KEY POINTS:
Labour Weekend 2005, Saturday, 5am. George Naea, 17, calls in to check on his dad, Lio, while making his way home from his part-time job stuffing inserts into the day's newspapers. George looks out for Lio, a chronic alcoholic who left the family long ago. The scene at Lio's Otara home is worse than ever - teenagers from a neighbourhood gang called the PDBs have trashed the place and someone has hit him. George wants revenge.
George Naea is a good boy. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and doesn't do drugs. He is a prefect at Otahuhu College, goes to church every Sunday, leads a youth group, and wants to serve as a missionary. George has a part-time job. He listens to easygoing Samoan music. He likes rugby and league. Despite his clean-cut good looks he has never had a serious girlfriend. He comes from a loving, caring family who live down a tidy Mangere cul-de-sac. He looks after his little stepbrother to give Mum a break. He always goes to the wider family gatherings. The family are proud of George's leadership qualities.
But there's something his family don't know - George is also a gangster.
He is in a street gang called the JCBs - the Juvanyle Crip Boys. And when he is with "his boys" everything changes - George becomes a thug.
The JCBs cruise in convoy and take out rival street gang members or whoever they can, using whatever they can. They attack in numbers in vicious blasts of violence. In JCB talk, these are "hits".
George has been right in the thick of these before, leaving another boy paralysed in an attack squeezed in between school and babysitting a week ago.
And now George and the JCB boys are intending to do a hit for his Dad.
Labour Weekend, Saturday, 11pm. George has gathered his JCB crew at their pad in Mt Wellington. They outnumber and are more organised than the PDB - Penion Dosina Boys - that they are about to "hit". About 40 JCBs arm themselves with bottles, table legs and baseball bats and set off in convoy, with George in the leading car.
The JCBs are a Crips gang, one of the two main Los Angeles street gangs dating back to the late 1960s. The JCB boys have picked up on them through rap and hip-hop music, through movies, through their big brothers. Their colour is blue, their insignia the blue bandanna.
For whatever reason, they have ended up Crip blue, and that's the way it is. Other so-called "youth street gangs" are often no more than a group of kids hanging together with a nickname, here one day and gone the next.
THE JCB are different. They are organised, they have T-shirts with their patch. Some have the symbol tattooed on their arms.
They are mainly Pacific Islanders and have links with other gangs in the "Crips family".
They have a fluid set-up. Some are into crime and others not. Some are members, some are hangers-on. Some are from good homes, some from bad. Some go to school, others have jobs.
JCBs give simple explanations of what they get from it - the bond with "ma boiz" is deeper than with any mate.
They even have a small "pad" off Jolson Rd in Mt Wellington where they hang out, do weights and enjoy PlayStation.
It sits right next to the Black Power headquarters - Black Power's colour is blue, too - and its Kia Kaha boxing gym, which will soon be raided by police as part of a cannabis-based crime enterprise allegedly worth more than $1 million a year.
The JCBs have ambition too. One of their top boys encourages them to stay in school because he doesn't want them to just be like any gang. In the hierarchy, police place George as part of the brains.
But they are no master criminal gang. Many, like George, are still sneaking behind their parents' backs.
George has spent the day with his mother and stepfather at their fortnightly family gathering at an aunt's house before some mates pick him up.
He tells Mum he is off to visit his Dad. She tells him not to be home late because "it's church tomorrow".
Labour Weekend, Sunday, 1.45am. George and the JCBs arrive in the Otara neighbourhood and with no sign of the PDBs, attack a nearby party where they might be. Screaming "JCBs" and throwing bottles, they smash up cars. They find two PDBs on the street and chase them down. George "goes for gold", bashing one on the head with a wooden baseball bat while another JCB beats the other. They leave them for dead.
Word reached the PDBs that Lio had called on George to get his JCBs to "do a rush" in retaliation for messing up his place.
The PDBs are a loose "street crew" made up of schoolboys and teenagers from among the 100 or so fibre-cement-clad houses in the tight network of cul-de-sacs and streets.
There seems to be only a hardcore of a dozen. They don't have a colour and seem to be more of a gang, tagging, drinking in the park, and "spotting"cannabis oil.
They know the neighbourhood well, skipping between sections, down alleyways and up to each other's bedroom windows.
On the tier of street gangs, the PDBs probably sit just above "wannabes". Much as they would like to, the PDBs certainly don't "run this 'hood". Some members couldn't even get into the party that night. Lio, the annoying drunk they dismiss as a "fob", is the only guy they seem to be on top of.
This part of Flat Bush, Otara, is a cars-on-front-lawn neighbourhood, a hard-working, hard-living place where the men wear work boots and pick the missus up from housie. Tonight, they watch the NPC final on delayed coverage. The kids wear Dickies pants and have afros.
There are no mature trees, every place looks the same. Decile-one schools. At the Dawson Rd shops, a takeaway advertises deep-fried chicken wings for 60c each. The dairies do money transfers to the Islands, and the Samoa Observer is on sale.
And there's plenty of booze for sale. Two-for-one deals are the norm - get two big bottles of Jim Beam for $66, save yourself a buck. The PDBs certainly drink. So far this weekend it's been bourbon, gin, beer and pre-mixes.
The PDBs have a three-street "empire" of Penion Drive, Dosina Place and Norrie Smith Ave. But tonight they can't protect it.
Labour Weekend, Sunday, 2am. PDB Marlan Tuporo sees his two PDB "brothers" lying on the ground in pools of blood. Believing at least one is dead, he stalks off after George's father, who has just stumbled home. Tuporo follows him inside, whacks him in the face with a pipe wrench then stabs him in his chest with a kitchen knife. "I just done a 187," Tuporo tells a friend." "187" is the American police code for homicide, a term used often in gangsta rap.
That is a "youth street gang killing" with the usual mishmash of reasons - alcohol, testosterone, social disconnection, poverty, hip-hop and rap culture, gangs, peer pressure, lack of parental supervision, excessive violence, poor choices.
The sad reality: a wrench dumped in a lavatory, Lio Naea dead, a cigarette still in his hand, his machete still beneath his tatty single bed in the lounge, the school photos and awards of his estranged kids on the wall.
Only 24 hours earlier George was stuffing inserts into the Weekend Herald, while Marlan, and Lio, his victim, were drinking together.
The neighbourhood will wake to another Sunday morning of uniformed police in the streets, cordons and detectives with notebooks knocking on their doors. In 15 minutes everything has changed. These kids face jail, grief, or hospital.
Labour Weekend, Sunday 1pm. George, with no idea his father is dead, has been sending congratulatory texts to other JCBs about the hit they put on the night before. He says, "If they do it again we'll kill them". When he arrives back at a family get-together his stepfather takes him to one side to tell him his father has been killed. George goes silent, his head drops. He weeps. He will go to his father's funeral in handcuffs.
The killing comes as no surprise to some. Otara community and youth workers had been predicting a death from the street gang wars, asking if that was what it would take for action to be taken.
The death has now come, and Otara goes into crisis mode. Aiming to diffuse the tensions and prevent another death, within a few weeks a group of community-spirited "old Otarians", including Allan Va'a, set up a youth worker organisation called 274, named after the first three digits of Otara phone numbers.
Others were not as worried - publicly at least. Counties-Manukau Police's Detective Inspector Steve Rutherford talked of the "odd incident here and there" with street gangs, and promised that "they're going to be eradicated".
Manakau City Mayor Sir Barry Curtis described the JCB-PDB battle and Lio's death as an isolated incident that "shouldn't cast unnecessary odium on Manukau".
Such views are wrong. It is the first of 10 youth or street gang killings to hit Auckland. Eight will be here on the "Southside".
Monday, September 4, 2006, almost a year after Lio's murder. "My advice to parents is to keep your kids indoors after dark in South Auckland. It's got to that stage," says Detective Senior Sergeant Gary Lendrum after a weekend of street gang violence in which an Otara boy died.
Nobody predicted the chain of street-gang related killings that hit South Auckland last year.
A stabbing, a shooting, and a deliberate hit-and-run. There were innocent victims too: a teenage bystander clubbed with a baseball bat, and a worker bashed while going to get his breakfast.
Auckland was hit too: a 14-year-old was stabbed at a church-organised hip-hop rally, again apparently unprovoked.
Then there were the pitched battles that could have taken lives but didn't.
Beyond the headline-grabbing gang violence is the underlying criminal element in the street gangs, last estimated to have 1000 members and associates in South Auckland alone.
They offer a straightforward career path from wannabe, to violent territory soldier, to a gang involved in organised petty crime, to one with direct links with an "adult" gang and drugs.
The JCBs are stepping up. Its members have been involved in serious crimes since the attack, including one, who cannot be named for legal reasons, being charged with murder.
The street gangs are growing up - and not in a good way.
Saturday, July 16, 2007. Time magazine's cover story is on New Zealand gangs. A "new wave of vicious teen gangsters reveal the ugly reality", it says. There is a series of black-and-white photographs of gangsters and eye-witness detail of a series of stabbings during a night on South Auckland's streets. The gang story sits next to an article about Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail.
The street gangs of South Auckland making the cover of Time would make excellent rap lyrics.
Inspector Jason Hewett, frontman for the Counties-Manukau police's fight against street gangs, is clearly unimpressed.
The district's policing development manager wonders if he should bother talking to the media.
Derek Crafar, newly appointed national manager for youth gangs for the Ministry of Social Development - which is pumping $10 million of taxpayers' money into the problem - sits alongside in agreement.
Hewett says the "relentless" reporting of youth gangs has contributed to the problem and he won't discuss the up-to-date estimated numbers of gang members ("unhelpful", he says) or specific gangs ("it just gives them mana").
Hewett prefers to raise questions such as, "What defines a youth gang?"
He points out that a kid with a cap on backwards standing on a street corner is not necessarily a street gang member and that gangs, by any definition, make up just a fraction of South Auckland's population.
He says the police response - achieved with existing and "redirected" resources - is working. They have gone for "suppression" or zero-tolerance policing using "youth action teams" in barred trucks to hit trouble-spots, plus hardline enforcement of liquor bans and bail conditions.
Schools such as George's Otahuhu College claim they have shut the gangs out at the gate and "moved on".
Hewett can proudly point out that there has not been a youth gang killing all year.
So is there still a youth gang problem in South Auckland?
Hewett: "I can't answer that, because I can't define what a youth gang is."
Crafar: "There are issues with our young people that we want to deal with."
July 28, 2007. Dance group Dziah compete at the World Hip-Hop Championships in Los Angeles. They are mainly Otara kids, based at the two studios at the 274 headquarters. Hip-hop dance such as street-style krumping is one of the main activities available to the 250 teens and children who regularly attend.
The 274 development is one of the good news stories of the youth gang killings.
"Old Otarian" Allan Va'a, a South Auckland youth worker for 22 years, helped to set it up after the gang problems that led to Lio's death literally landed on his doorstep - the killer, PDB member Marlan Tuporo, was Va'a's neighbour on Penion Drive.
The night changed his life too. Va'a has been working fulltime for 274 ever since.
274 is a "club". About 250 kids come here every week and Va'a says its objective, is to "flip the script" on the gang culture and give them something else to believe in.
Youth worker Tia Suemai has been working with the PDB gang since Lio's killing and says they don't really exist any more - they have grown up and moved on.
He still works in the area, running "Gentleman's Quarterly" nights, at which the boys learn grooming or get to go on fun "practice dates" with older women.
Va'a and Suemai have positive stories - kids into jobs, a boy who quit gang life and became dux.
But Va'a is straight up: Otara has a worse gang problem than ever and so does South Auckland.
Asked if he thinks there will be another killing, he admits he doesn't want to say either way, "because I just hope there isn't".
It is not the "heavy" social work favoured by some, but Va'a is confident they are making an impression and says the gangs don't like the way they are stealing their soldiers.
But what of boys like George Naea, who doesn't fit the mould of a troubled kid?
This is one of the big concerns for Va'a, who says wearing the same scarf as the kids in your street is not a fashion statement, "but the seeds of a gang life".
He says that from that moment on there is the framework for peer pressure, for alcohol, for mixing with a bad crowd, for using mass violence, for doing drugs and doing crime.
These boys know their families love them, "but still lack a sense of value somewhere", Va'a says.
This trigger for gang life could be anything: a teacher who is down on them, a big brother who bullies them.
"So they look for value in the first place they can find it - on the streets outside."
The 274 effort has $2.5 million of the MSD funding to keep it going for the next four years.
The police investigation into Flat Bush and the legal costs are estimated to have topped $2.5 million.
July 2007. George Naea is convicted in the High Court at Auckland of injuring with intent. He is acquitted of a more serious charge of attempted murder. His mother weeps in the gallery. Five other JCBs go down for the attack. At a separate trial, Marlan Tuporo is convicted of murdering Lio Naea and gets a life sentence. His mother watches from the gallery.
George's mum, Emo, and his stepfather, Tom Latu, sit in the lounge of their home in a new subdivision on the way to the Auckland airport.
This is not a family "at-risk", nor a family "known to police".
A picture of George - handcuffed, but joking, while allowed out for his father's funeral - is the screensaver on their computer.
George, now 19, has been in jail for almost two years.
He is already serving five years for the after-school attack and now faces the prospect of more jail time for the Flat Bush attack.
A stay-at-home mum and a hard-working stepdad - they are dedicated parents and can offer no explanation for the picture of the JCB gang painted in the court case.
Emo sat through the whole trial, always with a fresh flower in her hair.
At least, she says, "there is no JCB ... We always know where he is. When does he have the time?"
They account for the admissions he made in police statements by saying George was exhausted and grieving when he made them.
They shake their head at talk of the attack George was involved in a week earlier.
They are not naive. They know how dangerous South Auckland can be. But they never saw a blue bandanna, never heard him listen to rap music. They tried to keep a close eye on who he had as mates. They never saw him angry, never heard him swear.
George managed to keep his gang life from them through texting and sneaking about: by being an ordinary teenager.
Emo cries quietly at talk of George in jail, but her face bursts into life when she talks of his ambition to serve their mission.
Tom has tears in his eyes too. They believe there was nothing more they could have done to stop what happened to George.
"Judge us how you want," he says. "What we say is the truth."
They advise parents to investigate their children's activities further, even if they don't like what they are thinking.
And as for the "trigger point", Tom points to the love George had for his father, and the issues that came with Lio's alcoholism as the fuel for his anger.
"Is jail the right place for George to learn from this?" Tom asks.
And then there is a mother's simple wish: "I just hope we see the same George again."
* George Naea will be sentenced on the Flat Bush attack next month. Cases involving the nine other street killings since Lio's death are still to go to trial.
