An incident in Gate Pa

Newsroom

03-08-2025

The Greerton Secondhand & Pawn Warehouse at 18 Wilrose Place (an address technically in the nearby suburb of Gate Pa) was a rust-coloured building on a dead-end street in an industrial part of town. Customers would visit the proprietor, 'Uncle' Stu Keepa, to flog their modest wares: antiques, furniture, machinery, tools, electronic goods and all other manner of bric-a-brac. One man's trash is another man's small profit margin. Keepa would take whatever could be fixed with a bit of spit and polish, then sell it off and come out a few bucks on top.
Keepa, who was in his 50s, lived in one of two bedrooms upstairs at 18 Wilrose Place. The other was occupied by a woman who can't be identified (let's call her Annette), while another boarder, David Kuka, lived in a room downstairs at the back of the shop.
The Greerton Secondhand & Pawn Warehouse also ran a little side hustle; it was well known in Tauranga's seedy underbelly as a place to buy drugs. It even had a nickname: 'The Trap'. Gang members would come and go from The Trap to visit Annette, who was selling meth, or Keepa's son, who was doing the same.
Keepa himself wasn't directly selling drugs. But as someone who had been in the pawn game for 20 years, he also knew a lot of different people. If those customers were looking to score drugs instead of a second-hand bargain, Keepa could steer them in the right direction.
So when a young woman named Kararaina Wihapi turned up at her cousin's doorstep in the early hours of New Year's Eve 2017 wanting $2000 worth of meth, the cousin (known as Lady Muck) reached out to Keepa. 'Hey was just seeing if you was on, after a biggie though, got 2k. Any good or not?'
Lady Muck asked in a text message. Keepa replied: 'Okay my mate will go get it.' It was 4am.
Keepa sent a driver to pick up Lady Muck's flatmate, MJ, who wanted to buy weed, and Wihapi, who had the $2000 stashed in her bra. They were chauffeured to Greerton Secondhand & Pawn Warehouse. MJ introduced Wihapi to Keepa. She discussed getting a 'quarter round one' – a quarter of an ounce, or 7 grams of meth – and Keepa said his 'bro was on the way'.
His 'bro' was Colin Jefferies-Smith, a 26-year-old who lived at home with his parents in nearby Greerton. Jefferies-Smith was a street-level drug dealer, mainly in cannabis but he had recently started dabbling in meth. Meth is a lucrative business, but like most businesses, only the fat cats at the top of the supply chain make any serious money. Jefferies-Smith was at the other end of the scale, slinging 'dollar bags' (0.1 of a gram for $100) or 'quarter packs' (1 gram for $200) straight into the eager hands of consumers.
He wasn't driving around Tauranga in a late-model Range Rover or Mercedes-Benz of the kind that the police regularly seize from successful drug dealers and gang members. His car was a beat-up silver Nissan Maxima, worth about $800, which his father had paid for just before Christmas. It wasn't much, but the jalopy was all Jefferies-Smith had. It would end up costing a life.
This was because Colin Jefferies-Smith made the extremely poor decision to take Kararaina Wihapi's $2000, then fail to deliver his end of the bargain. Over the next few hours, angry phone calls and text messages were flying around. Wihapi didn't get the meth, or her money back. But she did get Jefferies-Smith's silver Maxima. Someone staged an intervention: Lance Waite.
No one ever argued with Waite. Heavily tattooed, the 58-year-old was a senior member of the Mongrel Mob and held the position of sergeant-at-arms for the Notorious chapter. His job description was basically to serve as the chief bad-arse for the Mongrel Mob's most bad-arse group.
He had been hanging around The Trap earlier that day, and was introduced to Kararaina Wihapi. The new acquaintances made a connection through common heritage – her uncle was also a Notorious Mobster – and Wihapi shared her misfortune at being $2000 out of pocket. Waite became her knight in shining armour.
By failing to stump up with the meth, Colin Jefferies-Smith owed Wihapi $2000 but the money had somehow vanished, most probably to pay an outstanding debt of his own. Once Waite became involved in the discussions, Jefferies-Smith was persuaded to hand over some cash, thought to be around $1200, a few ounces of cannabis and the keys to his Nissan Maxima.
The exchange was not down to Waite's silky diplomacy skills. It was a vivid illustration of the shadowy underworld practice known as 'taxing', where criminals – most often gang members, who have the fear factor of the patch on their back – extort cash, drugs or valuables from other criminals.
There are different forms of 'taxing'. Sometimes the 'tax' is actually a euphemism for robbery, plain and simple, where the strong just take what they want from the weak. Other times the 'tax' is in the form of the repayment of a debt – real, perceived or invented – while on other occasions the 'tax' is demanded as a form of protection money to allow the weaker criminal, say for example a drug dealer, to carry on operating on the gang's territory.
On every occasion, the consequence of failing to pay the 'tax' is violence, painful and prolonged.
The criminal code of silence also means victims of 'taxing' are reluctant to make official complaints to police. More often, police learn about 'taxing' by talking to confidential informants or through hospital admissions, as a favoured tactic in recent years has been to shoot the taxee in the leg. The injury will leave the victim maimed, but alive. It's not just beatings and gunshot wounds, though; victims get stabbed, have their kneecaps broken with baseball bats or, in one horrific case, a blow torch was used as a torture device.
Paying 'tax' is often seen as a cost of doing business in the underworld, and it seemed that, initially at least, Colin Jefferies-Smith had accepted the fate of his silver Nissan Maxima. It was being held as collateral until he could pay his dues – and penalty interest, no doubt – but that was supposedly the end of the matter: Lance Waite had given his word.
It seems Kararaina Wihapi didn't get the memo. The following day, New Year's Day 2018, Wihapi and her cousin Lady Muck were hungry and decided to drive their new set of wheels to Pizza Hut in Greerton. Still pissed off about the loss of the $2000, and perhaps cocky because of the backing of her patched benefactor, Wihapi decided to pay Jefferies-Smith a visit.
The two women walked up the stairs to his parents' house on Cameron Road, and called out to him through the open door. Jefferies-Smith was asleep on the couch in the lounge, but jumped up and came outside after being roused by his mother.
He said, 'What's going on?'
She said, 'You owe [me]. Where's my stuff?'
He said, 'But I've already paid.'
The two women walked back to the silver Maxima parked in the driveway, with Jefferies-Smith close behind. He reached through the open door, snatched the keys out of the ignition and walked away briskly.
Wihapi and Lady Muck looked at each other. They knew they were going to be in trouble with Lance Waite. Not only had they gone behind the Mobster's back to extort more money from Jefferies-Smith (which made Waite look like a liar), they had also lost the ability to drive the car.
Hungry and stressed, Lady Muck spent a frantic 10 minutes trying to hotwire the Maxima, fruitlessly, before making the rash decision to take out her frustrations on the stubborn ignition with a crowbar. Now even if they got the keys back from Jefferies-Smith, they couldn't start the car.
Defeated, Lady Muck called Stewart Keepa and asked for a ride back to The Trap. When they got there, someone was waiting for them: a very grumpy gangster. Waite growled at the two women for throwing a spanner in the works, as he had already made a deal with Jefferies-Smith about the debt.
Waite's word was his bond, and the greedy and foolish actions of Wihapi and Lady Muck made it look like the Mongrel Mobster had gone back on it. He told the women that they owed him now, too.
Nevertheless, Waite couldn't let Jefferies-Smith keep the car. The gangster couldn't show weakness; he had to dominate the situation and show everyone who was the boss.
So he went around to the Cameron Road address with an associate, and towed the Maxima back to The Trap, then called Jefferies-Smith demanding that the keys be returned.
A very unhappy Jefferies-Smith refused. He felt the debt had been cleared with the $1200 cash and four ounces of cannabis given to Waite, so his car should be returned.
Jefferies-Smith was getting desperate. Although worth only $800, the silver Nissan Maxima was his most valuable possession, and also the only way to keep his drug business afloat. Any hope of repaying his debt disappeared along with it.
He spent most of January 2, negotiating with Waite to get his car back, to no avail.
'Fucking mutts, I want my car back,' he said in a text message to a friend. 'I paid the mutt, still no car, I'm about ready to start chopping the cunts up.'
Jefferies-Smith was friends with a man called Casino Williams, a senior Black Power member. The Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs have been bitter rivals in New Zealand for as long as anyone can remember, with a bloody history of violence and murder across the country. Everyone knows Mongrel Mob and Black Power can't stand each other but curiously, Casino Williams and Lance Waite had their own personal animus. The bad blood dated back to the 1980s when Waite, when he wasn't in prison, was living at his family homestead near Paeroa.
The Hauraki Plains was Black Power territory, and Waite was pretty much the only Mobster for miles around. There was always tension whenever he came home, boiling over into confrontations when the two men crossed paths in town, with Waite – a few years older, more hardened than Williams – often getting the better of these exchanges.
So it's not hard to imagine that three decades later, when Colin Jefferies-Smith was recounting his woes with Lance Waite, Casino Williams had a glint in his eye when he encouraged him to 'take a stand and shoot the cunt'.
Williams even put a gun into his hands: a black, .22 calibre Ruger semi-automatic rifle.
Taken with kind permission from the wildly exciting newly published investigation into organised crime, Underworld: The new era of gangs in New Zealand by Jared Savage (HarperCollins, $37), available in bookstores nationwide. It's the third book in his trilogy that traces the evolution of heavily armed, determinedly violent gangs who have capitalised on the methamphetamine trade in New Zealand.