Meth, guns, gangs and the long road back
He traded violent favours for drugs on a fast trip to hell. Vinny Jordan should be dead, but is instead finding atonement, writes Sam Kilmister.
His pupils are dilated, his eyes twitch and beads of sweat drip from his face. Overlooking the driveway of hismother’s spare room, drug mule Vinny Jordan has a highpowered rifle in his arms.
He is waiting. Waiting for someone to come down the driveway and steal the drugs, take his money and his life.
Someone is out to get him. He knows it so intensely he is ready to pull the trigger on the next person who pulls up.
You don’t want to be the one who loses a stash of drugs; drugs that belong to a gang.
‘‘I thank God no-one came in the driveway. I honestly believe I would have shot someone that night.’’
At the time, Jordan, 45, was a debt collector in a biker gang. He also had a raging methamphetamine addiction.
Gang life gave him access to a free-flowing stream of drugs. In return, he did favours.
Paranoia, hallucinations, delirium and delusions were a daily occurrence, symptoms of psychosis.
Jordan’s behaviour became so agitated that most of the time he had no understanding ofwhat was happening around him.
These patterns of increasing harm run parallel to the increased purity and prevalence of P available.
Childhood of torment
Jordan had an abusive alcoholic father who made life pretty hard for he and hismum.
He recalls his mother packing their things in the middle of the night and fleeing. He thought that would be the end of it, but soon his mother became abusive too.
‘‘She vented on me. He emotionally ruined her. I absolutely believe my mother sent me away for my own protection. She did it because she loved me, and she knew she was going to hurt me really bad. I was out of her care for about a year, but a lot happens in a year.’’
He was removed from his mother at age 6, and sent to a foster centre in taki called Health Group. It wasn’t healthy at all, and further abuse followed.
Even now, Jordan suffers flashbacks of a terrifying moment.
‘‘I couldn’t breathe. Being suffocated is very traumatic for me. The beatings and just seeing the rage in the eyes and feeling unwanted. I just felt like I was someone they hated.’’
He was told no-one would believe him if he reported the abuse. Hewas a troublemaker and his parents didn’t want him.
‘‘I was 6 years old, so you believe these things. You get stripped of self-worth. I always have to have other people’s acceptance to feel good about myself. I still have nightmares, a lot of night terrors, horrific.’’
Jordan is going through counselling now to deal with the abuse he suffered from his foster mother.
‘‘I was very angry. I would lash out. I would always like to help the victim or the person who was getting picked on. If somebody was abusive towards awoman I would intervene.’’
After leaving foster care he stayed at the home of his grandfather, the first positive male role model in his life.
He also lived near Stratford for a time, where hemade some good memories.
He recalls hanging out with his cousins. They would take to the hills, camp and do what boys did in the 1980s to have fun. But there was always something missing.
‘‘I’ve definitely suppressed ... memories. They are traumatic. They are always there and they haunt you. They come out when you are at your most vulnerable moment. I’ve always struggled with abandonment and rejection.’’
Living a double life
Jordan was a qualified aircraft engineer in Australia, and he travelled a lot in his early 20s. He lived the high life and made good money.
Staff were put up in flash hotels. They often travelled in groups of 20 or 30 and the party life came at them fast. That’s when his drug use started.
He worked six weeks on and two weeks off. He stayed at the Penrith Panthers Hotel inwestern Sydney and worked at the air force base there. It was chaotic.
Every day the crew would take ecstasy, cocaine or meth.
He was contracted at Qantas and, despite his drug use, did well in his career. He had the drive to succeed.
The serious addiction started through o contacts who were doing large quantities of drugs. He became amule on the side, running large quantities of drugs from one town to the next.
‘‘I had a habit by then and this paid for my habit and some.’’
At 24, Jordan fell in love and got married. They had two children, but he kept using.
‘‘I was a pretty cunning addict. I lived a double life. But my wife is no dummy. Shewas picking up on behaviour changes.’’
Jordan tried to be a hardworking, loving husband but his demons never slept.
‘‘All this time, things that had happened tome inmy earlier life were affecting the way I was behaving, but I never really linked it at that point.’’
Eventually hiswife had had a gutsful. She took the kids and left.
Feelings of abandonment and rejection flooded Jordan and stripped his soul. All he had left was the gang and his addiction.
‘‘I felt worthless. I felt unloved. I started really getting involved in things I shouldn’t have been involved in. I think for someone who wants to feel loved and accepted, when you want it that badly you take it however you get it.
‘‘I was getting it for all the wrong reasons, but it was enough to make me feel part of something.
‘‘For me to feel good about myself I had to use. I couldn’t stop. I had to have it to function. If I didn’t have it I would crash.
‘‘I’ll never forget the look in people’s eyes when they inhaled that stuff. It’s like all their morals exhale and their eyes roll over. The most important thing to them, over their family or anything, is their next hit.’’
Collecting debts
Jordan became an angry man. He had a chip on his shoulder that could only be satisfied by inflicting violence.
He fast became the gang’s most feared debt collector. The job description consisted of ‘‘just generally making lives miserable’’.
‘‘I inflicted a lot of trauma on people. The sick part about it is I liked it. I don’t know why.’’
That’s the power of meth, he says. It turns you into somebody else, something not even human.
Eventually Jordan was arrested and charged with aggravated robbery and assault.
He was jailed for five years after entering two people’s homes to recover drug money. He bound and gagged them at gunpoint.
‘‘Nobody deserves that. What I put these people through, I took away their right to be safe in their own home.
‘‘God only knows the trauma they’ve had to work through since then.’’
In the haze of addiction, horrific acts were commonplace. The gang would joke and laugh about it.
‘‘You would say: ‘Oh we will take him for a boot ride’. And you would take them for a boot ride. No human being should be put in the boot of a car, full stop. When does that become right? It’s just not.’’
That is the dark underbelly of methamphetamine people don’t see. Eventually an addiction will exceed a person’s ability to pay for it. Then a message has to be sent. The drugworld is powered by a hamster wheel of fear and terror.
‘‘That’s not a life to live. That’s why I need to get that message out to our kids ... there’s no light at the end of the tunnel – it’s jails and institutions for death. I was lucky enough to end up in jail.’’
Jordan spent 12 months in a high-security prison and was locked in his room 22 hours a day. Meals were passed through a hole, and he was locked in a cell with a person he hated more than anyone else in the world – himself.
‘‘I was angry in jail for a long time. I didn’t really play the game to start with. I rebelled, but I clung to the hope that I was eligible for parole at a third of my sentence, which was two years eight months.
‘‘That kept me alive, and my wife visiting me twice a week and bringing my kids on a Sunday kept me alive to the nextweek.
‘‘You go into survival mode in jail, and it hardens you. I don’t really show emotion because that’s weakness, so I struggle to show emotion when I should. But I’m working on that.’’
After a couple of years behind bars, hewas able to reawaken his empathy and trace the source of his anger back to his childhood trauma, in the Maori Focus Unit at Kaitoke Prison.
‘‘I started to think the people I loved the most were the people I hurt the most. My two beautiful girls and my wife out there with their whole world turned upside down.’’
Any of his offending could have gone muchworse. He could easily be in prison on man slaughter or murder convictions.
‘‘It’s just so scary when I look back at it now. I carried a gun everywhere, and I would hold it to people without the safety on.’’
Back to jail
Jordan was released from prison in June 2019 to attend rehab at the Salvation Army Bridge programme in Wellington.
Despite being determined to become a better man, hemade some unhealthy friendships.
‘‘I had this arrogant way of thinking that I had been off drugs for so long I’ve got it beat. I can go and hang with the old crew and do my thing.
‘‘That didn’t last long.
‘‘I went harder and faster than I ever had before. I was doing the things I was doing before, the debt collection and personal grievances, and it escalated big-time.’’
Jordan was recalled to prison due to a failed drug test.
‘‘That was my breaking point, going back to prison. Because they can keep you there until your end date. My end date was 2023, so I broke in prison that time.’’
Detoxing in jail is a hard road. No support, no relief, just four cold walls.
Jordan looks back on those days with disbelief.
‘‘I shouldn’t be alive. The big fella definitely had a plan for me. I should have been dead somany times.’’
Between jail stints, his offences included serious police chases. On one occasion he was pursued from Turangi towhanganui on a motorbike at speeds of 270kmh.
‘‘I got away. Everything had to go right that day, and it did. I had the sense of being bulletproof, immortal. It used to be my joke, ‘you can’t kill me’.’’
During a final three-month stint in prison he tried to kill himself. His recovery presented something of a full stop and the chance for a new beginning.
He deleted socialmedia, threw away his Sim card, and set about starting again with a blank canvas.
The Government has shown a willingness to help inmates with addiction. More than $128 million over four years was set aside in Budget 2019 for mental health and drug intervention services for people in prison and on community-based sentences.
This funding supports up to 2310 additional offenders with mild to moderate mental health needs per year.
Redemption
Jordan’s mother, who by this time had worked in mental health and addiction for 25 years, provided valuable support, as did his wife, despite their separation.
‘‘They saw a good in me that I couldn’t see.’’
Jordan is now training to be an alcohol and drug clinician at UCOL. He got an A-grade in his first paper.
‘‘I’ve never had an A inmy life. I get to the end of the day and I am proud. I don’t think I’ve ever felt self-pride.
‘‘I’m not there yet. I’ve got a lot of shame, guilt, regret. I feel filthy about what I’ve done in the past.
‘‘I wish I could sit in front of every person I’ve hurt and tell them how truly sorry I amand actually mean it, but I can’t.’’
His eldest daughter still struggles with who her father used to be.
‘‘I broke them when I went to jail. I was very close tomy daughters, my wife. They cried for the first year, every night. As a father, to know that you hurt your children so much, that’s the ultimate failure.’’
He is driven by the desire to prove himself – to his family and himself. He wants his wife to feel she can trust him again.
They are still separated, but he has been told the door is not closed.
‘‘That’s all I need and that’s what I’m fighting for every day. I can’t imagine my life without her. What sort of woman would put up with that and still love me? You won’t find that again, and I’m not interested in looking.’’ Staying clean has its rewards. ‘‘I’m healthy – a bit fat – but running on your own energy when you’ve run on synthetics... for so long is such a good feeling. And not having to live that double life. Life is actually so easy clean.’’
And life looks pretty good when you know the other options are prison and the cemetery.
Jordan has a placement at Manchester House, a social service organisation, in Feilding, where he works with four men who are struggling with addiction.
He can relate to everything they are going through.
‘‘I find they open up more to me because of it. Themore I do it, the more passionate I get about it. This is me giving back.
‘‘There’s not a lot of guys working in this field and there needs to be. I’ve got huge admiration for these guys asking for help. I was not capable of getting clean bymyself. I had to go to jail to clean up.’’
Ultimately, the cell set him free from a life of addiction and knocking on the doors of other junkies, who could be inside sweating, waiting, with a gun.
‘‘I felt worthless. I felt unloved. I started really getting involved in things I shouldn’t have been involved in. I think for someone who wants to feel loved and accepted, when you want it that badly you take it however you get it. I was getting it for all the wrong reasons, but it was enough to make me feel part of something.’’