Sitting in the sunshine at a Mt Maunganui cafe, sipping coffee with his mum, Duax Ngakuru looked like any other bloke on his summer break.
It was December in 2017 and Ngakuru was staying nearby in a $1000-a-night holiday home he had rented with his wife, children, and their maid, where they celebrated Christmas a short walk from one of New Zealand's most popular beaches.
This trip was a homecoming for the 37-year-old Rotorua native, who had risen through the ranks of one of Australia's most notorious motorcycle gangs, the Comancheros, to allegedly become a major figure in the international drug trade.
Ngakuru was now based in Turkey, from where he operated beyond the reach of Australasian law enforcement as the Comancheros' "international commander".
From the moment he arrived in New Zealand on that trip, Ngakuru was under constant surveillance by detectives in the National Organised Crime Group, who suspected the Comancheros boss had muscled in on the lucrative drug trade in the country of his birth. Over a few weeks, they watched closely as Ngakuru splashed out $55,000 in cash on luxury accommodation, including at the Hilton Hotel on Auckland's waterfront, and fancy restaurants.
It was also a working holiday. Police observed Ngakuru meeting with rival gang leaders and an associate who had been deported from Australia, according to police records obtained by the Weekend Herald. The detectives suspected Ngakuru was planning to expand his drug distribution network in New Zealand.
As tempting as it was to arrest Ngakuru, the detectives involved in Operation Van (as the investigation was codenamed) felt they needed more time to build a case. So they kept their distance, taking a calculated risk to let Ngakuru fly home to Istanbul while they gathered more evidence about his operation here.
Four years later, they're trying to get him back.
Duax Hohepa Ngakuru is a central figure in a group of overlapping criminal investigations, both in New Zealand and overseas, which have exposed an alleged drug organisation that law enforcement authorities suspect sent hundreds of kilograms of methamphetamine, cocaine and MDMA into New Zealand over several years.
Those investigations included Operation Trojan Shield, the so-called "sting of the century" conceived by the FBI and Australian Federal Police, in which organised crime figures around the world were tricked into using an encrypted messaging platform called Anom. The alleged criminals believed they were communicating privately, but their conversations were being monitored by investigators.
In June, law enforcement agencies in 16 different countries arrested more than 800 people, in what has been described as one of the most significant blows against organised crime in history.
For several years, detectives infiltrated deeply into Ngakuru's New Zealand business, conducting extensive surveillance on individuals in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Waikato who they suspected were involved in importing, distributing, and selling illicit drugs. As a result of those investigations, more than 1200 criminal charges have been laid against 40 individuals in this country.
The Weekend Herald has obtained hundreds of pages of legal documents relating to those criminal cases, which provide an unprecedented insight into the inner workings of an alleged international drug empire of staggering ambition and reach. Included in the documents were police allegations that:
• Ngakuru personally made more than $100 million from drug dealing, according to his alleged "right-hand man".
• Ngakuru had ties to powerful international organised crime groups including Mexican cartels and syndicates in China and the Middle East.
• His network used a variety of daring techniques to smuggle vast quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine into New Zealand, with street values in the tens of millions of dollars.
• Ngakuru boasted of having multiple "doors" to the New Zealand market, which were facilitated by corrupt port, airport and postal workers.
• Ngakuru's network was highly sophisticated and organised. They communicated using encrypted technologies that, until Operation Trojan Shield, law enforcement agencies could not crack. In these secret messages, Ngakuru was referred to by aliases including "Negotiator", "Bullseye", "Chuck Norris", and "El Mito (The Myth)".
The Weekend Herald can also reveal that Ngakuru has himself been charged, in the Hamilton District Court, with drug conspiracy, import and supply offences, money laundering, and participating in an organised criminal group. New Zealand Police are seeking to extradite him from Turkey so he can face trial here.
A new breed of gangster
Ngakuru was born in Rotorua in January 1979 and moved to Australia with his family in his early teens.
He became friends with Mahmoud "Mick" Hawi, who became national president of the Comancheros at only 21. Another mate was Hakan Ayik, known as "Big Hux," who although not a member of the Comancheros rose to power in Sydney's underworld with a combination of brains, brawn, and ability to bring people together for a common purpose: making money.
Ayik was alleged to be able to source drugs overseas through Chinese crime syndicates and use the strength of the Comancheros to distribute the product through Australia. Ngakuru was the gang's enforcer, the sergeant-at-arms, but took control of the Comancheros in 2009 when Hawi was jailed for the manslaughter of a rival gang member in a sickening brawl in front of hundreds of travellers in Sydney's airport, according to Australian media reports.
Ayik and Ngakuru were alleged to be a new breed of organised criminals: living a lavish lifestyle and unafraid to flaunt it on social media. Ayik became known in the Australian media as the "Facebook gangster".
Their unexplained wealth and growing influence did not go unnoticed by law enforcement. For two years, Australian police, through "Operation Hoffman", targeted Ayik and the Comancheros to dismantle their syndicate.
But their tentacles had spread everywhere: A corrupt police worker caught leaking records. A safehouse stacked with military-grade rifles, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests, and explosives. Dodgy wharfies steering drug shipments through the ports. Millions of dollars shifted overseas by professional money launderers.
A tip from Operation Hoffman to New Zealand detectives led to the biggest drugs bust in Tongan history when a corrupt Customs official was caught with 30 litres of liquid methamphetamine concealed inside red wine bottles destined for Australia.
Ayik and Ngakuru slipped the net in Australia and fled to Turkey, where Ayik was a citizen. Ayik, the Facebook gangster, posted a taunt on social media to the officers pursuing them: "Catch me if you can."
The rampant NZ meth market
Their self-imposed exile did not slow them down. If anything, Ngakuru's and Ayik's new home in the Mediterranean provided more networking opportunities to grow their business.
One of the markets they allegedly targeted was Ngakuru's home country, where the appetite for methamphetamine was growing rapidly.
There was a time, in the early 2000s, when New Zealand police celebrated seizing 1kg from a large-scale drug dealer. But by 2015, there had been a profound shift in the market here. Much bigger shipments were coming into the country from Southeast Asia and, for the first time, Mexico; now police and Customs were intercepting shipments of 100kg, 200kg, even up to 500kg.
New Zealand was a relatively small market but there were profits to be made. While 1kg of meth might cost $1000 in Mexico or China, it sold for between $100,000 to $200,000 in New Zealand, which had put it on the radar of international crime syndicates. The lucrative margins had also caught the attention of Duax Ngakuru, according to police.
Around the same time, a change in immigration policy meant Australia could cancel visas of individuals on "good character" grounds. Over the next few years, thousands of these so-called "501s'"- named after the new section of the immigration law - were deported "home" to New Zealand, even though many of them had left here when they were children.
They often returned penniless, with no long-term accommodation, employment or even family to support them. Many had mental health issues or drug and alcohol addictions. They were vulnerable, with no one to care for them.
Among the 501s was a somewhat smaller subset that posed a much greater risk to New Zealand: Australian bikies and their associates who were targeted for deportation because of their links to the gangs.
At least a dozen Comancheros, and more associates, were sent to New Zealand including some with ties to Duax Ngakuru.
One of these associates was his cousin, Shane Ngakuru, who was deported after serving a prison sentence of eight years in Australia for supplying a large quantity of methamphetamine. He stayed in Auckland for just six weeks, before moving to Phuket in Thailand.
It was in 2016 that New Zealand police became aware of Duax and Shane Ngakuru's growing activity here and opened Operation Van, a joint investigation led by Detective Sergeant Bruce Howard, of the National Organised Crime Group, and Customs.
In April of that year, Customs identified a parcel labelled as two Blackberry phones delivered to a home in the Tauranga suburb of Otūmoetai. Four more Blackberry devices were sent to different addresses in Clendon and Manurewa in June, with two more delivered to the Otūmoetai address in October. The packages were sent from Shane Ngakuru's address in Thailand.
Although Blackberry had been overtaken in popularity at that time by Apple's iPhones, they had an enormous advantage for criminals: all communications between Blackberry devices were encrypted and could not be intercepted by police.
For years, police had listened to phone calls or read text messages between targets in covert investigations, which were valuable pieces of evidence, even when the targets talked in code.
The switch to encrypted technology, which later became readily available to anyone with a smartphone, slowed progress on police inquiries like Operation Van, which had to rely more heavily on other methods of investigation such as physical surveillance and listening devices concealed inside vehicles and dwellings.
Through these methods, police identified a crew they believed was working for Ngakuru in New Zealand. That was how they knew Ngakuru was meeting with gang leaders in the Bay of Plenty and Auckland on his summer holiday in 2017.
One of the individuals, living in Rotorua, was described as Ngakuru's "right-hand man". Police listened into conversations in which this man, whom the Weekend Herald cannot name for legal reasons, allegedly talked about hiding methamphetamine inside leisure boats imported from China and cocaine inside blocks of balsa wood from Ecuador, as well as chartering a 100-foot yacht to Tonga to pick up a shipment of drugs.
Nothing came of those discussions, but according to a description of the conversations seen by the Weekend Herald, in November 2018 a $180,000 vessel was purchased on Ngakuru's behalf and berthed at the Tauranga marina.
Police allege Ngakuru's associates planned to rendezvous with a "mother ship" 200 nautical miles out to sea to pick up one tonne of cocaine, in 20kg bags, that had been sent by "Colombians".
The boat was kitted out with extra fuel bladders for the long trip, new radar and floodlights. The crew also purchased a satellite phone for $2500 cash, night vision goggles, and charts for the sea between Tauranga and the Kermadec Islands.
In the end, the alleged deal didn't take place, but the plans illustrated the lengths that police believe Ngakuru's group went to in order to import drugs.
Police were also following someone who was allegedly sending money back to Ngakuru in Turkey.
Millions of dollars were collected by a family in Auckland, who kept the cash safe until Ngakuru instructed them - always by Blackberry - to shift it overseas. Most often the dirty cash was taken to professional money launderers, who washed the money through the foreign exchange system or used it to purchase gold bars.
The bullion was then physically transported by people flying from New Zealand to Turkey. There was also talk of investing $6m into a medicinal cannabis venture.
Most of the evidence and specific details obtained by the Weekend Herald cannot yet be reported because of suppression orders in the criminal cases or other legal reasons, such as to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial.
But one of the individuals under close surveillance in Operation Van who can be named was Lionel James Ruka McDonald, a Rotorua local who allegedly supplied meth on Ngakuru's instructions.
In July 2019, police executed a covert search warrant on a storage shed in Ngongotahā that McDonald rented in his father's name. They found household items, a Harley Davidson, and four metal lockers.
Inside the first three lockers were 140 parcels of methamphetamine, each weighing around 1kg, disguised as packages of Chinese tea.
Police didn't arrest McDonald right away — they didn't want to blow their investigation — but their hand was forced a month later when he visited the storage unit and removed numerous tea packages. There was no way they could let so much methamphetamine hit the streets.
They busted McDonald, trying to make it look like a lucky break by Rotorua police so as not to alert the rest of Ngakuru's network to their surveillance operation. Packed inside a chilly bin and two camouflaged bags in McDonald's Toyota Hilux they found 62 small bags of meth, weighing 36.5kg. There was another 101kg still in the storage locker.
Together, the 137.5kg the police seized from McDonald that day was the largest amount of Class A drugs ever found inside New Zealand's border. At the wholesale rate of $140,000 per kilogram at the time, the stash was worth around $20m — although it would have fetched much more when broken down and distributed to users.
McDonald's arrest led to panicked phone conversations between others allegedly involved in Ngakuru's New Zealand operation, which the police were able to eavesdrop on because of listening devices planted in their cars.
The arrest came at a tricky time for the group, according to conversations monitored by the detectives. The Comancheros (who controlled most of the cocaine coming into New Zealand, Ngakuru's alleged associates boasted on the recordings) had a "s***load" more drugs on the way. They had stitched up a deal with Colombian suppliers that took 18 months to arrange and were expecting three large shipments.
When McDonald was arrested, Ngakuru's alleged right-hand man in New Zealand instructed others working for him to vacuum-seal any cash they were holding and bury it in a hole, and to destroy any phones they had used. It was a precautionary measure, they said, and business would continue. McDonald's role in the organisation had already been replaced.
A few months after his arrest, McDonald pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine for supply, although there was no mention of Operation Van or Ngakuru in any of the court proceedings. Operation Van stayed below the radar. McDonald was sentenced to 13 years and nine months in prison, which was held up on appeal.
There was one small clue found during the raid on McDonald's house which would lead to Ngakuru's alleged network in New Zealand being blown apart, although no one could have known the significance at the time.
One of the five phones seized from his house was a Xiaomi handset loaded with an encryption platform the detectives had never seen before. It was called Anom.
The sting of the century
In October 2019, Customs intercepted a shipment of 20 Xiaomi phones sent from Hong Kong to an address in Ngāruawāhia. Ngakuru's alleged associates, it seemed, had swapped their Blackberries for newer devices loaded with an encryption app that detectives hadn't seen before: Anom.
The police went to the High Court to get a warrant that allowed them to track the phones and see when the devices transmitted or received data, but Anom's encryption meant they couldn't read the messages exchanged by their users. A few months later, in March 2020, the FBI let the detectives in on a big secret.
Anom was a set-up.
The encryption platform had been created by an informant recruited by the FBI during an investigation into Phantom Secure, another impenetrable network used by global crime syndicates, which was shut down in 2018.
With Phantom Secure no longer working, established criminal networks looked to find a new communications platform to trust. The FBI created Anom to fill the void in the market.
With the informant's help, it persuaded suspected criminals to start using Anom to do business. Anom's users believed their messages could not be intercepted. In reality, the FBI would be able to read every word courtesy of a "master key" to decrypt every single message sent on Anom.
The idea had been dreamed up over beers by friends at the FBI and the Australian Federal Police. And one of the first people they targeted in Operation Trojan Shield, as the investigation was codenamed, was Hakan Ayik.
After leaving Australia in 2010, the "Facebook gangster" had gone on to establish himself in Turkey as a major player in the global drug trade, in the assessment of Australian law enforcement. Who better to convince others in that world to use Anom?
A device was put into Ayik's hands and by word of mouth, Anom spread around the globe. More than 9000 handsets were used exclusively by organised criminal groups to communicate with one another in secret.
One of those Anom converts was Duax Ngakuru, who in turn used it to convey orders to his alleged New Zealand network on the devices that his cousin Shane had provided: the very same phones the police had been tracking for several months but couldn't crack.
After years of slogging away to gather evidence on the "international commander" of the Comancheros, New Zealand police were now given access by the FBI to every single message sent from his device. It was a goldmine of intelligence.
Ngakuru's organisation had been disciplined in their tradecraft, but their faith in Anom inadvertently handed police an unprecedented insight into the inner workings of their business.
'Make it snow'
The documents obtained by the Weekend Herald indicate that Ngakuru's alleged network simultaneously operated numerous routes into New Zealand. To keep supply flowing, they sent small quantities of drugs through courier and international mail services, labelling the parcels as "Epsom salts" or baby clothes, to addresses in New Zealand where they would be received by low-level "catchers".
Heavier shipments allegedly sent by sea or air freight revealed Ngakuru's vast connections across the world - South America, Mexico, Hong Kong, the Middle East – and the scale of his ambition.
In November 2019, the FBI intercepted encrypted Anom messages between "Ironman" in Australia and "Real G" in Lebanon. They discussed a plan in which the "Colombians" wanted to send 500kg of cocaine on a yacht from Barranquilla, on the Colombian coast.
Real G said he would talk to Duax Ngakuru and Hakan Ayik since Ngakuru had a fishing boat in New Zealand. Once they landed the shipment, Real G thought, it would be easy to transport to Australia.
He then started a new conversation with Ngakuru, who was in Thailand at the time, and Ayik in Turkey, in which they discussed meeting the yacht 100 nautical miles off the coast of New Zealand.
Ngakuru is alleged to have suggested dropping the drugs into the water, attached to a buoy, at a location marked by GPS coordinates.
But because of "recent events", which police believe hinted at the arrest of Lionel McDonald a few months earlier, Ngakuru expressed doubts as to whether his crew in New Zealand were up to the task.
He would get a new crew, said Ngakuru, but reduce the fee for their replacements.
It is unclear whether the shipment took place but his cautious approach was also seen in a different conversation in April 2021, in which Ngakuru exchanged messages with someone known as "Gringo".
He asked if Ngakuru had any divers who could retrieve drugs from a sealed compartment in a ship's hull once docked in port. Authorities were wise to that smuggling method, warned Ngakuru, noting a shipment like that had been "pinched" in Tauranga a few years ago. That was likely a reference to 46kg of cocaine caught in Operation Heracles in October 2017, the largest seizure in New Zealand so far.
Later that day, Ngakuru messaged a senior Comanchero in New Zealand, with the Anom handle of "Birdman", to ask if he had "options" for receiving heavy machinery.
Drugs would be loaded inside the machinery in Mexico, Ngakuru explained. He would send the shipment to Europe first, to disguise the country of origin. Then it would come to New Zealand.
He asked Birdman to look for people who worked at inland ports, like the one in Ruakura, near Hamilton. Ngakuru could arrange for drugs to be hidden in the lining of shipping containers, which could be cut out by a "pawn" or inside man at the land-based port.
Ngakuru boasted of having a number of these so-called "doors" into New Zealand, one of whom took up to a 25 per cent cut of the deal to guarantee safe passage through the border.
In March 2021, Ngakuru's cousin, Shane, who was still in Thailand and had become a key distributor of Anom devices, asked if Ngakuru had any drugs heading towards New Zealand.
Not right now, Ngakuru replied, but he had plans to make it "snow".
He then told a contact in Hong Kong that he was ready to move forward with a deal to "push" 120kg of methamphetamine in the next two weeks, followed by another 150kg soon after.
Meth was selling for between $170,000 and $200,000 a kilo at the time. When Ngakuru asked how much product the Comancheros could handle, Birdman's answer was: "as much as possible".
Just two months later, Ngakuru had another conversation with his associate in Hong Kong about two more shipments, 80kg and 100kg of methamphetamine. That should be enough to tide them over for winter, Ngakuru said. The supplier in Hong Kong had arranged everything; all Ngakuru's men had to do was move the product.
"Too easy brother," Ngakuru replied.
The Negotiator, Birdman and PBlock
The documents also reveal in extraordinary detail how Ngakuru's alleged distribution operation worked day-to-day once the drugs were inside New Zealand's borders.
Detectives working on Operation Equinox, an investigation into an alleged alliance between the Waikato chapter of the Comancheros and individuals in the Waikato Mongrel Mob, gathered thousands of messages in which Ngakuru's associates allegedly discussed drug deals openly as if those in the conversation had no reason to believe the police could monitor them.
Quantity. Price. Addresses. Debts. Photographs of drugs and cash offered as proof of payment.
A clear hierarchy was in place, according to the police documents. Birdman was allegedly in charge on the ground in New Zealand. He had a direct line to Ngakuru, who controlled supply into the country from his base in Turkey. Once the drugs were here, Birdman instructed workers on where to collect payment and where to deliver drugs.
Ecstasy, cocaine, methamphetamine: Birdman allegedly ordered his lieutenants to arrange for packages weighing anywhere from 1kg (which 20 years ago would have been the police bust of the year) to up to 10kg to be delivered to buyers.
They in turn would instruct the workers, who were effectively staff members collecting a weekly wage, to carry out the tasks. The lowest rungs on the ladder were earning around $3000 a week, tax-free, although Birdman slashed their pay to $1000 when the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020 made distributing drugs more difficult.
Life as a drug dealer was far from glamorous. The mundane locations where drugs were delivered, or cash collected, can read like a long list of weekend chores than a script for a television show:
Take 11kg of methamphetamine to the boat ramp in Mercer.
Pick up $40,000 in the Mitre 10 carpark in Hamilton.
Take 3kg of cocaine to the KFC in the Bombay Hills.
Collect $60,000 from the Countdown supermarket in Huntly.
Monitoring the Anom chatter, police detectives intercepted numerous conversations in which the alleged drug dealers talked about arranging safe houses in which they could receive packages from overseas or stash drugs and firearms.
They would look for rentals in "above average" neighbourhoods with privacy, preferably on the outskirts of a town and with double garages to drive into. They used false identities for the rentals, although it could take time to forge references and procure clean cellphone numbers for the "straw man".
Sometimes landlords asked to see bank statements to prove income, which could be an obstacle.
The Anom messages also revealed fluctuations in the prices of drugs, dictated by supply and demand, which the alleged dealers discussed as if they were commodities in a legitimate market. At its peak, methamphetamine fetched around $300,000 per kilogram in New Zealand, but an increase in supply pushed the wholesale price down to between $90,000 and $200,000 per kilogram.
At that time, a common price was around $125,000. The buyer would break down that amount into 35 ounces (28.5 grams) and sell them for around $5000 each, giving them a profit of $50,000 per kilogram. Street dealers are the next step in the supply chain as the retailers to the end-user, dividing the ounce into grams (up to $500) or 0.1g (known as "points") for $100.
At the wholesale level, drugs are supplied on "tick" (credit) so dealers can sell the product in order to pay for it. Birdman kept a ledger with meticulous records of amounts sold, who owed money to whom, with up to $100,000 racked up by lieutenants and their workers. He kept a close eye on the accounts and even his own family and friends were not exempt from Birdman's strict instructions.
One of his workers was dressed down for giving drugs to Birdman's father without his knowledge.
On another occasion, Birdman admonished one of his oldest friends, who called himself PBlock on Anom, who asked for another 10 ounces of methamphetamine on top of his debt of $212,000.
PBlock needed to live within his means, Birdman advised, and to live under the radar instead of drawing attention with a lavish lifestyle.
He did, however, supply the drugs to his old friend under one condition: to hand over the keys to PBlock's brand new Mercedes AMG C63, with a price tag of $160,000, as collateral.
Unspoken was what happened to those who didn't pay their debts.
One of PBlock's workers owed him $10,000, so he took the gang member's Harley Davidson motorcycle as payment instead. Taking someone's prized possessions to repay debt is known as "taxing" in the criminal underworld, where the victims of this extortion very rarely complain to the police for fear of retribution or revealing their own criminal behaviour.
Other minions were ordered to "knock off" jewellery or Louis Vuitton stores to clear a debt of just $9000. They had four weeks to "sort it", and what happened if they didn't come up with the money was unspoken.
For all the sophistication and discipline in the Birdman's network, violence was always lurking in the background.
In one conversation, the Birdman debated whether to "kneecap" someone - shoot them in the leg so as to cripple but not kill - but they agreed the gunshot would be too loud.
He decided to chop off the debtor's finger with a knife and hammer instead.
Catch me if you can
On June 7, a Monday evening, dozens of people were arrested in Auckland, Waikato, and the Bay of Plenty. It wasn't until the next morning that the magnitude of what had taken place was made public: the raids in New Zealand were part of a much larger series of strikes against organised crime figures coordinated across 16 different countries.
The big Anom secret was let out of the bag, with the ingenuity of the sting by the FBI and AFP revealed in press conferences announcing that more than 800 people had been arrested around the world.
In New Zealand, more than 40 defendants were put before the courts to face in excess of 1200 charges. Detective Superintendent Greg Williams, the head of the National Organised Crime Group, could barely suppress his smile.
"This is one of the most sophisticated law enforcement operations in the global fight against organised crime," Williams said.
"It takes years to build these networks. Large-scale operations of this nature create enormous disruption and paranoia within organised crime groups because it breaks down the communication channels that they use to evade law enforcement detection."
Two names were conspicuous, however, by their absence in court: Hakan Ayik and Duax Ngakuru are still walking free.
The good mates escaped the net of the AFP way back in 2009, when the drug bust in Tonga went bad, and have so far managed to evade capture 12 years later in Operation Trojan Shield.
Dozens of serious drug importation and organised crime charges were laid against Ngakuru in October, although New Zealand police are tight-lipped about whether the 42-year-old could be dragged back here.
Detective Inspector Paul Newman confirmed a warrant has been issued for Ngakuru's arrest and Interpol has issued a "red notice" in case Ngakuru attempts to cross an international border.
"He was recently believed to be residing in Turkey and inquiries are continuing with the Turks to confirm this," Newman said in a written statement.
"We are hopeful that Mr Ngakuru will want to return to New Zealand voluntarily to answer the allegations against him, but if he doesn't there are legal remedies that can compel him to do so."
Court documents list Ngakuru's address in Turkey as "unknown". In the past, he's been confident it will stay that way.
In one Anom conversation, Ngakuru discussed a criminal associate who moved to Turkey to avoid the Australian Federal Police. The AFP should admit they had "lost the war", Ngakuru said, because he had too much power and influence in Turkey. He could get away with murder, Ngakuru joked.
Catch me if you can.
