Gangs

by Ross Kemp

  As a break from filming during my second week in New Zealand, Makalio took me to a rugby league match between North Island and South Island Mongrel Mobsters. It was one of the most violent games of rugby I have ever seen: there didn’t seem to be any rules and the referee didn’t seem to mind when someone gouged an opponent’s eye or landed a punch. The violence threatened to become personal when one of the gang came up and told me in no uncertain terms I wasn’t wanted.

  While we were watching the match, another Mobster told me about a Mongrel who had been asked to act as a paid bouncer at a middle-class family wedding. He said he couldn’t name the man, and once I had heard the story I could understand why. Everything was going fine at the feast until the bouncer had one drink too many and tried to grope a couple of female guests. When he learned what had happened, the bridegroom got the rest of the men together and threw the Mobster out on his ear.

  Some months later the Mongrel in question was out driving with a female friend when he spotted the bridegroom cycling along the road up ahead. He felt he had been humiliated. It stuck in his craw. Now, he decided, it was payback time. He floored the accelerator, raced up behind the bloke and rammed into him. By some fluke the bridegroom’s head came clean off his shoulders, smashed in through the car windscreen and ended up on the passenger’s lap. The man’s jaw was still working up and down. Shocked to the marrow, the woman started screaming hysterically. The Mongrel told her to shut up and calm down. When she kept on screaming he punched her into unconsciousness, threw the victim’s head out of the window and drove on.

  Just in case I was getting too close to the Mongrel Mob and starting to believe they were not all that bad, Jarrod Gilbert took me to the site of an infamous rape and murder that had happened outside Napier in 1989. The victim, a pretty sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Colleen Burrows, had told her mother, Ida Hawkins, she was just popping into town with some other members of the family to get some food. It was a fifteen-minute drive from where they lived. Instead of returning with the takeaway, Burrows and the others ended up in a bar drinking with a couple of Mongrel Mobsters who took Burrows on to a party and later, after more drinks, propositioned her. Her mother told me what happened next: ‘They’d taken her down the riverbank for sex. She never gave in to their demands.’ Mrs Hawkins began to cry as she remembered what had been done to her daughter. ‘They booted her brutally with their steel-capped boots. Kicked her body. And left her lying there.’

  Jeff Gunn, the now retired police officer who investigated the murder, took up the story: ‘They drove off in the vehicle. As they were driving off they noticed she was still moving. They turned the vehicle around some distance from her at that stage, and then drove back towards her.’

  Ida Hawkins again: ‘They ran her over, I don’t know how many times. And left her lying there.’ The injuries to the body were so bad the police were only able to identify it because of its distinctive tattoos.

  The two men had stripped Burrows, beaten her, raped her, beaten her again and then run her over. Arrested, T. K. Sullivan and Samuel Tahai eventually confessed and got life in prison. Gunn says, ‘When he [Tahai] finally did admit to his involvement he could have been admitting to stealing a car or doing a burglary. No remorse at all, just a shrug of the shoulders.’

  On the day I went to visit the dead girl’s grave, it was pouring with rain. Whatever Tahai felt or did not feel, watching Ida Hawkins weep for her daughter certainly got to me.

  When he found out I was going to include the story in the programme, Makalio got upset, insisting the gang doesn’t rape any more. But it happened and is far from being the only time Mongrel Mobsters have attacked and raped. Another example of the Mob at its worst, and one that set virtually the whole of New Zealand against the gang, took place in Ambery Park, Auckland, in December 1986. Wisely or not, the city authorities had allowed the Mob to gather in the park for a ‘convention’, otherwise known as a massive drink-up. The Mobsters duly met and drank, and then some of them spotted a woman walking her dog along a street bordering the venue. Grabbing her right off the pavement in broad daylight, they took her to a secluded corner of the park and gang-raped her. Others joined in, raping the victim repeatedly in an attack that lasted for several hours. When she at last managed to escape and hid behind a stage, the woman made the mistake of asking another Mongrel if he would help her get away. Promising to do so, the man instead led her back to the pack. Many of them raped her again.

  While some countries segregate warring gangs in prison, in New Zealand the policy is to put the Mongrel Mob and Black Power together on the same wing. The idea – call it hope – is that this will force them to get along. Does it work? Bryan Christy, site manager at Auckland prison, says it does. What may not work so well, as far as I could make out from talking to gang members, is putting them in prison at all. Some told me they looked on their time behind bars as a kind of rest: a chance to get free of drugs, down some square meals and get into better physical shape. They also claim to run the prisons. When I put this to Christy, he said,

  I don’t believe they run the prison. We monitor their activities and see how things go. If it starts looking like the Mongrel Mob is starting to tool themselves up we’ll close the place down and do a pretty thorough search. If there’s a need to separate individuals we will do that. Having a big war or a scrap doesn’t faze these guys: it’s just part of their lifestyle. They hate each other with a vengeance, sure, and there have been occasions where we’ve had brothers in different gangs in this place and they have to fight against each other. That is a sad thing. A lot of people can’t understand it, but that’s the way they are, that’s how strong the code is.

  Mongrel Mobsters also claim that prison is where they recruit most of their new gang members and that for every two Mongrels sent to prison another two leave and take their place. I watched them play ‘crash’ rugby in the prison gym with no thought for their personal safety. Just as in life outside, they were prepared to risk anything to win.

  The methamphetamine problem in New Zealand is now considered so serious that no individual is allowed more than seven prescriptions a year for drugs that contain pseudoephedrine, the main constituent of P. Used mainly in cold and flu remedies, pseudoephedrine is cooked out of the tablets, often in home labs, turned into crystal meth and then sold at a gigantic mark-up. As addictive as crack cocaine – some users say more so, in that the hit lasts much longer – crystal meth drives its users to commit almost any crime to feed their need. It can also dissolve their facial bones and kill them. After being in the country for a couple of weeks I could see that P is going to be a massive problem for everyone in New Zealand over the coming years, including the country’s various gangs. Drugs tend to split gangs, most often when members start to quarrel about money.

  In October 2004 Detective Sergeant Ross Tarawhiti of the Christchurch police launched a massive fifteen-month investigation into the activities of the Christchurch Mongrel Mob, codenamed Operation Crusade because the Mongrels’ pad was situated next door to the Crusaders rugby club ground. Maintaining round-the-clock surveillance on the gang, officers covertly taped hundreds of hours of telephone conversations between its members. Said Tarawhiti, ‘The operation began as a result of tensions within the Mongrel Mob. There were leadership problems – they were fighting among themselves. The police were being called to gang members’ addresses where other gang members were breaking and smashing their way in using baseball bats and stabbing their own guys. The whole gang was starting to fall apart.’

  ‘They were quite brazen about the way they were selling their drugs. They weren’t exactly hiding it, were they?’ I said.

  Tarawhiti shook his head. ‘They don’t care. They just go out there and do the business.’ The police discovered Mongrel Mobsters worked a roster, with drug peddling the most important part of their duties. But according to Tarawhiti, it was here things went wrong for the gang: ‘The funny thing about the whole operation was, they were in the busine
ss of selling and they were actually ripping each other off. Quite a few of the members were using quite a bit of the product themselves. And then telling other people that for one reason or another the money had gone.’ Raids on gang premises turned up drugs, ammunition and further evidence of dealing. The evidence gathered led to New Zealand’s biggest ever drugs trial. Fifteen Mongrel Mobsters were convicted on charges that included dealing methamphetamine and cannabis, and possessing guns and ammunition. At a stroke, the police had taken out the entire leadership of the Mongrel Mob’s Christchurch chapter. For good measure, they bulldozed flat the gang’s fortified headquarters at 460 Wilson’s Rd.

  Commenting on the bigger drugs picture in New Zealand since then, Tarawhiti said, ‘Methamphetamine is bad news as far as the police are concerned because it alters people’s behaviour, makes them violent. It’s causing a lot of problems within the gang too, a lot of their members are dropping dead because of it.’

  Whether or not the many convictions will help rid Christ-church of the Mongrel Mob in the longer term remains to be seen. But it certainly slows them down.

  Leaving New Zealand was and remains one of the strangest – and most moving – experiences of my life. After I’d been drinking with Makalio and Gilbert all night, Liz, Makalio’s wife, drove us to Napier airport, where I was scheduled to board a small, twin-prop aircraft bound for Auckland on the first leg of the journey home. With several crates to help us on our way, we necked tinnies of Steinlager at a steady rate. Napier is a small airfield. As we arrived, I looked up to see a party of middle-aged white ladies dressed in blue blazers and white pleated skirts waiting to board the same flight – a local ladies’ bowls team off to play the Auckland opposition.

  Dennis wasn’t content with just dropping me off; he wanted to see me onto the plane. I went to shake his hand, but he grabbed me, pulled me towards him and did the South Sea Island nose rub. We hugged. In the short time we had spent together we had become good friends. It may be hard for people reading this to understand, but we both had tears in our eyes. I turned and walked away to board the plane. He put his head back and ‘barked me out’ in true Mongrel Mob style – a series of harsh guttural barks cut with long, baying howls. The ladies around me in the queue boarding the plane tutted and shushed and shot disapproving looks, but in that moment I felt more connection with the Mongrel Mob than I ever would with any bowls team. On the steps of the plane I turned, lifted my arm and waved a final salute to Dennis Makalio.

  To this day he remains a friend.

  3. El Salvador

  I knew very little about El Salvador before setting foot in the place. But the second the crew and I cleared customs one thing jumped right out at me: the country is awash with guns. The police have them, and there were plenty of officers in and around the airport; the armed forces were out on the streets – there was a roadblock on the main highway into the capital, San Salvador; and if what little I had heard about El Salvador was true, the gangsters have even more of them.

  Taking in all the weapons on display I started to get an uneasy feeling, the kind you get before something really bad happens. Tom Gibb, the BBC’s South America correspondent, our local translator and first point of contact with the gangs, didn’t lessen my apprehension by pointing out that in a country the size and population of Wales there are at least a dozen murders a day. The vast majority are carried out by El Salvador’s two deadly rival gangs, Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS13, also known as the El Salvador Gang) and 18 Street, known to its enemies as the ‘foreigners’ on account of its ethnic Mexican origins.

  Statistically the most violent and aggressive gangs on the planet, MS 13 and 18 Street operate mainly in the place where we were now headed – the capital city, San Salvador – but before we even got there El Salvador lived up to its murderous reputation. Lying in the dirt at the side of the road was the body of a man. We slowed, and then crawled to a stop. I got out to take a look with Andy Thomson and our director. Dressed in blue jeans and a red T-shirt, the dead man lay sprawled where he had fallen. There was blood and bits of brain on the grey-brown mud around what was left of his head. The crime scene was taped off with orange traffic cones and yellow and black DO NOT CROSS police tape. The rest of the traffic roared by at our backs without stopping. A bus rolled up and started to let off passengers. I hadn’t realized it until then, but we were at a bus stop. I asked one of the officers what had happened. ‘This man was a bus conductor. He was twenty years old. He has been executed with a single shot to the head. It happened this morning, in front of all the people on the bus.’ I stared down at the body. The officer added, ‘They shot the driver also, but we have already taken his body away. He too was killed by a single shot to the head.’

  ‘Why would anybody want to kill a bus crew?’ I asked.

  The policeman shrugged. ‘The gangs make the bus operators pay money to cross their clica – their turf. If they refuse…’ He left the sentence unfinished. But the price of refusing the gangsters’ extortion was only too plain. This was a piece of human gang graffiti, a warning to others who might think of refusing to pay. We left the young bus conductor lying with the remains of the takeaway he had been eating at the moment of his death strewn around him.

  Following this first-hand experience of cold-blooded murder, the morgue seemed like a good place to start finding out more about the country’s gangs. San Salvador’s city morgue is a large tin and concrete warehouse lined with freezer cabinets. It stands next to a couple of other large tin and concrete blocks that turned out to be the central criminal court and beyond that the police station. As we drove up to the entrance, a grieving family was loading the body of a young teenager into the back of a pickup. His mother, father and brothers had brought along their own coffin in which to bury him. The victim of an unexplained gang stabbing, the boy had been just seventeen years old when he died.

  We walked into the courthouse. All around us there were rows of handcuffed youths, most heavily tattooed on the face and body with their respective gang insignia. Some covered their heads with their shirts when they saw the camera, but most gave us gang recognition hand signs, smiling proudly while they did it. When I remarked on the number of kids awaiting trial, Gibb said, ‘This is a very, very violent country. I really hoped at the end of the civil war there would be peace, but in fact the violence has carried on at almost the same rate. It was a war in which 2 per cent of the population was killed – in British terms that would be a million people. And the legacy of that violence has continued. There’s a war going on between the two main gangs, and there are daily killings.’ He nodded at the court building. ‘That’s really the two ways out for an awful lot of gang members. They’re either brought here and then go onto jail’ – he switched his gaze to the morgue – ‘or they are brought there dead.’

  Just then a police SWAT team brought in a suspect. In his early twenties, the guy had an evil look on him – a flat cold steady-eyed stare that warned you to steer clear. Whatever he had done it had to have been bad – the SWAT men stood close and never once took their eyes off him. In standard black fire-retardant coveralls and boots, they were armed with M16s, M4s, sub-machine guns, knives, machetes, semi-automatic pistols and even in the stifling heat wore black balaclavas to protect their identities. The captain in charge told me this is because many officers live in the clicas cheek by jowl with the gangsters they fight. He said the suspect was a leading 18 Street gang member.

  The prisoner, in a bright scarlet silk shirt, began to get cocky and really pleased with himself when this foreigner showed interest in him. Grinning, he refused to answer any of my questions except to claim he did not understand why he had been arrested. Next day, I found out the reason he might have been so reluctant to talk: under banner headlines that screamed ‘Leader of the Child Killers!’ the same suspect’s name and face were all over the front pages of El Salvador’s rabid tabloid newspapers. He was accused of murdering two small children to stop the family testifying against another 18 Stree
t gangster about to go on trial for a separate crime.

  The next day I went to meet a MS 13 sub-gang Tom Gibb had managed to make contact with in one of the clicas, the gang neighbourhoods I kept hearing about. (The word clica is also used to refer both to the neighbourhood and the sub-gangs themselves.) The gangsters said they might be prepared to talk to us.

  When we got to the clica in question, we spotted five guys outside a collection of tumbledown shacks built on a hillside a few hundred metres up a disused overgrown railway line. The only access to the clica was via a narrow rickety railway bridge, which helped keep the police and the wrong kind of gangster at bay. The housing was close to rock bottom, self-build shacks with running water and electricity stolen from the mains. There was washing hanging everywhere and all around the lush green of encroaching plant life. The gangsters wore jeans and vests or T-shirts or no shirts at all. There was a very strong smell of excrement.

  After some staring and glaring as we climbed the narrow steps up towards them, the boys started yelling, ‘Mary Jane, Mary Jane!’ This didn’t strike me as being very friendly. I can be in touch with my metropolitan side, but give me a break, guys. But then Gibb leaned across and told me I shouldn’t take it as an insult: Mary Jane was their nickname for the massive marijuana spliffs they were all smoking.

  I went forward to make contact. At first, their leader didn’t want to admit to being the top man. A fidgety-looking guy named Omar, with restless eyes and a wiry build, his gang name was Chucho. The monicker suited him. Chucho said the gang was called the Small Psychopaths of Delgado City – Delgado City being the name of the San Salvador clica where we were now standing. It wasn’t much of a city, more a mudslide waiting to happen. The Psychopaths were certainly small. And dark-haired and wiry. But what came across as we stood there was how young they were. They didn’t look like a gang of murderers, ‘the second biggest threat to America after al-Qaeda’, as the FBI put it. They looked like a bunch of scared teenage kids.