Unusual bedfellows fight against P

Mongrel Mob member Layton Te Nahu (left), with his partner Jennifer Kemp and daughter Terina Te Nahu. Photo / Richard Robinson.

Second-generation Mongrel Mobster Layton Te Nahu is off the drug P and back with his family, thanks to a remarkable New Zealand story that involves the Prime Minister, the Salvation Army and a retired surgeon.

Te Nahu, 35, was born into the Mongrel Mob. His father was a Hawkes Bay member of the gang's "Notorious" chapter, which was founded by convicted rapist Roy Dunn in 1980 and which recruited the toughest, most notorious gangsters from other chapters of the Mob.

"I grew up overnight," Te Nahu says. "I had to learn how to drive cars and wait for my dad and drop him off. I spent a lot of time in and out of jail - property offending, you name it."

When pure methamphetamine, or "P", came into the country about a decade ago, it quickly became part of Mob culture as both a source of income and a way of life.

"I used it any time I could. It was around all the time," says Te Nahu. "It's like having a coffee or a cigarette," says his partner and mother of their four children, Jennifer Kemp.

But of course its effects are far more dangerous.

"It's a demon," says Te Nahu. "My daughter called me a monster. I was [so] abusive that Jennifer left me and went to live in Mangakino."

He followed her there and got some help to get off P. But when the family returned to Hawkes Bay he started using the drug again.

Then the family heard that Dunn had brought in the Salvation Army to help his members kick the habit for good.

"It never approached the area we were in, so we approached it," says Kemp. The whole family spent seven weeks up to September 3 at a backpacker lodge in Turangi, Club Habitat, with 11 other addicted families, Dunn and other Mob leaders and five Salvation Army therapists.

Eight of the families are now in Mangere where a trust co-founded by Dunn in 2005, Te Ara Tika o te Whanau Trust, is running a reintegration programme at the historic Massey Homestead aimed at helping them to find new homes and jobs, get their driver's licences and continue classes in Maori language and culture which they began at Turangi.

Te Nahu says he hasn't touched P since the Turangi course started. He and his family plan to stay in Auckland for a while, find work in the city, and return to Hawkes Bay "when we are strong".

Te Nahu is one of the lucky ones. Dunn says the 130-strong Notorious chapter has lost 12 people to P in the past six years, mostly through heart attacks. "That was more or less a wake-up call," he says. "They were leaving behind their kids and grandchildren, and a lot of them got taken by CYFS [Child, Youth and Family Services]."

Dunn knows what that means. Denis O'Reilly, a veteran community worker who employs Dunn and an associate Edge Te Whaiti as youth workers, says Dunn was taken from his own parents at the age of 7.

"When he was 7 he pinched a bike from school. Social Welfare intervened and he [didn't see] his family for another five years," O'Reilly says. "So by the time he was 12 he was an angry, rebellious young fellow who determined to make war on New Zealand society."

Dunn says he joined the Mob in the mid-1970s when he was 14. He changed course 13 years ago after being introduced to Otara community worker Sam Chapman.

"We were already doing it 13 years ago - trying to make things better, without the drugs, without the criminal activities, to break the cycle for the next generation," he says.

Dunn used his chapter's 25th anniversary celebration attended by about 350 people in Onehunga in 2005 to launch a campaign to "eradicate" P in the gang.

A small group approached numerous state and non-government agencies for help. Finally property investor Perry Knight heard about the group at a Christian business breakfast and talked about it later over golf with a retired surgeon, Dr Laurie Smith.

Knight and Smith agreed to meet the chapter leaders at the Massey Homestead and were horrified to hear that 80 per cent of the 1500 members of the wider Mongrel Mob were addicted to P.

"They said the way to treat it and get people off P was to isolate them from access to the drug for six to eight weeks," says Smith. "So Perry and I combined to try to find a remote place that might fulfil their requirements."

Eventually they thought of Rotoroa Island, where the Salvation Army ran a drug and alcohol treatment centre until 2005. So Smith went to see the Salvationists. Rotoroa was no longer available, but a couple who run the Salvation Army's welfare and addiction services, Majors Ian and Lynette Hutson, agreed to meet the Notorious leadership. Through 10 months of negotiations, they found a way to help.

The Hutsons admit that the project was wildly "beyond our safety or comfort zone".

"My heart would pound when I knew we were going to hold a meeting," Lynette says. "[People] said, 'They only want you to justify their activities, they don't really want to make genuine change'. But as we developed a relationship, I was convinced that they were really genuine. And even if they are not, if nobody does anything, we'll never find out."

Gradually they came up with a programme to be run jointly by the Salvationists and the Mob.

"We went into their community rather than expecting them to come into our community. What that actually meant is that we had to become part of the community. So it was not a matter of working nine to five and going home. We had to go and live with them."

As Christians, they called it "incarnational living". They felt compelled to offer grace to even the worst of sinners.

They found a Christian camp at Kakahi, near Taumarunui, that was willing to host the first group of 35 Mob members and families and four Salvationists a year ago.

They applied to the Health Ministry for funding. There were indications of support but no guarantees. The Salvation Army's national leadership told them to go ahead regardless.

Just days before the start date, the ministry suddenly asked for a detailed proposal because the Prime Minister was planning a package to "fight P". They worked through the night with a consultant to finish it.

"[John Key] read it on a plane on the way to London. He liked it," she says. "I got an invitation to go to a Prime Minister's briefing. The funding announcements were made. It was not overtly put out that they would be funding a programme for gangs, but I knew what it was. I got out of the meeting and drove straight to do the programme."

Key's package gave the Hutsons $1 million to run five P programmes for gangs over two and a half years.

There were problems straight away. When they arrived at Kakahi, the local community was in uproar.

"I had to go to a public meeting with 150 people," Ian says. "People wanted absolute guarantees [about security], and I'm lying in bed at night thinking, 'I hope I'm right'."

Once inside the camp, Dunn outlined the kaupapa.

"What it came down to was there had been too many of their brothers who had died. They had pictures of those brothers which they put on the wall and he explained his own journey. It was quite emotional," Ian says. "There was one particular woman who had lost a son. There were tears in the room, while outside in the community there was this furore going on."

The programme included drug and alcohol education, problem-solving skills, behavioural techniques, classes on healthy eating and exercise, relationship skills and parenting, and a big Maori language and cultural component provided by consultant Francis Te Maari.

"One of the things I truly celebrated was when one woman got her driver's licence. To do that she had to learn to read," Lynette says. "We almost didn't take her on the programme because she looked hard work at the time. But when it ended she looked a different woman, a different demeanour. Her hair was glossy, she was smartly dressed and had a smile a mile wide on her face."

Other gangs are noticing. Leaders of both Black Power and the Tribesmen joined Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia and other dignitaries at the closing ceremony of the recent Turangi camp, where the men presented carvings they had made, and the women gave flax kits to staff and supporters.

Dunn and Te Whaiti are already working through O'Reilly's charitable trust with other Mongrel Mob chapters in Waikato, Wellington and Murupara. They have taken young Wellington members of the Mob and Black Power horse-riding together, and most recently diving together off Kaikoura. "When you're using hand signals you start to rely on your diving buddy, you don't care what colours they are wearing."

He hopes to bring young members of the Murupara Mob and Tribesmen together in something similar this summer.

"We should have done this 30 years ago," he says. "We are behind the times, but a late-starter is better than a non-starter. What we model to our kids and to our communities and contribute to society in general - it's not all doom and gloom."