Footage released during trial of gang member shooting which took place at Sofitel hotel Auckland in 2021. Video / Supplied
CCTV footage of a high-profile shooting inside the lobby of a luxury Auckland hotel - the culmination of days of “tit-for-tat” violence involving three outlaw motorcycle gangs - was played for jurors today at the outset of a trial for five Head Hunters members and associates.
Patched members Marcus Nielson,Fred Tanuvasa and another man who has continuing name suppression were joined in the High Court at Auckland by gang prospect Tyran Panapa and gang associate Paraire Paikea.
Crown prosecutors acknowledged during an opening statement that not one of the five co-defendants actually pulled the trigger inside Sofitel Hotel on the morning of April 15, 2021, as two shots were fired in the direction of a rival Mongols member and a hotel employee - both of whom escaped without injury.
The confirmed gunman was fellow Head Hunters member Hone Reihana, who pleaded guilty last week to discharging a firearm with intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
But all five of the current co-defendants should be found guilty of the same crime because they aided Reihana in committing the crime, prosecutors allege.
The shooting inside the five-star Viaduct hotel garnered a large and high-profile police response. But tensions between the gangs had been boiling over for weeks, after a Silverdale motorbike repair business frequented by the Head Hunters changed ownership, switching allegiances to closely associated gangs the Mongols and the Comancheros, authorities said.
On April 6, the business was damaged after a vehicle belonging to a Mongols associate was set on fire outside the building.
The next day, a Browns Bay gymnasium run by the Head Hunters was shot at in retaliation. On April 9, 21 shots were fired at a business thought to be associated with the Mongols, and later that day there was an altercation outside a Murrays Bay home where Mongols and Comancheros members lived. Shots were fired outside the same house later that night.
Two days later, the Head Hunters’ headquarters in Mt Wellington was sprayed with about 30 bullets.
Armed police stand guard outside the Sofitel Hotel on Auckland's Viaduct responding to a firearms incident on April 15, 2021. Photo / Jason Oxenham
“These prior incidences of gun violence play an important part in this trial,” Crown prosecutor Sam Teppett told jurors while also emphasising that none of the defendants has been charged with any of the prior incidents.
It was just one day after the Mt Wellington shooting that a former Head Hunters member who had defected to the Mongols began a four-day stay at Sofitel.
It was as that man was checking out around 9am “on an ordinary Thursday as Sofitel employees and patrons of the hotel were going about their regular business” that the gang rivalries played out again in a very public way, Teppett said.
“Three gang members walk into a five-star hotel, and what happened next was no joke,” he said.
“They were there to do a job ... to use violence against a rival gang member.”
Reihana, the gunman, opened fire as two co-defendants walked by his side and two other co-defendants waited in a vehicle just outside the hotel.
He left in the waiting vehicle after the shooting, prosecutors said. With no room for co-defendants Panapa and the man with name suppression in the waiting ute, those men instead bought new clothes at a nearby Lacoste and changed into them before taking a bus out of Auckland’s city centre, according to authorities.
During brief defence opening statements, lawyers for most of the co-defendants acknowledged they were inside or just outside the hotel when the shooting occurred. Tanuvasa, alleged to have booked a room at the hotel but never showed up, was the exception.
“You need to guard against thinking Mr Panapa is guilty just because he’s there ... or just because he had some association with a ‘gang’,” lawyer Simon Lance told jurors.
“Was there really some common purpose or plan? Did he know that Mr Reihana was going to fire the gun with that specific intent? The answer to those questions would be no.
“Perhaps Mr Reihana has just done his own thing on the spur of the moment.”
Lawyers for the other men mirrored Lance’s sentiments, emphasising that there is no evidence of a pre-conceived plan rather than an “impulsive and opportunistic” act by Reihana.
“This trial is nothing more than tunnel vision on the part of police,” said Shannon Withers. “Mr Tanuvasa was not there.
“Is there any actual evidence [of a shared plan] or is it just a guess, a hunch?”
