Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  By the evening of November 15 the team had amassed sufficient material to get the necessary warrants. In order to best proceed from there, though, they knew it would be necessary to nab a hopefully unsuspecting Calcinai at work so that his house could be searched without interference. They waited overnight. Shortly after seven the next morning van den Heuvel and a couple of the plainclothes team headed over to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs while the others headed to Brooklyn. Outside the Bowen Street building, which stood in the physical shadow of the Beehive, the sky was azure, blurring above the harbour twinkling in the distance, the kind of morning on which the detective might have been out diving if he hadn’t been on the assignment of his professional life. He slipped a hand into his pocket to check he had everything. Arrest papers? Check. ID card? Check. Handcuffs? Check. Time to move in. The three men strode across the foyer to wait for the lift. A few moments later a bell sounded and the doors slid open.

  Nobody who was present upstairs at the ministry that morning remembers precisely what Vincent Calcinai was working on when the cops arrived. Possibly he was fine-tuning another media release having to do with the freshly drafted Fair Trading Act, a big-ticket policy of the then National-led government framed in the expectation of bringing wayward business operators to heel, the sort of liberal-minded legislation Vince approved of. As soon as the introductions had been dispensed the old actor’s plump face whitened and he began to shake. Yes, he muttered, he knew why they were there. No, he said in response to the second, third and fourth questions, he wouldn’t be making any comment, and he stayed good to his word. Sensing that the performance was heading nowhere, van den Heuvel reached into his pocket for the handcuffs.

  As Calcinai was being taken to a cell at the nearby courthouse to await an initial hearing on eight counts of sexual assault, the detective jumped into his car and headed up to Brooklyn, easing to a stop outside 8 Mills Road, a 1960s-style house located on the rise above Washington Avenue. Inside, his colleagues had already unearthed a small trove of evidence inside the dimly lit rooms: along with the predictable photographic material stored on film reels and computer disks, there were a number of ‘souvenirs’ presumably taken from victims. Leaving them in the front room, van den Heuvel wandered down the passageway leading from the front door out to the back of the house, noting that the place had the musty air of a slightly sinister bachelor’s pad. In the lounge he came to a halt. For the first time that day he allowed himself a satisfied smile, for there in front of him stood a pool table. Now they had everything they needed.

  Shortly after lunchtime that same day, a judge agreed that what had been amassed was sufficient to justify keeping Calcinai in custody. The case was adjourned and the accused was bundled into a waiting vehicle. Who knows what he may have been thinking in the police car on the ride across town and as Wellington Prison came into view? Did his thoughts go back to 1978 when he had been awarded a grant from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, the precursor to Creative New Zealand, to write a play on the life and trial of one of the prison’s notorious inmates? Hamiora Pere was a misunderstood individual, in Vince’s estimation, who was convicted of treason and hanged at the same prison in 1869.

  Possibly his thoughts went back still further, to the boys whose future careers he had guided as an all-purpose teacher at Epuni Boys’ Home, kids with names like Rufus Marsh (who killed Diane Miller) and Paul Dalley (who killed Carla Cardno), young boys whose subsequent transformations into singularly vicious sexual predators and psychopaths shocked everyone who ever worked with them.

  By the time he was marched through the prison door, though, Calcinai had regained some of his usual composure, at least to a sufficient degree for the receiving officers not to follow the usual precautionary practice of removing every article on his person that might be used to inflict self-harm. Nor did it seem particularly notable when he asked for a pen and paper to take with him into the prison’s remand wing, the necessary tools for completing what was to be the second-to-last creative act of Vincent Calcinai’s life: penning a brief message later that night declaring his innocence, before bending down and undoing his shoelaces.

  The following morning they discovered this final self-exculpation next to his body.

  ‘He lived a double life,’ van den Heuvel said afterwards. ‘Everyone thought the world of him and he had a real dark side.’ Even his former manager did, too, it seemed; for despite being annoyed — doubtless with some justification — at being called at home by a reporter seeking comment, he was happy enough to offer a snap assessment of his one-time employee. After a moment’s thought, he responded by telling the reporter that Calcinai had always been highly regarded at Epuni. ‘He was a respected staff member who worked very hard and gave freely of his time,’ Maurie said. ‘He often planned extra activities for the kids.’

  IT WAS ALSO AROUND THIS TIME THAT A bespectacled young Wellington lawyer named Sonja Cooper felt she had reached the point in her career where she should be running her own law practice, a decision she took after being appointed a district inspector of mental health — an ombudsman role in respect of the rights of people subject to the Mental Health Act. She had no ultimate game plan, no settled career path other than to keep pursuing the love of law she first acquired as a schoolgirl after doing a classroom project on criminal law. Nevertheless, and probably not surprisingly in view of the specialist work she was acquiring a reputation for, Cooper started receiving visits from individuals who claimed they had been abused while in care — foster care rather than institutions at this point — even though this was not an area in which she was specifically touting for new work.

  Her curiosity was aroused. ‘I don’t even know how they started coming to me,’ she recalled. ‘I know there was one client who came to me by way of another lawyer who was becoming a judge and thought this was the kind of work I would do, but there were others who popped up out of nowhere.’ One claimant, she said first heard about her from a hairdresser.

  That hairdresser was onto something. Family law already figured large in Cooper’s professional interests. As the child of ‘a fairly messy childhood’, growing up as the oldest of three kids in a single-parent household, it figured among her personal interests, too. True, she had grown up in one of Wellington’s wealthier suburbs and the education she received was at one of the city’s swishier high schools. But as Cooper likes to remind visitors to her modest Wellington office, ‘I’m certainly not your typical pampered rich child.’ For one thing, she grew up a Catholic girl in a house of modest means, during an era when such distinctions counted for something. The good education was thanks to her mother’s hard work and the break of having a scholarship. ‘I was the poor kid growing up with a whole lot of rich people, which I think made me sensitive to the fact that life can be different from how you imagine,’ Cooper added. ‘And I think I’ve always been kind of grateful that I was able to succeed and do well in a context where others probably would’ve ended up in the system.’

  Thus began her work with those from somewhat similar circumstances who did not fare as well. She has since overseen cases prepared on behalf of hundreds of former inmates of institutions run by the former Child Welfare Division, the former Department of Social Welfare, and the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services. About one in four of those cases relate to Epuni Boys’ Home, by far the largest institutional showing among the country’s former short-term training facilities. Epuni’s high visibility relates to the institution’s ‘completely ineffectual’ style of management during much of its history.

  In 2000 Cooper won her first victory against Social Welfare in the High Court. That decision was subsequently taken to the Court of Appeal, which in 2003 ruled that the government was liable for abuse, both sexual and physical, perpetrated on children in state-run institutions such as Epuni Boys’ Home. Cooper has always insisted that courtroom victories are not all that her firm has wanted, but that the refusal of successive governments to consider what she would vie
w as an acceptable out-of-court process to address the hundreds of claims she has overseen leaves her clients with no other reasonable option.

  Internationally speaking, none of this is breaking fallow ground. In Ireland, a major Roman Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy, in late 2009 offered to pay the equivalent of more than $250 million in compensation for decades of acknowledged abuse in its system of institutions for the republic’s most-deprived children. Earlier, state investigators ruled that orders such as these — which had operated as an arm of the government over many decades — had covered up endemic rape, molestation, beatings and mental cruelty of their wards, as many as 14,000 of whom had outstanding claims topping $2 billion. Closer to home, the government of Australia has formally apologised to the migrant members of what is known as the ‘Forgotten Australians’, the term coined by the Australian Senate to describe the ‘great evil’ that befell many of the children who were brought up in the country’s orphanages, children’s homes, institutions or foster care.

  In early 2010, British prime minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the ‘shameful’ and ‘misguided’ programme that saw thousands of young Britons resettled in Australian residential care. The apology capped years of separate investigations into British children’s residences beginning in the early 1990s when a former principal, Frank Beck, was sentenced to five life terms for sexual assaults against more than 100 children in state care, including five kids who later committed suicide. The Independent newspaper reported that as many as 67 investigations took place in the wake of the Beck case, involving 400 homes and schools, at least 2000 victims and 415 suspects, with in excess of 400 detectives working full-time on the matter.

  Across the Atlantic, in 2006, the Canadian government agreed to pay more than two billion Canadian dollars to compensate an estimated 80,000 survivors from indigenous backgrounds who were forcibly removed and placed in care. The Canadians also established a truth and reconciliation commission to allow claimants to tell their stories, which would, it is hoped, provide the basis for a review of how such widespread systemic abuse was allowed to occur.

  In the country where many of the modern ideas about juvenile delinquency were minted, including the concept of juvenile hall itself, some serious soul-searching was taking place. In New York, the state where juvenile delinquency first found its way on to the statute books, a damning report issued in 2009 by the United States Department of Justice highlighted abuses at juvenile residential centres similar to those in the old New Zealand system. Investigators there found that physical force was often the first response to any act of insubordination by the young residents, despite rules allowing force only as a last resort. The report suggested that acts of violence and abuse against children had been routinely covered up. It accused officials of failing to act in a timely fashion, if at all, when cronies were caught violating policy in dangerous ways.

  The section of the report on mentally ill children, who have made up a significant part of the incarcerated population, was as The New York Times later put it, enough to make any American shudder — and cause a well-informed New Zealand reader to start with recognition. ‘Medications appear to be handed out almost at random, without proper monitoring or clear therapeutic goals,’ the paper reported, and while many detained youths had drug problems, these haphazard stabs at creating treatment programmes were simply ‘a shambles’.

  But at least one stark difference between the situations in New Zealand and the United States remains. In the United States it is the federal government that has taken a lead in battling the state-run institutions. The government has even threatened a takeover of the state’s entire youth residential system, including the infamous Tryon Boys Residential Center, in upstate Fulton County — the same centre where Mike Tyson was briefly housed before being discovered by an old boxing trainer who tutored him in the art of the sweet science.

  But successive governments in New Zealand have been reluctant to heed the international cues. Each of the cases Cooper’s firm has brought before the courts has been vigorously defended, usually by the state wielding technical defences such as the statute of limitations, which holds that after a certain period offences can’t be prosecuted, while denying the existence of any widespread abuse or indeed any pattern of abuse at all. The process has been arduous. At the rate seen up until late 2010, it would take approximately 150 years for all the claims filed by Cooper and her team to have their day in court, and that’s not counting the dozens of new ones that come in most months. The government has categorically ruled out any official inquiry. It has said it will not apologise for the treatment of its former wards, and stated that all the systems anyone might need have already been put in place for dealing with any serious issues relating to the former ‘homes’.

  Media interest has gathered pace. In 2009 teleision current affairs show 60 Minutes aired what it billed, a touch optimistically, as a full investigation into the hundreds of abuse claims and various examples of official duplicity relating to the children’s institutions. The show went big on Epuni Boys’ Home, as might be expected, but in the end offered little new information or insight, although it did feature a sympathetic interview with one former inmate who said he had been subject to nothing but abuse and neglect during his time there in the 1970s. (The details of that case remain the subject of a suppression order and the former ward involved asked that he not be identified in this work.) Presumably without any intended irony, this television investigation into bureaucratic duplicity also made extensive use of phoney cutaway footage purporting to show Epuni’s passageways and bedrooms at night. Yet the programme did succeed in bringing the subject to wider public attention.

  With a sharp economic downturn on one hand and a nominally conservative political administration eager to weed out wasteful public spending on the other, at least some of the debate spurred by the coverage has turned on the question of publicly funded class actions and what critics describe as the country’s credulous system of legal aid. Writing in The National Business Review, commentator Matthew Hooten homed in on Cooper for being what he considered a poster child on both fronts. Hooten has acknowledged that the substance of the claims Cooper’s firm has worked on may be correct, and that the erstwhile wards she has represented deserve to be heard and to receive some sort of apology, compensation and a chance to make the most of the rest of their lives. At the same time, however, he argued that the passage of time and the murky environments in which past abuse may have occurred simply make it too difficult to prove criminal wrongdoing.

  And even if these cases had a reasonable chance of success, he added, the trauma of reliving the past on the witness stand was ‘a barrier to resolution’. Why, he demanded, had the system forked out $4.4 million in aid for Cooper to pursue historic claims at a time when other more appropriate avenues of appeal existed?

  One possible answer might be that not dispensing legal aid could constitute a fresh abuse. Cooper’s own answer was slightly longer. For one thing, she pointed out, she does not work as a sole operator but as the principal of a medium-sized firm employing solicitors and administrative staff. And the claim that her firm had enjoyed no success in historical abuse cases was simply incorrect, having successfully argued a number of interlocutory applications for leave as well as settling around 30 cases in 2009 alone.

  Nor was Hooten present during one of the cases argued by Cooper, in the Court of Appeal in 2009, at the end of which one of the presiding judges, visibly moved, described her standard of research and presentation over three days as ‘impeccable’.

  ‘We do a lot of work here that we have absolutely no guarantee we’re going to be paid for, but we do it anyway,’ Cooper said. ‘We do it because we have to protect the clients. That,’ she added, ‘is what this firm is about. We’re a human-rights firm. So believe you me, it’s not all sun and roses.’

  To be sure, none of the testimonies assembled by Cooper and her team makes for cheerful reading. But one need not be a
conservative newspaper critic to find at least a small number of them a bit problematic. One claimant, for instance, recounts that boys regularly had sex with female staff members, ‘either in the gym or in our rooms while no one else was about’, while another adds the intriguing detail that one of these women would sometimes insist on the boy shaving her legs for good measure.

  Another litigant claims that, ‘on a date he does not specifically recall’, a staff member grabbed him by the hair and held him over a urinal while another pissed on him, apparently as punishment for some trifling neglect of cleaning duties. Here again, one supposes, the hopeful claimant doesn’t appear destined for a hefty payout, not least because of the doubt cast by the sheer logistics involved in two housemasters having to dispatch 40 other unattended wards to various parts of the relatively confined residence in order to proceed, as it were, unmolested. Stories of boys forced to mow fields with a hand-mower, or even scissors, also abound.

  Not surprisingly, few of the people who were involved with Epuni buy into many of the allegations. Even Mike Doolan, perhaps the most liberal-minded and sympathetic of former administrators, admitted to being worried about how ‘a black and white memory has a way of becoming technicolour with the help of some advisers’, which he believes has in some cases led to ‘apocryphal’ recollections, such as the recurrent theme of boys being sent out to giant paddocks with hand-mowers, which is after all a staple of army folklore, too.

  ‘But people who say these things come to believe them,’ Doolan added, underscoring an unarguable psychological truth. As a rule, most of us romanticise the past — it’s a natural thing to do. But when one has been most horribly betrayed, or at any rate feels that way, an opposite effect kicks in, the experience becoming infinitely more tainted and rancid in recollection than perhaps it really was.