Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  To the memory of my friend Helen Bain, 1971–2009

  Everyone who enters an athletic contest goes into strict training. They do it to win a temporary crown, but we do it to win one that will be permanent. So I run — but not without a clear goal ahead of me. So I box — but not as if I were just shadow boxing.

  — 1 Corinthians 9:25–26

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  OUT OF NOWHERE

  WONDERLAND

  MOON OVER EPUNI

  LITTLE CRIMINALS

  A PLACE CALLED HOME

  JERUSALEM

  THE BLACK LIGHTS

  HEY, CHARLIE! WHERE YOU GOIN’ WITH THAT GUN IN YOUR HAND?

  NIGHT TRAIN

  THE GIRL WHO KICKED IN DOORS

  TIME!

  A BOXER’S HEART

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright

  OUT OF NOWHERE

  Sonny Liston, in many ways the mightiest, most mysterious opponent Muhammad Ali ever faced, was a man of strictly limited musical taste. As he prepared for his epic bouts he only ever listened to the one song: ‘Night Train’, as recorded originally by Jimmy Forrest and later James Brown. Nothing else. In Forrest’s version it’s the stiletto-sharp tenor saxophone break that defines the rhythm and blues hit, ducking and weaving around the chugging backbeat. Brown’s rendition, however, which was released a couple of years before the men first fought in 1964, is the really memorable one, not least because of its innovative use of American city names, which Brown joyously hollers out as if espied from the window of a passing train, while backing band The Famous Flames pistol-whip their instruments: Miami, Florida … Atlanta, Georgia … Raleigh, North Carolina … Washington DC … oh, and Richmond, Virginia, too! Some trip. ‘Night Train’ carried the popular song of the time to its spookiest limits, instrumentalists and singer charging into a nocturnal darkness deeper than anyone involved could imagine.

  Sports writers have often puzzled over Liston’s obsession with ‘Night Train’. Almost everyone who reported on the fighter’s exercise regime made mention of his unswerving devotion to the tune, how he endlessly fed off it, allowing it to curl his mind into rugged introspection and his body into a river of sweat as fluid as the track’s arrangement. Yet nobody has ever really explained what drew Liston to it in the first place. Sure, for any boxer in training there’s an obvious play on the word ‘train’. But that can’t be all; it doesn’t explain why somebody would soak it up thousands of times, as if the track held some kind of extraordinary secret about where life can lead.

  As I write these words, though, I remember where I was the first time I heard ‘Night Train’, and something occurs to me as well. Might it have been … was it possible that the obsessive chord it struck with Liston wasn’t so much to do with the hoodlum fighter he became but the persistent memory of the abandoned ward he first was, locked up as a teenager at Missouri State Penitentiary, dreaming of a better life outside the walls of the institution?

  Maybe.

  Writing these words down, I also remember very clearly where I was in the hours leading up to the experience of hearing that same song. It’s 1975, in the autumn, in Trentham, and I’m just shy of my 13th birthday. I’m taking the day off school, as I have more or less routinely since the close of the previous year, idling along the road in the overcast afternoon, possibly thinking about a fight I saw on television or a book or some girl who’s so attractive it’s challenging just to look at her, or that recent court appearance in which I was deemed to be NUPC — in the jargon of the time, ‘not under proper control’ — and informed that a decision would shortly be made on my future.

  Then a police van grumbles into sight, and somebody tells me to get in.

  — Where are we going?

  — Where we’re going.

  — When will we get there?

  — When we get there.

  By the time I reach the Lower Hutt facility the sun has dropped like a shot and the rain is sheeting down. Ray Campbell, a young housemaster at the residence, meets me at the door. Papers are exchanged and signed. Campbell ushers me through to the institution’s sewing room, gathers some old clothes and a toothbrush along with a couple of sheets, a pillowcase and towels, and gently guides me through a fortified entrance located at the back of what I later discover to be the junior wing. Next a shower room. I’m told to undress. Campbell turns on the water.

  Doing as I’m instructed, I get underneath the torrent while he checks my discarded clothes for cigarettes, money and matches. While I’m in the shower, Campbell checks me for bruises or needle marks. Satisfied there are no traces of either, he produces a pail of what I assume to be body paint, but which is actually benzyl benzoate, a pungent condensation product of benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol, which is colourless but turns slightly white on contact with skin. He tells me to step out. Soon my entire body, including the scalp, is covered with the concoction, dabbed on with a brush while Campbell explains the emergency procedures for the cellblock. Next follows some powder, then a few clothes to put on — a pair of boxer shorts and a sleeveless top. Then into the cell, a little concrete cube, maybe three or four metres across with a high ceiling, its only light coming from a solitary bulb hoisted high or else through the barred window. There’s no furniture in the room, just a mattress on a wooden frame and a low-slung metal toilet. There are no books. No fucking stories.

  James Brown is no longer playing on the radio. It’s The Three Degrees or some such all-female troupe solacing the night with promises of warm booty for their chosen guy just as soon as the singers figure out when they will see him again. Shortly after I arrived some men had to come in and restrain the guy in the cell directly opposite — a pigeon-chested gang recruit just in from Lake Alice Hospital, I later discover — who had been slamming his head against the steel door. Now it’s relatively quiet again. Dead air. The plastic lights flicker out in the corridor, the rain falls and the darkness spreads outside the bars of the window like an opaque veil. Gradually, I move towards sleep, rock yourself asleep, am asleep, swaying aboard the night train, powering through the endless night, the darkened desert.

  Then, suddenly, just up ahead in the distance, an ocean of blue and green and pink neon lights: Las Vegas.

  WONDERLAND

  Arthur William Taylor has, shall we say, a certain familiarity with the New Zealand justice system. By 2010 Taylor, who was born in 1956, had spent all but five years of his adult life in one or other of the country’s jails, most recently as a long-term guest at the maximum-security prison in Auckland at Paremoremo. The sentences he has received cumulatively total more than a century. A one-time gang member affiliated with the Mongrel Mob and the Nomads, Taylor’s rap-sheet includes convictions for armed robbery, theft, fraud, burglary, attempting to pervert the course of justice, possession of various drugs and firearms and receiving stolen property.

  On the inside the burly inmate has acquired a formidable if not unreasonable reputation: don’t fuck with Arthur Taylor, they say, and Arthur Taylor won’t fuck with you, and especially don’t fuck with him if you happen to be a lawyer, because the chances are — and he has the transcripts of his courtroom jousts with some of the country’s best-schooled legal minds to prove it — you may get seriously fucked.

  But although Taylor is not known as a violent man — although allowing a firearm to be discharged into the ceiling in the course of one of his heists probab
ly wasn’t such a brilliant idea — he does enjoy the dubious distinction of being one of country’s most closely monitored prisoners. His escapes are legendary, including one much-publicised episode in 1998 that saw swathes of the Coromandel in lockdown while the cops searched for Taylor and a fellow absconder, the infamous double-killer Graeme Burton.

  Any author wishing to speak with Taylor is therefore guaranteed an unenthusiastic response from the prison’s tremulous overlords. Easy enough to understand why. Nearly as much in the way of public resources has been expended in keeping this ripe old adventurer in line as in housing him. Without even factoring in the additional costs of Taylor’s particular situation, the basic tab for keeping him in penal style has been enormous, somewhere in the annual vicinity of nearly $100,000, which could then be multiplied by 30 for each of the years he has been incarcerated. Add to that the cost of his various breakouts, court appearances, legal bills and lost income opportunities, and the total cost of Taylor’s enforced lifestyle might be in excess of $3 million. And still the meter ticks.

  In the circumstances it seems reasonable to ask what it was, over and above the obvious choices Taylor has made throughout a knockabout life, that first got the meter ticking.

  In the broadest sense it is possible to see Taylor as an individual who has intersected with a system that has long reflected New Zealand’s deeply punitive character. This is not mere sociological fancy. How else, after all, can one even start to explain why our country has one of the developed world’s highest rates of incarceration, a sanction that in all but the most heinous cases is supposed to rehabilitate lives?

  To be sure, the desire to rehabilitate is the opposite of the retributive character. Yet the admirably tolerant society that in many other respects is New Zealand has so often betrayed the deep-seated urge to punish that it has to be reckoned a very powerful impulse indeed.

  From the country’s curious status as one of the democratic world’s few jurisdictions to reintroduce the death penalty, as it did briefly in the 1950s, to the tenacity with which it clung a generation earlier to the judicial practice of flogging petty criminals and homosexuals; from the legislative violence with which for much of its history it angrily clamped down on Maori nationalism, whether in language, schooling, land rights or welfare eligibility, or, worse yet, Maori exceptionalism; even in the collective electoral fury seen in more recent times in response to a relatively modest proposal to remove the defence of ‘reasonable force’ from parents charged with savagely beating their offspring, New Zealand has collectively expressed this yearning so often and in so many different ways throughout its brief and sometimes beautiful history that the desire to mete out the very stiffest punishment to all-comers must be counted among the attributes of a national character that has also long subsisted on episodic outbursts of moral panic.

  Arthur Taylor has hardly led a blameless life — he would be the last to claim that he has — but neither has that life taken place inside a cultural vacuum. As one might expect, the circumstances of how and why it all began for him have occupied Taylor’s thoughts over the years. One might also expect his conclusions to have something to do with his various adult activities, the style of local policing and the courts, and so forth; but apparently not so. Indeed, during a lengthy conversation held on a graceful lull of a summer morning in 2010, one of the country’s most notorious prisoners barely mentioned the particulars of his current situation or past criminal activities at all.

  Instead he directed the conversation back to a far-off setting from half a lifetime ago, to a small state-run residence that used to operate in the Hutt Valley — and the colossal nationwide experiment in residential children’s care that this little institution represented — a matter that Taylor first contacted me about after word reached Paremoremo that a book on the subject would shortly be in process.

  Within this country’s punitive history, few themes loom larger than its episodic infatuations with institutional children’s care, a subject that has periodically baffled the national discussion since the establishment of modern New Zealand, even dominating the headlines as relatively recently as the general election campaign of 2008, when both major parties promised to ‘get tough’ and put away young offenders. Only at one historical point did this discourse flower into a fully fledged movement. This was the period from the late 1950s through until around 1990, when the government of New Zealand incarcerated not just the worst criminal offenders, who never numbered all that many, but also more than 100,000 children and young people, mostly Maori, who were believed to be in need of getting locked away. Strikingly, however, given the size and duration of the dramatic project, it is a chapter in our history that has never been widely understood, its ongoing effects never fully appreciated, and its ultimate cost never really quantified.

  Within this wonderland of state-run residences — 26 of them sprinkled from Auckland to Dunedin at one point — few loomed as large as this now discarded short-term correctional centre in the Hutt Valley, an institution that until the present day remains the quintessence of the movement’s brightest hopes and darkest experiences. As Taylor pointed out with a sigh, 40 years on from his own initial encounter with it, ‘the wings of our prisons are still full of guys from there. So really, if this experiment was ever meant to do anything it pretty obviously failed — and it’s cost the state an enormous amount of money along the way.’

  Had this place never beckoned, he believes, his life would have carried on rather as it had been: he would have overcome what his records suggest were relatively minor difficulties at school and almost certainly have graduated with some kind of diploma, picked up work in spot-welding, and that would have been pretty much that. Perhaps he would never have earned a king’s ransom from the trade but, as Taylor pointed out, the New Zealand taxpayer would surely have saved a small fortune over and above the hundreds of millions of dollars it cost to administer the old youth system.

  Taylor was sent to the correctional centre in Lower Hutt three times. The first time was for a few months in 1968, and by his account hardly a day passed during that initial lag when he did not want to be back with his natural family. After all, he said, it’s not as if he and his father and mother did not get on. His parents had been as startled as he had the day the social worker arrived to take him away — and the kid felt ashamed and distressed at where he had ended up simply by dint of skipping a few classes at school.

  The positive recollections? ‘Oh sure,’ Taylor replied, ‘I have many good memories — all of leaving the place.’ This he usually did by running away. At first he started taking the odd item from somebody’s garden or back shed as he went, and ineluctably the boy’s offending escalated by degrees as his attitude hardened. They always caught him, always sent him back, but each time he was just a little more difficult to manage.

  Then one day he clocked a supervisor with a rake, which led to him being sent to a psychiatric hospital in Porirua where, drugged up to the eyeballs, the appeal of a criminal lifestyle finally crystallised and the meter starting ticking. He was 13.

  Escape artist that he is, Taylor has reached a few conclusions on how the culture might also have saved itself a lot of subsequent grief in the time since that point. ‘You can’t do a one-size-fits-all policy when it comes to children, but rather have to look at what the circumstances are and find something to fit what the perceived problems are,’ he began. ‘Another problem, of course, was the mixing of kids who simply needed care and protection with those in there for serious crimes.’ Perhaps he might have gone on, but the interview was over, the prison officials having allowed Taylor only a brief few minutes in which to hold court.

  IF THIS INSTITUTION CONTINUES TO DEFINE TAYLOR and many of his fellow inmates, it remains almost as profound an experience for the men and women who administered it and others like it, and the policymakers who charted their course. It continues to cast a shadow on the present day, when the problem of youth offending remains as widely felt as ever and th
e country’s best minds scramble to find a reason why New Zealand fares worse than other comparable jurisdictions in getting on top of the delinquency problem, and in other significant ways too. It is currently also the subject of millions of dollars in outstanding lawsuits, a tidal wave of activity occupying an entire division of the Ministry of Social Development and a team of lawyers working in downtown Wellington representing a strikingly sad and angry clientele.

  ‘I’m not saying it was some kind of evil enterprise set up to destroy young lives,’ Taylor said, ‘but that’s effectively what happened because, really, they didn’t know what they were doing in running these places for what they thought of as little criminals.

  ‘The little criminals,’ he added knowingly, ‘who became the big criminals.’

  In order to get the clearest appreciation of the source of this ongoing discontent and the system it represented, we need to approach the Epuni Boys’ Home not from the vantage of the 2010s but during its historical highpoint, after carefully selecting a pivotal date to make our entrance along curvy Riverside Drive. The bad side of Riverside, that is, the black side.

  We should go there by way of Wellington, the political capital in which the purpose, direction and ultimate end of Epuni and other institutions like it were plotted, driving out along the northern highway that spits cars out near the settlement town of Petone. Making our way along the foreshore, where the now vanishing skyline seems to shout out from across the water and ask departing vehicles where they’re heading, we will turn north along Waiwhetu Road and the first glades of a forest of state houses that dominate the remainder of any trip deep into the Hutt Valley.

  When we approach the institution the period should, of course, be smack in the middle of the 1970s, the weather will be fresh and expectant — as it always is when life’s full possibilities still beckon — and the time very early and still dark, as befits an operation in which every day is another strict lesson waiting to be imparted.