In the early hours of a Sunday morning in October 2019, three vehicles parked in a quiet cul-de-sac in a Papamoa subdivision went up in flames. Blackened metal husks and burst tyres were all that remained of the destroyed ute, van and car.
Frightened residents of the street told the Bay of Plenty Times they awoke to loud bangs and a car alarm blaring. One thought someone was breaking into her home.
“I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, but then I saw the light from the flames,” the woman said on the condition of anonymity. “I was s***ing myself.”
The official line from police was the fires were considered “suspicious”, but you didn’t need to be a trained detective to figure that out. Three cars don’t just spontaneously combust.
The police didn’t need to look far to work out why the property had been targeted.
Living at the address were senior members of a new gang: the Mongols.
Established by a group of 501 deportees from Australia, this Mongols chapter was the first in New Zealand and had muscled in on territory long held by the Greazy Dogs gang.
For the most part, rival gangs in New Zealand exist side-by-side in relative peace. Conflict is bad for business. But the arrival of these 501s soon challenged the local pecking order.
In this case, the Mongols had ignored established boundaries in the Bay of Plenty without paying their dues. The Papamoa arson was the start of a tit-for-tat conflict involving three different gangs, in scenes more reminiscent of Sydney’s infamous turf wars than suburban Tauranga.
Watching this unfold was a small group of detectives running a covert investigation into the Mongols, Operation Silk, which led to the biggest criminal trial of 2022.
From the streets of LA
The first chapter of the Mongol Nation was started in Southern California in 1969. The club’s name was inspired by the fearsome Mongolian Empire which conquered Eurasia under the leadership of Genghis Khan. The Mongols even put the warlord on their black and white patch, with a cartoon of him astride a humming motorcycle.
“This was a lifestyle, a culture, and a way of life for the brothers riding around on their chopped Harley-Davidson motorcycles on the streets of East Los Angeles showing power and solidarity,” according to the Mongols’ official website. “The majority of new members were Vietnam veterans … and were accustomed to a strict disciplined, regimented programme that was about honour, loyalty, respect and camaraderie. This made them a force to be reckoned with.”
Within five years, new chapters had sprouted in California and spread across the United States. Eventually they established a presence in a dozen far-flung countries including Thailand, Germany and Australia. As their numbers grew over the decades, so did the conflict between the Mongols and other outlaw motorcycle gangs.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) designated the Mongols as “the most dangerous and violent” gang in the United States after their undercover agents infiltrated the group.
In December 2018, a decade-long prosecution ended with a Californian jury finding the Mongol Nation to be a criminal enterprise guilty of racketeering, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and drug dealing.
The case was the result of an investigation, Operation Black Rain, in which four undercover agents successfully infiltrated the Mongols to become full-patch members. Four women agents also went undercover to pose as their girlfriends. The undercover agents developed and maintained biker personas, and had to undergo rigorous scrutiny by the Mongols to be accepted as members.
When one of the agents received his patch, one of the gang’s members said: “Being a Mongol promises you one of two things – death or prison”.
The first New Zealand chapter of the Mongols was established in the Bay of Plenty in the middle of 2019. There were also a handful of patched members in Auckland, Hastings and Christchurch. The gang’s New Zealand president Jim David Thacker, better known as JD, was deported from Australia five years earlier, after a biker brawl on the Gold Coast in 2013.
Back then, Thacker was a member of the Bandidos - another United States motorcycle gang that had set up in Australia - and rose to be president of its chapter in Beenleigh. He was one of dozens arrested in a rolling scrap in the Broadbeach dining precinct.
A “lynch mob” of nearly 30 Bandidos stormed a restaurant hunting for a gang rival, forcing police to fire their tasers as brawling bikers spilt out of the venue and on to the footpath in front of terrified diners. The Bandidos laid siege to the local police station to demand the release of comrades who had been arrested.
Thacker, who had been on the periphery of the violence, was sentenced to just 150 hours’ community service. But that was enough to get him kicked out of Australia as a 501 on “good character” grounds.
On his return ‘home’ to New Zealand in 2018, Thacker was appointed North Island president of the Bandidos, who had established a presence in New Zealand a few years earlier.
Eventually Thacker fell out with the gang’s hierarchy after one of his members was assaulted by other Bandidos at a party in Christchurch. Thacker and several other gang members flew to Christchurch and ambushed the assailant in a carpark building - commonly known as getting “rushed” - while filming the beating on their phones. The video was shared on social media, a literal insult to injury.
The powerbrokers in the Bandidos were unimpressed and demanded that Thacker hand in his colours. With the backing of his staunchest supporters, he refused and decided to “patch over” to the Mongols and start the first New Zealand chapter of the international gang.
One of his first purchases was a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the black-and-white colours of the Mongols. The registration plate was DPORT.
While relatively small in number – perhaps 20 patched members – their brazen attitude meant it wasn’t long until the Mongols made their presence known.
Swift retribution
On New Year’s Eve 2019, the Faded N Bladed barbershop and tattoo parlour in the Tauranga suburb of Greerton caught fire. The blaze sputtered out without causing too much damage, but a few weeks later, in late January, every window pane in the shopfront was smashed.
No one had even had a haircut yet, and this vandalism would delay the opening to paying customers until the glass could be replaced.
Then the barbershop was gutted in a second fire.
JD Thacker was angry. The barbershop was his pet project, now left in ashen ruins, and the message was resoundingly clear: leave town.
Greerton and the surrounding suburbs had long been considered the home of the Tauranga chapter of the Mongrel Mob, who hadn’t taken kindly to the arrival of the Mongols. So the Mob torched Thacker’s barbershop.
Thacker’s retribution was swift and on a scale never seen before in New Zealand gang history.
Less than 24 hours later, a car rolled up outside the home of a senior Mongrel Mob leader before daybreak. Three men stepped out of the vehicle carrying semi-automatic firearms and turned the quiet residential street into a warzone.
They opened fire on the house and riddled the Haukore St property with bullets until the magazines clicked empty.
Police officers who responded to the 111 call collected 96 bullet casings which littered the street outside. It was a miracle no one was killed. There were five children inside, some in the lounge where bullets passed through the couch they were sitting on and smashed the television screen they were watching.
Families are normally considered off limits in gang conflict, so a direct attack on a private home, that put innocent lives in danger, was only ever going to provoke one response.
Around 1.50pm that day, there were 111 calls about semi-automatic gunshots at a rural address in Te Puke where Hone Ronaki, the vice-president of the Mongols was living.
Half a dozen cars filled with angry and heavily armed Mongrel Mobsters drove there to exact revenge for the attack that morning. Ronaki was ready and waiting.
He started shooting with a semi-automatic rifle at the group of cars, which had parked down the road about 400m away.
The Mob members fired back, with shots ringing out through the kiwifruit vines, then scattered before armed police and the Eagle helicopter swarmed the area.
It would have been laughable, if it wasn’t so deadly serious. Following the tit-for-tat shooting, the police called for calm.
A meeting was convened between Thacker and a senior Mongrel Mob leader on neutral ground at a sports club in Mt Maunganui.
Once introductions had been made and assurances given, police officers left. The Mongrel Mob representative aired grievances about how they had controlled certain streets and suburbs in Tauranga for decades.
Thacker apparently interrupted to say: “Are your colours worth dying for?”
A personal feud
Tensions with the Mongrel Mob seemed to ease after the meeting, but the Mongols’ conflict with the Greazy Dogs was only just getting started. The feud became personal in May 2020, when Thacker and Leon Huritu drove on to the forecourt of the Caltex service station on Girven Rd, Mount Maunganui.
A giant of a man, Huritu was the gang’s sergeant-at-arms and nicknamed “Wolf”.
The pair went inside to pay for fuel and while they were waiting at the counter, two members of the Greazy Dogs pulled up. When one of them came inside wearing a hooded sweatshirt printed with the Dogs’ insignia, Thacker angrily confronted him: “Where are you from?”
The Greazy Dog replied he was a local, then walked back to his car followed by Thacker and Huritu, who demanded he take off his gang colours.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Wolf, who started to chase the Greazy Dog around the petrol station. Thacker walked over to the other member sitting in the passenger seat of the car.
Thacker pulled out a knife, threatened him with the blade, then took the man’s Greazy Dog hoodie from the back seat.
“That’s us, let’s go,” Thacker called to Huritu, who was still stalking the other Greazy Dog around the forecourt.
Huritu walked back to their ute, filled it up with petrol, then left with Thacker.
The Greazy Dogs were shaken by the Mongols’ aggression and humiliated by the loss of their gang colours. In the gang world, such a shameful insult can’t be allowed to slide.
A dozen or so Greazy Dogs turned up at Huritu’s home in the suburb of Matapihi to get revenge.
Huritu answered the door with a shotgun, pulled the trigger but heard nothing but a dead man’s click. The gun had jammed. Vastly outnumbered, Huritu and his family - including his heavily pregnant daughter - fled by jumping over a high fence at the back of the property, with one suffering a badly fractured ankle from the high drop.
They hid in an elderly neighbour’s home, where the police later found two shotguns stashed away for safekeeping.
The violence was getting out of control. Operation Silk had to wrap up before someone was killed.
For months, the Tauranga-based squad of the National Organised Crime Group had been covertly gathering evidence about the Mongols’ drug dealing and shootings. They wanted to prevent violence but didn’t want to blow their cover.
When the decision was made to end the inquiry in June 2020, JD Thacker was found in a BMW heading towards Welcome Bay with another patched Mongol in the driver’s seat.
Also in the car, stuffed inside a box of tissues, was a .357 calibre pistol with four of the six chambers loaded with live rounds.
The police believe the pair were on the way to shoot up the home of a senior Greazy Dog.
They were among 17 people associated with the Mongols, ranging in age from 19 to 66, who were arrested and charged with 263 offences including participating in an organised criminal group, money laundering, conspiracy to deal methamphetamine, supplying cocaine, unlawful possession of firearms and explosives.
Nineteen vehicles were seized – five motorcycles, one light truck, one heavy truck, seven cars, four utes, and a quad bike - as well as Molotov cocktails, ammunition, cannabis, methamphetamine and cash.
Over the course of the investigation, 33 illegal firearms had been found including five loaded AK-47s, an MP38 machine gun and four military-style semi-automatic rifles.
“The ongoing violence between this organised crime group and other local gangs is simply about controlling a share of this drug market,” said Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, head of NOCG, said at a press conference to announce the Operation Silk raids.
“All these gangs have made it clear that they are prepared to use violence to protect their share.”
The Mongols had radically changed the New Zealand criminal landscape, fulfilling predictions of increased violence made by detectives and local gangsters when the first 501s arrived five years earlier.
El Presidente and Wheel Man
JD Thacker and the Mongols would be behind bars for the foreseeable future. But prison didn’t slow them down. Corrections officers found a handwritten note destined to be smuggled out of prison showing Thacker was still directing the gang’s operations on the outside. It was signed “El Presidente”.
Thacker ordered the gang to collect large sums of money owed to him, spoke of his desire to “blade” a fellow inmate, and instructed one of his lieutenants, Moko Chong, to take the blame for the .357 Magnum found by police when they were arrested.
He also talked about the need to send a very clear message to a certain Mongol prospect to “shut their mouth”.
We can’t reveal the identity of this individual. But his handle on Ciphr, the encrypted phone network the gang used without fear of being caught, was Wheel Man.
When police raided Wheel Man’s house during the termination of Operation Silk, officers found an AK-47, an AR-15, a .22 calibre rifle, cannabis, three cellphones, a homemade bomb and a Molotov cocktail.
Feeling uneasy about the escalating gang conflict he was caught up in, he had baulked when Thacker ordered him to burn down the house of a Greazy Dog in the days leading up to his arrest.
Driving past the property on a reconnaissance mission, Wheel Man spotted a child’s swing and trampoline on the front lawn.
Wheel Man had his own kids and didn’t have the stomach for the kind of mayhem that would impact innocent lives. A few days later, Wheel Man and the rest of the Mongols were rounded up in the Operation Silk termination.
At first, he refused an invitation to speak with Detective Sergeant Nigel Grey, the officer in charge of the case. Disobeying instructions from your gang’s leader is one thing. Turning on your own members to give evidence against them is another matter entirely. It’s an egregious breach of the criminal code - never talk to the police - and results in the worst name a gangster can be called: Nark.
There was no doubt Wheel Man would be putting his life in danger if he agreed to talk with police.
He refused but changed his mind after one phone call.
A conversation with his terrified wife was the tipping point. While Wheel Man was sitting in a holding cell, Hone Ronaki and other Mongols turned up at his house and started taking whatever they could get their hands on.
When his wife, kids and mother tried to escape in their car, the Mongols circled on their Harley Davidsons, blocking them off in the street and nearly running them off the road.
Wheel Man couldn’t believe it. His loyalty had been repaid with the intimidation of his family. It was the final straw and sole reason Wheel Man became a pivotal Crown witness instead of a defendant in the dock along with JD Thacker, Hone Ronaki, Leon Huritu and the other Mongols facing hundreds of charges.
Wheel Man was given immunity from prosecution - a decision that needs to be signed off at the highest levels of the Crown Law office - and placed in witness protection.
Inside the Mongols
In return, Wheel Man told police about everything he did for the Mongols. Giving evidence by video-link from a secret location during the trial, which ran from August to November this year, Wheel Man explained to the jury how he became involved with the gang after moving to Te Puke in January 2019.
He met Ronaki through family and it wasn’t long before Wheel Man was spending time at his house where he was introduced to Thacker among others.
No one seemed to be working but everyone always seemed to have plenty of money, Wheel Man noticed. They carried stacks of cash, wore clothes by designers such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton, and drove expensive European cars. Ronaki, for example, drove a black Mercedes Benz V8 SUV.
One day, Wheel Man was given a test. He was asked to deliver two drug packages. He drove a V8 Commodore - licence plate BAD NEWS - to Picton and returned with $7000. Wheel Man had passed the test.
He started prospecting for the Mongols - essentially doing anything and everything asked of him to earn his patch - and became a trusted driver for Thacker.
Thacker would send Wheel Man to Auckland to pick up parcels of methamphetamine from another senior Mongol - never less than 1kg, sometimes up to 4kg - which he would deliver around the country.
The meth was “really good shit”, said Wheel Man, and he would deliver parcels as far south as the Mongols chapter in Christchurch. Ounces were selling for about $4000 so a kilogram was worth about $80,000 - the cheapest it had ever been in New Zealand.
He’d come back with cash, normally around $100,000 in $5000 bundles inside a shoebox, although on one occasion Wheel Man described a “paddling pool” full of dirty money.
As someone who had acquired a taste for the finer things in life, Thacker decided to splurge on a Christmas shopping spree in Auckland.
Each smoking a big joint out the car window, Wheel Man drove Thacker and a couple of other Mongols down Queen Street to the exclusive Louis Vuitton store.
Wearing socks and jandals, shorts and a white, long-sleeved jersey emblazoned with “Mongols”, Thacker went around the store picking out handbags and T-shirts as gifts for his family.
The bill came to a total of $19,580. Thacker pulled out so many stacks of cash from a leather satchel - Louis Vuitton, of course - that the shop assistant had to use an electronic money-counting machine.
Thacker decided to treat his Mongol brothers too. They trooped across to Foot Locker where they picked out some new kicks for Christmas, including two pairs for Wheel Man.
The bill came to $2320 and Thacker again paid in cash.
As well as moving drugs and cash on official business, Wheel Man told the jury he would also run personal errands for Thacker.
The Mongols president had an insatiable appetite for cocaine and Wheel Man would drive to Auckland to replenish Thacker’s supply for personal use.
Thacker made his way through an ounce every week “easy”, reckoned Wheel Man, who recalled one particular feat which showed Thacker’s ability to consume mind-bending drugs.
Thacker cut a line of cocaine beside a metre-long builder’s level, and snorted nearly the whole lot in one swoop. He filmed it on his phone and shared the clip on the Mongols’ Snapchat group.
The video was later recovered by police and shown to the jury. “Quite impressive,” said Wheel Man.
A path that ‘wasn’t good’
Drugs. Money. Firearms. On one occasion, Wheel Man recalled picking up a large rectangular box, a trunk meant to stow swimming toys, that was filled with guns.
Giving evidence, he rattled off the contents like it was a shopping list: a sawn-off semi-automatic shotgun with an extended magazine, a black 8mm pistol, a customised .22 rifle with an “aftermarket stock”, some AK-47s and a few AR-15s.
When it became clear the Mongols were prepared to use the firearms, the gang prospect and his partner grew nervous about the wars the Mongols were fighting.
He drew the line at being asked to burn down the home of a Greazy Dog when children clearly lived there. They decided to pack up and get out of town.
“We weren’t feeling too good about everything that was happening around us,” Wheel Man told the jury. “Violence, shootings, gun crime, people running amok, not caring about anything or anyone.
“I could see the path that it was all going down and it wasn’t good.”
Wheel Man’s evidence was crucial for the Crown case, joining the dots drawn by countless hours of surveillance and intercepted conversations to paint a vivid picture for the jury.
Because they themselves are criminals, witnesses like Wheel Man are obvious targets for experienced defence lawyers. During the trial Bill Nabney, Steven Lack and Ron Mansfield, King’s Counsel, spent days poking holes in his testimony.
He was accused of a combination of exaggeration, half-truths and outright lies. The defence lawyers tried to portray Wheel Man as betraying Thacker and other Mongols to save himself.
“You knew that if you were to get immunity for anything that you spoke about, you needed to give up senior members of the club,” said Mansfield, “and to be of value, you needed to provide the police with information that they didn’t otherwise have.”
“No,” said Wheel Man, “I believe the jury needs to see these people for who and what they actually are. What they stand for.”
At the end of a marathon trial, which stretched for more than three months (Crown Solicitor Anna Pollett spent three days just summing up the evidence for each of the 137 charges), the jury decided exactly who the Mongols were.
After deliberating for six days, the jury foreman said ‘guilty’ 113 times. Every Mongols office holder on trial - Hone Ronaki, ‘Silver’, Leon ‘Wolf’ Huritu, Kelly ‘Rhino’ Petrowski, and Jason Ross (a Hells Angel who patched over to become president of the Christchurch chapter) - was convicted of either drug supply, participating in an organised criminal group, unlawful possession of firearms, firing with reckless disregard, money laundering or a combination of those.
The worst outcome was saved for JD Thacker, however. ‘El Presidente’ was found guilty of 40 serious charges. Being a Mongol promises one of two things - death or prison - and Thacker is likely to spend a long time behind bars after his sentencing hearing in April.
