BEYOND THE WIRE
Arthur Taylor spent nearly 40 years behind bars, the most recent stretch ended last year. Over a custard square this week, he reflected with Kelly Dennett on his year outside the wire.
12 months after his release, infamous inmate Arthur Taylor recalls how he had to talk 'psycho' Graeme Burton out of shooting two sleeping policemen during one of his prison breaks. PLUS Why the prison advocate now says he's done 'a hell of a lot more good than bad' during his life.
The prison escape had been prepared meticulously, right down to the campsite on Muriwai’s bushy coast. But when then 41-year-old Arthur Taylor was masterminding the audacious break from one of New Zealand’s most notorious prisons, he didn’t bank on his sidekicks nearly blowing the whole heist.
Taylor, convicted killers Graeme Burton and Darryn Crowley, and armed robber Matthew Thompson, had made it to the west coast 28 kilometres away, in June 1998, armed ‘‘to the teeth’’ and with a stash of cash. They arrived at a camp kitted out with supplies. Taylor was in charge.
‘‘Anyway, I told them to stay low and not attract any attention to us, right? OK. Well one night I woke up in the middle of the night and I f ..... noticed Matty and Burton and Darryn Crowley were all missing, right? I thought, ‘where are these pricks?’.
‘‘So I walked into Muriwai, which is about 3km down the road, right? And I hear this loud music and partying coming from the fire station, you know? Lucky every bastard in Muriwai is a good sleeper! So I bowled down there.’’
Taylor discovered Burton, Crowley and Thompson ‘‘having a hell of a time’’ wearing fire helmets and uniforms, sinking a stash of booze and playing pool.
Taylor is shrill. ‘‘I said, ‘Jesus Christ!’ Do you know what’s going to happen tomorrow when they discover this? The whole country is looking for us! Everything within 30 to 40km of Auckland is under police scrutiny! And you’re doing this!’’
Taylor is yarning at the dining room table, one arm draped across a chair, his left hand occasionally gesturing. He’s bellowing with laughter. An untouched custard square sits in front of him, and a halfdrunk cup of instant coffee. A fly has been loitering; Taylor uses his other hand, tightly grasping his phone, which rings often, to wave it away.
It’s a rare few hours away from his computer at the Porirua home he shares with friend Julianne, who is in the lounge, smoking out the window, interjecting occasionally. ‘‘Tell her what (Burton) wanted to do to the house in Tairua,’’ she says. ‘‘Yep, that comes next love . . . I spent more time looking out for that bastard than looking out for police!’’
The next morning a helicopter was screaming overhead, and they could hear dogs.
The men fled into the bush, seconds ahead of police. ‘‘Past police checks, roadblocks, which was pretty hard doing, because we’d lost most of our equipment. And it was wintah! Middle of wintah!"
They came across armed offenders squad officers, asleep, in a car. ‘‘They’re meant to be watching the road into Waimauku!’’ Taylor shrieks. ‘‘Burton wanted to take them out but I said,’’ – dropping his voice – ‘‘no, they haven’t seen us’’.
(‘‘He’s a psycho nut case,’’ Taylor adds of Burton, ‘‘he should never be let out of prison’’.)
After stealing a car and aiming it toward the Coromandel Peninsula, where Taylor had his eye on a fancy house ‘‘with all the amenities’’, Burton began pestering Taylor. They were all starving.
‘‘He’s a big, tall bastard. And I said, ‘get down in that back seat, you’re the most noticeable of all of us, right?’ So I pulled into the Manukau McDonald’s, you know the drive in? I ordered all breakfasts for them, and all sorts of shit, right?
‘‘And then I hear this voice from Burton, who’s down in the back seat, you know, hiding away, as big as he is: ‘Oh, and a banana thick shake!’ The f ....
chick is looking out the window, thinking, ‘where the hell is that voice coming from?’ and I was like, ‘oh yeah, a banana thick shake!’’’
More than 20 years later, Taylor is half scandalised their plot was nearly ruined by a loose cannon in Burton. As it transpired, the four would be caught weeks later. Taylor was the first to go after nearly drowning in the tide. But that’s another story.
Taylor recently passed the McDonald’s where they had stopped for McMuffins on their Big Break of 98, and it triggered the memory. Burton is still inside – just – he nearly died from a prison shanking last year; Crowley and Thompson aren’t. Taylor is free, largely.
A year ago he was paroled from a 17-year, sixmonth sentence for kidnapping, possessing firearms and explosives, and drug charges. The long stretch is a drop in the bucket – by the time Taylor stepped outside the wire he had spent a cumulative 39 years in prison. He’s 63. His rap sheet is 150 convictions long, including breaking out of prison, aggravated robbery, fraud and dishonesty.
During Taylor’s bust with Burton and co, they squatted at billionaire Roger Flowers’ Tairua mansion, which they rigged with explosives. It wasn’t the last time Taylor embarrassed authorities by making a mockery of security.
Corrections was issued a ‘‘please explain’’ after Taylor called the Holmes current affairs show to discuss his escape. During a 2005 trip for a Child, Youth & Family meeting, he fled onto the top of a Wellington building, only to come crashing through the ceiling onto a women’s toilet. He planned that dash with a secret cellphone.
It wasn’t just his brazen run-ins with the law that captured attention, so much as Taylor’s multiple law suits against Corrections, and his dedication to battling for prisoners’ rights, sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court. To call Taylor a bush lawyer would risk minimising his contribution to the law. Cases he’s launched, including arguing for prisoners’ rights to smoke and vote, are discussed in law schools.
He’s organised cheaper, healthier food for prisoners, saw contact visiting resumed at the maximum security wing at Paremoremo after watching a young emotional inmate separated from his infant, and instilled a nightly outreach programme on his landing where inmates would hongi and say, ‘‘see you in the morning, bro’’, in an attempt to reduce suicides. (‘‘There’s nothing worse than a young life being snuffed out on a concrete floor away from their loved ones. That used to make me very, very sad,’’ Taylor says, genuinely sadly.)
In 2017, he successfully took a private prosecution against double murderer Roberto Conchie Harris for perjuring himself at the murder trial of David Tamihere, thus dismantling one of the key planks in the case against Tamihere, convicted of the deaths of Swedish backpackers Heidi Paakkonen and Sven Urban Hoglin.
Taylor’s release on February 11, 2019, therefore, attracted just as much interest as his escapes. Stories recounted his first meal out of prison, a ham sandwich, and his love life prospects. The real question: would Taylor be able to keep out of prison?
‘‘I hope so,’’ says Taylor this week. ‘‘I mean, you can never predict the future. But let’s say... everything I can do to not go back to prison, I’ve done.’’
Taylor now virtually works fulltime from his Whitby home, just streets away from where he grew up, (in other trips down memory lane he’s recently visited the home he grew up in), fielding calls from inmates and their supporters. Last year he participated in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into state care abuse. This week he’s been in the Waikato to look into a claimed miscarriage of justice case, involving a man and a cannabis bust.
Taylor was raised by a loving family, his siblings don’t have so much as a parking ticket, but his criminal career began with school truancy, which saw him chucked into the notorious Epuni boys’ home in Lower Hutt. His crimes began with forging a savings balance, escalating into robbing an O¯ taki TAB. He became a burglar.
A Taranaki Daily News account records a constable ‘‘gave plod an entirely new meaning when he sprinted, jogged, slipped, slithered and tumbled over more than 30km of central Taranaki countryside in the middle of the night in pursuit of a burglar’’ – one Arthur Taylor.
That report claimed Taylor loved the limelight. During the Paremoremo escape one prison guard said Taylor craved fame, that he was a ‘‘nobody’’ otherwise. Others noted Taylor was intelligent and meticulous, the brains.
Taylor doesn’t seek fame, he says, he just knows how to use the media to his advantage, spreading his message, gaining support for his campaigns, informing the public about reality as a prisoner, or parolee. (Taylor is technically still serving his sentence. His parole conditions expire when his sentence does, in 2022. This means he’s required to obey some rules and check in with Probation Services).
After his release Taylor had a steak and Steinlager dinner with law professor Mark Henaghan, and moved to Dunedin where he has given talks to law students, some who’ve sidled up to him later, drunk, thanking him for his candour, Taylor says.
Henaghan is almost breathless in his praise of Taylor. ‘‘His cases are probably the most discussed at law school,’’ Henaghan says. ‘‘One judge said if Arthur was a lawyer, he’d be a QC. He’s very sharp. I get the impression he was probably quite intelligent from an early age, but he just got bored. But he’s never stopped using his brain, which is fantastic.
‘‘He has this ability to cut straight to the guts of something, in a straightforward way. He doesn’t complicate things, he doesn’t use wordy words. He has an instinct for where the argument lies. It’s a pity he didn’t do something else, but he hasn’t wasted it. It’s a story of hope really.’’
From Dunedin, Taylor has relocated to Porirua, thanks to long-time friend Julianne (the daughter of a prominent drug smuggler who was friends with Taylor), who wanted to give him a North Island base for work.
Julianne adores Taylor. ‘‘Jeepers, well,’’ she starts, ‘‘I admire his work. I think there needs to be more people like him. People just seem to spill their entire lives’ stories to him.’’
He listens, and empathises, she says. On his release his moods were a bit up and down. ‘‘Gruff,’’ she thinks, before replacing that with ‘‘volatile’’, before replacing that with ‘‘less patient’’. ‘‘It’s been quite a journey.’’
‘‘He really enjoys his work. If he starts a job, he cannot do it half-hearted. Even if it’s a small issue – fixing the cable on the TV – he just won’t stop.’’ She worries about him. She confesses she’s heard him shouting in the night, in his sleep. Women seek him out, sending letters from prison, or calling. She frets Taylor is vulnerable to exploitation.
As recidivism goes, offenders with little to no support on their release, with little financial means, are likely to commit crime just to get by.
‘‘One judge said if Arthur wasa lawyer, he’d be a QC. He’s very sharp. I get the impression he was probably quite intelligent from an early age, but he just got bored.’’ Law professor Mark Henaghan
Taylor says with all the work he’s got on, he’s occupied, and happy. He’s got good support. Though he initially planned to study law, he now reflects there’s little point – there’s not a lot he doesn’t know, he reckons, and the Law Society will never admit him.
Henaghan reckons organisations should be snapping Taylor up. Though Taylor has given authorities a hard time, he has respect for people just doing their jobs. It’s difficult to imagine Taylor not getting along with anyone.
Take this other Taylor story, about putting up prolific criminal and bank robber Anthony Ricardo Sands, which saw police hovering over the
house with a helicopter.
Taylor pauses to explain – ‘‘I’d gone to see a cop at Auckland central to say, ‘hey, your helicopter has been flying below 200m over my house,’ I said, ‘that’s illegal,’’’ – Taylor bursts into a wheezy laugh – ‘‘it was f ..... funny actually, and (the cop) said, ‘look, just between you and me Arthur, it’s got nothing to do with you, it’s to do with that prick Sands.’"
More wheezing.
‘‘Anyway, so, what had happened, a cop had jumped over one of my f .... fences . . . The Head Hunters had loaned me this dog called Zorro. Big black, nasty f ..... dog. It had a big chain on it, just like a tractor chain, to hold it. I tell you what, it was silent. Silent as anything. But by Christ, if anyone went past on the road it was straight up there, ya know. You’d have to hold it back. Zorro chased this cop, and he leaped just as quickly over the other fence.
‘‘He ran, jumped, straight across. Anyway I went down to the police station a few days later and said, ‘listen, stop launching around in my backyard ‘cause I’ve got Zorro there’. I says, ‘not only that, you know Sands is there, who knows what that halfwit might do one night.’ I says, ‘I don’t want any cops getting bloody injured on my conscience.’ They’re only doing their job.’’
Taylor could have kept talking, he’s on a roll, but it’s time for an appointment with Corrections. His phone rings: ‘‘Can it wait for a couple hours, love? So she was arrested last night? OK. Well I’m very busy today... but give me another ring in a few hours.’’
Taylor isn’t concrete on his future, but he believes in karma. ‘‘I’m going to sum it up this way. I’ve got a lot of regrets about some things, but not a lot of regret about a lot of things, because I know I’ve done a hell of a lot more good than bad, in my time.’’ He calls out to Julianne, ‘‘eh, hun – I sleep like a baby at night.’’
Julianne remarks that actually she thinks he’s got sleep apnoea.
‘‘Yeah, but I sleep very soundly, don’t I?’’ Yes, she fibs, you do.