Something New

 

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“LIGHT KEEPING” by Adrienne Jansen (Quentin-Wilson Publishing $NZ37.50); “GANGSTER’S PARADISE” by Jared Savage (Harper-Collins, $NZ38)

 

 

A married couple die in a car crash, leaving behind two children, Robert (aged 10) and Jess or Jessie (aged 8). Their paternal grandparents, Bill and Annie, adopt them and take them into their home, which is next to the lighthouse of which old Bill is the keeper. So Robert and Jessie grow up in an unusual place on the coast of New Zealand. They do not do their learning through correspondence school. They are able to go to the local school, although it is clear that grandfather Bill and grandmother Annie teach them much more about life than school can.

Of course things are not always happy. Robert and Jessie are traumatised by the sudden death of their parents. Even the best grandparents are no substitute for mum and dad. At first Jessie cries at night and Robert becomes positively surly, pushing away even the most charitable and loving things his grandparents offer him. In fact Robert’s surly-ness spills over into his behaviour at school. When a pleasant Scottish boy, Jamie, a new arrival at school, is invited to Robert’s birthday, Robert is sneering and hostile towards him. It takes a long, long time for Robert to settle down and begin to appreciate the majesty of the lighthouse, old Bill’s skill as a keeper and the tales Bill tells of shipwrecks and rescues of people near to drowning. The coast is a wild place with its battering winds, hidden reefs and treacherous rocky cliffs. But as Jessie matures, warms to Annie and thirsts for learning, Robert himself becomes creative making models of houses, lighthouses and other things. Could this be his salvation?

But there is a problem hanging over this lighthouse and its nearby domicile. The time is the late 1970s, and the government is considering “de-manning” lighthouses and ”electrifying” or automating them. This means Bill will be out of work and he and Annie will be evicted from the home they rent. Bill has earnest conversations with other lighthouse keepers about the menace hanging over them.

All this is only the premise of Light Keeping. Adrienne Jansen – in her 6^th novel – applies three techniques that are now much-used in shaping a novel. First, she writes throughout in the present tense. Second, she makes every chapter brief. And third, she splits her narrative into separate time periods. Jessie’s and Robert’s childhood takes place mostly in 1977 with some skipping forward to the 1980s. But other chapters are set in 2019, when Jessie and Robert are in their forties, she running a clock-repair shop after her marriage has broken up; and he having had some run-ins with the law as a petty-criminal. He’s now a bit of a layabout with his sister having to help him out when he gets in trouble. What was it that made things go so wrong for them? And how can they mend things and live more fruitful lives?

Adrienne Jansen has clearly undertaken much research to make the lighthouse keeper’s life credible and interesting. She has a very vivid sense of place and as a narrator she is at her very best when [in Chapter 17] she has young Robert help old Bill rescue two men in peril in a small boat, during a storm. Naturally this connects with the idea that some things could only be done by old-time lighthouse keepers, and not by automated lighthouses. On the debit side, there are some moments when the novel goes a little didactic, especially when [in Chapter 21] old Bill lectures Jessie and Robert about his own childhood and what the First World War was like.

I have often referred on this blog to my “don’t be a swine” code. Don’t give away the outcome of a new novel. But, having taken us through traumatised childhood and one suicide, I think the novel’s outcome is a little pat. That said, I enjoyed Light Keeping as a thoughtful novel making best use of time and place and a strong sense of the dynamics of families.

 

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In his introduction to Gangster’s Paradise, New Zealand Herald journalist Jared Savage gives us a similar warning to the one he gave in his earlier book Gangland. He writes: “ In my view, the escalation of organized crime in New Zealand – more drugs, more shooting, more corruption – has been driven by the arrival of gangs as ‘501’ deportees from Australia. The likes of the Mongols and the Comancheros, in particular, have brought a more professional edge to the gang scene. They have better connections with international drug syndicates, better criminal tradecraft and encrypted communications, and are more willing to use firearms to enforce their will.” (p.5) So crime, and often lethal crime, has ballooned in the last decade. Prior to these imports from Australia, the most dominant home-grown New Zealand gang was the Mongrel Mob, which has approximately 2500 members nationwide, twice the size of its rival Black Power.

Once again, as he did in his Gangland, Jared Savage illustrates these facts with stories he has covered in the last three years, including the work of the National Organized Crime Group, which had to be set up once the rate of serious crime grew.

He begins with the Chinese ring who attempted to import methamphetamine (“meth”) hidden in umbrella stands underneath gypsum. They were arrested and sentence in New Zealand after a long investigation. But as Savage notes, the problem here is that the real “kingpins” – those who give the orders to their gangs and carriers – live outside New Zealand, mainly in Asia, and can barely be touched. Besides, as Australian police soon discovered, as soon as a billionaire drug baron is toppled by the law, another simply takes his place.

Savage considers next the invasion of the Comancheros, deported from Oz, who set up in New Zealand a big network involving many Samoans and Fijians. They took over many properties with the huge bankrolls they had from their drug-dealing, then proceeded to destroy the Head Hunters gang and were able to dominate the crime scene in Auckland. The police reined them in with their Operation Nova but managed to have only some jailed. Later, the Comancheros attempted to get their meth sold through the local Rebels gang in Christchurch, but they were thwarted by the careful surveillance by the police. In Tauranga the Mongol Nation – another import from Oz – brought in tons of meth and broke up the local gang the Greazy Dogs in a “war” involving shootings and arson.

One of Savage’s saddest stories is the plight of Kawerau. Once it had been a prosperous timber town with full employment, but hard times came, many people in the town were now unemployed, and the meth-dealers moved in. Their technique was, of course, to first supply the drug at a low price, then once the users were hooked to rack up the price and turn their clients into couriers and distributers to pay off their debts. In effect, they made drug-users their slaves. Eventually the mayor of Kawerau complained that the police were only concerned with crimes in the big cities and not in the smaller towns, and begged the National Organized Crime Group to deal with the situation. The police did just that. They invaded the town in what they called Operation Notus, explored every known peddler and user of meth and took down the town’s boss of the local mob Frank Milosevic. They also set up agencies to help people get over their addiction. For a while the town – in which it had been “easier to get meth than milk” – order and peace flourished….. BUT within a matter of months the drug-dealers were back again and the trade went on in its grim way.

The trade of crime was enhanced by corruption, as in the story Savage tells of the corrupt employee on the wharf who allowed the gates to be unlocked at night to allow parcels of Class A drugs to be passed through. Later Savage deals with a clique of corrupt baggage-handlers at Mangere Airport who also attempted to pass through Class A drugs, but in this case they were all arrested by the police as soon as the drugs came in. Again astute surveillance worked.

Another major problem was and is the growing importation of firearms. The general public became more aware of this with the daylight murder of Constable Matthew Hunt.  There was great looseness and loopholes in New Zealand’s laws pertaining to firearms. The first major attempt to limit the use of firearms came after the Aramoana massacre and later the even worse Mosque massacres in Christchurch. There was a major campaign to have firearms handed to the police, with compensation for those who handed them in. But the obvious problem was that, while honest people handed in many of their rifles and guns, the criminals did not. Police were aware of “straw buyers” who handed in firearms on behalf of unnamed persons – usually gangsters sacrificing a very small portion of their arsenals to pretend they were following the law. There still remain a huge number of firearms in criminal hands.

As he noted in his earlier book, one major Maori-dominated gang, the Mongrel Mob, has attempted to use PR to make itself seem respectable. The gang’s national head invited people into his fort to hear him say that the Mongrel Mob was actually involved in caring for people, mending the poverty created by colonialism, teaching young people Maori traditions and getting youngsters into work programs. How nice. Unfortunately three major members of the Mongel Mob were still cooking and distributing meth, were caught and prosecuted. When challenged about this, the Mob’s boss claimed that he didn’t control individuals’ actions… even though one of the three convicted was his deputy and right-hand man. The Mongrel Mob is still a criminal organization.

Interestingly, Savage closes with the story of a pakeha guy who went badly off the rails after having a privileged youth. Henry Whitehead (who later adopted a number of pseudonyms) was educated at Auckland Grammar School, a prestige school in an expensive suburb. Beginning as a tagger and general nuisance, he moved into dealing small-time in drugs. From this he graduated to importing meth and other drugs from Asia, Australia and America. He built up his own distribution “empire” and often operated outside New Zealand, mainly in Europe. It took the NZ police many years to have him extradited, but finally they won the battle and Whitehead is still serving a life sentence. In his epilogue, Savage tells us that there is an even bigger drug-dealer operating from overseas and attempts to extradite will be even trickier that extraditing Whitehead was.

Crime continues. It has not abated, for all the diligent work of the police, and the gangs and dealers are still at work.

There is no doubt that Jared Savage is a very capable journalist, telling his stories clearly and in well-researched detail. But there are some inevitable shortcomings.

First shortcoming: Savage often enough tells us that criminal gangs attract people living in poverty and/or coming from dysfunctional families. But then these impoverished people most often prey on other impoverished people – selling them Class A drugs, hooking them on such drugs and then using them as their peddlers, couriers and in effect their  slaves. In New Zealand the most impoverished tend to be Maori and Pasifika, and most of the crims mentioned in this book have Maori or Pasifika names. But while he does accurately note all this, he only rarely refers to the damage done by gangs (violence, threats and intimidation) to innocent bystanders, people who were shot or maimed or had their houses invaded by gangs. This requires as much attention as the acts of the gangsters.

Second shortcoming:  This inevitable shortcoming is no fault of Savage. It is simply the fact that [nearly] all Savage’s stories end with the police successfully routing gangsters or having them prosecuted and incarcerated. Obviously Savage has to rely partly on news stories, but mainly on police records and other information only after an investigation is completed and the accused are in the dock. Investigations still in progress are not made public by the police. Why should the police broadcast to the nation’s gangsters about the surveillance systems they are using, the informants they have interrogated, their knowledge of where illegal shipments are being hidden etc. So we, as readers, know only what has already happened. We do not know what major crimes are currently in the making. My guess is that in two or three years Jared Savage will produce yet another book telling us about crimes that are already in the making now.

 

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            Just for the record I append below in full my [necessarily brief] review of Jared Savage’s earlier chronicle of crime Gangland, published late in 2020. The review appeared in the NZ Listener 6 February 2021

 

“GANGLAND”

Is New Zealand really Gangland - a country awash with violent crime? Perhaps it isn’t by international standards. But as Herald journalist Jared Savage tells it, organized crime has grown exponentially in the last twenty years, fueled by the importation and manufacture of meth and other Class A drugs, the resulting turf wars between gangs, sophisticated enterprises in money-laundering, crims being more crafty in their counter-surveillance of police and the greater use of firearms.

Added to this have been the return of violent New Zealand-born gangster deportees from Australia, the involvement of large Asian criminal syndicates, and the interest of some Mexican cartels in New Zealand as a fresh market for cocaine.

Savage describes this book as “a collection of twelve of the most intriguing cases I’ve covered as a reporter”. There’s the Breaking Bad-scenario of the respectable chemist who set up NZ’s first meth lab. The networking of powerful gangs is documented, along with the savvy PR of some gang-leaders who have presented themselves as benefactors to society. We get the big bust related to a meth-laden inflatable that landed on 90 Mile Beach in 2016; and the even bigger bust when a huge haul of cocaine was intercepted in Tauranga.

Most, but not all, of Savage’s stories end with the police cracking the case and courts imposing heavy sentences. Police are prominent among Savage’s informants and their techniques take up almost as much space as the stories of gangsters and their bosses.

Savage’s style is largely solid factual reportage, only slightly sensationalised. The profusion of names can be confusing, when partners of, associates of, bosses of and rivals of criminals have to be mentioned in any given case. It’s informative, but in the end it’s also a dismal and depressing work. Real crime is sordid stuff, not like the version shown in the movies.