Gangs

by Ross Kemp

  To make absolutely sure they know who to attack when they fight, each Mongrel Mob chapter or regional gang sports a different style of cartoon bulldog on its red and black reggies. Black Power wear black and blue, especially when they go to war, and their badge is a vertical clenched fist.

  Since the battle of Wairoa courthouse, the Mongrel Mob has been banned from the town’s hotels and bars; its original town-centre clubhouse has been closed down, and the gang exiled to a disused factory on the outskirts. With Makalio riding shotgun, I went along to see it. There were about a dozen gang members in the pad as they call it, and I walked with Dennis across the room to meet them. They called out ‘Sieg, bro!’ to us. The Mongrel Mob use the Nazi salute all the time to meet and greet, as in, ‘She’s a good-looking bird – Sieg!’

  Most of them were middle aged. A bearded older Mobster told me, ‘They have sort of forced us to live the lifestyle we live. But we don’t want to go by their system. It is failing already.’

  A second man – in shades, full tattoo facial mask and Nazi helmet who looked as if he had just stepped off the set of a film about zombie SS storm troopers – added, ‘They forced it on us. Forced control.’

  His much younger neighbour said, ‘We have tried to change. Tried to keep out of jail, get a few of our members into jobs and that. But…’ He shrugged.

  To get it straight from the horse’s mouth, I asked the Wairoa Mob about all the Nazi symbols, language and kit. The older man explained: it was a kind of two fingers to polite, white New Zealand. ‘Pissing society off, you know. They don’t want to see that, but here we are and no one’s going to change it. The country hated Nazism – there was a Maori battalion and everything – so Hitler’s sayings… symbols – we picked that up and use it to piss society off.’

  Makalio agreed: ‘I mean, even the abuse of putting a German helmet on a British bulldog, that’s an insult. And anything to do with insults, we would wear it.’

  At this, the chapter members all shouted, ‘Sieg!’

  ‘You still do all that now?’

  ‘We show respect to people that we know that deserve our respect. Otherwise, we don’t want to know you. Get out of our road.’

  Until then I hadn’t realized the Mongrels had picked on the bulldog because it was a wartime symbol of British and Commonwealth defiance. This is a country where many people’s parents and grandparents fought and died fighting the Nazis. The Mongrels act as if the Nazis would have been a good alternative, but if Hitler had won and arrived on these shores, I doubt very much whether the gang would have ended up being his best mates.

  How did a heavy-duty gang like the Mongrel Mob come to have a presence in most of New Zealand’s towns and cities, and hate its society so much? Originally a white gang but now mainly Maori, the Mongrel Mob was formed in Hastings and nearby Napier back in 1968 by kids who said they had been abused in the country’s childcare system. Alienated by what they claimed to have suffered at the hands of their supposed carers, the kids formed the Mongrel Mob as a way of striking back, not just at the people they felt had ruined their childhood but at the country as a whole. Forty years down the track, the Mongrel Mob are still exacting their own unique form of revenge although not everyone in the gang knows exactly why and how the Mob got started.

  Makalio had introduced me to the real love of his life – always excepting his wife Liz and his kids – a 1964 V8 Ford Galaxie convertible. The key thing about this vehicle for a member of the Mongrel Mob, he told me, was its V8 engine. Classic Fords with V8 engines – the bigger and more powerful the better – are to Mongrel Mobsters what the Harley-Davidson motorcycle is to the Hell’s Angels. Some ‘Mongies’ as they call themselves even have V8 tattooed on their necks. With the Galaxie’s hood down we set off across North Island, through Palmerston North, skirting the foothills of the Ruahine Range. I wanted to take a look at Napier and nearby Hastings to see for myself where the Mob got started. I especially wanted to meet one of its few surviving white members, a man named Gary Gerbies. If he had Dennis Makalio’s respect, then in Mongrel Mob terms Gerbies had to be something special.

  Steering the red Galaxie through a series of sweeping S-bends in his leisurely style as we made our way north, Makalio told me what had happened when he was starting out in the gang and looking to make his name. He was in a Mongrel clubhouse one day when two local police officers walked in without permission. Just about everyone in New Zealand – and especially the police – knows the Mongrel Mob take extreme exception to uninvited callers. To make things worse, the gang was in the middle of a chapter meeting. The police were asking for trouble, and they got it. ‘These two pigs walked in like fucking Starsky and Hutch swinging their batons. I had no commitments. I just fucking went behind them and I shut the door and turned the lights out.’ He paused as the memory came back to him and then said, ‘Yeah, they fucking got it.’

  ‘How long did you hold them for?’

  He made a dismissive gesture. ‘Oh, maybe for fifteen minutes.’

  ‘But you were done for torture, weren’t you?’

  ‘Torture?’ He snorted. ‘You know, I was burning them, every fucking thing. I got a lag [prison term] for it, that’s why I can talk about it. I got found guilty. Other Mongrels got found guilty just from fucking watching. I’m not ashamed for saying that. They have a problem with the Mongrel Mob – they want us to close up. I’m not going to fucking close up. I’m proud of being a Mongie; I’m proud of talking about the Mongrel Mob.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t talk about other people. I only talk about me.’

  I couldn’t help liking this guy, even though he had tortured two policemen. In the process he had taken a step up the Mongrel Mob ladder. He said some of the Mongrels were upset by his decision to talk to me, but Makalio was convinced the Mob should be known much more widely – even globally – for who and what they are. He wasn’t just proud of the gang; he was proud of its ideals, which he said came down to three principles: honour, loyalty and respect.

  The next morning I had my meeting with Gary Gerbies. Now in his sixties and no longer active in the gang, Gerbies was one of the hardest men I have ever met: not quite as tall as I am but broader, with huge Popeye forearms and ham-sized fists. He had a lumpy broken boxer’s face and had lost most of his teeth fighting. I met Gerbies in the living room of his Napier home, and he wasted no time before telling me how he had come by his anger: ‘We despised the system because of the treatment we got as social-welfare kids, man. The abuse you got from people who were supposed to be your helpers was bred into us as thirteen-year-old kids. Supposed to be our helpers? They shit on us, man.’

  ‘So you shit back?’

  ‘We shit back and we made them stand up and take notice. We formed a gang, and we took the Nazi swastika as a symbol of rebellion.’

  He told me how the Mongrel Mob came by its name. A Hastings District Court judge passing sentence on a group of Mongies had said, ‘You are nothing but a pack of mongrels.’

  ‘If you want to call us mongrels and dogs,’ Gerbies retorted, ‘we’ll be it.’ The name stuck.

  I asked him, ‘What does the gang stand for? What does it mean to you?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘It means a bunch of guys that are friends regardless of what you’ve been through, where you’ve been. You’ve had hard times with each other, you’ve had good times with each other, but a friend’s a friend.’

  Gerbies told me how he used to take ‘highballs’, cocktails of hard drugs, in his heyday. ‘We did things to shock people in those days,’ he said. As an example he told me a story about a foreign backpacker who had hooked up with one of his best mates. Drinking with them one evening in a Napier bar, Gerbies said the woman started making fun of his friend, Dougie. She made one mocking remark too many. This is what Gerbies and his friend did about it: ‘She was sitting on a bar stool. Dougie grabbed her by one leg and ankle and I grabbed her by the other one.’ Gerbies stood to demonstrate, raising his arms high above his head. ‘We just
hoisted her up in the air. Her dress fell down around her head and we tipped her up on the bar. I ripped her fucking pants off with my teeth.’

  Seeing my reaction, he lowered his arms and smiled. ‘Like I said, we did things to shock people. She had a period. In them days I was crazy, I’d do anything. So I ripped her pants off and I pulled her tampon out of her with my teeth.’ He drew a sharp, hissing breath: he was back there in the bar that day, reliving the scene. ‘I was slapping it around my face and Dougie was licking all the blood off my face. We were pretty rough people. It was mind-blowing shit.’ He laughed, rubbed his bald head and then looked back up at me. ‘And then we ate it.’

  It certainly was mind-blowing shit. ‘You both ate the tampon. And what happened next?’

  ‘A couple of people had a thing about it and moaned so I knocked them down, bashed them up, gave them a hiding. I made love to her on the bar, screwing her in front of everybody.’

  ‘How was she about that?’

  He shook his head. ‘She enjoyed it.’

  ‘Did she go away after that, or did she hang around?’

  ‘Oh no, she loved it. She was in love with me then. In those days I felt that a lot of women were into aggressive, hard men.’

  Right.

  I wasn’t the only person who found Gerbies hard: when he was young people used to come from miles around to the Napier pubs where Gerbies worked as a bouncer to see if they could beat him in a fistfight. But this was someone who had been fighting since he could walk in a series of orphanages and care homes. Seen for years as one of the hardest men in New Zealand, no one ever succeeded in putting Gerbies down. He told me that he had been put away for murder a couple of times, and even in prison had managed to kill someone, if only by accident. Horsing around with a friend in the prison gymnasium, Gerbies gave his mate what he described as a ‘playful tap’. The man fell back, hit the weights bench on the way down and snapped his neck. Some playful taps are harder than others.

  Despite all the horrible things he might have done in his life, Gerbies was fascinating. A part of me liked him. He told me a funny story about his reggies. While he was in prison for murder he bought some new jeans to make into reggies and hung them over the grille where the inmates emptied their buckets when they slopped out. Going for the world-record smelliest reggies, Gerbies left the jeans there for several years. On his release from prison he took them home. His mother promptly threw them out. Gerbies never spoke to her again.

  Leaving Gerbies with the bar scene he had told me about ringing in my head, I went to see Makalio again. I found it hard to believe that any woman, even back in the late 1970s, would have enjoyed what had happened that day. I wanted his take on it. Makalio told me that when it comes to the Mongrel Mob, some women are like groupies round a rock star: ‘They love a dog.’

  ‘You told me you’ve got fan clubs.’

  ‘We’ve got fan clubs.’

  ‘Explain a fan club to me?’ He shook his head and took a long drag of the cigarette he had going. ‘A fan club is just a whole load of bitches that look after a soldier – look after a brother without him getting into any fucking shit.’

  ‘They protect them? They fuck them?’ Makalio nodded. ‘Fucking right.’

  Since it was nearby and Makalio had set it up for me, I went over to see the Mongrel Mob Hastings chapter pad. After hearing about what had happened to the two policemen Makalio attacked in Porirua, I made sure the invitation was rock solid. A big old shed of wood and corrugated iron painted in Mongrel red, the pad was at the end of a track off a quiet street. Inside, it was a gloomy barn of a place with a bar at the back and a pool table in front of that. MIGHTY MONGREL MOB was painted in huge white letters behind the bar. There were six or seven gang members sitting around a table covered in a blood red cloth waiting for me. It looked as if they had been in the place drinking all night. A girl of about three years old dressed in a Mongrel red tracksuit was playing with the pool balls. She was the daughter of one of the gang. Three of the mobsters were wearing Nazi helmets. Most had full tattoo masks. One Mobster’s face didn’t really have any tattooed words or designs, it was just solid ink. He wore sunglasses, and his lips quivered convulsively as if from the effects of crystal methamphetamine abuse.

  The clubhouse walls were covered in gang regalia – cartoon bulldogs everywhere, including the Hastings chapter’s own emblem. They told me the Mob has adopted – or adapted – some things from the US Hell’s Angels gangs. Most chapters have a president and a sergeant-at-arms. The sergeant-at-arms acts as the chapter’s enforcer when any of its members step out of line. Before they are admitted, anyone who wants to join the Mongrel Mob has to serve time as a ‘prospect’ – hanging around doing bad stuff with patched men. Sometimes, they told me, guys spend years as prospects before the Mob will let them join.

  At initiation into the Mob, many chapters make the prospect fight selected gang members. If he gives a good enough account of himself, he’s in, and moves on to the next stage: masking and patching. A new man can choose how much he wants done, but the tattoos on his face are in almost every case so uncompromising they lock him into the Mongrel Mob for life. This helps keep up Mob numbers, ensures its survival and more or less guarantees none of its members will grass on the gang.

  The Hastings Mongrels launched into a drunken gang ballad that began, ‘We are the members of the Mongrel Mob / We drink all night and we fuck like dogs / We put women on the block / They love the satisfaction of a Mongrel’s cock / Sieg heil, Sieg heil, Sieg heil!’ They broke off to give me the Mob salute and bark. To salute they made an M shape with their hands and raised them over their heads. They were singing about the fact that if a woman other than a wife or girlfriend of a Mob member comes into one of the chapter pads uninvited, then just like the New Zealand police she does it at her own risk. But the Mongrel Mob doesn’t torture and beat women. Instead, they put her on the ‘block’. The block might be the pool table the little girl in the background was playing on, or it can be an actual block of wood or a box the mobsters keep handy for uninvited – or for that matter invited – female callers. When I asked him about this, Makalio insisted it was not rape: ‘A chick knows what the story is if she’s going to come knocking on the door. She knows she’s only in there to feed us. She has to assume the fucking position.’

  At the end of the week I had a day off to chill out. When I met up with Makalio again, he was washing down Mongrel Mob headstones in a Porirua cemetery. For him, the graves of fallen gang members are places of pilgrimage. Most of the headstones were black marble with an inset Mongrel Mob patch. There were also presents left for the dead, and their favourite possessions. The Mongrels die in all kinds of ways – in car accidents, shootings and stabbings, drug overdoses – but Lester Epps, the gangster whose grave Makalio had come to tend, had been killed by a rugby league team. ‘It took the whole rugby team to kill this fellow. He was asleep outside the pad; he’d just finished coming back from the pub that night and he’d given quite a few of them a good crack.’

  ‘He’d been to the pub, beaten a few of these rugby league guys up?’

  ‘Yeah. They came round, and they got him at about five, six o’clock in the morning.’ Epps was beaten so badly he died of his injuries in hospital three days later. The members of the rugby team involved in the assault each got eighteen months in prison. Epps was twenty-six when he died.

  Sometimes, when a well-respected gang member dies the Mobsters commandeer the corpse, prop it up in the dead man’s car, stick a cigarette in his mouth and a beer in his hand, and take him out for a final party. The grieving family are not always too happy about a bunch of Mongies turning up and grabbing their loved one’s corpse. When they finally bury him, the Mongrels sometimes have the dead man’s engine block sandblasted, rustproofed and the air filter patched with the chapter insignia and use that as a grave marker.

  Makalio said he looked after gang graves that were left untended because he believed in the Mongrel Mob, in its tra
ditions and core code of honour, loyalty and respect. But the problem for him and older gang members like him was the erosion of this code. Old-timers don’t believe the new generation is upholding the true Mongrel gang spirit. ‘Drugs,’ Makalio said tightly, ‘are ruining it.’

  He said that whereas in the past the Mongrel Mob had banded together and taken on the world, for the younger guys now it was all about money and drugs: more and more crystal methamphetamine was coming into New Zealand from Asia, and at the same time more of it was also being ‘cooked’ in the country. Like their customers, many Mongrel Mob members were getting addicted to the drug, which in its pure form is known locally as ‘P’. Given the chance of making big money many of the older mobsters, too, were joining the drugs trade, dealing marijuana and manufacturing and supplying P to the growing market.

  Makalio said, ‘A gang member in the old days might try a little bit of LSD or whatever was around, pot and that. But at the end of the day that shit would slow you down. The difference is, back then there was nothing wrong with having a buzz. But if you were caught out to be a fucking junkie you’d get kicked out or given a fucking good hiding. Today, it’s sad, but I think they’ve just forgotten that. I talk about how I love the Mob – I’ll never leave and all that – but there’s one thing that would most probably make me leave the Mob – if I see it all turning to junkies.’

  Makalio saw that drugs risked undermining the gang from within. Speaking to me over the grave of another Mob friend who had taken his own life he said, ‘A lot of people have forgotten our bros that have passed away. They’re forgetting everything. I just want to bring that tightness back, that brotherhood.’ It was like listening to the last man of his tribe.

  On leaving the cemetery where Epps and other Mongrel Mobsters were buried, I forgot to rinse my hands in the bowl of water usually placed at the entrance to a New Zealand graveyard, particularly Maori sites. The idea is to wash away the spirits of the dead. I don’t believe in ghosts, but that night I had the worst nightmares of my life. I woke up in a cold sweat, staring at the walls and wondering where I was. Now, any time I visit a burial place, I give my hands a thorough wash on the way out.