Tangaroa Demant was a pillar of his community until his descent into financial ruin and drug use. In this abridged chapter from his new book, Underworld, investigative reporter Jared Savage reveals how a covert investigation uncovered that a fisherman from a sleepy seaside town in the Bay of Plenty was
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Underworld: How a Bay of Plenty fisherman began working for a Mexican drug cartel
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Tangaroa Demant, inset, was a pillar of the community in the seaside township of Omaio in the eastern Bay of Plenty until his convictions for drug offending in Operation Tarpon. Photo / NZME composite image
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Omaio was also where Demant’s life began to unravel.
He lost about $1 million in poor investments, which in turn resulted in his losing the family business, the family home (and three other properties they had accumulated), and eventually his family.
He separated from his wife, and his relationships with his children also broke down. The final straw was having his boat seized by the Ministry of Fisheries, after which Demant was left unable to work and had to move in with his parents.
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Demant was crippled with an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and failure, his life turned completely upside down.
Like so many other people who have hit rock bottom, Demant turned to drugs and alcohol to ease the pain.
He chose methamphetamine.
The “wonder drug” also seemed to offer a way out of his financial crisis. It was easy money, too tempting for Demant to refuse.
His ascension from simply consuming meth to becoming a crucial cog in the supply chain from overseas was quick, and this is how Demant first came to the attention of the police, when he was spotted meeting with a senior organised crime figure from Australia in 2019.
Authorities first thought that Demant may have been connected to a 210kg meth haul police intercepted in Hamilton. He was someone at home on the water and therefore the perfect suspect to help an organised crime syndicate sneak a boatload of drugs into the country.
The obvious question to ask was just how a family man in his 60s with just a handful of fishing offences on his rap sheet could make such influential international criminal connections so quickly.
No one knows for sure, but officers involved in Operation Tarpon (a long-running drug investigation spearheaded by Detective Sergeant Steve Matheson) came to believe that a nephew of Demant’s, a senior patched member of the Head Hunters motorcycle gang serving a long sentence for supplying meth, arranged the introduction.
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Demant had recently visited the younger man a couple of times in Waikeria Prison, where he was serving his lag with several other inmates who would soon feature in Operation Tarpon’s surveillance.
Coincidence? Maybe. But most detectives don’t believe in coincidences.
Demant was kept under close watch. It eventually became clear that he had nothing to do with the Hamilton bust.
But there was something curious going on that warranted further investigation – and it led all the way to Mexico and the feared Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG).
An offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel (think “El Chapo”), CJNG very quickly eclipsed it to become ever more notorious.
By 2018, it was ranked in the top five most dangerous transnational criminal organisations in the world, according to the US Department of Justice.
But what would Mexican cartels want with a little country at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean?
As always when it comes to organised crime, the answer is money. For nearly 20 years, New Zealanders had paid around $100 for a “point” (0.1g) of meth.
It’s one of the highest retail prices in the world. And the cartels had taken notice. Meth is dirt cheap in Mexico, where the cartels can pump out tonnes of the stuff in commercial “super labs”.
At a wholesale level, 1kg of methamphetamine might fetch $1000 in Mexico, and be worth $5000 when smuggled across the border into the US.
In New Zealand it’s worth anywhere between $80,000 and $160,000 depending on market forces.
Despite the growing cache of intelligence and evidence, which police and Customs were certain of, it still seemed a little far-fetched that such dangerous organisations (which most Kiwis had only heard of because of the Netflix series Narcos) were present in little old New Zealand.
But there must have been something to it.
Because it wasn’t long before the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also the stars of countless movies and TV shows, were also opening branch offices in Wellington.
Organised crime is global, so to have any chance of combating the threat, so too must law enforcement agencies work together across borders.
“If you were to ask any significant trafficker what is the best market for meth and coke in the world, they would say Australia and New Zealand,” Kevin Merkel, the DEA attaché for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, once told me.
“The same people that are pumping drugs out to the US are the same ones that are pumping out drugs here. If they see potential to make more money, they’re going to do it.”
In 2020, Demant was living on a yacht called Good Times, moored in Whangaroa Harbour, a remote inlet on the east coast of Northland, while telling his friends and family that he was sailing overseas.
It was clearly a cover story.
Demant was actually using that time in self-imposed exile to make contact with international drug suppliers, according to conversations intercepted by Operation Tarpon, and hatch plans about a number of different smuggling schemes.
In particular, he was in regular contact with someone working for a Mexican cartel.
Demant even made plans to travel to Mexico for an in-person meeting to take place (in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, which had enveloped the entire world) – even going so far as to book a slot in quarantine facilities for his return home.
He never did go ahead with the trip.
But his drug business really took off when a violent gang member was released from Waikeria Prison towards the end of 2020.
In 2015, Tama Waitai (also known by the surname Maney) had been sentenced to 10 years and 9 months’ imprisonment for a brutal home invasion in which the victim lost an eye.
Despite having what the Parole Board accurately described as an “appalling record”, the Filthy Few gang member was released in November 2020 to live in Te Kaha (just 10 minutes up the road from Demant’s hometown of Omaio) with a number of strict conditions.
As well as having grown up in the same neck of the woods, police suspected there was another connection between Waitai and Demant: Demant’s Head Hunter nephew was in the same prison block at the same time as Waitai.
Despite the strict parole conditions, on leaving prison Waitai almost immediately linked up with Demant and joined in the conversations with the Mexican cartel.
Those communications took place on encrypted devices which the police are unable to intercept, although the criminal tradecraft of the Bay of Plenty duo slipped when they talked to each other by cell phone.
During one of those phone calls, on January 31, 2021, Demant and Waitai recounted their separate conversations with the Mexicans, in which they discussed importing a very large quantity of cocaine into New Zealand.
Detective Sergeant Steve Matheson’s ears pricked up when the police heard the details of the plan – 200 “keys” (kilograms) hidden inside a shipping container.
If successful, the proposed import would have dwarfed the previous New Zealand record of 46kg of cocaine, smuggled inside a diamante-encrusted horse head.
Demant: “We’ll have a good little f***** earner there, brother”.
Waitai: “Yeah yeah yeah yeah”.
That’s a lot of yeahs. It was a lot of drugs.
The shipping container would be loaded on to a commercial vessel bound for the Port of Tauranga, then offloaded on to the wharves and stacked alongside thousands of other containers. Then came the genius part of the plan.
Before anyone at Customs even had a chance to get suspicious and inspect the container, someone who worked at the port would remove the cocaine.
It was an utterly brazen example of what Customs and the National Organised Crime Group had been warning of for several years: corruption.
For a long time, New Zealand has had a reputation for being largely free of corruption, but since 2019, law enforcement bodies have detected a number of disturbing incidents, referred to as “insider threats”.
There had been a heist of a container simply driven out the gates at the Port of Auckland and the arrest of an Auckland Constable for leaking police intelligence, as well as a group of Air New Zealand baggage-handlers who were charged with bypassing border-security checks to import meth.
Operation Tarpon could now add the name Maurice Oliver Swinton to the growing list of “insider threats”.
The 44-year-old had also spent time with Waitai in prison, but was now working as a stevedore at the Port of Tauranga.
In a conversation intercepted by police, Swinton was caught talking to a friend about his role in the cocaine conspiracy. It was going to be a simple job: “just pick up, go to smoko, and go home”.
He would be paid $250,000 and given a kilogram of cocaine for his efforts, Swinton said.
There was just one problem. Swinton could access only the eastern side of the port, at Mount Maunganui, but some vessels would dock on the other side of Tauranga Harbour, at Sulphur Point.
Undeterred, Demant and Waitai encouraged Swinton to get a job at the Sulphur Point docks, too.
They also embarked on a backup plan.
Waitai approached Ryan Walsh, a commercial diver who also happened to be in a relationship with the gangster’s sister.
Walsh had indicated he knew people who worked at the port, and in three conversations with Demant and Waitai – to which the police were listening – agreed to approach them about the cocaine plot.
Walsh: “I was talking to my workmate … He’s got a bro on the port. He’s got a couple".
Demant: “Oh yeah”.
Walsh: “On the container side, and he reckons one of them will definitely be keen … so he’s sussing him out … He said that things go wrong all the time there, and containers that get put in the wrong place".
Demant: “Yeah, so it’s easy to do shit, eh”.
In early March 2021, Demant called Swinton and said the shipment would arrive at the end of the month. It never did.
Swinton was told to “stand down”; Demant explained he hadn’t spoken to the Mexicans for several days, as he was having problems with his “other phone”, as he referred to his encrypted device.
The stop-start wait for a shipping container filled with drugs was deeply frustrating for Demant, but also for Operation Tarpon.
Matheson could keep going for a bit longer, in the optimistic hope that the mythical 200kg cocaine shipment would turn up and the police could catch them all red-handed.
But even if that didn’t eventuate, Operation Tarpon had gathered more than enough evidence to prove a drug conspiracy charge against Demant and the others, as well as their distribution of other drugs imported into New Zealand by the Mexican cartel.
Angel Gabriel Gavito Alvarado was their man on the ground, and he lived in perhaps the last place anyone would suspect a Mexican cartel operative to be hiding out: the sleepy seaside village of Ōmokoroa, about 20km west of Tauranga.
His job was to co-ordinate the cartel’s activities in New Zealand, including the importation and delivery of drugs and, most importantly, sending money back overseas.
On January 14, 2021, Gavito Alvarado and Tama Waitai were seen meeting in the carpark of the McDonald’s in Fairy Springs Rd, Rotorua (why does almost every drug investigation end up at the Golden Arches?), where Waitai handed him a package.
The police believed it was cash for a small consignment of cocaine from Guatemala that had been couriered to Rotorua for Waitai, labelled as a “power steering pump”.
The following day, Gavito Alvarado deposited $20,600 cash into his Westpac bank account, then transferred the money to an overseas bank account.
The recipient? The wife of Uziel Saab Acosta, a Mexican national who had previously been caught trying to smuggle 3.9kg of meth into the country.
Saab Acosta had been deported back to Mexico a few months earlier, after being released by the Parole Board – but not before he had made some new friends behind bars.
Everyone knows that prison is a finishing school for criminals, where inmates teach each other how not to get caught next time, as well as a networking seminar to help them conduct business once they get out.
Saab Acosta’s connection to Mexican organised crime made him exotic and very popular inside Waikeria Prison, where he spent time with none other than Tama Waitai and Maurice Swinton.
Detectives would later find his contact details on the phones of both Operation Tarpon targets.
If there was any scepticism about the bona fides of Demant’s Mexican drug pipeline, the discovery of a connection to Saab Acosta, and the ongoing delivery of cocaine and methamphetamine, proved it was the real deal.
In early 2021, the police made a pragmatic decision to end Operation Tarpon (covert investigations are expensive, resource intensive and time consuming).
Instead, in late April 2021 they made a pre-emptive strike, and the police issued a press release to announce that eight men had been arrested following an eight-month investigation.
All but one of the men admitted the various charges laid against them.
Only Ryan Walsh, who was facing a single charge of conspiracy to import cocaine, pleaded not guilty, and gave evidence in his own defence during a trial in the High Court at Rotorua in February 2023.
While the 28-year-old admitted that his voice could be heard in the three intercepted phone calls with Demant and Waitai, Walsh said that he “had no clue” the plan was to smuggle drugs into the country.
He lied about having contacts at the port, Walsh said, in order to impress his girlfriend’s brother, Tama Waitai.
Then he kept lying, Walsh said, because he felt intimidated.
“I was making it up, I just wanted to fit in... I was out over my head.”
In truth, they were all in over their heads, and very likely would have drowned if the cocaine shipment had arrived.
Importing a Class A drug carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and 200kg of it would have put Demant and his crew near the very top of the sentencing band.
But, because the shipment never came, they were convicted of conspiracy to import a Class A drug – a less serious charge for which 14 years is the longest possible sentence.
So Demant and the others could count themselves lucky that the Mexicans never came through.
Demant’s defence lawyer argued that his client had a “boastful and delusional manner of behaving and speaking”, and that there was no realistic prospect of importing 200kg of cocaine into New Zealand.
There is no doubt Demant was delusional; police overheard the skipper suggest to Waitai that they wouldn’t pay the Mexicans for the drugs.
Perhaps he hadn’t watched enough Narcos on Netflix to see what happens to people who rip off Mexican cartels.
While Demant was clearly talking a lot of s***, Justice Mark Woolford did not believe the conspiracy was mere exaggeration on his behalf.
Demant was the leader, the judge said, the one who clearly went to great lengths over several months to plan the importation: working out on which side of the port the boat would dock, exactly where the container would be offloaded, the recruitment of port staff.
The only reason the plan failed to come to fruition, Justice Woolford said, was because of matters at the Mexican end of the operation.
As well as suffering a “very significant fall from grace” in the eyes of his family and community, Demant was sentenced to seven years and two months in prison.
After the Operation Tarpon court hearings were concluded, Detective Inspector Albie Alexander confirmed that intelligence suggested the drugs were coming from Mexico’s CJNG.
This was the first public acknowledgment from law enforcement in New Zealand that CJNG, one of the world’s most dangerous criminal organisations, had established business interests here. It would be the first of many.
Underworld: The new era of gangs in New Zealand by Jared Savage is out now via HarperCollins.
Jared Savage covers crime and justice issues, with a particular interest in organised crime. He joined the Herald in 2006 and has won a dozen journalism awards in that time, including twice being named Reporter of the Year. He is also the author of Gangland, Gangster’s Paradise and Underworld.