Mongrel Mob boss Steve Taiatini’s last interview before his death: Gangster on prison, suicide, meth addiction

Steven Taiatini speaking at methamphetamine support group meeting at Rotorua in 2001. The Mongrel Mob leader was killed in June and police are still investigating his death. Photo / Mike Scott

In August 2021, Mongrel Mob boss Steve Taiatini, his wife Pauline and addiction counsellor Kevin Hollingsworth met with the Herald to talk about their support group for meth addiction. Following his death in Ōpōtiki during an escalating gang conflict, his widow and close friend invited reporter Jared Savage back to hear their story.

Steve Taiatini looked the part of a Mongrel Mob leader: barrel-chested with tattoos across his face, arms and legs. He’s had a criminal history to match, too.

But he didn’t hesitate to reveal a painful memory, a private shame, when asked why he wanted to leave his drug addiction behind.

“I went into a dark space in jail, where I actually wanted to commit suicide,” Taiatini told me.

“Even though I was in jail, I was still using [meth] … you’re in a little room fried out of your brains, you’re just bouncing off the walls. It’s not good for you.

“I had no family, my kids weren’t even contacting me. All the friends that you had, well, you know, they disappear. Everyone disappears.

“When I actually thought about … why I was thinking that way, it all came back to methamphetamine. Yeah, so I just made the decision to stop smoking meth, cold turkey.”

Before he was killed in June, Mongrel Mob Babarians president Steven Taiatini was helping P addicts get off the illicit drug. Photo / Mike Scott.

It was a remarkable moment of vulnerability for a tough-looking gangster to share with strangers.

Taiatini had agreed to be interviewed on camera, along with his wife Pauline and her former counsellor Kevin Hollingsworth, about their Bay of Plenty network of rōpū, or support groups, for addiction.

Under the banner of Mana Enhancing STOP (Stop Taking Our People), the trio helped run meetings in Rotorua and Ōpōtiki where people could gather each week, without judgment, to talk about their struggles (and successes) on the road to recovery.

Their own personal stories were powerful, even inspiring, but also revealed the huge amount of mahi needed across all communities to curb New Zealand’s meth crisis.

This was August 2021. Soon after the interviews were recorded, the country was put back into another Covid-19 lockdown so our story was postponed as other work was prioritised.

Weeks turned into months, then years - the Covid years - and the urgency of telling their story faded into the background.

That is until a Friday night in June, when Steve Taiatini was struck by a vehicle in Ōpōtiki during a gang confrontation. The 45-year-old did not survive his injuries.

His death came at a time of escalating conflict between the Mongrel Mob Barbarians, of which Taiatini was the captain, and the Mangu Kaha, a chapter of rival gang Black Power, in the small town.

Hundreds of gang members attended the tangi and caused widespread traffic disruption during the funeral procession, leading to criticism of police tactics, which became a political football during an election year.

Despite a lengthy homicide investigation, no one has been charged over the 45-year-old’s death yet, although police have made a number of arrests as a result of the ongoing gang turf war.

All of this at a time when Pauline Taiatini is grieving.

Steven's wife Pauline Taiatini struggled with meth addiction for years and now works with others in recovery through Mana Enhancing STOP. Photo / Mike Scott

She has coped by carrying on the work of Mana Enhancing STOP, and we met again this August following a group session at the Taharangi Marae in Rotorua.

“Oh my love,” said Pauline, smiling as she watched the 2021 interview with her husband.

“He always said ‘feeling was healing’ and he was a pou [guiding marker] in my own healing … every day he’s a reminder of what to do.”

Their relationship was no fairy tale. For many years, it was chaotic and dysfunctional; Steve and Pauline dragged each other into drug abuse, leading to stints in prison for both of them.

But their enduring love for one another also dragged them out of addiction, then to support others trapped in the same cycle.

This is their story.

Steve and Pauline were born and bred in Ōpōtiki, a small town with a population around 9000 in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

They met as teenagers; he was 16, she was 15. Within a year, Pauline was pregnant with their eldest daughter - the first of three children together.

There was no meth back then, Pauline remembers, just weed and booze.

They had their first puff on a glass pipe in 1999, in the first years of the drug arriving on the shores of New Zealand.

Like the rest of the country, the couple had no idea about the ruin those little rocks of “ice” would wreak in their lives for the next 20 years.

“Well in the start, like most things, a mate has got it and you have a try,” Steve explained. “I think that’s how everyone starts, with a mate having a smoke.”

He passed the pipe to his partner.

“My addiction started with having a taste, yep, that’s all good,” Pauline said. “Then eventually wanting it all the time, and then doing anything to get it.”

It was a downward spiral that cost Pauline her freedom, and her family. She went to prison in 2006, serving most of a two-and-a-half-year sentence on drug charges.

Steve took care of their kids during that time, but had moved on with a new girlfriend.

By the time Pauline was coming out of prison in 2008, Steve was going in and out himself.

Ōpōtiki is a “red” town, the colour of the Mongrel Mob, and he was forging his own unenviable reputation for drugs and violence in the gang world.

Unable to have custody of her children because of her convictions, Pauline moved to Auckland to study public relations at university.

She completed four papers at Unitec, then moved to the Waikato to complete the course and regain custody of her youngest daughter.

Money was tight as a uni student.

“I just went back to what I knew. What was easy to do. So I went back to selling methamphetamine,” Pauline said.

“And the money I was making from selling paid for my own personal use.”

During this time, Pauline and Steve were still estranged and living with different partners. They each loved the pipe more than each other, as Pauline puts it.

By 2012, Steve was spiralling out of control. The senior Mongrel Mob member was caught selling meth and jailed for more than four years.

Incarceration didn’t end his 13-year addiction, however: meth was readily available behind bars.

That’s when the dark thoughts of ending his life entered Steve’s mind - no family, no friends, no future - and he realised methamphetamine was to blame.

“I chose P over my family … what made me give it up was my last lag. I went to jail and realised I had no one because I’d pretty much rubbished my family,” Steve said.

“I just shit on my family, terrorised them, you know, threatened them for money, all sorts of stuff.

“It just wasn’t me anymore, you know, even my mum used to say that, ‘you’re not my son, we don’t know who you are’.”

He gave up the pipe and completed several addiction and rehabilitation courses available to inmates.

His good behaviour meant Steve was also allowed to join the “release-to-work” programme at Waikeria Prison, labouring on the farm surrounding the Corrections facility, before his sentence ended in December 2016.

Waiting for him in the car park was Pauline. They barely recognised each other.

The drug-addled Steve walked into prison weighing a scrawny 70kg, but walked out tipping the scales at 110kg.

Getting clean inside meant his appetite had returned, but he was shocked at how Pauline had wasted away.

“There’s this skinny little lady sitting in the passenger seat, you know, looking sickly,” Steve said.

“And I was thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve fixed myself up but now I’ve got to do it for my family’.”

Looking back, Pauline laughed at her motivation for their surprise reunion.

“We’d been apart for about eight years. My kids rang and said ‘Oh Mum, you need to help out Dad, he’s getting out soon’. And I was like ‘nah’,” Pauline said.

“Then the kids said ‘He’s getting out with $40,000′ because he’d saved up during the release-to-work time. Straight away, I was like ‘What time do I pick him up?’”

Money pulled them back together, but love made it last.

Steve gave Pauline an ultimatum: kick the meth habit, or he’d kick her out.

She asked for more time, and they agreed on a deadline of starting the following year without drugs.

On New Year’s Eve 2017, Pauline was still smoking meth in the toilets at a bar in Mount Maunganui and playing pokies as the revellers counted down to midnight.

When the clock struck 12, she smashed her glass pipe after Steve reminded Pauline of the promise she had made to their whānau.

For the next three months, they didn’t let Pauline out of their sight.

“We had to feed her. We had to wash her. We had to monitor her, basically, to make sure she wasn’t socialising with certain people,” Steve said.

“Sometimes she would go into a state where she would just lose control, and we actually thought ‘far out, maybe we should just give the pipe back to her’.

“But we stuck to our guns to not let her go out and do this anymore … the whole whānau helped Pauline get through it.”

She might have stopped smoking meth herself, but Pauline carried on selling the harmful drug to others.

Busted by the police in 2018, she was arrested and charged with conspiracy to supply. With her previous criminal record of dealing meth, Pauline was heading back towards prison.

Desperate to avoid another lag, she entered Te Whare Oranga Ngakau, a residential kaupapa Māori addiction clinic in Rotorua, as efforts to complete rehabilitation treatment can lead to a reduced sentence.

Pauline admits she just wanted to “tick the box” for the court-ordered process.

But that’s where she met Kevin Hollingsworth.

“I said to the office lady ‘I need a counsellor who knows about meth’. And they said ‘we’ve got the right person for you’.”

Hollingsworth was a university-qualified clinical practitioner with degrees hanging on the wall.

But in a previous life, he’d been involved in all aspects of the drug world - including prison time - during a decades-long struggle with addiction.

“It was good because from one ex-user to [another] ex-user because, you know, we’re very manipulative in addiction,” Pauline said.

“Especially meth, you can manipulate any situation. But I couldn’t do that with Kevin.”

During his own recovery journey, his social work degree, then working as a counsellor, Hollingsworth realised two things.

The first was the general public’s knowledge around methamphetamine was vague. So he started running educational wananga, called Tu Taua, at marae across Te Arawa alongside police, health professionals and community leaders.

The second was that Hollingsworth recognised the individual model of sobriety didn’t work for everyone, especially Māori.

“Recovery doesn’t happen in people, it happens between people. That’s a Te Ao Māori way of living; whānau, hapū and iwi working alongside each other to make sure we can all heal.”

Kevin Hollingsworth at the Taharangi Marae, which was one of the first in Rotorua to open its doors to the meth education wananga he started. Photo / Mike Scott

He started working on a meth harm reduction programme, which morphed into a rōpū, or support group, as an alternative to other group counselling sessions.

Pauline was one of the original members of the rōpū, which they named Mana Enhancing STOP (Stop Taking Our People).

The first meeting was in November 2018, when a handful of people gathered in the St Luke’s Anglican church in Rotorua.

They gathered each week, just a handful of people. The rules are simple. Start on time, no smoko breaks and phones are off (as everyone deserves to be listened to), everything is confidential, and most importantly, no judgement.

“This is a safe space. We’re not here to say ‘you’re a crackhead’, we’re here to support you going forward,” Pauline said.

“We talk about being QBE - Qualified By Experience. What better people to listen to you, than those who have actually walked that journey.”

Although he was wary of Taiatini’s gang connections at first, Hollingsworth said it didn’t take long for the Mongrel Mob leader to gain his trust in the rōpū.

“We had other gang members here, who saw the bulldogs [Mongrel Mob tattoos] on his legs, but he would go straight over to give them a hug,” Hollingsworth said.

“He talked about his time in prison, having suicidal thoughts. He was so vulnerable, and very humble, and that really resonated with others in the group. It allowed them to open up their own feelings.

“So I had to learn not to see the patch, but to see the person.”

Pauline and Steve started to lead the rōpū as facilitators each week, as well as present workshops at the Tu Taua wānanga with Hollingsworth.

As the numbers began to grow, so did Pauline. She completed two stints at Te Whare Oranga Ngakau, which helped keep her out of prison. Then she got a job there.

Mana Enhancing STOP started meeting in Tāneatua, Waikaremoana, Te Teko and Ōpōtiki.

Unfortunately, meth is causing disproportionate harm in smaller, poorer, rural communities across New Zealand.

The Herald was invited to a meeting in Rotorua in August 2021, where we sat and listened to everyone.

There were about 30 people in the room, all at different stages in their recovery journey. Many were putting their broken lives back together.

Others had been hurt by the addiction of their family members. Their stories were brave and sad and honest. The response from the group was empathy and aroha. There was hope.

Steve was at the centre of it all, alongside Pauline and Hollingsworth: setting out chairs, cooking sausages on the barbeque, leading the group discussion.

It was inspiring. But also a little confusing given his leadership of the Mongrel Mob Barbarians chapter in Ōpōtiki.

The involvement of gang members in the drug world is well established, so I asked Steve to respond to what a sceptical public might think about his volunteer work as a meth counsellor.

“We always get judged on our past life. And every time we try to do something good, no one wants to remember that,” Steve said.

“It’s baby steps. You’ve got to get the whānau healed first, get them off it. So to be part of our Barbarians family, you’re not allowed to smoke [meth]. We want to get them educated, get them into work.

“But we’re always going to get judged, but we wouldn’t be doing this sort of mahi if we were still doing the same shit.”

Mongrel Mob Barbarians president Steven Taiatini at a Mana Enhancing STOP rōpū (support meeting) in Rotorua in August 2021. Photo / Mike Scott

Kevin Hollingsworth knew something was wrong when his phone was ringing at 3am.

It was Pauline with devastating news: her husband Steve was dead.

The early stages of the homicide investigation led police to believe the 45-year-old had been struck by a vehicle outside an Ōpōtiki address, during a confrontation between members of the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.

A Holden Colorado ute was later found abandoned and burnt-out.

No one has been arrested over Taiatini’s death yet, although a 49-year-old man has been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The police investigation also uncovered a string of violent incidents between the rival gangs in Ōpōtiki on June 9, 2023, the day Steve was killed.

Nine people have been arrested on charges of aggravated burglary, as well as firearms and violence offences, although the tit-for-tat turf war has carried on.

All of which raises questions about what role, if any, Steve Taiatini played in the gang conflict.

Pauline is angry, mostly out of frustration of not knowing what happened that night.

“What I’m thinking is that my husband’s gone down to face them … he wasn’t about violence, well okay, in the past,” Pauline said.

“But he had grown up so much that he wanted to sit there and talk about it. You know, ‘let’s come up with a solution bro’. That’s what I’m thinking.”

The full picture of what happened may not emerge until someone stands trial for Steve Taiatini’s death, if ever, given the difficulty in getting witnesses to give evidence in gang-related prosecutions.

But Pauline is clear on one thing: her husband would not want anyone to seek revenge.

“He was too humble for that carry-on.”

She’s still hurting though, and dealing with her grief by throwing herself into Mana Enhancing STOP and working to help reintegrate prison inmates on their release.

They were a great double-act in leading the rōpū, Pauline says, and carrying on that legacy is the best way to honour Steve’s memory. She’s also grateful that her own personal growth means she hasn’t slipped back into addiction, despite the deep pain of her loss.

Pauline is also determined to be strong for her family.

For years, Pauline has also carried guilt for not being a “present mum” for her three children during the years she lost to her drug addiction. She’s worked hard to rebuild those whānau ties, and to be the best “Nan” she can be to her six grandchildren.

“Acceptance and acknowledgment is the main thing. Accept my husband’s never coming home, acknowledge that he’s gone. And for whatever reason I’m still here, I’m still living,” Pauline says.

“So I will live the best that I can for my children and do both our roles, be mum and dad.

“And that’s okay because we’ve done it before.”

Jared Savage is an award-winning journalist who covers crime and justice issues, with a particular interest in organised crime. He joined the Herald in 2006, and is the author of Gangland and Gangster’s Paradise.