The Meth SuperCartels Destroying Tropical Paradise
43:52 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

Okay, you can do this. I know, I know. Carvana makes it so convenient to sell your car. It's just hard to let go. My car and I have been through so much together. But look, you already have a great offer from Carvana. That was fast. Well, I know my license plate and Vin by heart, and those questions were easy. You're almost there. Now to just accept the offer and schedule a pickup or drop-off. How'd you do it? How are you so strong in letting go of your car? Well, I already made up my mind, and Carvana's so easy. Yeah, true.

And sold. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. Yolanda Tuhaver knows something ain't right. It's April 2018, and Yolanda's husband, a stocky 28-year-old Aucklander named Epelehame, or Hame 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 had moved 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 fueling Australia's colossal appetite for drugs. He'd become a patch member, and he was even cosy with the group's hulking bearded leader, Michael Clarke.

But the two havers returned to New Zealand in 2017 and Hame got his head turned by another more fearsome gang. The Comancheros had been christened in 1960's 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 at the bars of Bangkok and Pattaya 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 the 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'd been deported, began christening chapters in New Zealand. And none were as feared or as flashy as the Comancheros. These were the blinged-up cartel-linked criminals who turned Hame'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 Comancheros New Zealand chapter. Weeks later, Hame reaches out to a commo named Viliami Tani, a towering, shaven-headed man who's got links to the right people. Sell a big consignment of meth, Hame 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 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 Tani, his accomplice and a driver. Hami has packed two sports bags, one with around 35,000 US dollars, the other with another 10k and some meth.

Harmey and Tani agree to meet a little later at a barren 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 Harmey is throwing the car's door open and flinging one of the sports bags onto its back seat. He turns to face Tani, who's pleading for his life.

Yolanda sees that Tani is holding a rifle and is pointing it straight at her husband. At that moment, Tani's accomplice appears at her window and points an antique revolver at her head. He drags her out of the car and the couple are frogged 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 Hame, 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. Yolanda lies on the street and plays dead. She hears Tani shoot her husband another time, and his screams fall silent.

Yolanda 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. Hame 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. 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 global organised crime. I'm your host in Aotearoa, 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 I'm 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, the Sinaloa and CJNG, reshaping not just the Pacific drug trade, but digging their hands deep into some of the world's most remote and fragile democracies. Yeah, it's pretty disturbing stuff I think you guys will find with this episode. Yeah, just otherwise shocking. But also, let me give a correction for last week because I got an angry email about it. I said Northern California when I meant Southern California, but

I hope you guys forgive me. That's enough. That's enough to get people typing angrily on their own time. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Doesn't all this stuff sound fun? Downfall of democracy, lots of murders, drug crime. You know, that's what you're tuning in for. Now, a quick reminder, you've 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.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 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 a first-hand reporting right here on the show. You are very welcome. So...

The thinking goes in podcasts that to get a bigger audience, you should try it. Time and episodes of big world events, news, etc. So there's a Euro's 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 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 organize crime podcast in New Zealand and Fiji.

And French Polynesian in general, I think. I want to be number one there. Yeah, we need to check our 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 is 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 as an 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 US is tall. Oh, and the whole thing is home to fewer people than downtown LA.

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 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, 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 tonnes of cargo.

Now, bear in mind that Rotterdam is considered 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 got to call it. I've been calling out other stuff throughout this script.

Anyway, yeah, there was like a big bust 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 a single grain of sand in an Olympic swimming pool. Or like finding a brick of powder in the Pacific Ocean, which...

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 coast of Central and South America. So you've got Panama, Baja California, Jalisco, Guayaquil, and even lately, Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, which we got into the episode earlier this year on how Ecuador has gone from an idyll 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 landfall 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 port a starboard for Australia or New Zealand. Sometimes ships meet small Inarco yachts out at 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 crap gram of a blow or whatever the algorithm wants to call it.

A custom official told me that the cartels can afford to lose 9 out of 10 shipments and still make a profit. The margins are sky high, which is totally wild, of course. And as you might have already guessed, the cartels are not losing 9 out of 10 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.

I'm going to focus on this country, 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 Suva, they dismantle a meth factory with enough precursor chemicals to cook over half a billion US dollars worth of the drug.

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 region's big two, 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 organised crime elements using Fiji as a staging ground for their illegal activities, the country's chief cop says.

Increasingly we are seeing these elements coming to Fiji and joining up with local organised 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 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 Niue this week, if you've heard of that. And it's the size of Brooklyn with a population of less than 2,000. 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 joint, say, Marshallese or Vanuatuan or 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 the 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 working. Yeah, I mean, it's all so depressing, right? I guess it makes sense, but the drug trade 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, 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 is changing now, 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 Comancheros 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, Pattaya or Kowloon.

This migration goes both ways, with Chinese triads using Australia as a base to launder cash, something they're still doing today 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-fuelled 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 the show, although sometimes it feels like it. And they were full of a coke that was getting shipped down under courtesy of Italian-Australian mafia connections.

But in the early 2000s in the Pacific, it is all about triad meth. I'm using a lot of information from Jared Savage's book Gangster's 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. Wait, so hold on. These islands, and New Zealand in general too, they were trend shipment points for Coke, and now it's meth, or it's both? It's both, but the Coke is way lower, and it's coming from different places. So I think the Coke is coming mostly from air freight,

From like the Italian mafia, 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, hotel in it, bit of a shithole. And that's where the crooks call ho.

home and they laundered millions on the casino floor not only that but they forged 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 sea 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 US 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...

I don't think, I don't know if, I wouldn't classify them all as white supremacist, you know? I think they might have some rules, but like, I don't think you could say like the big US biker gangs are technically white supremacists. Yeah, not all bikers are white supremacists. No, it doesn't work like that, does it? No, it doesn't work like 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 Maori, 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. Quote, it was lewd behaviour, outrageous behaviour, obnoxious behaviour, drunk, vulgar,

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. In many towns and villages, they're actually not seen as gangs rather than social movements. So for the triads, they're a perfect distribution network. And 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 are 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.

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 meth village. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. But I mean, you can see if you look on a map and you type in Boshe, it's B-O-S-H-E, you can see like why this place became such a

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

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 a 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 mega labs in the golden triangle. Burma mentioned guys, Burma mentioned, remember those Aussie bikers who'd been expanding into the region? Well,

Well, this is awesome news for them. And now they're getting even richer off 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 Laos, 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 episodes.

You, Sean, were telling that story. And also now something I don't, I realized 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 US or South America, right? Can't you just like-

make something up like are these is there some sort of global tax thing that uh 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 gonna 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 fort knox where they can stop like

the people they don't trust getting their hands in it. But also maybe the Tatmadaw 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 that's the same thing as I did with the Indian people.

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 lucrative anyway the next move that shakes up this underworld it comes the following year in 2014

And that's when Australia amends 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 organised crime on a level the local gangs have 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. They also have teeth, guys, so...

yeah they could definitely beat me up if they listen i'm the guppy sorry 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 Comancheros. They launched their own takeover with the murder of Hame Tuahava 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 would call 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 criminal scene here. We're seeing escalating violence. We're starting to see firearms concealed 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 in Trinidad and the increasing murder rate, though I guess it also applies to pretty much any transshipment point like this, right? You have your local groups who you kind of rely on to help receive it and shepherd it onto 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 still getting pretty bad. I mean, Bruce, he was a pretty cool guy to speak to. He's been busting shipments since the 80s, like pretty stern fella, grey cropped hair, stout.

And it's clear things are spiraling right from him since the 501s 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 from 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 bloc.

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, Hundreds 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 stored 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 guys might have seen from the news recently, with 1.46 tonnes of cocaine hidden in its hull. 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 busts 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.

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 Culty 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 NXIVM, Scientology and Theranos. It's definitely not your typical cult show.

Listen to A Little Bit Colty 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 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 Zealanders start getting cocky and thinking they're the 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 bloodied 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, says a security official on a recent Lowy Institute paper. Places like Auckland and Suva now have established networks of Sinaloans and Haliskans marshalling huge shipments of meth and cocaine. And Pacific Island nations now have chronic addiction problems of their own, where literally nothing of the sort existed just a few years ago, like absolutely zero.

Major police operations have snagged 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 into 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, Australia is the main country 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 use 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 organized criminal groups really rely on to get stuff across borders.

Here's customs investigator Bruce Berry again, quote, 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, Berry 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 cut in gear right here in Wellington, which is pretty alarming. Yeah. I mean, if Fent is starting to 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,

Anyway, the Comancheros 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 patch 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 sicarios 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. They christened something called the Mombrol 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 might not seem 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 and Mongrel 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 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. Thirteen people have been charged since the bust, 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 tonne from the January bust 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 lessen 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 for financial corruption. They've had like dozens of coups. It's a really like undersold mad place. And right now there just seems to be a lot of shrugged shoulders over the fact that Fiji is fast becoming the property of the cartels. Says 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 Euro group 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. Gotta respect it. 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.

you