Extract: Underworld, by Jared Savage

The brutal execution of an innocent man. The undercover DEA agent who fooled the Hells Angels in a 400kg cocaine plot. The brutal execution of a not-so innocent man. The never-ending quest to bring down New Zealand's most wanted gangsters. These stories read like a crime novel - delving down into a parallel universe that many do not know even exists: The Underworld.

Jared Savage's first book Gangland traced the evolution of the methamphetamine drug trade in New Zealand from the late 1990s to 2020. His second book, Gangster's Paradise, focused on stories about the escalation of organised crime: more drugs, more guns, more money. This third book, Underworld, follows that pattern; but now the situation is now even more dangerous. The stakes even higher.

Extracted from Underworld: The New Era of Gangs in New Zealand by Jared Savage, published by HarperCollins, RRP $39.99. Tangaroa David Demant was from Omaio, a tiny coastal township in the eastern Bay of Plenty, about 60 kilometres east of Ōpōtiki. Omaio is about as isolated as it gets. Demant had lived there for his entire life. It was where he married his wife of 30 years, and where the couple raised their six children (one of whom went on to be named the best rugby player in the world and steered her team to a Rugby World Cup on home soil).

He worked hard to provide for his family, taking over his father’s fishing business catching crayfish and exporting the seafood delicacy to China for sale. Demant was also a pillar of the community: the chairman of the board of trustees at Omaio School and the nearby marae, as well as the manager of the local kapa haka group.

Everything was going right for Demant – until it went horribly wrong. 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, and Demant was left unable to work. The 60-year-old had to move back home with his parents.

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 the senior organised crime figure from Australia.

In September 2020, Detective Sergeant Steve Matheson was put in charge of Operation Tarpon. He viewed Demant, an experienced seaman, as a prime suspect in the smuggling of the 210 kilograms of meth found in Hamilton.

The obvious question to ask is how a 60-year-old family man 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 Operation Tarpon 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.

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 Australians and the 210-kilo meth haul in Hamilton, but there was something curious going on that warranted further investigation.

He 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 31 January 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 46 kilograms of cocaine, smuggled inside a diamante-encrusted horse head.

Demant: We’ll have a good little fucken 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 onto a commercial vessel bound for the Port of Tauranga, then offloaded onto 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.

‘This kind of corruption is not unheard of internationally but New Zealand has been isolated from it for a long time,’ the head of Customs investigations, Bruce Berry, told me in an interview in 2020. ‘Now, we’ve been thrust into this space very quickly with the arrival of the “501s” [deportees from Australian gangs] with their greater sophistication and international connections. It’s a scary story.’

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 200-kilo 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.

Underworld is available in all good bookstores now.