Sleeping dogs snarl
Behind the sudden eruption in gang violence
Man mountain Tahu Kingi would be front and centre of the fights back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when the Kawerau Mongrel Mob was at constant war with the Whakatane Black Power.
‘‘He was big, tough, strong and courageous – he was probably the toughest dog to come out of Kawerau,’’ says Kevan McConnell, who was in the Black Power in those days but is now a social worker.
When Kingi died of a suspected heart attack on January 13 this year, it was inevitable that he would be sent off with a bang, but no-one predicted the dramatic and frightening public clashes that unfolded in Whakatane.
Shots were fired in broad daylight on a busy road – the bullets lodged just centimetres above the doorway of a commercial building.
That evening a member of the public was allegedly dragged from his car and a gun was held to his head.
On Friday police announced 12 men from Whakatane had been charged with a variety of offences, including using a firearm against law enforcement officers, reckless discharge of a firearm and rioting.
It was like a throwback to the bad old days, before the gangs reached a truce that allowed them to get on with their core business: organised crime.
Yet there’s a modern twist – much of the action was captured on cellphone cameras and posted to social media.
Community leaders warn the reemergence of public flare-ups, represents a gang scene that is thriving as poverty and drug use worsens.
‘‘You’ve got three generations of people stuck in high deprivation areas and the things that seem to grow are pokie machine profits, bottle stores, churches and gangs,’’ McConnell says.
King’s body was taken to Gateway Funeral Services in the Whakatane suburb of Awatapu, into the heart of Black Power territory. Driving around the back streets of the suburb during the day, teenagers, some of them patched up, are getting high or drunk in the middle of the road.
The night Kingi’s body was being moved, a young gang member, probably wasted, happened to walk by as the Mob were loading his coffin on to the deck of a hot rod truck.
Kawerau Mob boss Frank Amadeus Milosevic, whose son Slobodan shares the name of the late Serbian president and war criminal, explains his version of what happened next.
‘‘We just went to collect the bro, and a few of them young ones tried to stop us from leaving town, they tried to block the road.
‘‘They had baseball bats, knives, all sorts. We started chasing them and they started throwing their weapons away and running away.
‘‘The main instigator, he threw his patch at us to try and stop us from chasing him, eh, thinking that would be the end of it. He ended up getting caught and getting a bit of a tune-up.’’
At one point during the fracas, as the hot rod joined in the chase, the coffin, with Kingi in it fell on the road.
Eventually Kingi was brought back to Kawerau for a tangi, and four days later plans were put in place to take his body to the Hillcrest crematorium between Whakatane and Ohope.
Wanting to avoid a repeat of the Friday night debacle, Mob leaders reached out to the leaders of the six or so Black Power chapters in Whakatane.
‘‘We didn’t want to go through the centre of town,’’ Milosevic says. ‘‘We had conversations with the senior chapters over there, they knew we were coming through and it was OK with them.
‘‘We thought they would control the young ones, but there’s a few rotten eggs out there,’’ he says referring to the Outback Blacks, a kind of Black Power juniors, who are thought to have been involved in the Friday night incident.
McConnell, who works with a lot of gang families in Whakatane, says the young up-and-comers don’t know the true meaning of gang conflict because things have been peaceful for so long – as long as many of them have been alive.
‘‘These are the kids of members who’ve been around for 30 years – they’ve been brought up on the old stories.
‘‘We have to unwind that learning and that thinking so they can see what the true enemy is – it ain’t their cousins down the road wearing red, it’s drugs, alcohol, meth addiction, no future, no work.’’
On the day of the cremation, a meeting was held at the Kawerau mob pad – a barn in a paddock on the outskirts of town – attended by Milosevic, Kingi’s family, police and social worker Warwick Godfery, a former Mob member, to discuss a plan for avoiding conflict.
‘‘They were worried about the safety of the body,’’ Godfery says.
Sergeant Al Fenwick, a rotund cop who has been in Kawerau for nearly three years, says the initial plan was that only immediate family, about 30 people, would go to the crematorium.
‘‘Things started changing for us when . . . people went across beforehand to make sure everything was all good and they saw the Black Power protest, saying they weren’t going to let the Mongrel Mob into town.
‘‘Just before they were due to leave Kawerau they made the decision that instead of just the immediate family going, they were going to take every man and his dog they could muster – and there were a lot of men and dogs.
‘‘When you go from dealing with 30 people to dealing with 150 carloads of people, I guess the potential for things to go wrong jumps,’’ Fenwick says.
‘‘We did everything we could to avoid it, but there’s only so much we can do.’’
The procession took a back route along SH2 to Taneatua avoiding the main streets by coming into Whakatane from the south-east, but the ‘‘protesters’’ got wind of the route change and stationed themselves at a roundabout on Valley Road.
At one point the funeral procession stopped and dozens of
You’ve got three generations of people stuck in high deprivation areas. Kevan McConnell
Mob members assembled in the street, facing off with Black Power associates a couple of hundred metres away. Cellphone footage captures the sound of shots.
Bullets struck a nearby building company. Staff at a neighbouring car parts business heard the shots and ducked for cover.
Gang members frequent his business so he doesn’t want to comment saying only: ‘‘We get them in here all the time, we deal with both sides.’’
Godfery, who works for Manna Support Services in Kawerau and is a district councillor, says that’s the point – the gangs are ingrained in the community.
‘‘They’re neighbours, they’re involved with the school community, coaching, taking kids on trips.
‘‘Gangs are a symptom of the economic divide – we also know that it’s larger now than at any point in New Zealand’s history.
‘‘The focus can’t be on trying to pull people out of the gang because you lose them, eh.
‘‘You’ve got to work with them and when they’re ready, they’re ready.’’
Milosevic says the gang is trying to put initiatives in place to turn members’ lives around.
He’s now at the centre of peace talks with the ‘Blacks’, which he says are at a sensitive stage.
‘‘We didn’t want any of the public to get hurt on that day – with the cops knowing that we were coming through we actually thought they would have kept the public away.
‘‘We kept our heads and tried to keep out of the way of those guns. The cops have all the guns but they were hiding behind us.
‘‘The gunshots didn’t trouble us. As soon as you hear a shotgun you know it will only go from here to there and then the pellets will fall down on the ground.’’
He doesn’t expect any more violence. ‘‘We’re not at war. It’s up to Black Power to bring the younger chapter under control.’’
McConnell says Milosevic is showing maturity as a leader and is a ‘‘different sort of gang member’’ with a strong work ethic and doing well as a highly qualified gas driller for an Icelandic company.
The mayor of Kawerau, butcher Malcolm Campbell, says there’s no escaping that the Mob is a big part of the community.
‘‘Some of them are my relations. We’ve had a few excited punters around town telling us to wipe them all out, I said ‘easier said than done’.
‘‘I haven’t seen one MP who’s got enough balls to have a crack at that.’’
Whakatane mayor Tony Bonne, who runs a sports store, says gang clashes are rare, but scary for the public when they happen.
He questions if police are resourced well enough to deal with gangs.
‘‘The reality is we need better policing in provincial New Zealand. Hopefully coming up election year, with the Government in surplus, they will start looking at it.’’
Meanwhile, an uneasy truce is holding. At the Whakatane District Court last Tuesday, a Mongrel Mob member from Kawerau, sans patch, sheepishly approached the public counter and asked if he could be dealt with quickly. ‘‘I’m on enemy territory,’’ he told the Sunday StarTimes.
Back in Kawerau, Kingi’s loss is being felt. In the year or so before his death he’d been meeting with McConnell and senior Black Power members to discuss reconciliation efforts and social initiatives.
He was also a good musician, writing his own material. ‘‘He was super-talented. He should have been a millionaire,’’ Godfery says.
His widow, Julie, doesn’t want to talk about the clashes.
‘‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’’ she says. ‘‘My bulldog’s gone. No-one got killed, no-one got hurt.’’