Rise and fall of a gang meth programme
A $900,000 scheme to get gangsters off meth collapsed amid internal dissent, staff turnover and concerns that few people were being helped. Tony Wall reports.
In February 2018, Florence Leota, a senior adviser in the Ministry of Health’s addictions treatment team, emailed her boss, group manager for addiction Richard Taylor, over concerns about a programme to get predominantly Black Power gang members off methamphetamine.
The programme, Wakatika Ora, was being run by the Consultancy Advocacy and Research Trust (CART) – a social action group with long history of working with gang communities, using a $920,000 grant from money seized under proceeds-of-crime legislation.
The grant had been signed off by then-prime minister John Key as part of his government’s
$15 million action plan for tackling the meth plague, and was being overseen by the ministry.
It was supposed to be a joint initiative with the Salvation Army, but it pulled out after disagreement over who would be the lead agency and how it would run.
Documents obtained by Stuff under the Official Information Act have for the first time shed light on what went wrong with a scheme the government had hoped would turn dozens of gang members into taxpaying citizens and help turn the tide in the war on P.
CART launched Wakatika Ora in May 2017. By the end of that year, officials had growing concerns.
‘‘Ten months into a two-year contract, no reports have been received, there has been very little delivered on the contract in terms of services, and we have paid $300,000 to date,’’ wrote Leota in her email to Taylor.
She noted that CART’s contract required it to support 40 people from gang families using a community approach, rather than a medical treatment model. While there had been a lot of work to develop infrastructure, there had been little actual service.
‘‘For example, it appears that only one person has participated in any structured programme. This raises concerns for us,’’ she wrote.
Leota said there had been an exodus of staff and there were concerns about two board members being paid $22,000 for a workshop that had only one attendee and may not have been fit for purpose.
‘‘We are very concerned about CART’s ability to deliver the contract,’’ she wrote.
CART brought in new management and began to get things back on track, but internal emails reveal that, by November 2018, officials were discussing ending the contract and recovering funds.
Around that time, the ministry stopped monthly payments – $613,000 had been released – and in early 2019 told CART it was terminating the contract and wanted $80,000 of unspent money returned.
Denis O’Reilly, a lifetime Black Power member who was CART’s chairman off and on during the period, says the dispute almost destroyed CART.
O’Reilly, a former methamphetamine user who began an antiP crusade in 2003 after a Black Power friend killed himself in a bout of meth-induced psychosis, claims officials weren’t acting in good faith.
They let the trust believe there was a future under a redesigned programme, he claims, all the while planning to shut it down.
He says CART used all of its cash reserves built up over 30 years to continue delivering services when the Health Ministry funding stopped. In the end, the trust delivered most of what was promised in terms of numbers of people helped, he says, and the ministry gave up on its attempts to claw back money.
CART had some big names in the prison and gang reform world behind it. The chairman when Wakatika Ora launched was John Wareham, a leadership coach and self-help author who’d spent more than 20 years working with prisoners in New York.
Eugene Ryder, a Wellington Black Power member and social worker, led engagement with the gang community. Former All Black Norm Hewitt was chairman for a short stint. So what went wrong?
CART was founded in 1989 by Dunedin Mongrel Mob member turned government policy adviser Harry Tam, who later left over disagreements about the direction it was taking.
It became dominated by Black Power figures such as O’Reilly, and took on an ethos based on the teachings of poet James K Baxter, around spiritual aspects of Ma¯ ori communal life.
The trust won numerous government contracts to work with communities described as ‘‘hard to reach and difficult to deal with’’. Official records show that, in the 10 years from 2009, it was paid more than $2m by the Health Ministry to run a programme to reduce drug and alcohol harm in young people.
Wakatika Ora had its beginnings in 2015. CART had originally sought about $100,000 to run a trial addiction programme for gang members in Wellington.
The trust would find them a house or a flat in which to detox, and they would be supported there for several weeks while appropriate treatment, such as the Salvation Army’s Bridge programme, was arranged.
The proposal landed at a time when the Government was looking for anti-P programmes in which to invest proceeds-of-crime funds. There was big money on the table.
CART was encouraged to apply for a much larger grant, $800,000 plus GST, to focus on weaning gangsters off meth. Ministry documents state that the proposed service would support about 40 people in the Wellington area over two years, aiming to get at least 60 per cent of them off drugs.
Ministers were told this would mean more gang members finding work; the projected savings in welfare liability alone were calculated at $3.5m.
But the project hit trouble before it even began. The Salvation Army pulled out, with CART becoming the contract holder and the Sallies providing one housing unit, and receiving the odd referral.
Lynette Hutson, the army’s national director of addictions support, told Stuff it had previously received money from Key’s meth action plan to run a drug treatment project with the Mongrel Mob’s Notorious chapter.
The programme had run for nine years and was successful, but the organisation had concerns about the Wakatika Ora proposal, she says. ‘‘The clinical standards that we would work to and the quality controls . . . may not have been in place.’’
CART pushed on with developing the programme alone.
O’Reilly says the contract eventually drawn up with the ministry wasn’t fit for purpose. He describes it as a ‘‘cut and paste’’ from other health contracts.
‘‘We didn’t realise it at the time, but we were almost expected to be
like a tier one organisation like a DHB or something, and we were a non-clinical service. We were about getting people inspired and taking control of their own lives.’’
Wakatika Ora included a programme developed by Wareham called Taking Wings, which he had used successfully with the New York prisoners. It used Greek philosophy, poetry, film and debate to help people understand the forces inside their heads that were causing their problems with substance abuse.
O’Reilly believes Wareham is a ‘‘freaking genius’’, but CART staff brought in to implement Wakatika Ora couldn’t get their heads around it. ‘‘He’s having people reading Plato and all this sort of stuff.
‘‘The staff that had been recruited came from the clinical treatment sector . . . [said:] ‘Where the f... are you coming from?’ They saw him I think as being
paternalistic – this old white guy wanting to help [Ma¯ ori].’’
Tensions between the board, which shared Wareham’s vision, and some staff got to the point where there was almost ‘‘open rebellion’’, O’Reilly says.
Meanwhile, according to O’Reilly, management was spending too much time discussing the spelling of programme names and role definitions. ‘‘There was a lot of hui and very little do-ey.’’
When ministry officials started asking questions about what outcomes had been achieved and how many people had been through the programme, Wareham explained that major delays had been caused by some ‘‘catastrophic events’’ involving staff.
Stuff understands these included a senior manager being asked to resign because they hadn’t spoken up when a clerical error led to them being overpaid; another manager exaggerating their CV and disappearing on unauthorised
leave; and a senior worker quitting on the spot when asked to provide updates on participant numbers.
Board members told ministry officials they believed these former staff had made unfounded allegations that had led to the scrutiny CART found itself under. They were upset to be questioned about $22,000 paid to Wareham and Hewitt to run the Taking Wings course.
Fourteen people had been enrolled, but on the day only one person, a veteran Black Power member, turned up. ‘‘I would have walked away from that,’’ says Wareham. ‘‘But Eugene [Ryder] insisted, ‘I’ve got the guy here now, we should run the programme’.’’
Wareham says the gangster went through the eight-day programme over eight weeks and announced at the end that he was cured. ‘‘That was a big success.’’
Hewitt says he and Wareham declared their conflict of interest and were not present when the board voted to pay them to deliver the course. He says he left in early 2018 because of the differences between staff and the board.
Susan Turner, a specialist health consultant, was hired as general manager. She began a major remedial project to get Wakatika Ora back on track.
A new service delivery model, using a kaupapa Ma¯ ori lens, was drawn up and was accepted by the ministry.
Turner says the ministry conducted an audit which commended her and CART on the new systems, but noted that CART was not delivering the service set out in the original contract.
‘‘We ended up developing a really clever approach and got the thing up and running. It was really humming . . . But I think they had already made up their minds about ending the programme. They were being hard-arses.’’
She says the ministry never gave CART the opportunity to go through an establishment phase, to set up systems, employ staff and establish relationships. ‘‘They gave CART a truckload of money, never monitoring, never supporting and then the natural outcome of all of that is their perception of failure.’’
Toni Gutschlag, the ministry’s acting deputy director general of mental health and addiction, says the audit report found that, while Wakatika Ora had been rebuilt, it was not operating in the manner set out in the service agreement.
‘‘Subsequent to the audit, the contract with CART was ended. The ministry chose not to renew a relationship with CART for the Wakatika Ora contract.’’
Wareham says there was an element of vindictiveness in the way the ministry handled the issue, such as leaving a document on its website that said it was trying to recover funds, when that was no longer the case.
He believes the programme was wrongly positioned from the outset. ‘‘I would say that the mistake . . . was to treat Wakatika Ora as a straight-out addiction programme.
‘‘I would have liked to have run a personal development programme looking at the mind and the heart and the body and the family and giving people the understanding of their predicament, so they can see a way out of it – give them something to believe in.’’
O’Reilly, now CART’s general manager, says the board’s vision for Wakatika Ora was not an easy fit with the contract that was signed. ‘‘Within the bureaucracy
. . . there is a command and control perspective. They’re uncomfortable with community action, with stuff that is organic and isn’t planned.’’
He admits it didn’t achieve what it set out to with Wakatika Ora, but says it got some good results.
By June 2019, services had been provided to 35 clients, 346 wha¯ nau members with 7937 hours of intervention and 700 hours of counselling supplied, he says.
‘‘Oh yes, we got gang members off methamphetamine.’’