concepts of land ownership, Maori iwi, or tribes, fought each other bitterly with fighting staffs called taia, and later muskets.

Maori are also among the first people in the British Empire to volunteer to fight Nazism, with the Maori Battalion gaining legendary status on the battlefields of Greece and elsewhere that helped turn a tide for the Allies. Five of every seven Maori 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 Porirua in Wellington and Otara 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

you know, codifying ways to get away with second neighborhoods, 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 to reverse there and it ended up, ended up with the same sort of situation. Yeah. It's like an anti redlining and it just didn't work because like people didn't really know each other back then. So they just, they didn't really trust the other, 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 States or Australia.

And that's definitely true, but obviously it's a pretty low bar. And Maori and Pasifika 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, quote, 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 Maori and Pacifica 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 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 whakapapa. What now? That's whakapapa, which is kind of a Maori 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 there'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 through 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 biker 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 drug dealing and more organized crime before then or around this time at all? I mean, they're involved in weed dealing, definitely. There's a lot of that going on. They're kind of supplementing a lot of these clubhouses with weed.

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 Faruaka. 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 Maori 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 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 naughty 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 light magazine in New Zealand, which is completely different, which is weird. Okay. They call it stuff. Yeah.

I kind of want Abe to do history lessons like Dan Carling's history, but for Abe, where everyone smashes cunts. And this query goes on, quote, Farawaka is the eldest gang leader in the country, the grandfather of New Zealand's underworld, an avid reader, globetrotter, an entrepreneur, variously fueled and hobbled by his unremitting appetites for methamphetamine and prostitutes. Farawaka has been to the top and he's lost everything. Sounds a bit like you, mate.

This guy, I mean, this guy is a nutcase, basically. And he spent ages behind bars for all kinds of offences, including drugs, of course. He grows up in a massive family post-World War II, when Maori 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 sindi, 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, building 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.

It 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 been 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 te reo 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 later than 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 been duking 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 boys turn 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 Marae, which is a Maori meeting spot, 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 Marae.

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 over 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 is 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 60-40. 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 deal with what seemed to be an unfair social situation.

And Abe, he actually dies in 2017, aged 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. Cut the bagpipes. This one is a chemist who in 1994, age 54, is let go from his job at Air New Zealand, a 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 electroplating shop in Otahuhu, 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 on a sports car, $100,000 to do some Italian race cars up, $70,000 on an industrial unit, another $70,000 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 roll. 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 shelves all over the place and they're full of chemicals like ephedrine, 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, then you lose it all. How many you got? How many you got these days? Have you lost it already? Let's not, 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 his sophisticated set-up 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 its 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 wanting 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 Mongol mob and the black power, and leaders are getting deeper into drugs, fucking each other over, fighting, getting nastier for sure. In 2001, Cops 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 Hawke's 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 a 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 and how they operated as far as i can tell like i said before like the weed was really big with the gangs um 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 and the country really

Like every gang went from zero to a hundred 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 Tribesmen 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 Attara. He's a good rugby player. I mean, for American listeners, rugby is like American football, but without all the body armour 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 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 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, yeah, we need to reach out to that guy. That's just...

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 seizes 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, aged 30, Masters is sentenced to 10 years on money laundering and drugs charges.

On April 26, 2019, Masters is riding his Harley by a dealership when a former friend, a giant guy called Okusutino Taya, who's now a member of the tribesman outfit himself, shoots Masters in the arm with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The bullet ricochets off Masters' bones and lodges in his spine, paralyzing him. He crashes and the bike falls on top of him, nearly killing him. Taya just walks towards Masters, pointing the gun at his head.

When he's right in front of his old pal, Tai pulls back the slide and squeezes the trigger, but nothing happens. Tai has forgotten the gun automatically loads another bullet into the chamber, and he's jammed it. He tries again. Again, nothing. Finally, Tai 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 to make sure there's not a war. And he turns himself in to cops later on. Last May, that's May 2020, a judge sentences Tay to seven years in prison. That's it, huh? They really don't do the whole send criminals to prison thing there. No, I mean, they've got prisons, unlike Guinea-Bissau, but 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 where they either grew up or have family heritage.

This is like the genesis of MS-13 becoming massive all over again. Man, I didn't even 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. But they were, I mean, some of them had barely spoke Spanish or grown up mostly in the U.S. or 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 into New Zealand. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Australia and New Zealand are like super tight, as you'd imagine, politically. But this move from Australia was 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. It's worth checking out where Jacinda Ardern and Scott Morrison, the two leaders, are just standing there at a press conference shitting on each other, not looking at each other once and saying how bad this move is. And 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 Comanchero MC. These lot, they're a one percenter outlaw motorcycle gang at war with fellow Aussie outfit the Bandidos. It's most notorious, the Comancheros, 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 Comancheros officially opened a New Zealand chapter in 2018 and they get to work supercharging the domestic drug trade. The Comanchero New Zealand president, Pasolika Nofahu,

was jailed for 10 years this February for his role in a massive drugs and money laundering scheme. Nofahu, who's Tongan by heritage, was sent, inverted commas, back under the 501 scheme in 2016. Says the judge at his sentencing, quote, Mr. Nofahu's resurrection of his gang affiliations and his resort 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-em-out mustaches, but this seems quite different than that. Well, they kind of are that as well. It's really weird. They're like, they combine so many different aesthetics of different gangs. Like 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'd been listening to this pod, Nofahu and his boys, they're busted when cops get into Instagram posts of them with stolen bikes, 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, are

They all do their thing hanging out in casinos in Phnom Penh or go-go bars in Pattaya, liaising with cartels like that of Say Chi Lop 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 organized 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 launderers, Australian bikies, 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 it and now they've turned into an importing economy? Yeah, pretty much. With the advent of these international gangs that are coming in that are basically bigger and badder than the locals, they can bring the stuff in from Southeast Asia instead. And it's 5 million people? That's a big enough market to make it worth it? Apparently so. I mean, the markups are just gigantic. 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 organised 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 are now 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 kilo 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 coke 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 price 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 Comancheros to flood New Zealand with high-grade South American cocaine.

In 2016, police seized a three-foot-tall Diamante horse's head, I can't even say that straight face, stuffed with 77 pounds of coke that's come in from a plane from Mexico to Auckland. And that's the biggest cocaine impoundment in 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 with these 501 is.

The meth the Comancheros are dealing comes from the Sinaloa cartel, one of New Zealand's top cops has claimed. The bikers have bought five kilos for three grand in Mexico, with a potential 300 grand profit in New Zealand.

The Sinaloans have slashed 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 socioeconomic areas and vulnerable communities. And guess who they're most likely to be? Yep, it's Maori and Pacifica.

The CJNG are now supposing the eye on 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 DA 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 the 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 supply of 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 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 who'd 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 Comancheros. They show this by performing a joint haka, that's the Maori war dance you might know from the All Blacks 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? Yeah. I mean, as much as I can tell, not a great deal, but you know, it's locked down. So maybe once it all goes, all COVID 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 Comancheros 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.