This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including exploring the NCEA and UE results of every college around NZ, the collapse of the Du Val property empire, revealing claims a former funeral director at Tipene Funerals was swindling grieving clients and charting the 10-year police probe that brought down Wayne Doyle and the Head Hunters.
The following article was one of the best-read Premium articles in 2024. The story originally ran in August.
Written on the wall of the Head Hunters’ gang pad is a quote from the classic The Godfather film series that says: “Real power can’t be given. It must be taken”.
For the best part of the past two decades, the motorcycle gang had power in Auckland’s criminal underworld.
Once a rag-tag bunch of teenage misfits with humble beginnings in Glen Innes in the 1960s, the Heads forged a reputation for never taking a backwards step.
This propensity for violence allowed their members to muscle their way into the methamphetamine trade, which exploded in the early 2000s, and enjoy the ill-gotten gains of their labour.
In particular, the East chapter based at 232 Marua Rd in Mt Wellington grew in size and influence.
The Head Hunters established themselves as heavyweight contenders in the criminal underworld, and the police had no choice but to treat them as such.
Top-ranking East members were targeted by police in a series of covert investigations, and eventually convicted of running lucrative drug dealing enterprises.
There was one name missing from the list: Wayne Doyle.
Known as “the Chief”, Doyle was the founding member of the East chapter and widely considered to be the leader of the notorious gang.
While his peers were in and out of jail for serious drugs or violence offences, Doyle had managed to keep out of trouble since his release from prison in 2001 after serving his time for murder.
There wasn’t any evidence to connect Doyle to any crimes committed by the Head Hunters, but frustrated detectives were suspicious about how an unemployed gang leader could accrue millions of dollars’ worth of property.
The mystery prompted the longest, if not the most ambitious, financial investigation ever conducted by the police under the powerful (some would say draconian) criminal proceeds law.
This week, nearly 10 years after Operation Coin started, a High Court judge gave a definitive answer to the nagging question about Doyle’s unexplained wealth.
Justice Peter Andrew spent 10 months mulling the evidence, and the nub of his 154-page decision is that the Head Hunters are an organised criminal group and Doyle, despite his assertions to the contrary, sat at the top.
As a result of his influential position, the judge found, Doyle reaped a financial reward from the crimes committed by the gang’s members and l
aundered the money through a charitable trust.
“The evidence in this case traverses much of Mr Doyle’s adult life,” wrote Justice Andrew.
“For much of the last two decades, he has lived beyond the reach of the law; his attitude to the law appears to be one of cynical disregard.”
It seems the law has finally caught up with him.
The landmark ruling (unless later overturned by the Court of Appeal) means Doyle must sell the five Auckland properties he controls, including the East chapter pad at Marua Rd, to pay a $14.8 million profit forfeiture order. A further $275,000 in cash found at the pad was also forfeited.
Not only will Doyle lose his family homes, but also the spiritual home of the Head Hunters: it is a staggering blow to a once swaggering outlaw motorcycle gang.
Real power can’t be given. It must be taken.
The Head Hunters’ current predicament can be traced back 25 years to the lavish lifestyle of one of their own members.
Peter ‘Pedro’ Cleven had been accused of making a fortune from dealing cannabis and methamphetamine between 1996 and 1999. He had a palatial Titirangi home (next door to a judge), a Harley-Davidson motorbike, a Mercedes-Benz convertible and a speedboat.
All of his assets were frozen following Operation Mexico in 1999, led by Detective Sergeant Darryl Brazier, in which Cleven was caught talking in bugged conversations about making a million dollars a year from methamphetamine.
Cleven was acquitted in 2002 after two controversial trials. The jury in the first trial was unable to reach a verdict, while the second jury was sequestered in a secret location for nearly three weeks. The reason why is still suppressed. But the jurors found him not guilty this time.
Cleven’s defence against the charges was that he had been making empty boasts to impress a woman, and that his lifestyle was in fact funded by the innovative methods of angora goat farming and ‘taxing’ (employing standover tactics) other criminals.
Under the law at the time, the Proceeds of Crime Act, the police needed a conviction to strip ill-gotten gains from underworld figures. So despite the ludicrous goat-farming explanation for how Cleven accumulated his wealth, the assets had to be returned.
Never again, the police swore, who used the case to convince politicians that the best way to battle organised crime was to follow the money and pass the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act (CPRA) 2009.
Under the new law, police no longer needed a conviction.
They only had to show that someone profited from criminal offending to the lower standard of proof applied in civil cases — “on the balance of probabilities” — rather than surpassing the more difficult “beyond reasonable doubt” threshold for criminal cases.
“This approach will allow us to target gang leaders who do not get their own hands dirty, but at the end of the day, enjoy the benefits of their fellow gang members’ illegal activity,” Mark Burton, then the Justice Minister, said when introducing the bill to Parliament in 2007.
Once the law came into force, the police went on to seize hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of assets – houses, lifestyle blocks, farms, cars, boats, motorcycles, diggers, investment portfolios, art collections, cash, bank accounts, even cryptocurrency.
However, the vast majority of those cases ran parallel to prosecutions of drug dealers, crooks and gang members who were all convicted of serious crimes anyway.
Among those seizures were some good wins for the police, especially in their war on the Head Hunters in a series of covert investigations between 2014 and 2016.
Millions of dollars in cash and assets had been confiscated from senior members, such as Dave O’Carroll, Mike Cavanagh and William ‘Bird’ Hines, while they served long prison sentences for drug dealing.
But the powerful tools under the CPRA were not being fully tested, at least not in the way parliament intended the police to go after the underworld figures who had been untouchable.
The social issues of New Zealand’s frightening problem with methamphetamine (and the role of gangs in the trade) was also becoming more widely understood by the public, with Prime Minister John Key’s Cabinet drawing up an “all-of-government” approach to tackle organised crime.
One key plank of the strategy was to investigate the finances of those suspected of pulling strings from the shadows, and take their dirty money.
So police bosses drew up a list of potential targets and sitting at the top was Wayne Doyle. They wanted to show everyone that not even the president of the Head Hunters was untouchable.
The task fell to Detective Sergeant Ngahiraka Latimer to pull together a team in the Asset Recovery Unit in Auckland. There were about a dozen staff when Operation Coin started in July 2015, a mix of frontline detectives and bean counters, with the civil investigation expected to be wrapped up within three years.
Two members of the original team, Detective Steve Peat and financial analyst Kylie Cairns, were still holding the file when the case finally made it to court nearly nine years later.
Peat’s first job was to identify what assets were linked to the Head Hunters’ East chapter, obtain the property records, then untangle a web of companies and trusts to find out who the true owner was.
According to Peat’s analysis, Doyle had a controlling or financial interest in six legal entities with two inextricably linked to the birth of the East chapter shortly after he was released from prison in 2001.
The following year, East 88 Property Holdings Ltd (East 88 PHL) was incorporated by Duncan McFarlane, a colourful Wellington businessman with fingers in lots of pies.
McFarlane, who happened to be a close friend of Doyle’s, was the sole director and shareholder of the newly formed company.
Soon afterwards, East 88 PHL purchased 232 Marua Rd from an associate of the Head Hunters for $330,000 (the market value was $500,000) which was funded by two mortgages.
Then in 2004, Doyle also became a director and shareholder.
He held 33% of East 88 PHL and shifted his shareholding to the Doyle Trust, of which he was the sole settlor, trustee and beneficiary.
Upon his death in 2010, McFarlane’s 32% share was also transferred to the Doyle Trust.
The remaining 35% was held by seven different trusts in the names of senior Head Hunters (all with serious criminal records).
Doyle was also a trustee for each of those trusts.
The effect of that, Peat believed, was that Doyle had control over every share in the company which owned the gang’s headquarters.
Easily the most impressive gang pad in the country, 232 Marua Rd was where the Head Hunters socialised, trained in their impressive gym facilities (complete with swimming pool), hosted “fight nights”, stored their motorcycles, and gathered for their regular national “church” meetings.
Doyle, and a few other senior members such as Bird Hines, even lived in the premises which was monitored by security cameras, and gang members rostered on guard duty.
The buildings were also the offices of a charitable trust, That Was Then This Is Now (TWTTIN).
This trust was also set up by Doyle shortly after his release from prison, ostensibly to reintegrate ex-inmates back into the community by providing education and social services.
In April 2003, not long after East 88 PHL bought 232 Marua Rd, the buildings were leased to the TWTTIN trust for $60,000 each year.
Doyle was never a TWTTIN trustee despite at times holding himself out as one, but otherwise had control of the charity including its bank accounts and finances.
Peat’s review of all the banking records led him to believe that the stated charitable purpose was a sham.
In reality, Peat believed the trust was nothing but a front to feather the Head Hunters’ own nest.
The gang was able to refurbish and upgrade 232 Marua Rd (while benefitting from tax breaks) for their own personal use and promote the Head Hunters’ brand. The $330,000 of mortgage loans had also been paid off within four years.
The next step was to obtain the financial records for each of the six Doyle entities.
Peat fired off “production orders” to banks, accountants, telco providers, and lawyers which required them to hand over documents, such as cheques or deposit slips, for countless transactions - some dating back to the 1980s.
Each set of records would raise new questions for Kylie Cairns, so Peat would have to send another production order.
All of these transactions were collated by Cairns into spreadsheets for analysis. The results raised eyebrows.
Between January 2001 and September 2017, the six Doyle entities received funds of $17.8m, of which $9.2m were cash deposits.
Patterns began to emerge as Cairns and Peat went cross-eyed staring at thousands of columns and rows in their spreadsheets.
“Rent” (total $662,860), “donations” or “koha” ($164,750), “fight night” or “lottery sales” ($2,334,396), and “loan” ($880,000) were common references for deposits into the TWTTIN trust accounts. Another $6,638,676 in deposits were simply unexplained.
A more likely explanation, Peat and Cairns believed, was that the charitable trust was being used as a money laundering vehicle to wash the criminal profits of drug dealing or violent offending.
“Koha” was also a term used by Head Hunters, the Operation Coin investigation would later discover, to give back a cut of their criminal earnings to the gang.
Doyle was the Head Hunters, according to the police analysis of the ownership structure, and he was definitely getting money from somewhere.
Leaving aside 232 Marua Rd, Doyle and his family had also acquired four residential properties across Auckland. The council valuations in 2017 were just shy of $6m.
Not bad for a beneficiary who had spent nearly his entire adult life either unemployed or in prison.
While Peat and Cairns pieced together countless financial records, the rest of the Operation Coin team were given an equally laborious task.
They pulled every single major investigation file involving the Head Hunters for the past 20 years, and even further for Doyle’s criminal history which started in the 1970s.
The offending could be roughly split into two camps.
Firstly, commercial drug manufacture and distribution led by senior members such as ‘Pedro’ Cleven (Operation Mexico), Dave O’Carroll and Michael Cavanagh (Operation Genoa), ‘Bird’ Hines (Operation Sylvester) and Brownie Harding (Operation Easter) to name but a few.
Police seized millions of dollars in cash and other assets, such as luxury cars and gold bullions, in these cases.
Secondly, the underworld practice of ‘taxing’ where the Head Hunters would extort cash, drugs, or other valuables from other criminals in fear of violence or intimidation.
These standover tactics are reported to the police on very rare occasions as the victims are concerned of further retribution, or exposing their own criminal behaviour.
In one extreme case exposed by Operation Ark, a criminal syndicate selling designer drugs that competed with Ecstasy and other party pills were forced to pay $10,000 each week to the Head Hunters.
This was because a batch of the pills were stamped with 88. The manufacturers thought the drugs would be popular with their Chinese customers, as the numeral 8 is associated with good luck.
What they didn’t realise was that “88″ is also the number which the Head Hunters claim ownership of (H being the eighth letter in the alphabet).
Representatives of the gang made it clear there would be consequences for infringing on their brand, regardless of intention, unless the drug syndicate paid them $1 for every pill sold.
This was later increased to a weekly fee of $10,000. A spreadsheet later found by police showed they paid the Head Hunters nearly $466,000.
It was a cost of business which the illicit drug empire could not afford to refuse.
Staff from Operation Coin reviewed thousands of documents from previous police investigations, although they were looking at the evidence through a different lens than the original detectives.
While they were aiming to paint the bigger picture of the Head Hunters’ criminality (the common theme being money), the financial investigation was also looking for the smaller details about the gang’s hierarchy.
There were a few clues here that indicated Head Hunters were required to give “koha”, or commission of up to 20% of their illicit earnings, back to the club.
Being a member of a feared outlaw motorcycle gang helped them do business. Paying “koha” was the price of membership to the notorious club.
There were numerous examples where Head Hunters, overheard in conversation or messages intercepted in previous police investigations, talked about making payments to their boss, the “Chief”.
Those communications were largely irrelevant in the original investigations, but significant to the circumstantial case against Doyle being woven together by Operation Coin.
Doyle himself was never heard in these bugged conversations, with a single exception.
In January 2011, a Chinese drug supplier was kidnapped by two senior patched Head Hunters over a $190,000 debt he supposedly owed.
The pair then used him as bait to lure other drug dealers to meetings, so they in turn could be robbed by force. The gang members collected $290,000 in this fashion, telling their kidnapping victim the cash would be used to repay a loan they took from the “club” to finance the drug deal.
While holding the victim against his will at the Takapuna Motor Lodge, one of the Head Hunters phoned a fellow member at 232 Marua Rd.
The police, who at this time had launched Operation Morepork to investigate the kidnapping, covertly intercepted the conversation.
A frustrated Doyle can be overheard in the background at 232 Marua Rd asking about the “koha”, then taking over the phone to give orders directly.
Doyle: “Where can we send someone to pick it up bro?”.
Head Hunter: “Takapuna Motor Lodge”.
Doyle: “Takapuna Motor Lodge. What unit?”
Head Hunter: “Ummmm what’s our number? What’s the door number?… Number 19.”
Doyle: “Number 19”.
To the police listening in, there was no doubt who was in charge. The “Chief” had spoken.
On September 25, 2017, scores of armed police turned up at 232 Marua Rd with a search warrant.
In a press release, the police said the search followed an extensive investigation into ‘alleged accumulation of criminally derived wealth by a senior member of the Head Hunters gang’.
Described as a ‘62-year-old beneficiary’, the individual was not named in the press release and no criminal charges were laid.
But five properties linked to Doyle, including the gang’s pad, had been restrained (frozen) by the High Court following a police application under the CPRA.
“A significant amount of work has gone into Operation Coin by a dedicated group of detectives and investigators from partner government agencies,” Detective Superintendent Iain Chapman, head of the police’s Financial Crime Group, was quoted as saying in the press release.
“Police are committed to ensuring that people cannot accrue wealth and assets as a result of criminal behaviour, at the expense of the safety of our community.”
One of those partner agencies was the Ministry of Social Development which alleged that Doyle failed to declare substantial income and assets, enabling him to fraudulently claim social welfare payments of $380,992.80 between May 5, 1994 and July 16, 2017.
As detectives swarmed through the Heads’ gang pad and gym, then carried out computers and boxes of paperwork, Doyle stood outside speaking to senior police officers.
Dressed in a grey sweatshirt emblazoned with the Head Hunters’ insignia, the shaven-headed Doyle looked stunned.
There must have been a dawning realisation of the enormity of the problem; that his personal assets - and those of the gang - would be tied up in the courts for years.
The state of limbo went on longer than anyone could anticipate.
In May 2020, the police filed an application for forfeiture of Doyle’s frozen assets and in doing so, revealed the full extent of their case. There were 33 affidavits from police officers, past and present, as well the financial analysts, MSD investigators, and all the supporting appendices.
All up, more than 9000 pages of evidence.
The trial was set down for September 2021 but Doyle’s legal team, led by Ron Mansfield KC, successfully argued that he needed more time to prepare for the complex case.
A new hearing was scheduled for July 2022, although that date was also postponed because of ongoing legal arguments which went to the Court of Appeal.
Finally, in October 2023 (six years after the assets were first restrained), the civil action between the Commissioner of Police vs Wayne Stephen Doyle commenced in the High Court at Auckland.
The hearing stretched for four weeks, the longest ever under the CPRA law, with lawyer Mark Harborow calling witness after witness.
While the evidence was complex in many respects, the police case boiled down to a simple concept.
Many Head Hunters had made money from their crimes, and a portion of those profits (labelled as “koha”, “donations”, “rent”, or “loans”) filtered back to the gang as a commission.
As the boss of the gang, the police alleged, Doyle had kept himself at arm’s length from those crimes but still received the financial benefit of the money flowing into the various entities he controlled.
“He’ll never use the word president,” said Detective Inspector Kevin McNaughton, formerly the officer-in-charge of the Motorcycle Gang Unit, in giving evidence at the trial.
“But we can all tell a leader from how they behave, and how people behave around them … I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to anyone who’s said Wayne Doyle wasn’t the leader of the Head Hunters.
“I’ve never heard anyone say he is not in charge, the chief, the boss, WD.”
No one except WD himself.
Giving evidence in his own defence, Doyle sat in the witness box and was cross-examined by Harborow for hours.
The pair jousted back-and-forth, with Doyle conceding he was a senior member of the Head Hunters.
But he adamantly denied any leadership role in the gang, official or otherwise, or receiving any dirty money because of that status.
When confronted by any messages or recordings of Head Hunters that contradicted that position, Doyle would dismiss them as drug addicts or empty boasts.
“This guy is a lunatic,” Doyle said of one patched member. “He’s ringing from prison and he’s talking all this crap to these young fellas who look up to him.
“He’s just making trouble. He’s making trouble for me today.”
Doyle also professed to despising methamphetamine, and the effect the drug has on society, which jarred with the fact so many of his fellow senior Head Hunters made a lot of money from the drug trade.
But there was one piece of evidence which encapsulated the essence of the police case which was very hard to explain away. And it wasn’t even part of the original Operation Coin investigation.
Between May 2020 and July 2021 (after Doyle’s properties were restrained) the ANZ bank submitted three “suspicious activity” reports in relation to one of Doyle’s accounts to help pay for his legal battle.
The police uncovered nearly $200,000 in funds that were put into the trust accounts of law firms on behalf of Doyle.
Many of the cash deposits were amounts less than the $10,000 threshold which triggers a red flag for the banks to report to the police.
More than $72,000 was transferred from a shell company based in Hong Kong, which the police managed to trace back to a convicted Chinese drug importer living in Auckland.
He also just happened to be a neighbour of the Head Hunters at 232 Marua Rd.
Doyle needed a war chest to fight the case, and the police alleged these surreptitious funds were more proof of the influence and loyalty that he inspired within the Head Hunters.
Once again, Harborow said, it showed Doyle was willing to accept money from people involved in the criminal underworld for his own benefit.
The Head Hunter was at a loss to explain any of it.
Doyle: “I’ve never met these people. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
Harborow: “Well it’s got everything to do with you because these are people who are giving you money for your legal expenses?”
Doyle: “I do not know these people. I have never met these people in my life. It’s just a bad coincidence that his guy lives in Marua Rd.”
Harborow: “A bad coincidence that he’s in Marua Rd and he’s a drug dealer and he’s transferring money to your legal fighting fund?”
Doyle: “Yes”.
On Tuesday, nearly 10 years after Operation Coin first began, Justice Peter Andrew issued his eagerly awaited decision on the Commissioner of Police vs Wayne Stephen Doyle.
The 154-page civil judgment traversed the law and the reams of evidence placed before him, although the judge noted there were witnesses who would not step foot in the High Court for fear of reprisals from the Head Hunters.
Gangs are a complex social phenomenon, Justice Andrew said, and he accepted Doyle’s statement that the Head Hunters provide companionship, a source of identity, and a sense of belonging to a community.
The judge also believed Doyle when he said that he provided pastoral care to the younger members of the gang.
However, it would be wrong to infer that Doyle’s interest in their welfare was simply a legitimate and innocent role, Justice Andrew said.
As well as being a motorcycle club, the judge said the Head Hunters were also an organised criminal group with many of its members engaging in drug dealing and violent offending for profit.
“The sheer volume of Head Hunters, including patched members, prospects, and associates, convicted of very serious criminal offending in the last 20 years makes that abundantly clear,” Justice Andrew said.
Despite assertions that he was a senior member of the gang because of his longevity, as opposed to being in charge, the judge rejected Doyle’s evidence as “implausible”.
“Mr Doyle is obviously a strong and powerful personality who can and does intimidate others … The irresistible inference from all the evidence is that he sits at the pinnacle of the Head Hunters and is an extremely, if not the most, influential person in that organisation.”
The judge also ruled that the charitable trust controlled by Doyle, That Was Then This Is Now, was a front for the Head Hunters and used to launder millions of dollars.
After nearly a decade of investigation and litigation by the police, Doyle was ordered to sell his properties - at 232 Marua Rdincluding the Head Hunters pad - to pay a profit forfeiture order of $14.8m.
It won’t be the end of the matter.
His lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, immediately signalled that an appeal would be lodged, and even if the police prevail in the next legal battle, there is still the question of who would want to buy a confiscated gang pad?
It doesn’t matter, detectives who have investigated the gang for years told the Herald.
Although far larger sums of money have been forfeited under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act, Operation Coin is probably the most significant victory by the police simply because of who Doyle was for so many years: untouchable.
Jared Savage is an award-winning journalist who covers crime and justice issues, with a particular interest in organised crime. He joined the Herald in 2006, and is the author of Gangland and Gangster’s Paradise.