This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2024. Today we take a look inside New Zealand’s gang scene with Jared Savage and George Block’s investigative reporting.
Inside the 10-year police probe to bring down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters
Written on the wall of the Head Hunters’ gang pad is a quote from the classic The Godfather film series that says: “Real power can’t be given. It must be taken”.
For the best part of the past two decades, the motorcycle gang had power in Auckland’s criminal underworld.
Once a rag-tag bunch of teenage misfits with humble beginnings in Glen Innes in the 1960s, the Heads forged a reputation for never taking a backwards step.
This propensity for violence allowed their members to muscle their way into the methamphetamine trade, which exploded in the early 2000s, and enjoy the ill-gotten gains of their labour.
In particular, the East chapter based at 232 Marua Rd in Mt Wellington grew in size and influence.
The Head Hunters established themselves as heavyweight contenders in the criminal underworld, and the police had no choice but to treat them as such.
Top-ranking East members were targeted by police in a series of covert investigations, and eventually convicted of running lucrative drug dealing enterprises.
There was one name missing from the list: Wayne Doyle.
Jared Savage goes inside one of NZ’s most complex financial investigations which ended with a High Court judge ordering the forfeiture of $15m.
It started with a $1.2m money drop: King Cobras and the Air NZ baggage handlers
A silver Hyundai SUV pulled into the car park of the Countdown supermarket in Onehunga and parked right beside a blue Nissan Skyline.
The driver of the Hyundai grabbed a bag from his car, and placed it in the front passenger seat of the Skyline, before both vehicles left abruptly.
The encounter was brief, less than a minute, but a detective watching the odd interaction suspected he knew what had happened.
The Skyline driver was working for a money laundering syndicate under investigation by the police, codenamed Operation Worthington, and the car park meeting in late March 2021 was a suspected “money drop”.
Inside the bag, police later discovered, was nearly $1.2m.
“Follow the money” is a law enforcement cliche but one that can often break open cases, so identifying the Hyundai driver became a priority for the detectives.
Jared Savage unravels the complicated investigation which exposed how easily corrupt ‘insiders’ smuggled drugs through Auckland International Airport.
Tauranga’s underbelly: The meth lab, the gang taxing and a murder charge
Surrounded by thick native bush on the rural outskirts of Tauranga, at the bottom of a steep track, was a makeshift tent covered in camouflage netting.
If anyone had stumbled across the crude shelter, at first glance they might have thought it was a hut built by adventurous kids, or perhaps hunters staying overnight in the Kaimai Ranges.
But inside the shanty was an odd assortment of miscellaneous items: a six-burner barbecue, a 9kg gas cylinder, plastic buckets, frying pans, cutlery and rubbish bags, all scattered across terraced steps hewn from the earth.
Curiously there was also a hose syphoning water from a natural underground spring, as well as an enormous metal cylinder.
It was a reaction vessel, which detectives searching the remote property in June 2019 immediately recognised as a crucial piece of equipment to cook methamphetamine.
The welded cylinder was so heavy that police needed a helicopter to winch it out of the bush.
Jared Savage reveals how the discovery of the hidden drug lab spiralled into chaos and led to an unarmed man being shot dead.
‘F...ed bro’: Hells Angel’s secret messages to undercover agent lift lid on gang world
The inner workings of the New Zealand gang world and drug trade have been exposed through encrypted messages between a senior member of the Hells Angels and an undercover drugs agent, according to evidence given in a United States criminal trial.
Murray Michael Matthews, a patched member of the Auckland chapter of the motorcycle gang, and Marc Patrick Johnson, one of the country’s original meth cooks, were arrested in Romania in November 2020.
Marius Lazar, president of the Bucharest chapter of the Hells Angels, was also arrested after a sting operation orchestrated by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
All three were to be extradited from Romania to stand trial in Texas, with Matthews and Johnson allegedly involved in a plot to import 400 kilograms of cocaine through the US to New Zealand.
Matthews and Johnson believed they were talking with a large-scale drug trafficker. Instead, they exchanged dozens of encrypted messages with an undercover DEA agent.
The pair are now on the run after absconding from Romania while on bail.
Lazar was eventually extradited to Texas and convicted in November of drug conspiracy, importing cocaine and conspiracy to commit murder.
Evidence given at his trial included the encrypted Wickr messages exchanged between Matthews and the DEA agent.
Jared Savage obtained hundreds of pages of documents from a United States courtroom to unravel how the DEA agent fooled a group of Kiwi crooks on the other side of the world.
Auckland CBD shootings: How police believe gunman Matu Reid got a firearm without a licence
Matu Reid walked on to a construction site in downtown Auckland in July with a pump-action shotgun and opened fire, killing two of his workmates and injuring 10 others.
After exchanging shots with armed police in a tower block on Queen St, the 24-year-old was found dead in a suspected suicide.
Among the many questions raised by the shocking act of gun violence was how a young man, on home detention for assaulting his partner, could get his hands on a firearm without a licence.
Now police believe they have an answer.
Detectives investigating the origin of the firearm allege the shotgun was purchased legally from a retail store in New Zealand before it was sold on to the black market, the Herald can reveal.
It’s a tactic known as using a “straw buyer”, or retail diversion, which police believe is the most common way for firearms to end up in criminal hands.
Jared Savage and George Block revealed this story by obtaining documents through the Official Information Act and the court system.
How a gang member masterminded 200kg meth import from behind bars
A notorious member of the Comancheros outlaw motorcycle gang masterminded a plot to smuggle nearly 200kg of methamphetamine through the border while serving a long prison sentence.
Operation Brewer, a covert investigation by police and Customs, discovered 199kg of the drug ingeniously concealed inside four wheat thresher machines imported from Dubai into New Zealand in June 2023.
The shipment was delivered to a rural Auckland address where detectives raided the property as four men, aged 18 to 28, were caught allegedly dismantling the machinery to find the drugs.
Two other men were arrested in Auckland but the raids were kept quiet.
Operation Brewer ran for another three months as investigators from the National Organised Crime Group (NOCG) tried to identify the ringleaders of the syndicate.
Three men were charged in September 2023 as the “alleged organisers and facilitators of the import”, according to a police press release.
The trio were inmates at Rimutaka Prison at the time of the offending, which again raises serious concerns about the apparent ease that prisoners can access cellphones while in custody.
Jared Savage and George Block revealed how the covert investigation unfolded in this exclusive story.
Mt Wellington shooting victim was patched Rebels MC member
A young man shot dead in his car in Mt Wellington in July was a Rebels MC member whose father joined the gang to protect his family amid a bitter and violent neighbourhood feud.
Texas Jack Doctor, 22, was shot in a car on Penrose Rd on a Saturday night shortly before 11pm.
No one has been arrested for the fatal shooting. The police investigation will focus on a number of violent incidents involving Doctor and his family in recent years.
The young Rebel was himself charged with shooting a man in a car in Papatoetoe, though the case was later dismissed in court.
He was also involved in a brawl with members of the Head Hunters at an Auckland mall last year. The year before that, Doctor’s father was shot in the driveway of his own home in Penrose.
Jared Savage and George Block were the first to reveal the identity of the Mt Wellington shooting and the connection to an earlier feud between the Rebels and Head Hunters.