Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

  Dunedin private investigator Wayne Idour said, ‘I’m just a small sprat in a big pond.’ At fifty-seven, age had turned the colour of his standard-issue police moustache to ash. His knees and hips were in bad shape. His broad frame came wrapped in a warm black overcoat he bought in a factory sale. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd. I didn’t notice him as he sat alone in a café.

  That was on a winter’s morning in August. The flight to Dunedin had been delayed because of that delicious phrase ‘ice on the runway’. Snow down to 400 metres, its white coat worn lightly on Saddle Hill and Mortgage Hill, a temperature high of four degrees, the flat harbour so cold to look at that it seemed to wear a sign reading ‘DO NOT TOUCH’. Modern city, modern rates and rents. But what a visitor notices is olde Dunedin: the intoxicating smell of coal smoke in daytime, the citizens with ‘sober drops at the end of their cold noses’ – an antique line from Janet Frame. And these from Denis Glover: ‘Over the harbour waters / A slow-gonged clock / Floats the hours / And the quarters.’

  The gongs pushed out the raft of eleven o’clock when I met Idour, when that unremarkable man made himself known. I had negotiated with his lawyer, Frazer Barton, to secure the interview. No inquiries, said Barton, were to be made about his client’s involvement in what might be termed ‘delicate matters’.

  During the last election, Idour was hired by the Exclusive Brethren to spy on the Labour Party. Earlier this year, he was revealed as the source – ‘one of the sources,’ he claimed – behind Investigate magazine’s revelations that police commissioner Howard Broad had once screened a bestiality porn movie at a party in his home.

  Such scandals. Do tell. ‘We’re not going down that road,’ said Idour, once, twice, three times, four times. But that road led somewhere towards Idour’s character. What sort of guy would act the way he had? Oh, Barton had said, he’s larger than life. Idour didn’t seem like that kind of rooster at all. I asked how much time he had ever spent living outside of Dunedin. He said, ‘Not a lot. Very little. About a year and a half.’ Where? ‘Invercargill.’

  He talked about honour, respect, loyalty. ‘I just want to help people,’ he said, once, twice, three times … five times … eight times – in all, over two hours, eleven times. It was as regular as clockwork, Idour’s own slow gong, floating his position across the table.

  He seemed to believe he had been more sinned against than sinning. When his role in the Exclusive Brethren surveillance of the Labour Party was revealed, prime minister Helen Clark came up with a good word to describe those kind of tactics: ‘Obnoxious.’ Deputy prime minister Michael Cullen called them ‘sordid’.

  Was it possible that he had become the victim? His name had been tarred, held up for contempt. I asked if his reputation was important to him. ‘Yes, definitely.’ Well, it would be fair to say it had taken a knock. ‘I’m a sensitive sort of person. A very proud person. Very proud … I feel for my family and friends, the people who know what’s been said about me isn’t true. It hurts me to see them hurt. Let’s leave it there.’

  Naturally, I brought it up again. What was his response to police minister Annette King’s derisory comments about him in parliament? He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been consulting my lawyers all along over this. I’ve been spending a lot of money on lawyers. They’ll make the call.’

  Idour joined the police force in 1972. When he left in 1991, he was charged with perverting the course of justice; the charge was dropped, and Idour did the police for malicious prosecution. He won a reported $3000. A few years ago, Idour did The Sunday Star-Times for libel. He won a reported $230,000.

  But he was full of bonhomie, he chuckled and reflected and rambled, he paid for my cup of tea – and, yes, he offered help, if ever I was in Dunedin and wanted information. He said: ‘I think anyone who fears Wayne Idour is someone who’s got something to hide.’ And: ‘I have knowledge of people. And knowledge is power. I know things about people, and that can be scary.’ Also: ‘It’s a sad day if people can’t make legitimate inquiries.’

  He talked about his job – document services, repo work (‘We seem to be getting more of it. The market’s been ringing’), providing security for school and varsity balls, criminal defence work (‘I’ve got two rape files right here’). I asked twice whether it was dignified work, and later I asked whether he felt his line of work was important to him. He said, ‘Yes, it is. You asked me before whether I brought anything of this on to myself, some of the controversy, the bad mouthings. I don’t see it that way. I don’t see that any organisation has a right to dictate who can help who. Providing it’s lawful, I don’t see that anyone has a right to interfere. I’m just one of those people that will stand up to people. It means a lot to me to help …’

  Were these sincere values? Idour talked about growing up in a working-class family in south Dunedin. His father worked for thirty-two years at Shacklock. ‘Good, solid citizen. Hard-working. Loving. He was very strong in his beliefs and his loyalties. Taught me a lot. Integrity and all that. To be straight up with people. Speak my mind. I learned all that from him.’

  The family never had a car: ‘Didn’t matter. Walked everywhere, or took the bus. It just took a bit longer. I think the modern lifestyle’s probably got a lot to answer for.’ His mother was a great cook: ‘Always, always in the kitchen. I can always remember the smell of the coal range.’ As a teenager, he dressed as a Mod: ‘I’ve always taken pride in my appearance. If you came into town on a Friday night, you got dressed up. That was going out. But times have changed, and I can’t say they’ve necessarily changed for the better.’

  He was olde Dunedin, or olde something, distressed at ‘all the social engineering that’s been taking place’. He was ‘a staunch believer in discipline … respect … loyalty’, etc. He said, ‘I’ve always been there for my mates, always there to support family. That’s me. Very caring.’

  But he didn’t exactly support Howard Broad. ‘Howard’s not a bad bloke,’ he said. ‘I’ve known Howard since day one of his career. He used to come round to our home as a young kid. He always wanted to be commissioner. Always. Right from day one.’

  I asked whether honour was important to him. He said, ‘Honour means a lot. Honour means a lot.’

  What honour was there in spying on the Labour Party on behalf of the Exclusive Brethren? He said, ‘We’re not going down that road. It’s a matter of … if I’m asked to do something that’s lawful, and I’m comfortable with it, and I believe it’s for the right reasons, then yes, I’ll do it.’ Was he comfortable being hired by the Brethren? ‘I was comfortable with it. I was comfortable once I found out; I didn’t know initially.’

  Did he aim to keep his head down from now on? ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re asking. But … I just want to get on with life, and be left alone to do what I do, and help people. I can’t say that tomorrow something’s going to come along, and I’m going to give some advice or be involved and all of a sudden there’s going to be another frenzy. I’ve got no control over that. I’m certainly not going to actively look for something.

  ‘I guess the proper way to sum it up is that I’m not going to be intimidated or bullied out of offering help to people if they’re entitled to it. If that means not keeping my head down, then I guess I won’t keep my head down. But it’s done for the right reasons.’

  We walked next door to his office in The Octagon. A guy in dreadlocks called out, ‘Keeping your head down, Wayne?’ The door to his upstairs office was next to a dentist and a tattooist. Inside, the air felt stale and dank. The wallpaper had seen better days. There was a pot of instant beef noodles, police memorabilia in a glass cabinet, and photos of Idour in police uniform. The moustache was dark back then. But his face wore the same expression it still has: an unexpected sadness.

  [August 19]

  12

  Anita McNaught

  We Cross Live to Iraq

  On a summer’s morning in August in Iraq, Anita McNaught woke up in her cot in a US milita
ry base, where she is embedded as a correspondent for the Fox television network, when the phone rang from her former home, Auckland, New Zealand. She got up, and spoke on her way to the shower. She was in desert on the outskirts of Mosul, a city in the north-west of Iraq, and it was forty-eight degrees. She said, ‘The landscape here – you get up in a Black Hawk helicopter, and it’s brutal and it’s melancholy and it’s empty and it’s ancient and it’s mysterious and it’s powerful.’

  She is in Iraq for six weeks. On her first week, suicide bombers drove trucks into two nearby villages occupied by a religious sect called the Yazidis and killed maybe 250 people, maybe more, definitely the worst death toll of any suicide blast since the US invaded Iraq. McNaught went to the villages the day after they were attacked, and saw a pair of muddy feet that were not attached to a body.

  American military claimed it was probably the work of the Islamic State of Iraq, a group linked to al Qaeda. McNaught said, ‘If you call yourself al Qaeda here, you’ll attract international funding and foreign fighters. Often, the US forces tell us, when there’s something massive, like a suicide truck bomb, it’ll be the real fanatical foreign fighters whom they use to drive the vehicles. These are people who come to Iraq expressly to die. These are people who are really quite off their heads with hatred. According to the people I’ve spoken to, who have arrested them and interrogated them, you can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them, they’re beyond that, far beyond that.’

  President Bush tells the world that the US military has Iraq under control. McNaught said, ‘Iraq is in the grip of a low-level civil war. You never know where it’s going to flare up next. I mean, those Yazidis – there are so many strange religious groups in Iraq, and they’re just one of the more distinctive because they’ve got this colourful pageantry of angels and peacocks. They’re a gentle, discreet group of rather powerless people. They were only living in those villages in the middle of the desert in the middle of nowhere with nothing because Saddam Hussein moved them from somewhere else in the 1970s. But they were living quietly.

  ‘While it’s true the Americans have been conducting quite an effective security operation, it’s driven some insurgents and militants out of what were really no-go areas for anyone, but they haven’t all been killed. A lot of them just left town. They turn up somewhere else, and they want to say, “Hello, you haven’t killed us!” to the Americans, so they bomb ancient communities living in mud-brick homes. There are so many factors playing into the violence here, and there are still foreign fighters coming across the border from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. That’s all playing into the violence. So Iraq is not under control.’

  The phone went dead.

  After my fifty-three attempts at redialling, the signal picked up again just after Anita had eaten breakfast; she was walking towards her portacabin holding two polystyrene cups of tea. She said, ‘We are remarkably well catered for. At breakfast there are five different kinds of porridge, two kinds of scrambled eggs, and so many kinds of doughnuts you want to run screaming.

  ‘I share my shower with about fifty female soldiers. The water is so hard you can barely get a lather up for your shampoo. The drinking water tastes something indescribable. But the hygiene standards are very scrupulous, and there’s air-conditioning everywhere. The amount of electricity – the dominant feature on this base is big diesel-powered generators every couple of hundred metres, and they make the most demonic noise. Sometimes if you get far enough away, you can hear doves. This is an old Saddam Hussein army base, and rather bizarrely it was planted up with eucalyptus trees; all around is stony desert, but doves sit in the eucalyptus trees and coo all day long.’

  I asked about her assignment for Fox. She said, ‘There’s something special going on here in Mosul. It’s the story we came to get. What we’ve witnessed over the past couple of days is really something quite extraordinary. The community leaders, the sheikhs, and the Iraqi commanders of police and military now understand what America is about, and have personal relationships with the commanders and the soldiers, and really, really like them. And the American commanders and the rank and file really like their Iraqi counter parts. They now have a common goal, which is to get Iraq back on its feet in whatever window politically is left for that to be possible.

  ‘And the warmth was palpable. I mean, these guys go in, and the embraces, the warm smiles, the jokes – the interpreters are working so fast to keep up with the banter – the intimacy, the pleasure they take in one another’s company, the lunch that gets laid on, the knowledge they have of each other’s families, it’s very real, it’s very human, and it’s producing results. They trust each other now. Iraqis will now die, and have died, protecting American forces. Americans will act at lightning speed to an intelligence tip-off. And the partnership in the space of four months has reduced the levels of fighting by about fifty percent, which is to say there are only six bombs a week in Mosul now, as opposed to twelve. You know, there was one right outside the base the night before last, leaving a rather large hole, killing a few locals. I mean, Mosul is still a nightmare.

  ‘But there’s finally now a partnership of mutual respect in Mosul, and I can tell you this because I’ve seen it. The Iraqis have begun to understand that America is not a demonic presence. The Americans have learnt Iraqi culture, they’ve learned respect, and they’ve learned how to work with Iraqis. A lot of them are exhausted and are sick of the fight. But they feel – and it’s shared with the Iraqis I’ve met here in Mosul, because I’ve got out, I’ve got off base – the outrage and sympathy for ordinary Iraqi families about the suicide bombers and the really brutal insurgents. I don’t see any difference in their emotional response to that reality. Notwithstanding the obvious fact, of course, that before the American coalition forces arrived here, Iraqis on the whole weren’t killing other Iraqis.

  ‘One of the mythologies about Iraq is that if the Americans left tomorrow everything would be fine. But one of the first things you realise when you get here is that if the Americans pulled out tomorrow, Iraq would not be fine. It is almost a certainty that if the US were to withdraw now, civil war would intensify.

  ‘There is a real problem in Iraq of an insurgency out of control and a sectarian violence unleashed. Both the Iraqis and the Americans feel that, in the time they have left, they have to do what they can to fix what the demonic forces have unleashed here, and are sincerely working towards trying to achieve that.’

  She really did speak at that length, and with that fluency and intensity. She said, ‘This is history. If you’re a journalist, you want to witness history being made. If it’s a branch of journalism you’re interested in – and for me it’s been the only one I’ve really ever been compulsively interested in – then you have to come here. You know, you really do get fed up reading blogs written by people who’ve never been to Iraq. Blogs really irritate.’

  And then she said, ‘You never know when the chance to do the things you really want to do may not be there. So you have to seize every moment like it’s your last. Even a long life is so short. There’s so much to learn and so much to explain. Sleep’s for pussies.’

  I asked her whether she was still experiencing trauma from last year, when Palestinians kidnapped her husband, cameraman Olaf Wiig, and held him captive for two weeks in a secret location. She said, ‘Who knows? I don’t have time to go and talk to anybody about that. Your guess is as good as mine.’

  Had she not wanted to think about it? ‘I haven’t wanted to stay still. The after-effect for me was a tremendous restlessness. The questions I always had in the back of my mind became really clamorous. And the need to find answers to them became overwhelming. So here I am.’

  Her fluency had left her. I wondered out loud that even though Wiig had been released a year ago, the whole trauma of it would have been damaging. This was the closest I got to asking her about rumours that her marriage had collapsed. She said, ‘The achievement of the freedom was wonderful. I probably lack t
he words to express how good that day was. But an experience like that marks and changes and touches everyone. None of us are the same.’

  Was her husband the same? She said, ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  Anita, I asked, how are you? ‘I feel engaged. Very engaged. I feel well-deployed. I feel I’m doing what I should be doing, and doing what I always wanted to do.’ She said, ‘It’s a privilege.’

  [August 26]

  13

  Garth McVicar

  Fatal Shore

  Friday in Napier was the kind of day – warm as toast, the sky as blue as the sea – that made you suspect all of Hawke’s Bay is the winterless east. August was posing as February. There were palm trees and pied stilts; there was the smell of fresh paint and the promise of a drink at sunset. It made you feel good to be alive. I spent the morning with Garth McVicar, and talked about death.

  A short man, fifty-six, fit, merry, with a pleasant smile and a relaxed walk, McVicar was gearing up for the Advancing Victims’ Rights conference at the War Memorial Centre. Victim workshops; panels with judges and police; opening and closing addresses by McVicar as head of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, that vocal, scornful lobby group that has sometimes caught and often shaped the public mood. The conference marks another opportunity for the trust to set out its popular stall: get tough on crime, recognise the suffering and rights of victims.

  Napier, the crime-fighting capital of New Zealand? It’s where the trust has its headquarters, working from offices that include a four-legged tub in the bathroom. McVicar claimed he was signing up fifty new members every day. He never puts a figure on membership; he said on Friday, ‘It’s in the thousands.’ Who are they? He said, ‘Generation Y are busy, busy people. So to be honest the majority of our members would be the grey brigade.’ He said he had one hundred and ten speaking engagements on his books. Where are they? ‘The RSA, Lions, Rotary, Grey Power …’