This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
The following article was one of the best-read Premium articles in 2023. The story originally ran in July.
The South Island boss of the Mongols MC gang was last month jailed for 12 years after flooding the Mainland with methamphetamine. Kurt Bayer reports on the fast rise, and even faster fall, of an underworld kingpin.
The Wheel Man sat waiting for “666″, who he had not met before. By now, having earned the gang’s confidence, he had encountered most of them: Rhino, Wolf, H1, Silver, even the big boss man, El Presidente, aka JD, Jack Daniels, The Bro, Cap.
The drop spot in the long shadows of a forestry block by the prison was cold, eerie. And he was weary. It had been a long drive: from the Bay of Plenty up to Auckland to pick up the stuff, back home to have it cut and vacuum-sealed, then hitting the road again south to the capital, across on the ferry, and south again, down, down, to Christchurch to meet the South Island honcho for the first time.
This had all happened quickly, becoming the trusted driver and drug courier for the New Zealand underbelly’s latest player, the Mongols MC gang.
Earlier in the year – 2019 – he was sucked into their nefarious orbit. At a house in Te Puke, he was introduced to the national president, Jim “JD” Thacker. A notorious 501 deportee from Australia, he had started the first Mongols chapter in the country and had strong-armed into drug territory long held by the Greazy Dogs and Mongrel Mob.
And Thacker desired empire expansion. He wanted the South Island too and had identified just the man for the job: Jason “666″ Ross, the Hells Angels’ Quake City chapter president who was having internal beef. In a sudden and seismic move that rocked the Christchurch underworld, Ross would patch over to the Mongols and head a new chapter to do battle with other gang incomers like the Rebels, Tribesmen, Head Hunters and Comancheros, all ruthlessly keen to cash in on the local drug market where meth was fetching higher prices than anywhere else in the country.
Now, some months on, Thacker was sending Ross drugs. While the Wheel Man drove south, he communicated with 666 via Ciphr phone – an encrypted messaging device and app. They had agreed on a place near the prison, close to 666′s Rolleston home.
Finally, a white 4WD Mercedes SUV rolled up. The two men got out and exchanged greetings. Ross, aka 666, handed Wheel Man a shoebox filled with $100,000 in cash, in $5000 bundles. He also gave the drug mule a mystery 4L bottle of clear liquid. In return, Wheel Man handed over a canvas shopping bag containing 2kg of meth.
“Then he went his way, and I went my way,” said the Wheel Man, the former drug courier turned secret Crown witness who would bring the whole Mongols gang down.
But the downfall was a few years away yet. In the meantime, El Presidente, Wheel Man and 666 would start flooding the South Island with methamphetamine.
The South Island job
Parked outside the Te Puke parley were pimped-out Harley-Davidsons, tinted SUVs, grunty V8 Holden Commodores and black Mercedes Benz SUVs. Inside were stacks and stacks and stacks of cash and heavily-tattooed gangsters with bulging muscles, wearing Louis Vuitton and Gucci.
If the Wheel Man wanted to be their driver - and he said he did – he would first have to pass a test.
And for that, he would need a new phone. A ghost phone.
Kelly Petrowski, aka Rhino, Mongols’ secretary and treasurer whose motorbike’s rego was RYKNO, took him to The Warehouse. He advised what cellphone to buy, along with SIM card and top-up, before setting him up with a Wickr account – an encrypted messaging app.
He was given a trial job. If he did well, there could be more.
Given a VF Holden Commodore SS, he was to head south and make a meth drop.
“I was told I had to drive to Picton and when I got there, I’d get a message from another Wickr account and then I was to meet up with someone, do an exchange and then travel back,” Wheel Man told a 12-week trial in the High Court at Hamilton last year where nine senior Mongols gang figures faced a raft of drugs and weapons charges.
He was given two vac-packed cylindrical bundles “rolled up in like a whole bunch of Glad Wrap”.
The car had two stash spots: “There’s one underneath the dash, above the steering wheel and there’s a bigger one – there’s a roof compartment with a light and you can just pop that out.”
He drove on and off the Cook Strait ferry and messaged the number he was given. They arranged the spot, a rest area just south of Picton.
There, he rendezvoused with a blue Toyota Hilux Surf and a man only known as Two Times.
“That’s the name that they told me that was his name ‘cos he says everything twice.”
Wheel Man handed over the stash and got $7000 cash back. He caught the next ferry and drove back to Te Puke.
He got paid $1000 for his efforts. He had done well. The Wheel Man was in.
The Christchurch beef
When Wheel Man first met Thacker he believes he was still a Bandido.
On his return “home” to New Zealand in 2018, Thacker was appointed North Island president of the Bandidos, who had established a presence in New Zealand a few years earlier.
Eventually, Thacker fell out with the outlaw gang’s hierarchy after one of his members was assaulted by other Bandidos at a party in Christchurch. Thacker and several other gang members flew to Christchurch and ambushed the assailant in a car-park building - commonly known as getting “rushed” - while filming the beating on their phones. The video was shared on social media, a literal insult to injury.
The powerbrokers in the Bandidos were unimpressed and demanded that Thacker hand in his colours. With the backing of his staunchest supporters, he refused and decided to “patch over” to the Mongols and start the first New Zealand chapter of the international gang.
One of his first purchases was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the black-and-white colours of the Mongols. The registration plate was DPORT.
While relatively small in number – perhaps 20 patched members – their brazen attitude meant it wasn’t long until the Mongols made their presence known.
They ignored the long-standing local gang landscape and started making moves. It descended into a tit-for-tat Bay of Plenty conflict involving three different gangs and resulted in firebombings and semi-automatic drive-bys and shoot-outs in quiet residential streets.
But watching the drama unfold, fearful it would result in innocent members of the public being killed, was a small group of detectives running a covert investigation into the Mongols, Operation Silk.
Shake up in Quake City
Ross, aka 666, was having his own problems. Sometime around mid-2019, “internal conflict” within the Hells Angels’ Quake City chapter where he was boss saw him being “expelled or de-patched” from the infamous global bikie gang that had its roots in California after World War II.
Talks were starting about getting a South Island chapter of the Mongols off the ground.
And on November 15, 2019, there was a high-level gang gathering in the Garden City.
Rhino Petrowski booked five rooms at the luxury Crowne Plaza Hotel in the heart of Christchurch using a Bank of Queensland card. Wearing a white Mongols T-shirt, CCTV showed Rhino meeting with El Presidente Thacker, with his hood up, and several other Mongols gangsters, including one only known as Silver.
Arriving the next day, Ross, driving his white Mercedes SUV, was captured on hotel car-park security cameras. And he wasn’t there for the sumac beef carpaccio or sweeping views across to the Southern Alps.
On December 2, 2019, Ross was seen flying into Mongols heartland – the Bay of Plenty.
Police had been tipped off that a senior Mongols member was due to land at Tauranga Airport. They got a USB stick with footage showing Silver, clutching a Louis Vuitton bag, arriving on a flight from Wellington.
But while they were there, airport staff advised they thought another gang member had come through earlier that day.
Security images showed Ross disembarking and walking out of the airport, talking on his phone, with no luggage, and getting into a black ute.
Three days later, back in Quake City, cops had spotted him in Mongols attire – riding a Harley-Davidson through Linwood while wearing a Mongols Moscow T-shirt with 1 per cent printed on its sleeve. On January 5, 2020, he was seen wearing a brand-new full Mongols leather patch in Christchurch.
Police soon started seeing more people wearing fully-patched Mongols clothing which showed “there was the establishment certainly of a South Island chapter”. About 40 other Christchurch-based Hells Angels were believed to have jumped ship.
“We saw the tab ‘South Island’, which would indicate there was a South Island chapter, and we saw more members there,” said Detective Sergeant Raymond Sunkel of the New Zealand Police National Organised Crime Group’s (NOCG) Motorcycle Gang Unit.
“And then we also saw them start to have tension with other gangs in Christchurch such as the Tribesmen and the King Cobras.”
Just after the Mongols - marked by their distinctive symbol of Genghis Khan riding a motorcycle – rolled into town, a barbershop on Wainoni Rd, with only tenuous links to Ross, was gutted after a firebombing.
And then a month later, the Burnham gang-pad – where Head Hunters MC gang associate and pimp Kane Wayman died after being brutally bashed at a 2020 New Year’s Eve party that would result in senior Christchurch Mongols figure Lyndon Sheed being convicted of manslaughter and jailed for five-and-a-half years - was shot at in a drive-by shooting.
The fight for the burgeoning South Island drug trade was on.
Wheel Man and 666
Wheel Man was clocking up the miles. He crisscrossed the country dropping off drugs, “meth mainly”, but also cocaine, and occasionally, guns.
After the “Two Times” delivery, he says he dealt with Thacker, Silver and Ross for the Mainland runs. It wasn’t clear if the South Island chapter of the Mongols was yet established or just what colours Ross was operating under. But this was how the protected witness said it went: Wheel Man would get a call from Thacker to go to Auckland for a pick-up. Nothing less than a kilo at a time. The most he handled was 4kg.
The first lot came in “little like shiny gold or shiny green teabags, like Asian-style teabags”. The tea bags have become familiar to law enforcement agencies around the world as being a popular trademark for drugs coming straight out of Golden Triangle meth cartel superlabs.
Wheel Man would message Silver and organise a pick-up spot in The City of Sails and return to Te Puke and cut it up – taking a clean ounce of class-A meth, opening it up, placing it on a roasting tray, spraying on some water, and sprinkling it with MSM - a sulphur compound, also known as methylsulfonylmethane, commonly used to support pain relief, especially discomfort caused by osteoarthritis.
He would repackage it and then put it in the vacuum seal bags. Ounces were selling for about $4000 so a kilogram was worth about $80,000 - the cheapest it had ever been in New Zealand.
“Once it had been cut and repackaged, I’d then make contact myself … generally Jason [Ross]. I’d work out the time it would take me to get from Te Puke to Christchurch, ferry included. I’d give him a rough ETA and I was pretty much on the money every time within 15 minutes.”
By now they were using Ciphr phones - an encrypted mobile with its own platform – which they called “Ting phones” or “Tings”.
The gang had a Ciphr phone group chat called “Flame throwers”, and were also on Snapchat, using their nicknames.
At first, he drove his own car before they got him trusty, nondescript Toyota Corollas which “supposedly had a good stook spot” for hiding drugs underneath its centre console.
Bookings for the Cook Strait ferries were made using phoney email addresses, fake names and traceless Prezzy Cards bought from various service stations.
He would do the Auckland-Te Puke-South Island drug run once a week or every fortnight, he claimed. A good 15-hour journey each way. Wheel Man initially told police he’d done somewhere between 10 and 20 trips but would later tell the court it was “possibly a lot more than that” between June 2019 and into early 2020.
“I’ve delivered a shit load of meth around this country for these guys,” he would say.
Shoeboxes of cash
Intercepted phone calls were played to the court where Wheel Man referred to his Christchurch trips.
“I caught up with the bros in Quake City,” he said, referring to meeting Ross in Christchurch.
Wheel Man, who was never a patched Mongols member, was by now coining $5000 – or “five stack” - for each run.
He spoke of one trip south to Christchurch – ordered by Thacker - this time with 4kg of meth.
En route, he got a message from Rhino, asking him to drop 2kg to one of his mates in Wellington. He organised the drop-off at a petrol station with a “dude in a black Ford Ranger”.
He continued over on the ferry with the remaining 2kg, dropping it with an associate of Ross, before meeting the man himself for the money.
At another drop-off – this time half a kilo of MDMA and 1-2kg of meth - Ross gave him 512 red pills that he said he thought were ecstasy tablets with “little love hearts” pressed on to them. Another shoebox of cash was also handed over.
While doing the South Island mule runs, Wheel Man was also zipping from the Bay of Plenty to Hamilton and Auckland once or twice a week to pick up cocaine for Thacker’s personal use. The court heard that Thacker, by now, was harbouring a significant coke habit, “easy one ounce a week”, according to Wheel Man.
Wheel Man also talked about meeting “Irish” - a Christchurch Mongols member.
Ross had sent Irish across the Cook Strait to meet Wheel Man in a car park opposite Ōtaki New World and pick up 2kg of meth wrapped in Glad bags. Irish, driving a blue Mercedes SUV, turned up 45 minutes late with a woman.
“Once he got there, he hopped out, came over to the car, said, ‘G’day’. That’s how I met him as Irish because he had an Irish accent, and he was quite a tall, skinny white fella. He picked up the bags and left.”
No payment was made that day. Wheel Man also claimed Ross would hand him a “50 bag of weed” each time for his efforts.
Another time, arranged by Ross, he delivered 2kg of meth and early the next morning picked up a shoebox stashed with $100,000 cash from tennis courts on Linwood Ave in the Garden City’s eastern suburbs from “a fat, old white dude … looked like an old biker”.
Sometimes Ross would meet him personally – other times it would be other associated figures. One time, around mid-January 2020, he says Ross handed him a swimming pool box with $150,000 cash inside.
He never went to the Mongols’ gang pad near Burnham outside Christchurch.
“Whoever Jason [Ross] sends to meet me at the point in time is up to him but everything I’m doing is for the Mongols and for Jason Ross to deliver those drugs to him, for him to distribute and make money for the club,” Wheel Man told, giving evidence by video link from a secret location in exchange for immunity from prosecution and a place in witness protection.
“I believe the jury needs to see these people for who and what they actually are. What they stand for.”
The crackdown
The final Christchurch trip came shortly before New Zealand’s first national Covid-19 lockdown, in March 2020.
Wheel Man picked up 3kg from Auckland “about a week” before lockdown, and the ferries stopped sailing.
“The shootings happened about a week later with the mob...”
The violence was getting out of control. Operation Silk had to wrap up before someone was killed.
For months, the Tauranga-based squad of the NOCG had been covertly gathering evidence about the Mongols’ drug dealing and shootings. They wanted to prevent violence but didn’t want to blow their cover.
When the decision was made to end the inquiry in June 2020, JD Thacker was found in a BMW heading towards Welcome Bay with another patched Mongol in the driver’s seat.
Also in the car, stuffed inside a box of tissues, was a .357 calibre pistol with four of the six chambers loaded with live rounds.
The police believe the pair were on the way to shoot up the home of a senior Greazy Dog.
They were among 17 people associated with the Mongols, ranging in age from 19 to 66, who were arrested and charged with 263 offences, including participating in an organised criminal group, money laundering, conspiracy to deal methamphetamine, supplying cocaine, unlawful possession of firearms and explosives.
Nineteen vehicles were seized – five motorcycles, one light truck, one heavy truck, seven cars, four utes and a quad bike - as well as Molotov cocktails, ammunition, cannabis, methamphetamine and cash.
Over the course of the investigation, 33 illegal firearms had been found. including five loaded AK-47s, an MP38 machine gun and four military-style semi-automatic rifles.
“The ongoing violence between this organised crime group and other local gangs is simply about controlling a share of this drug market,” Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, head of NOCG, said at a press conference to announce the Operation Silk raids.
“All these gangs have made it clear that they are prepared to use violence to protect their share.”
The Mongols had radically changed the New Zealand criminal landscape, fulfilling predictions of increased violence made by detectives and local gangsters when the first 501s arrived five years earlier.
The end
After Operation Silk, several armed police raids of their Christchurch gang pad, and the unwanted attention of the homicide probe after Kane Wayman’s New Year party death, the Mongols no longer enjoy a large presence in Quake City.
Police officers spoken to by the Herald say their numbers are low, especially when compared to others in the city like the Tribesmen MC, or the Comancheros who recently patched over the rival Rebels and took over their Woolston clubhouse.
Last month, 47-year-old Ross was sentenced to 12 years in jail as a result of Operation Silk. The jury in last year’s trial took five days to find eight members of the gang, including Thacker, Mongols national vice-president Hone “H1″ Ronaki, Leon “Wolf” Huritu, Kelly “Rhino” Petrowski, Matthew Ramsden, dubbed the meth “washer” and processor, 24-year-old patched member Kane Ronaki, and Silver guilty on a host of charges.
Ross was found guilty of four charges, including possession of meth for supply, thanks in large part to Wheel Man’s testimony.
Crown prosecutor Anna Pollett admitted that, with hindsight, Ross should also have been charged with participating in an organised criminal group, but either way, his involvement in the gang was “significant”.
He was instrumental in the supply and distribution of drugs around the South Island as well as the establishment of the Christchurch gang pad.
“That was one of the aims of this newly established gang,” Pollet said.
“It was a high-risk operation and nothing less than kilograms would suffice.”
Ross’ lawyer, Thomas Harre, asked for discounts for his client’s prospect of rehabilitation, previous clean criminal history, upbringing, and clear trajectory into gangs, given his father had also been a Mongols gang member.
Justice Melanie Harland, however, said the prospect of stacks of cash was his sole motivator.
“There’s no evidence that anything but financial profit drove your offending,” the judge said in sending Ross to a lengthy stint behind bars.
“You were not simply a prospect [of the gang] ... but the president.”
- Kurt Bayer is a South Island correspondent based in Christchurch. He is a senior journalist who joined the Herald in 2011.