Earlier this year Auckland University Press told me they were printing another run of Patched. The books have now arrived. While the size of the market means it will never shower me in riches, I couldn't be more pleased that Patched is still being bought. It makes the hard work of writing it feel worthwhile. Thanks so much.

Of course, it's also being stolen. Since its release, Patched has been heralded as the most stolen book in New Zealand. While it was a finalist for best nonfiction book and won People's Choice at the New Zealand book awards, I have never won any award whatsoever for it being the most flogged. Still, I'd like to acknowledge all those crooks who have such terrific taste in reading material.

​Here's an excerpt from chapter three describing the rise of the Mongrel Mob. I hope you enjoy it; but the story on page 41 may not be great for those with a delicate stomach. (I note the excerpt isn't visible on some phones - sorry about that).
If the viewer below doesn't work, you can download a PDF of the excerpt here.

​And if you want to buy it pop down to a bookstore or here's an online option, but you can also borrow it from your local library, of course.

The latest gang statistics the government is using to justify possible changes to firearms legislation make me feel uneasy. When it was put to Police Minister Judith Collins by Felix Marwick of ZB that I suspected the numbers may not be accurate, she replied she’d rather trust the police than a gang associate.
 
Leaving aside the unnecessary snip seemingly aimed at me, her faith may be misguided. The last time I felt uneasy about gang numbers the government was using, they turned out to be ludicrously wrong. She may want to ask her predecessor Anne Tolley about that.
 
Tolley claimed that 4,000 gang members were responsible for 34 percent of A and B class drug offences and 25 percent of homicide related offences over a three-month period. It turned out the numbers were actually four percent and zero percent respectively. The incorrect data were used as a basis for the much-touted ‘Gang Intelligence Centre’.
 
Now they are saying 44 percent of those 4,000 gang members have firearms related charges. Just instinctively this seems off the mark and given their history of wildly inaccurate data, I think we have a right to test if they are correct or not.
 
So, people in the media and opposition, please ask the Minister to provide the methodology of these firearms figures to test their veracity and to see if they accurately reflect reality.
 
If I were a betting man, I’d put a wager on them being misleading – but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong; after all it will be nice to regain some confidence in police data.

Few things are more baffling and self-defeating than confessing to a crime you didn't commit. Yet it's remarkably common. It's also intriguing and disturbing how they come about. 
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Read my latest New Zealand Herald column here

In my column in the Herald today I outlined some serious concerns that I have with the New Zealand Police's restrictions on academic freedom.
Below is a copy of the contract that researchers must sign. The key sections are 8.2, 8.3 and 11.2(d).

At one time the Epitaph Riders were perhaps the staunchest and most respected outlaw club in New Zealand, but they are no more. Last week their colours were burned and the club closed down. Here is the story of their early history. I wrote it for PATCHED as part of their remarkable war with the Devils Henchmen. RIFP.
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The Epitaph Riders was formed in 1969 by a bunch of friends in a large house on Geraldine Street in Christchurch. Although there was a nominal president, Ross Jennings, initially there were few, if any, rules and no club structure. Like other outlaw motorcycle clubs in the South Island around this time (such as the Antarctic Angels of Invercargill and the Highwaymen of Timaru), and before they had significant contact with the more mature scene in the North Island, the Epitaph Riders took their cues largely from popular media. A member of the Riders recalled:

         That book Hell’s Angels that Hunter Thompson I think wrote – that was out and we just – it all just sort of happened             and we were all running around with this stuff [patches] on our back and um that’s how it started . . . We didn’t [know         what we were doing] we were just a bunch of young guys, mate, that just hung around. We’re all fuckin’ 17, 18, the              oldest would have been 21 probably. And it’s just the way it happened. We all used to meet on Friday nights and just          go drink piss – it just started from there . . . Drink piss and fuck women. There was nothing else in life – riding bikes.

By 1973, however, the Epitaph Riders had matured significantly. The group was now comprised of young men from working-class backgrounds aged in their late teens to mid-twenties, and boasted some 22 patched members, including an executive consisting of a president, two vice presidents and a sergeant at arms. By this time, rules were also in place to ensure the club was a significant part of its members’ lives.
            The increasing commitment to the club is reflected in a decision made in August 1973 making it compulsory for members to attend weekly meetings and a Sunday run as well as any parties the group decided to have. A rented flat was used as a clubhouse and weekly fees of two dollars were collected along with an additional one-dollar levy for beer on the Sunday rides. Fees were used for club expenses including subsidising major runs, helping members in trouble, and paying fines incurred during group activities. The communal behaviours of the group are, in substantial measure, a reflection of the wider social environment of the time. The club’s colours were also held in significant esteem. While colours were only compulsorily worn on runs, it was against club rules to deny being a member of the club. In the mid-1970s, one member even rode to teachers’ training college on his bike wearing his patch. It would be impossible to conceive of this occurring now without a public uproar, reflecting a dramatic change in attitudes toward such groups.
            Although the Epitaph Riders’ motorcycles were kept meticulously clean, members had adopted the ‘ridgies’ style, that was by this time standard within the gang scene. ‘Ridgies’ (derived from ‘originals’) is the set of original clothing a member was wearing when he was initiated into the gang and given his colours. These clothes were regarded as sacred and never washed so they soon became dirty and tatty. The custom may have come about initially as an inevitable outcome of members working on their machines and travelling and sleeping rough while on runs. It soon, however, became the desired look – a form of gang uniform. Yet ridgies were also more than a uniform. Grease from vehicle breakdowns, dirt from motorcycle trips around New Zealand, blood from fights and fluids from sexual encounters all mixed together to become part of a subcultural, or countercultural, style imbibed with symbolic meaning. As one Mongrel Mob member put it: ‘To wash them would be to wipe away the memory of our conquests and history.’ When ridgies fell apart, they were either patched up or a similar item of clothing was sewn underneath.
            As they were for all gangs, the clothes undoubtedly represented a visible expression of the Epitaph Riders’ antisocial stance, and many of the members had convictions for petty offences. In what is now a common – and important – refrain, the police were perceived as an enemy and many of the club’s members believed they were unfairly targeted and victimised. Fighting was a significant activity that demonstrated machismo as well as instilling group loyalty that the club actively fostered. With an ‘all for one, and one for all’ philosophy, if any member got into a fight, regardless of fault, other members were required to back him up. This fighting ethos was central to enhancing the group’s reputation and ensuring that people thought twice about confronting its members. In Christchurch, the Riders engaged in many conflicts with other fledgling gangs, and particularly budding outlaw clubs. Like other Biker Federation clubs, the Epitaph Riders had determined that they would be the only outlaw club in their city. In the early 1970s, at least three other groups – the Apostles, the Heaven’s Outcasts, and the Highwaymen – were beaten or intimidated by the Riders and had their colours taken. Vanquished, these groups disappeared and the Riders maintained a firm grip on Christchurch. By 1973, the Epitaph Riders were a well-established outlaw motorcycle club, and with their frequent travels around the country it is widely acknowledged by those in the scene at the time that they held a reputation as among the country’s staunchest, and consequently one of the most respected, groups within the biker – and indeed the entire gang – community. In biker parlance, they were class.

[References for the above can be found in PATCHED - likewise the story of their dramatic war with the Devils Henchmen].

As discussed in my column in the New Zealand Herald, below is the report of a study of young people who went to prison but have been crime free since release. This research was undertaken on behalf of the Department of Corrections by Ben Elley and I via Independent Research Solutions.

​Read it below or download a PDF here.

"Rachael King and I had a drink at Christchurch airport and another when we arrived at the Whanganui Writers Festival". 
So begins my write-up of the festival that was published here.

It led me to the strangest place in New Zealand: Jerusalem. Below are the photos I took.


 

If you missed it, here's my latest column in the New Zealand Herald. The Coral Burrows description is tough to read (and write).

Too early in the morning to serve beer? Humbug!

I paid a fine Maori beggar $10 to solve that problem. He walked me to a strange little bar focused on gambling instead of liquor licencing laws. The beer was under the counter and Waikato Draft. We shared a drink and I went to buy a second but my companion declined.  Drinking was a breach of his bail conditions. He went to a pokie machine. In a flash he was up over $40. Take it out, I suggested. And he did. This day was on its way to being a winner and I was on my way to Wintec Press Club.

There are few better lunches hosted anywhere. Steve Braunias pulls a fine crowd; in fact the company is arguably the defining draw card. Waikato Draft alone would not do it.

Guest speaker Mihingarangi Forbes would have been enough but she unexpectedly teamed up with Annabelle Lee in a one-two act rivalling my all time favourites: as important as Woodward and Bernstein, as easy to watch as Bert and Ernie.

The pair discussed Maori journalism and political manifestations involved in Maori television. It was an inspired talk delivered seamlessly. Even my new mate Don Brash, so far from Orewa, seemed to nod in approval on occasion. But that could have been the drink. Mine, not his.

By this time the wine was flowing sweetly. That grand lubricant of journalistic minds spurred us on to the after match function. I left my name tag on and a senior Waikato policeman recognised it. Best I be on good behaviour, I thought. I had some concerns as we were at the same place that following the last Wintec event a great investigative friend of mine turned green at the gills, lost some weight and his sense of direction home.

It is for these, and dancing reasons, that I shall not mention names from this point onwards. Except one. Russel Brown - Public Address to his friends. Russell had alerted me to M H Holcroft who in 1966 had plagiarised an idea in my last week’s New Zealand Herald column and one that would be important to my next book. In a twist of luck he found a book by Holcroft in a second hand bookstore adjacent to the bar. In my delight I thought he had purchased it for me. In the last day or two it has occurred to me that he may have been showing it, rather than giving it, to me. Nevertheless I asked him to sign it and with that quite possibly stole it.

The evening turned a little cold and so I wrapped myself in a blanket kindly shared with me by a journalist with younger bones than me. At which point I was told I looked like, excuse me for this, a vagina. When I say I was told that I mean it was posted to Twitter: the journalists’ drug of choice.

All criminals need a disguise, I thought, as I leaned down to feel the comfort of Russell’s book in my bag.

Slowly, those who were driving home or, sensing what was ahead, fearing for their lives, slipped away. A hard-core of rascals and ratbags remained. Those of such madness that Sambuca shots appear as the solution to all things real and imagined.

By this time, the wise and witty words of Braunias, Forbes and Lee were long gone, replaced by terrible madness. I looked out into the Hamilton night wistfully.  I watched a dear friend weaving down the footpath.

I wondered if that Maori beggar was about and if he could loan me $40 for a cab ride home.