by Ross Kemp
‘Excuse me,’ I shot back, ‘but I’ve been in the air for the last two hours. The only thing that should be on that card since I left Rio is a hotel minibar bill for fifty dollars.’
‘No, Mr Kemp. Since leaving Rio you have spent more than £12,000.’
‘Twelve thousand pounds?’ I shouted. ‘Kill the card! Kill the card!’ There is already far too much killing in Brazil but this particular fatality could not come fast enough.
‘We’ll do that at once, sir, of course,’ said the soft voice on the other end, ‘but we think your card has been cloned, possibly more than once. People have been spending on it all over Rio de Janeiro and surrounding districts.’
By the time we landed at Heathrow eight hours later the total had gone up to more than £23,000. I wasn’t charged but the moral of the story is, when in Rio pay your bills in cash if you can, because a lot of the locals see a gringo’s credit card as a meal ticket. You have to work really hard to spend £23,000 in a couple of hours in Rio de Janeiro. I hope they enjoyed it.
Brazilians are obsessed with football – and world-beaters as a result. In the favelas the kids play all the time, racing after plastic footballs in the mud or the dust. Through Peter the cameraman we had met a local man who did not want to be named but who worked for a charity that tried to stop favela children joining the gangs. He told me what the kids needed most was team shirts, so they knew whose side they were on when they played soccer.
When I got back to the hotel that evening I had called Reebok and asked if they would maybe give the kids some shirts. Reebok came up trumps, promising to supply a few sets for free. Back in London three weeks later, I rang to see if the shirts had arrived. ‘They have arrived,’ said the man. ‘Many thanks for that.’ There was an awkward pause, the kind that tells you something is badly wrong.
‘Are the shirts OK?’ I asked.
‘The shirts are very good,’ he said. ‘Thank you. But three of the kids you saw playing that day have been shot dead.’
Shortly after we left Rio the gangs came back to town. In a series of coordinated attacks launched just after dawn on 28 December 2006, mobs of favela gangsters attacked more than twenty police stations with hand grenades and automatic weapons. Smashing windows and looting shops in Rio’s smarter areas, the gangsters hijacked six of the city’s buses, stripping the terrified passengers of their valuables. One mob went further: jamming shut its doors, they set fire to a bus, trapping seven people inside. The passengers burned to death. In total, twenty-one people died that day, including two policemen. Given the scale of the violence, the only miracle was that the toll of death and injury was not even higher. It wasn’t the first time the gangs had reminded the authorities of their awesome power, and as long as the gap between Brazil’s rich and poor remains as wide as it is, it won’t be the last.
2. New Zealand
A country with ten times more sheep than it has people, you would expect New Zealand to be quiet. And on the whole it is, at least if the people outside Wellington railway station were anything to go by. They looked well behaved and civilized, skirting the neat flower beds on either side of the square as they went about their lawful business. The area around the handsome terminus had a distinct retro feel, as if New Zealand’s capital was ticking over twenty years in the past. It felt much gentler and sleepier than the London I had left a day or two earlier – quaint in the nicest possible way. A good place to live, I thought, if you like a clean outdoor life and a spot of peace.
But this country has more gangs per head than any other country in the world, and two of the worst, the Mongrel Mob and Black Power, are locked in a deadly battle to be top dog. This conflict, which has been going on for decades, affects even the quietest and otherwise most pleasant towns and cities of these beautiful islands. And nowhere is this more true than in the town of Wairoa. A small and beautiful community of some 5,000 people on Hawke Bay which is on the east coast of North Island, when I went up to take a look at it Wairoa was New Zealand as I had always imagined: quiet, clean, attractive, well kept – just like the country’s capital. Except for the local gangs: for three decades and more Wairoa has been dogged by some of New Zealand’s worst violence.
In one of the biggest fights, large numbers of Black Power and Mongrel Mobsters gathered outside Wairoa District Court in November 2002. A local Mongrel Mob member was on trial for the alleged assault of a Black Power rival. With large numbers of opposing gangsters milling around the courthouse, this was a stick of dynamite waiting for a match. The gangs traded insults. And then it came to blows. The knives and the motorcycle chains came out, then the guns. And after that all hell let loose.
The fighting exploded out of the courthouse and raged down Wairoa’s main street, sending innocent citizens scurrying for cover. It was like a scene from a Western movie. By the time the battle ended, two men lay dead, one stabbed and a second shot. Outnumbered by at least a dozen to one, the Wairoa police called neighbouring forces for help. Dozens of gangsters were rounded up and sent for trial on charges ranging from affray to murder. In the most serious case the prosecution alleged that two Mongrel Mobsters acting on the suggestion of a third had lain in wait near the courthouse and then shot dead Henry William Waihape, aged twenty-nine, a passenger in a Black Power vehicle. More than a dozen Mongrel Mobsters and sixteen Black Power gang members were convicted on various charges relating to the fight. All bar a couple went to prison.
In an earlier but no less notorious case a man named Mahi Kamona had his stomach cut out in an attack that almost cost him his life. A Wairoa citizen not in either gang, Kamona saw a group of Mongrel Mobsters mistreating some of the town’s girls. He stepped in to try to protect them. The Mobsters set about him, but Kamona, who is not a small man, gave better than he got and punched one of his assailants unconscious. A few minutes later more Mongrel Mobsters came looking for revenge. Sergeant Chris Flood of the Wairoa police can’t forget what he saw when he responded to the emergency call: ‘We were called to the New Wairoa Hotel. We arrived there and sure enough in the toilet block of the hotel there was a guy who had been stabbed. It was more than a stabbing; he had almost been disembowelled.’
For Kamona, the memories are no less vivid. ‘I can remember like it happened just ten minutes ago. I’d just had a piss. I turned around, pulling up the zip, opened the door to walk out and as you are opening up the door the knives are going straight into your guts. You are trying to pull your zip up and there is a blade going straight in and coming out.’
Flood said, ‘His intestines were coming out and we just kind of held them there… We got bar towels. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, that someone had done something like that to somebody else.’
At home in his living room, Kamona lifted his T-shirt to show me the scars of his injuries. The attackers had really sliced him up: the flesh was pocked and contorted, with thick ridges, welts and broad white stitch marks from the cuts and the repairs that had saved his life. ‘Just a few cuts,’ Kamona told me, trying to play it cool, but when I asked him what it was like to live with the injuries, he looked away. ‘There’s no muscles in there to keep your stomach there.’ He kept saying ‘your’ as if the terrible injuries had happened to someone else.
Here I was waiting to meet members of the Mongrel Mob outside Wellington station on my first morning in New Zealand. I glanced up the street. They were more than an hour late. I was just thinking we’d need to rearrange the meeting when a long cream-coloured customized Cadillac town car with a magenta contrast paint job swerved out of the passing traffic and slid to a stop beside me. In case of any doubt about its status, the Caddy’s number plate read PIMP ON.
The nearside rear door swung open, and one of the three men inside told me to get in. For a few seconds I hesitated – and not just on account of the lurid purple dashboard and interior trim. The men had heavy tattoos on their faces that made them look like they were wearing masks. In fact, that’s what a full facial tattoo is called over there. One of
them was also wearing a Nazi coal scuttle helmet complete with chinstrap and swastikas. All three wore ‘reggies’ or ‘originals’ – evil-smelling, never-been-washed denim jeans and waistcoats plastered with red and black Mongrel Mob gang patches. They were the kind of people you wouldn’t want to meet in the back of a Cadillac. Or a dark alley. Or even a very brightly lit alley. Everything about them said, ‘We are the Mongrel Mob. Fuck off.’
I got in. The Mongrels decorate their faces, clubhouses and clothing with brash, cartoon-style bulldog emblems – their gang logo, like a corporate identity. The man at the wheel had bulldog images all over his face and body. They were jumbled up with words and other symbols I couldn’t at first decipher. In case anyone hadn’t already got the message from the bulldogs, MOBSTER was drilled in soot black on a red ground across the driver’s forehead. A stiff Mohican of black hair gave him extra height. Shaved to the bone, both sides of his long head displayed two more of the tattooed bulldogs, their tongues sticking right out. His fists and arms were tattooed, and the pictures covering his face ran on down his neck below the edge of his T-shirt. He wore a wide black leather and steel wrist cuff on his right forearm, a Confederate flag bandanna round his neck, and when he stood on the gas pedal I noticed he was barefoot. His appearance and the extra edge of menace in his gaze marked this man out as Dennis Makalio, the man who was going to tell me the secrets of the Mongrel Mob, one of New Zealand’s most notorious gangs. Or the man who might just turn in his seat, punch me in the face and throw me out of the window with his free hand. Like his mates, he was easily strong enough.
Nobody said anything. Gangsters don’t do introductions. Staring at these guys, and it was hard not to, I thought, in short order, What have I let myself in for? Why have I come to do this? and I must be insane.
A Mongrel Mob elder statesman, Makalio was a very scary guy. Right away I saw that on this first meeting he didn’t like the look of me any more than I did of him. I was just beginning to wonder if we were going to get a programme out of this visit at all when our director, Jonathan Jones, JJ, stepped in. We had driven over to my hotel and had met JJ outside. Why didn’t Makalio and I go in and have a drink? he suggested. Well, it was better than staring. But what JJ and I didn’t know was that going for a drink with Dennis Makalio wasn’t quite as easy as that. Mongrel Mob gangsters are barred from all of New Zealand’s hotels, and only the roughest bars will serve them. Since he couldn’t think of anywhere that might admit him in nice, polite Wellington, Makalio decided we should drive over to his home town of Porirua, about twenty miles up the coast.
The Odd Couple, we hardly spoke a word the entire way. According to its official website, Porirua is ‘nestled in a stunning harbour setting just 20 minutes north of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington’. In fact, it wasn’t bad – a small good-looking seaside town stretched lazily across a series of sparkling blue bays. Very New Zealand. We finished up in Makalio’s camper van on the beach. Our assistant producer for the programme was Jarrod Gilbert, lecturer in sociology at Canterbury University. An expert on New Zealand’s gangs, Gilbert had been my original point of contact with the Mongrel Mob. He decided to join us for a couple of tinnies – nothing like a bit of field work. I asked Gilbert how many gangsters there are in New Zealand. He said that in a population of just over four million, there are no fewer than seventy major gangs with an estimated four thousand full-time members. No one knows exactly how many of them are in the Mongrel Mob – no one’s counting – but with a presence or chapter in most of the country’s towns and cities they are by far the biggest gang. There are also quite a few Hell’s Angels-style motorcycle gangs, Gilbert told me, among them Satan’s Slaves, Highway 61 and the Bandidos. In fact, New Zealand had the first Hell’s Angels chapter formed outside the United States – definitely not an answer I’d have got right in a pub quiz.
We sat down and had a beer. After we had drunk ourselves to a complete standstill – or at least I had – I fell asleep. A few hours later I woke up. I couldn’t remember a word of what we had been talking about but it was morning and Makalio was prodding me awake with a fresh can of beer. There was no sign of Gilbert. I took the beer. Even though I felt like I’d been embalmed during the night by a team of incompetent morticians, I knew if I didn’t drink the can Makalio was holding out then all bets would be off. Leaning back and thinking of the series, I took a swig. Hair of the mongrel.
As we drank, we talked about this and that. I asked Makalio about his ‘mask’ – the facial tattoos that branded him a gang member. He said, ‘To me, it’s my belief. I can’t run away, it’s there for ever. Whatever town I drive to and whatever I do, people know that I represent the Mongrel Mob.’
‘Isn’t it like giving away your life?’ I asked.
He tilted his head. ‘It’s an identity. And there’s no turning back.’ Descended from a line of Samoan chiefs, Makalio didn’t just wear the Mongrel gang mask on his face and neck, he had ritual Pacific island tribal tattoos all over his lower body. For these ritual markings, the powdered charcoal, ink and spit mixture is hammered into the flesh with a wooden mallet and an ancient toothed whalebone comb. The pain involved is intense; the tattoos invariably go septic and then have to be lanced with a fine bone needle to remove the pus. The few men who undergo it usually have the tattooing spread over a period of six months, with intervals in between for healing. Makalio had the lot done in three days.
I’m still not entirely sure why this happened, but on some level Makalio and I began to connect on that second day. He agreed to tell me about the Mongrel Mob, beginning with a look around his home town. As we drove through the stunningly beautiful scenery, where you expect Bilbo and Frodo Baggins to pop up at any minute, Makalio said that while outsiders like me might think the country revolves around dairy farming, sheep and The Lord of the Rings, the Mongrel Mob despises all that, always has done and always will.
As luck would have it, there was a music festival in Porirua later that day, so we went along to take a look. There were a few hundred people in the park enjoying the sounds and the warm summer sunshine. An overwhelmingly Maori event, an alternative New Zealand flag flew over the marquees. A lot of Maoris believe the pakeha – the white European immigrants – should get out and leave New Zealand to them.
What surprised me was the way the two or three dozen Mongrel Mob gangsters present mingled freely with the crowds, as if they were an accepted part of everyday life. Like Makalio, the other members were very visible thanks to their facial tattoos and their black and red gang colours, and the fuck off factor in their appearance was well up to his own high standards. Yet the locals, at any rate, didn’t seem to shun the Mob. The kids especially kept coming up and sneaking looks at them or hanging around and watching from a safe distance. Maybe this was part of a recruiting drive. As if to confirm this, when I asked him how he had got started in the gang Makalio said, ‘When I was a little kid at primary, there were these two, big ugly motherfuckers who used to walk around Porirua and they were the meanest and ugliest fucking things on the face of the earth. And I just thought, That’s me, man. I wanted to be like that. And I’ve never looked back since.’ Makalio paused a lot as he spoke, using ‘fuck’ as a stepping stone to the next word. I noticed that the Mongrel Mob was the only gang at the event. When I commented on this Makalio said, ‘There were about eleven gangs in Porirua at one time, but as you see today there is only one gang here. It’s the only place in the whole of New Zealand no other gang will come to.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because we run it. We cleaned it up.’
‘If there were other gangsters here there would be trouble?’
‘Hell yeah. But no other gang would come here.’
‘What would happen to them?’
Makalio shrugged. ‘We both know what would happen.’
What would happen is bad. One notorious gang fight took place in Cathedral Square, Christchurch. I knew this because as part of my research I had seen the graphic vide
o shot by a man in the crowd at the time. When I went to see him a couple of days later, Senior Constable Gary Tibbotts of the Christchurch police told me what he saw that day:
There were probably a thousand people round the square. It was lunchtime. People were sitting down and enjoying the sunshine and the music. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a fight erupted between two gangs: the Christchurch Mongrel Mob and the Black Power. It was a planned attack. Two or three members of the Mongrel Mob were surrounded by about a dozen Black Power members. The leader of the Black Power gang signalled the start of the attack by holding his two fingers above his head and then bringing them down. Out came knives, lead pipes, chains… One of the Mongrel Mob got stabbed with a knife. Another had a bag. He took out an axe. His mate picked up the axe, grabbed one of the opposing gang members and struck him a blow just behind the neck. The axe went through his jacket, two thicknesses, through his jersey and a T-shirt, and just nicked the side of his neck. Miraculously, he escaped fatal injuries.
Exploding in the middle of an arts festival, the fighting was so brazen that many people in the crowd took it for some kind of street theatre. In fact, it was only too real and resulted in several serious injuries. But as my next interviewee, Dave Haslett, formerly of the Christchurch police criminal investigation branch, pointed out, the gangs didn’t care. ‘What surprised me was how the gangsters didn’t seem to mind how many people had been watching.’
They don’t really care? An axe in broad daylight in front of a thousand people?’
‘They don’t have the same fear that we would have of witnesses seeing something or taking car numbers,’ Haslett said. ‘Spontaneous violence takes over, and that person will end up getting a kicking or a stomping, or could well end up being stabbed or beaten to death in front of other witnesses.’
