Born to Fight (5 page)

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shit I did as a teenager, regretting the decisions I made or feeling bad about the people I hurt. I do think about my decision to pester John that afternoon, though, and I do wonder how things might have turned out for him if I hadn’t.

We were sent to different prisons: John to Mount Eden Prison, a nineteenth-century monolith of a jail, and me to Waikeria Corrections Facility, then New Zealand’s largest prison. Waikeria was probably the place where my childhood ended. My immaturity would continue for decades, but once you go to an adult prison, it’s hard to stay a kid.

Although the time I spent in Waikeria was probably the least violent in my life at that point, I did get belted the day I got in there. It was a screw who hit me, while I was drawing on my arm in a lame attempt to look like the rest of the real men with real tattoos

‘You cut that shit out, kid,’ he barked with a finger in my face. I did.

It occurred to me then that this dude had the ultimate level of control over me. I was getting pretty big, so not even Dad had that level of control over me anymore. This guy, though, he could do whatever he wanted to do to me in this place.

A few hours after that, another level of prison control revealed itself when I got into gen-pop. I was talking to
this Pakeha dude – shaved head, gothic tatts and also fresh to Waikeria – and out of the blue, one of the prisoners walking past just launched at him. The stranger took him off the bench, onto the ground and just started whaling into him with punches.

It wasn’t like that outside. Outside there’d usually be words or stares before the fists came. Here it was just a storm from blue skies.

‘Why were you talking to that guy?’ the puncher asked me after he’d finished with his prey. I said I didn’t know. He was just a guy.

‘Well fucking don’t, kid. Stick with your own.’

There were new rules, and one of those was that a coconut like me wasn’t going to be talking to any skinheads. The guy who was doing the punching was named Jinx, and he was one of the alpha males in the joint. I was going to be following his lead. That was going to work for me.

Like most prisons around the world, the gangs ran Waikeria, and if they decided to mess with you, then prison wasn’t going to be much fun. Thankfully, the gangs didn’t mess with me, and I quickly learned all the rules of the place. Things were especially easy for me perhaps because I was at the bottom of the heap – I was a kid after all. There really wasn’t much point in fucking me up.

I ended up having a pretty good time in prison. It felt like a holiday. There were three square meals a day – that was my favourite part – and work at the nearby dairy farm, and weights, and ‘crash’, which was a jail version of rugby league played on cement and sometimes – in my case, anyway – barefoot.

I was one of the better crash players in prison, and that gave me some social currency among the inmates. More came when Josh Mataulfati, a gang leader and one of the prison’s toughest guys, took me on as a sort of personal assistant and training lackey. Mataulfati was a kickboxer, and gave me the job of organising his gear and holding the bag for him while he trained.

I’d always loved my kung fu films, but this was the first time I’d seen martial arts for real. Josh was a good kickboxer: his strikes were precise, deliberate and well thought out. I appreciated the artistry and power of his punches, and I loved the
boom
when a good kick landed on the bag.

You might be thinking it was here that I saw a future in those martial arts for myself. You might also be thinking that I saw a future in crime, but in both cases you’d be mistaken. I never threw one punch in prison, not in anger, nor on a bag or pad. I wasn’t thinking about any future in
prison at all, I was just enjoying a break from the chaos my life had been.

One day after he finished training, Josh asked me if I wanted to ‘nom up’ (start the nomination process) for his gang the Mongrel Mob. Up to that point I’d never thought about what I wanted out of life, but this offer forced me to think ahead. Nomming up was committing to a certain life, and a certain code.

‘Nah, I’m right.’ That’s what I told Josh.

Even though I’d be coming out of jail a sixteen-year-old, uneducated, penniless, convicted criminal, I felt like I could get more out of this life than crime, gangs and prisons. I eventually ended up being right, but man, for a while there it was a close-run thing.

It had only been a few months, but when I got out of Waikeria I felt like I had crossed some kind of threshold. I felt older. I felt tougher. I felt less like a boy and more like a man, for better or for worse.

In prison, I met the real
hombres
. Not the bored shoe stealers and the drunken joyriders I’d hung out with up to then, but the real-deal criminals – the dudes who did the heists and the shakedowns, the guys who sold the drugs and stuffed people in car boots.

When I got out of prison, no one was going to tell me what to do. Before prison, the group of fellas I’d rolled with had me as their heavy-fisted lackey, but now I refused to be anyone’s bitch.

Prison had put me over a hump with my dad, too. After my release I lived at home for a while, but he didn’t have the power he’d had before. He, like most other blokes then, didn’t have the stomach for stepping to me anymore.

My mum was almost a stranger to me then, too, but I do remember one day when she stopped me with concern in her eyes and said, ‘Son, I heard about that bank that got robbed this week. Was it your gang that did it?’

I laughed right in her face. She really didn’t know shit about me. Robbing banks was not ripping off shit-box cars and belting other teenagers. I went to leave, still laughing, but she grabbed me on my way out.

‘If it was, you have to give me some of that money, right?’

That’s when the laughter really took off – peals and peals of it. I do feel sorry for my mum, and on my most
generous days even my dad. They never learned to be good adults, no one ever taught them. They lived a hardscrabble life, and it sent them wild in their own way. It’s not an excuse, but at least it made sense.

I enjoyed my new post-prison status, but I also came out craving some of the structure I’d experienced inside. In prison, I’d been put to work at a nearby dairy farm, and even though it was tough, stinky work, I got a lot out of it. I needed dates on the calendar to remember, something to strive towards. I took a couple of regular jobs in that period. I worked at a Mobil petrol station, and I also started to take my rugby a little more seriously, joining my first club side, the Mangere East Hawks.

As I described earlier, when I played rugby at school I played like a dickhead, disrespecting the rules of the game and the other players. Now I understood that only within the parameters of the game could I really test myself. That’s what I wanted to do. I was good, and now I wanted to know how good.

I played in the forwards, and while there were a lot of big, strong Polynesian blokes in that competition – including future heavyweight boxing legend David Tua, who also went to my school – I found myself pretty mobile compared to a lot of them.

After prison, I also started to generate a little bit of rep interest. I was picked for the Auckland under-nineteen rugby league team, and there was some talk of me getting a start in the Junior Kiwis, who were touring England later in the year. That would have been an honour, and I hadn’t had any of those in my life at that point. Even now, with more years living in Australia than New Zealand, an Australian family and Samoan blood in my veins, I still consider myself a New Zealander. No matter what happens in life I will always be a Kiwi, and being picked to represent that country in rugby league would have been a big deal to me.

They didn’t want me, though. I started hearing that the coaches had found out I was a crim, and not just a junior criminal (there were plenty of those in league), but a felon with prison time under my belt. After that, the talk of me being picked for a rep side cooled.

One day the coaches sat me down and said it’d probably be too difficult for me to get a visa to tour overseas, and perhaps I should shelve the idea of rep rugby. I’d worked hard at my league but after that conversation, I walked home from training with my mate Dave and decided I was done with it.

‘If they don’t want me, then fuck them and fuck their sport,’ I told him.

I was done with the petrol station job, too. Fuck the long nights, fuck my neon tan, fuck ‘three dollars fifty on pump nine’. Fuck it all.

I went back to robbing then, and I also thought about getting into drug dealing. There was a weed dealer round our parts named Barton who was a mate of mine and he seemed to do a brisk trade in tinnies, so I took Dave along with me to see if we could help him with his business.

Barton acted like Scarface on the streets, but when I went round to his place, I tell you, it was no Miami mansion. His place was tiny, and looked smaller because there were piles of crap everywhere – clothes, dishes, pizza boxes. There was also shit on the roof – yes, actual shit. How it got there, I have no idea.

Barton was happy for me to help him out, but having visited his joint, I wasn’t so sure anymore. The idea completely died a week later when Barton got batted up by some of his competitors. Next time I saw him, he had all kinds of surgery scars. Maybe that’s why he was so keen to get me into his enterprise.

I took another menial job working at a factory and soon my weeks and months were held up by the tent poles of weekend drinking sessions with the lads, robberies of various stripes and a shitload more street fighting. If you weren’t there in South Auckland in the nineties, you probably don’t
understand how it worked. Wherever you were, a fight was only one glance away, one look at any moment. That’s how it usually started, with a look. Sometimes you threw that look because of a real slight – perhaps someone had said something to your girl, or one of her friends, or maybe there was money owed, or you’d smashed a friend of theirs, or they’d smashed your friend. Sometimes the look was just because you were bored or because you’d had a shitty day, and someone had to pay for it.

Either way, when someone threw that look over to you, you had two options – you could pretend you didn’t see and bitch out, or you could throw over a look of your own. When you did that, it was on.

As my body grew bigger I started fighting every week, and I just got better and better at it. I can’t account for all of why I’m good at fighting, but some of it is that I don’t really feel pain, not like most people do. I know I can never feel what other people feel, and other people can’t feel what I feel, but I really don’t think we can feel it the same way, because otherwise others wouldn’t be so scared of it.

I vaguely remember what it felt like when Dad started beating the shit out of me. It’s not something I’m familiar with now, even when I’m being pounded by dudes like Junior dos Santos or Stipe Miocic. At some point as a little kid, I managed to take pain and put it somewhere outside
my head. It existed somewhere, but not anywhere it could stop my fight.

I didn’t really ever get injured then, either. I’d hear people I scrapped with copped broken jaws, busted noses, fractured eye sockets, broken ribs, but me, I was always golden. If I didn’t feel pain and didn’t get hurt, why wouldn’t I scrap? I fought in the city, in the south, in the suburbs. I fought at schools, I fought in bars, I fought in the street, but it was one day, fighting out the front of a club, where someone noticed and my life started to take a nice little turn. It took me nearly another decade after that brawl to realise how significant it was, but isn’t that how real life works? It’s only ever looking backwards that you can see whether a road you’ve taken was a road to fortune or ruin.

That night started pretty much like all the rest. Johnno and I were up to our regular brand of mischief – we found a few fellas on Karangahape Road, just north of the city, with a jacket and watch we liked the look of. We gave those fellas a whipping, stole their gear and then headed to Don’t Tell Mama’s nightclub nearby for some celebratory drinks.

All was good at DTMs – a little Bobby Brown on the decks and the drinks were flowing – until I realised I hadn’t seen Johnno for a little while. After a bit of asking around, I was told Johnno had gone out the front of the
club with some angry-looking fellas. In fact, the dude had been frog-marched.

Outside the club I found a scrum of guys putting the boot into Johnno, who was on the ground in a ball. I ran over to help, but slipped and soon I was on the ground next to him, copping my own kicking.

The police turned up on the scene, dragging these fellas off us. They put themselves between us and these fellas, some of whom we’d robbed earlier. The cops started asking questions, but of course no one was answering. I’m guessing we were close to being given a stern talking-to and told to piss off, but that old anger started to burn hotter than reason or consequence could possibly cool.

I could still feel their kicks on me and see the foot scuffs on my clothes. What were they, these fellas, to me? What gave them the right to put their boots into me? WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

While one of the cops was jibber-jabbering, I moved slowly towards one of the guys who’d been kicking me and I let fly with a big right hand. The fella was out before he even landed, falling under the wheels of the police car. Then I reloaded and dropped one of his mates, and then one more after that.