He found living in a small Central Hawke’s Bay community difficult.
Soon after he was released on parole, someone pointed a gun at him – the circumstances of which were not spelled out in detail when Forde came back before the Napier District Court on the new charges this week.
He received threats from people in the community, his lawyer, Cam Robertson, told the court.
Forde was ‘out on his own’
Forde was no longer associated with the Outlaws. He had no support or communication from the club since 2021.
“He was effectively out on his own,” Robertson said.
However, he didn’t tell his probation officer or his drug counsellor about the difficulties he was experiencing.
He started using methamphetamine again.
“He reverted to old ways,” in Robertson’s words.
Forde was possibly paranoid because of his drug use, Robertson said.
He bought firearms to protect himself. He started selling methamphetamine again to pay for the guns.
“It was all a very murky world that you were living in, that’s for sure,” Judge Bridget Mackintosh told Forde at the sentencing hearing.
But the main threat to Forde wasn’t coming from the criminal fraternity. It was from the police.
Primary target of police operation
In October 2024 they began Operation Burr, an investigation into the sale and supply of methamphetamine within Hawke’s Bay, and Forde was the “primary target”, according to court documents.
Just before midday on January 29, 2025, they came to his property in Takapau with a search warrant for his house and Volkswagen Golf car.
Detaining Forde, they asked him if there was any “safety risk” to their officers as they began to search.
Forde told them no, but immediately confessed that there was an ounce of methamphetamine and a Beretta pistol in a backpack under his bed.
Police looked and found the pistol, with six rounds of .308 ammunition in the magazine, and 27 grams of crystal meth in a ziplock bag.
In the garage, they found a Uberti .22 revolver firearm in a desk, along with a round of 12-gauge shotgun ammunition.
The shell went with the Kushnapup military-style shotgun they found in a cardboard box.
Elsewhere on the property, police found scales for weighing drugs, empty plastic “point bags” and $1000 cash.
In the pocket of a jersey found in the Volkswagen was one live round of .22 ammunition.
Inside Forde’s wallet was a bag containing 0.25g of meth.
Parole revoked
After the search, Forde’s parole was revoked and he was recalled to prison to continue serving his earlier sentence.
Forde later pleaded guilty to possessing methamphetamine for supply and six charges of unlawfully possessing firearms or ammunition.
Judge Mackintosh sentenced him to two years and four months in prison, to be served after his current sentence, which has a statutory release date of May 12, 2027.
“You’ve got a bad history of offending and a number of [those offences] relate to drugs and violence. It makes sad reading, really,” she said.
She also noted Forde’s “difficult background”. As a child, he had been in and out of foster care and “badly treated by people who should have known better”.
A past brain injury also made it more difficult for him to function.
The sentence Forde was recalled to continue serving related to offending in the months up until May 2021.
The charges then were similar to his latest – possessing meth for supply and unlawfully possessing firearms and ammunition.
Firearms ‘for protection’
He claimed the firearms then were for his protection after the March 2021 murder of Peter Lui by two Mongrel Mob members who chased Lui’s motorcycle. He was stabbed to death on a Napier street, for his Outlaws patch.
Hemi Rapata Meihana Cahill and Belmont Sonny Freedom Eruiti Te Aonui-Tawhai are currently serving life prison sentences for Peter Lui’s murder.
In February, Forde told the Parole Board that he now feels the need to move away from Hawke’s Bay and “make a fresh start in a different area” when he is eventually released.
Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay. His writing in the crime and justice sphere is informed by four years of frontline experience as a probation officer.
