Gangster's Paradise

By Jared Savage

The much anticipated follow-up to the bestseller that exposed the escalation of organised crime in New Zealand.

Gangster's Paradise is about drugs, guns, gangs and money. Lots of money.

A gang which took over a small rural town. A police officer shot and killed in a routine traffic stop. A port-worker who helped a gang whisk a shipping container off a wharf in the middle of the night. A crew of corrupt baggage handlers smuggling meth into the country during Covid lockdowns. A shooting inside a 5-star hotel in broad daylight. Turf wars, retaliation, and retribution: new gangs like the Mongols and Comancheros have brought with them better connections with international syndicates, challenging the established gangs like the Head Hunters - so dominant for many years - who have had to up their game in response.

Jared Savage's bestselling book Gangland was about the evolution of gangs in New Zealand. Gangster's Paradise is about the deadly escalation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Oct 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781775492405

Jared Savage

Jared Savage is an investigative reporter for the New Zealand Herald who has won more than a dozen journalism national and international journalism awards, including twice being named as the best reporter in the country. He lives in Tauranga with his wife and two young children.

Book preview

DEDICATION

For the Savage tribe – Rebecca, Harry and Lucy.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Introduction

  1   Rock-hard Evidence: The Kiwi Connection to Asia’s ‘El Chapo’

  2   Condor Empire: The Comancheros Move Into Half Moon Bay

  3   High Noon: The Sheriff Cleans Up Kawerau

  4   Mongol Nation: A Visit to Louis Vuitton

  5   Straw Buyers: How Illegal Guns Ended Up in the Hands of a Cop Killer

  6   One Bleed, We All Bleed: Comancheros Get Back in the Game

  7   A Text From Simon Bridges: Inside the War on the Waikato Mongrel Mob

  8   Gunfight at the Sofitel Hotel: The Head Hunters Strike Back

  9   Interview with a Gangster: The Sad Song of a South Auckland Rapper

10   The Don: The Downfall of the Biggest Kiwi Drug Dealer Since Mr Asia

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Photo Section

Also by Jared Savage

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Copyright

INTRODUCTION

I STARTED WORKING ON this book on the same evening I celebrated the end of the last one.

It was 8 December 2020, and the partners of the law firm in Tauranga where my wife worked at the time generously offered to host a launch party for Gangland. I had spent six months of my evenings – after finishing my day job as a reporter, and getting our young children fed, bathed and into bed – consumed by reading screeds of documents, interviewing sources or writing chapters, all from an ‘office’ in our garage we’d set up to work from home during the first Covid lockdown. It had been a hell of a year, and as something of an introvert, I would have happily slipped away for a summer break instead of being the centre of attention at a party.

But I’m glad we did. A hundred people or more turned up to have a drink in the sunshine, and looking around at the guests was a slightly surreal experience. Judges, defence lawyers, Crown prosecutors, detectives and even a few heavily tattooed gang members: all mixing and mingling with each other.

Simon Bridges was there. At the time he was the MP for Tauranga (and a friend) and, as the leader of the National Party, had been vocal in pushing for tougher measures to crack down on gangs. He gave a short speech, measured in tone, which rightfully acknowledged the need to also address the broader social issues which lead to a life in gangs.

Which was just as well, because Bridges was followed by a much larger man he had once prosecuted in Tauranga.

I had met Karl Goldsbury in Waikeria Prison when he was serving a 10-year sentence for conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine. The senior Mongrel Mob member had also featured in a documentary, Fighting the Demon, which I helped to produce.

Karl had turned his life around since being released by the Parole Board and now worked at Te Tuinga Whanau, a charitable trust working with high-need individuals and families. He spoke from the heart about his struggle with methamphetamine addiction, as well as the greed and power which came from selling the drug.

For the captivated audience of mostly white-collar professionals, Karl’s off-the-cuff speech gave a far greater insight into the world of organised crime than anything I could ever write. Karl was QBE – Qualified By Experience – and talked with pride about his new job, especially helping other inmates to get back on their feet after their release from prison.

‘It feels good to have legit work . . . to pay the mortgage on our home, to have a car – well, a car registered in my name for the first time, anyway,’ he joked.

Even the more cynical detectives in the crowd – some of whom had handcuffed Karl in his wilder days – began to think there might be hope. If he could change, then others could.

It was the highlight of a wonderful evening, and often the first topic of discussion as I made my way around the gathering. Then came the next question I was peppered with most frequently that night: ‘When is the next book coming out?’

Gangland had been on the shelves for less than a week and there was already an expectation of a sequel. I laughed it off while groaning on the inside.

Then I went home and started writing a list.

* * *

This book, Gangster’s Paradise, was born from that list. But it’s probably worth going backwards to give new readers a bit of background.

I’m a journalist for the New Zealand Herald. I spend a lot of time writing about organised crime: drugs, guns, gangs and money. Lots of money.

Back in March 2009, a source tipped me off about a case being heard in the High Court that morning. A significant methamphetamine dealer was being sent to prison, likely for a very long time, and the source hinted that the case involved some very interesting details.

I had never written about methamphetamine or organised crime before. What I heard in the courtroom that day was fascinating. The guy in the dock was a geeky-looking Chinese man with a cool nickname, ‘Four-Eyed Dragon’. The amounts of money he’d made through selling meth were staggering. There were no other reporters in the courtroom, and I couldn’t quite believe my luck as I walked back to the office with the facts of the scoop scribbled down in my notebook. It was my first front-page story for the paper, a splash in the Saturday edition, which exposed how Asian crime syndicates were laundering millions of dollars in drug profits through Auckland’s SkyCity casino.

It was my entrée into New Zealand’s growing obsession with methamphetamine, and the colourful characters who inhabit the criminal underworld. Reporting on that hidden world was addictive. I was hooked. Since then I’ve had a front-row seat at one of the most gripping true-crime dramas ever to hit the country.

Gangland: New Zealand’s Underworld of Organised Crime was an attempt to illustrate the subtle shifts in the multimillion-dollar enterprise of organised methamphetamine trafficking – and the investigative techniques employed by the police in response – over the previous 20 years.

Organised crime in New Zealand is a global business now. If Gangland was about evolution, then Gangster’s Paradise is about escalation.

* * *

In my view, the escalation of organised crime in New Zealand – more drugs, more shootings, more corruption – has been driven by the arrival of gangs as ‘501’ deportees from Australia. The likes of the Mongols and Comancheros, in particular, have brought a more professional edge to the gang scene. They have better connections with international drug syndicates, better criminal tradecraft and encrypted communications, and are more willing to use firearms to enforce their will.

In turn, the established gangs – such as the Head Hunters, who were so dominant for many years – have had to up their game in response. Escalation.

The police have had to up their game too, especially the National Organised Crime Group. For years, detectives in these ring-fenced squads (or their predecessors) have been engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse with gangs and crime syndicates, and their task has been made increasingly difficult in recent years with the widespread use of encrypted communications devices.

In turn, the police have been forced to find innovative new ways of gathering evidence and working with their international partners, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States and the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Escalation.

A gang which took over a small rural town. A police officer who was shot and killed in a routine traffic stop. A port worker who helped a gang whisk a shipping container off a wharf in the middle of the night. A crew of corrupt baggage handlers smuggling meth into the country during Covid lockdowns. A gang shooting inside a five-star hotel in broad daylight. A gang member born in New Zealand who allegedly became one of the biggest drug dealers in the world.

Escalation. My aim in telling these stories in Gangster’s Paradise is to make it bigger better and more bad-arse than the original – largely because the crimes as reported in these stories are bigger and more bad-arse. What follows is a portrait of organised crime in New Zealand right now.

1

ROCK-HARD EVIDENCE: THE KIWI CONNECTION TO ASIA’S ‘EL CHAPO’

IT’S FAIR TO SAY that fear and loathing lie behind the way the general New Zealand public regard gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and the Head Hunters. At least we all know what they look like. They exist in plain sight. But another kind of gang inspire a deeper, probably even more racist form of fear and loathing: Asian crime syndicates.

We don’t know what they look like. We don’t really know what they get up to. Even our best drug detectives don’t have a clear picture, because the biggest Asian crime syndicates are run way outside of New Zealand borders.

For many years, most of the world’s methamphetamine was manufactured in China. Essential ingredients of meth, such as pseudoephedrine, were freely and legally available in China. This vital pipeline of easily purchased drugs had made Asian organised crime figures increasingly influential in their new home of New Zealand.

The syndicates were among the first to recognise the fortunes to be made from methamphetamine. Like any economic market, supply will meet demand, and the booming meth trade of the early 2000s transformed New Zealand’s organised crime to a degree that made the infamous Mr Asia drug syndicate of the 1970s pale into insignificance. Asian syndicates had the advantage: they controlled the flow of the drug. They became experts at international trade, entrepreneurs capitalising on huge profit margins and the millions of dollars to be made.

Police had been aware of elements of organised crime in the Asian community in New Zealand since the late 1980s. From behind a façade of legitimate commerce, the groups had run a range of illegal businesses, from money laundering, drug importation and prostitution to credit-card fraud, extortion and pāua smuggling. In many respects, they had been small-time players. But when meth arrived, they became a crucial link to a huge, untapped drug source.

The drug squads running out of Auckland had some great successes in investigating these syndicates, dating back to Operation Major in 2006. Detectives could only admire the level of professionalism, discipline and criminal sophistication. Their admiration turned to incredulity when it came to the ingenious case of the umbrella stands.

* * *

Sixteen umbrella stands were listed as ‘outdoor leisure items’ on the manifest for a freight container sitting on the vessel Cap Cleveland, which docked at the Port of Auckland on 14 August 2017. They were packed in tight with furniture, bicycles, children’s slides and swings, tents and beach chairs. Valued at just $3165, the 67 packages from Guangdong in China were a collection of the kinds of cheap goods which flood the New Zealand market.

Thousands of containers are loaded onto the wharves every day. Customs profiling software flagged container TEMU9293203 as worthy of a closer look.

A check with a portable X-ray machine made the border control staff even more suspicious. Scan images of the umbrella stands picked up inconsistencies in the supposed solid mass of their concrete bases. Samples were sent to the laboratory inside the Customs inspection facility, for analysis by a scientist employed by ESR, the Crown research institute. The tests showed the umbrella stands were made of gypsum, a plaster or chalk-like material used in construction, similar to concrete but not as hard.

But the ESR tests discovered something else: methamphetamine. It wasn’t detected in any kind of hidden cavity or secret compartment. It was detected in the gypsum itself. The meth had been cunningly mixed with gypsum in a ratio of about 20:80, then cast into a metal tray to set in the shape of an umbrella stand. Once safely through the border to its destination, the Class A drug could be extracted by breaking up the gypsum blocks and dissolving the crushed powder in water. The cloudy grey liquid would be filtered to remove any insoluble lumps, then allowed to settle. The clear liquid would then be evaporated with heat, leaving a white crystalline powder worth about $150,000 a kilogram. About 100 kilos of methamphetamine had been mixed into the umbrella stands.

A covert investigation, Operation Abseil, was opened, and Detective Sergeant Mike Beal from the National Organised Crime Group put in charge. Beal decided to run a ‘controlled delivery’ of the shipment, a tactic in which the drugs are removed and substituted with a look-alike substance, then carefully repacked and delivered to their destination as if nothing had been found. This allows the police to follow the package and identify the unsuspecting recipient, usually a low-level pawn, and then hopefully those further up the chain of command.

This controlled delivery was a little different, though. It wasn’t a matter of switching out packages of drugs with a harmless substance, as was the usual practice. The drugs were literally baked into the gypsum, so Operation Abseil had to manufacture a placebo which looked and felt identical to the original meth/gypsum mixture poured into the umbrella bases.

To complicate matters further, the delivery address was a storage facility in Onehunga, which was literally just rows of shipping containers inside an empty yard. Who knew how long the umbrella bases might be left in storage before an unknowing suspect came to pick them up? There was no way police could afford to spare a surveillance team, watching and waiting, with no end in sight. They could be there for weeks, if not months, without success. Time for Plan B.

The controlled delivery went ahead on 23 August 2017, after the Operation Abseil team had planted tracking devices inside the ‘umbrella stands’, as well as hidden cameras with lenses trained on the container at the storage yard. This way the police would be alerted when the consignment was moved and capture surveillance footage of who shifted it, as well as follow the goods to where the methamphetamine would likely be extracted from the gypsum.

Beal and his team had also been working on who had sent the container of ‘outdoor leisure items’. The consignee was listed as Best Budget International 99 Ltd, at a Sunnynook address on Auckland’s North Shore, whose sole director and shareholder was a Chinese taxi driver working in Auckland.

However, a previous consignment to the same address was listed for one Ricky Leung, a 63-year-old Hong Kong citizen who had never lived in New Zealand, but had visited the country for the first time in April 2016. On arrival during that first trip, Leung told Customs he had invested in a business called Best Budget International Ltd. Companies Office records had confirmed he owned 100 per cent of the shares.

That company had since been removed from the register, and replaced by a business with a very similar name registered to the taxi driver. Yet an import of outdoor furniture cleverly disguising an enormous amount of methamphetamine had been sent to the same address. Something didn’t add up, and the police were eventually satisfied the taxi driver was a front – an innocent agent to insulate Ricky Leung from getting his hands dirty.

On the same day as the controlled delivery to the Onehunga storage yard, a judge of the High Court signed a warrant for the police to intercept Leung’s private communications should he ever return to New Zealand. They didn’t have to wait long. At 11.45am on 16 September 2017, Ricky Leung stepped off Cathay Pacific flight CX187 from Hong Kong and into Auckland International Airport.

There were people looking for Leung, though none rushed to greet him in the arrivals lounge. His name on the flight manifest had triggered a border alert, so plainclothes detectives were ready and waiting for him to clear the Customs hall.

They followed Leung to the Spark kiosk inside the airport. He purchased a New Zealand SIM card, which the shop assistant helped him insert into his phone. A few minutes later, the assistant helped Mike Beal and Detective Jane Scott, too. The police now had Leung’s mobile phone number and could listen to his plans, as well as watch his movements.

Surveillance teams followed the Alert taxi he hailed at the airport to the heart of downtown Auckland, where Leung was dropped off at a backpackers’ hostel on Queen Street. They went inside at 3.30pm and saw Leung sitting in reception, but left because of the risk of blowing their cover among a predominantly Asian student crowd.

Two days later, Ricky Leung received a phone call from someone he called ‘Tall Man’ in Mandarin. The police had no idea who Tall Man was, or how he fitted into the picture. But the two men spoke at several times during the course of the day, and it was clear from the tone of their conversations that they were in business together. They arranged to meet for breakfast the following day.

* * *

In a completely madcap day, the police would start by following their single known target, Ricky Leung, and end by chasing seven suspects across the city, six of whom were completely unknown to them.

After breakfast, Leung and Tall Man drove in a white Toyota Corolla rental car to the storage facility in Onehunga, where they opened the container and shifted six of the sixteen ‘umbrella stand’ boxes into the back of the vehicle. Leung drove Tall Man to SkyCity casino where he exited the car, and another man took his place in the front passenger seat.

This third target was also completely unknown to the police surveillance squad. He was later identified as Yiu Wai Chiang.

Chiang and Leung drove to the suburb of Botany in east Auckland and parked at the Chinatown shopping centre in Ti Rakau Drive. Police watched as the pair stacked the six boxes against a wall.

Leung drove away in the Toyota Corolla back to the city, while Chiang stayed with the precious cargo outside the mall. A few minutes later, a rented Toyota Estima turned up. Now the police had four more unidentified targets to follow – three men and a woman. Tall Man was in the car too.

The men helped Chiang to load the boxes into the back of the Toyota Estima, which the police surveillance team followed to a residential home on Claymore Street in Manurewa. The six boxes were taken inside the house which, the police learned later, had been rented just a few days earlier on a one-month lease.

Five of the targets then drove away in the Toyota Estima, back to the storage facility in Onehunga. Chiang stayed behind at the safehouse to guard the ‘umbrella stands’.

The police surveillance team covertly filmed as the five targets opened the storage container and started lifting the remaining 10 ‘umbrella stand’ boxes into the back of the Toyota Estima. They were watching in real time as Tall Man received a phone call, looked around in a panic, then told the others to put the boxes back into the storage container. Pronto. Tall Man was spooked. The group jumped back into the Estima van and started driving towards the airport.

Operation Abseil had been compromised, although the police were puzzled as to how and why. What Beal didn’t know at the time was that back at the Manurewa safehouse, Chiang had opened one of the six boxes of umbrella stands. He must have felt something wasn’t quite right with the gypsum concealment, and raised the alarm by calling Tall Man with his suspicions that the shipment had been tampered with.

With the Toyota Estima heading towards the airport, Beal’s best guess was the group had their passports in their pockets and would grab the first available flight out of New Zealand. Instead, the rental van eventually turned back towards Auckland CBD and returned to their hotel at SkyCity. They dispersed into the crowd with a stretched police surveillance crew in tow.

It’s a tricky job to track someone down, especially when grainy surveillance photos are all you have to identify the target. One fast move and they’re gone. Tall Man did a runner down a side street and managed to maintain a decent gap from the detective who gave chase. Unfortunately for Tall Man, he was running straight towards one of the surveillance team members who happened to be stationed down the road.

When he saw the pursuit wasn’t going well for his police colleague, the undercover officer decided to intervene by making a ‘citizen’s arrest’ as a member of the public, and grabbed Tall Man. However, Tall Man was not very tall. Incredibly, a worker at a nearby construction site decided he would make a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of the surveillance officer, who he thought was assaulting a much smaller man on the street.

The construction worker smacked the undercover officer in the head, with the immortal words uttered to every bully in New Zealand: ‘Leave him alone, bro!’

Momentarily stunned, the officer replied: ‘Fuck off, I’m a cop’.

The wannabe hero wandered back to work with a meek ‘Sorry, bro.’

With Tall Man, soon to be known as Tai Fi Chiu, now in handcuffs, the surveillance officer slipped back into his car and disappeared.

The police soon rounded up the other four targets, the three men and the woman, wandering around the SkyCity facilities. But this still left Ricky Leung and Yiu Wai Chiang at large. Chiang had been left behind at the Manurewa safehouse, and by the time police went through the front door with a search warrant, he was gone. They found the opened umbrella stand box though.

Beal realised it was Chiang who had raised the alarm, then given the surveillance team sitting outside the Claymore Street address the slip by jumping over the back fence.

Chiang and Ricky Leung were found a short time later, hiding in a downtown hotel room. It had been a crazy day of playing ‘catch me if you can’, which ended with police rounding up all seven targets and putting them in custody.

But the hard work

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