Roosters I Have Known

by Steve Braunias

The rains this week very nearly came over the Stone Basin bridge. At low tide on Thursday afternoon, pied shags waited for the mullet by roosting on logs washed up in the basin. A few years ago, a car left the road and went over the edge; there used to be a phone box at the basin but vandals had destroyed it, so a man who was covered in blood walked to Pauline’s house and said his passenger was still in the car and could she help. She phoned 111, went down to the basin, jumped in, and did what she could for the passenger until the fire service and ambulance arrived. It’s just what you do, isn’t it, she said.

  On Wednesday, she took her four stranded guests to the bus station, but the bus never arrived, and they were eventually told there was no bus. They said, Oh no. You should have seen their faces, said Pauline. They were good, lovely people, she said, who so much wanted to get where they were going. She thought, Do I really want to go all the way? But then she thought, Oh come on. We just chatted all the way to Awanui, she said, and found out everyone’s life stories and what’s happening in America and Queenstown and Kaitaia.

  Had she heard about other acts of generosity in Kerikeri during the storm? Oh, she said, I’m sure there were. That afternoon a police constable said, No, Pauline was the only one who rang.

  Her house will soon be in an exclusive cul-de-sac – there are plans for a bypass, the bridge at Stone Basin will be taken away, and Stone Hill will finish at the Stone Store. Her property really ought to be snapped up. But where will people go if there’s another flood? Oh, she said, they’ll just come to wherever I go to next, I suppose.

  [July 15]

  7

  Greg O’Connor

  The Policeman’s Friend

  Life, reflected Greg O’Connor, is a journey that flows from the mountain to the sea. He wheeled out this banal observation three more times during the ninety minutes I spoke to the police association president in his Wellington office. Fair enough. It does actually have personal meaning for the guy. And yet O’Connor – as president since 1995, he acts as union executive for ninety-seven percent of police officers – appeared stuck somewhere up the back of the mountain, cemented in a position of resistance to even the slightest trickling criticism of New Zealand police.

  The worst he said of his troops: ‘We’re not perfect.’ In 2007, these imperfections include the sordid rape trial of assistant commissioner Clint Rickards; the Dame Margaret Bazley report into 313 complaints of sexual assault against 222 police officers; the overturning of David Bain’s murder conviction by the Privy Council; the fiasco when commissioner Howard Broad held a press conference to deny he once watched a pornographic video involving unnatural acts with a chicken; and the revelations that police have lowered recruiting standards, inspiring the mocking Dominion Post headline ‘THICK BLUE LINE’.

  O’Connor is the police spokesman to whom journalists routinely turn in the old game of providing balance. You can guarantee he’ll stick up for the cops every time, and quite often in a pugnacious, sneering, charmless manner. In person he’s a hearty sort of rooster, forty-nine, lean and sandy-haired, clever and sensitive, fond of polite cussings like ‘ruddy’ and ‘blimmin’, from solid West Coast Irish Catholic farming stock – he grew up in the Buller, went to school at the Granity convent, was taught by the same nun who taught his grandmother. He said, ‘I’m tribally socialist, that’s what my roots are, and you can’t escape that.’ He now heads what may be New Zealand’s strongest union.

  He is married with three children. Michael, fourteen, was born with CHARGE syndrome. O’Connor said, ‘He’s reasonably severely intellectually handicapped … No, we knew from the second he was born. The doctor said, “There’s something wrong here.” But it was the best thing that ever happened, if I can say that, because we never knew Michael as anything other than a child with needs. I really feel sorry for people who don’t realise they’ve got a child with problems until the child’s one or two. Whereas with Michael the journey started at birth. He’s taken me and my wife places most other people don’t get to go.

  ‘We made a decision that we would never allow him to become an excuse for us not to do anything. Not long after he was born, I got promoted to Christchurch. Michael at that stage was very sick and not expected to live; basically he was in Wellington, dying. When I got the promotion, we started to say, “We can’t go because of Michael,” but then it was like, “Hey, we have to go.”’ They went, and O’Connor almost immediately stepped into a vacancy as a police association delegate.

  O’Connor writes poetry. He probably talks it better. His last poem ‘was about how the southerly is Wellington’s saviour from that horrible nasty little yapping terrier that is the northerly.’ This sounded like windy nonsense, but he was alert to language and imagery when describing his former life as a serving officer. On attending a fatal car accident in Wellington, soon after graduating from Police College: ‘I poured his brains into an ice-cream container.’ On the very last case he investigated, in Christchurch before taking up his role as association president: ‘The worst kind. Stranger rape. Middle of the night. Old lady alone. Shocking.’

  He said he sometimes thought about writing a novel. Disappointingly, it wouldn’t be crime fiction. ‘It would probably have a crime theme running through it, but it’d be more about the politics of New Zealand. It’s what I know.’

  It was inevitable during our interview that O’Connor would reach for the wise old saw that he has twanged many times in his editorial in the police PR organ, Police News: ‘You don’t look at the pedigree of the bull, you look at the pedigree of the man selling it to you.’ This was by way of dismissing criticism of armchair commentators, and trusting the opinion of the police. O’Connor put a lot of faith in that.

  Did he agree that New Zealand police were suffering their annus horribilus? ‘I think what’s happened is we’re seeing the result of the police-traffic merger.’ I interrupted him, and gave as an example the sex-crime trials of Rickards, Shipton and Schollum as having nothing whatsoever to do with the police taking over the formerly separate responsibilities of traffic cops. He said, ‘No, but it’s all in context. Nothing happens in isolation.’ Then he sold his version of history.

  ‘New Zealand police for many years enjoyed a unique relationship with the public. The first cracks started to appear during the Springbok tour; the current opinion-makers and leaders of New Zealand society, particularly this Labour Party caucus, generally were people whose politics were formed in the tour. People who are in their fifties now. And that really got police offside with the future leadership of New Zealand, the intelligentsia if you like, academia, the arts, and generally the fourth estate as well.

  ‘We still had intact our relationship with ordinary New Zealand, rugby-club New Zealand. The Kiwi bloke was pretty unaffected. Because we didn’t police the roads: most people only saw police when they were in trouble. We were the good guys. The old MoT [Ministry of Transport] were the bad guys. What’s happened since then is that the police have used up a lot of the goodwill. And that then created the environment of the huge criticisms we’ve had to face in the past four or five years.

  ‘The Rickards thing came in the middle of it. Bain is another one. And now, potentially, what’s his name, Mark Lundy, and down in the Sounds, Scott Watson, are other ones. All these things, these are all doubts that have been cast, it’s the environment in which they’re all fertile ground, and they’re all absolute rubbish. David Bain – I mean, Joe Karam very expertly, I think brilliantly, has tilled that fertile field. And he’s got his crop.’

  But the defence of David Bain is absolute rubbish? Once again, he backed the police. ‘Oh, of course it is,’ he said. Scott Watson’s innocence – absolute rubbish? He backed the police. ‘Yes.’ The Steven Wallace case? He backed the police. ‘Absolutely.’

  Wallace was shot and killed in April 2000 by a Waitara constable, who claimed self-defence. O’Connor said he welcomed the upcoming report from the coroner. ‘Look, that was a justified shoot. It was a privilege to be involv
ed in that. It’s not often in life you get to be absolutely one hundred percent on the side of the angels. And in that case we were.

  ‘That officer was as innocent as you can get. He was as justified as you can get. This man crawled out of bed in the middle of the night, and he’s never been able to sleep in his own bed ever since. It was just wrong, wrong, wrong.’

  The defence of Wallace, Watson, Bain, Lundy; the Bazley report; criticism of police recruiting – ‘all absolute rubbish’. Only doing his job? It’s a position that O’Connor has tenaciously held on to since his 1995 election. The quiet office, the six-figure salary, the power and sense of purpose: ‘I like to think that I can influence the direction of things for law and order better than I could if I was still a senior sergeant or detective somewhere. You only leave a job to do something better, and I just don’t see anything better.’

  O’Connor has mostly stood unopposed as association president. In 1997 he was up against Gary Orr, who was unhappy with O’Connor’s leadership style, saying that the messenger sometimes got in the way of the message. O’Connor said he didn’t know what that meant.

  The next election is October. Oh yes, said O’Connor, he’ll definitely have another crack. I asked him whether he thought twelve years as association president was excessive. Well, he said, he knew of a counterpart in Texas who had only just resigned after twenty-four.

  [July 22]

  8

  Steve Crow

  Battle of Wounded Knee

  Steve Crow said, ‘It’s very stiff at the moment.’ We sat in his office on a wet dreary winter afternoon in Auckland. A courier wearing a turban stood at the counter waiting to pick up a stack of DVDs entitled Desperate Housewhores. There was the deathly hush and clock-ticking boredom of all offices. The bathroom door was open; the seat had been left up, and a supply of budget toilet paper lay on the floor. With his shaved head and wide chest and his line of business, Crow might be mistaken for a brute, but he had such gentle manners. His son David fetched two cups of coffee from the kitchen. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ Crow said. His cellphone rang. ‘Hi baby,’ he said. It was wife. ‘Love you,’ he said.

  The stiffness was a complaint: he had surgery on his right knee last week, and was given a set of crutches. He will model them in public on Sunday when he launches a new political party. Crow, fifty, is running for the Auckland mayoralty. The party is called 1auckland.com. He said, ‘When it’s on the electoral register, because it starts with a “1”, it’ll be at the top. It’s also an advert for our website, because our website is our name. So that’s all there.’

  What was all there? I asked about the party’s candidates. He fished up the name of someone called Julie Chambers. Who? He said, ‘To be honest … Let me think about this … Um … I’ll forward you some background on each of the people, rather than trying to remember off the top of my head, because I don’t remember.’

  Why not? ‘I know who they are,’ he said. He asked himself: ‘Do I need to know their background?’ And he answered, ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  This was fast turning into a nonsense. I asked him whether he was a funny person. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘But I think I’m quite sharp intellectually.’ He said his IQ had been measured at 148.

  I remarked that he was probably very astute at business. He agreed. Crow runs a business called Vixen. The biggest income is sales of DVDs. You could say it’s a quick buck: ‘Buying porn is something people tend to do as an impulse.’ Then he said, ‘Actually, I’ll qualify that, because Steve Crow and Vixen don’t trade in porn. We trade in adult entertainment, which is between consenting adults.

  ‘Let me define some terms. If any parties involved are not consenting, then it’s porn. A child doesn’t have consent, so that would be porn. If you’re dead, there’s no consent, so that would be porn. If you’re an animal, you’re not a human, so that’s porn.’

  Amazing. I asked him what had been Vixen’s best-selling DVD. ‘You know the answer to that,’ he said. But I didn’t know the answer. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘Ripe. The pregnant porn star one.’ He meant the New Zealand movie starring a woman who was filmed giving birth. It generated a lot of headlines. Had the thing actually sold? He told a story: ‘We released an adult video last year called Pirates. It’s based on Pirates Of The Caribbean. Cost about six million to make. It was the biggest-selling adult title in 2006 world-wide by a long, long way. Well, we sold six times as many units here with Ripe. And it’s a shit movie.’

  Illuminating. What, I asked, were the most popular genres sold by Vixen? ‘The most widely demanded fetish is golden showers. We get asked for it every day. But we’re unable to sell it because of New Zealand law. It’s classified as promoting the use of urine in association with the sexual act, or something like that. Silly. But that’s the legislation. But the biggest genre we sell is amateur. It’s reality adult entertainment – genuine people in their homes doing what they do.’

  I began to wonder what Crow does in his home. He had four children; two were from his first marriage to a Chinese woman in Malaysia, the other two from his second marriage, to Gaylene, a policewoman. In each case, he was their stepdad. I asked whether he couldn’t father children of his own, and he said he could have, although not any longer because he had had a vasectomy.

  Why did his first marriage collapse? ‘Because I cheated on my wife,’ he said. After he met Gaylene, he had a relationship with a former Penthouse pin-up, Hayley Marie Byrnes, but they broke up and he got back together with Gaylene. ‘My wife’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ he said. ‘But my persona and activities have a severe negative impact on her job. We try and keep that separate. She goes alone to police Christmas parties. In fact, until I dropped her at the airport on Monday, I’d never seen my wife in a police uniform.’

  He said he’d been in love four, maybe five times. Did that include Hayley Marie? ‘Yeah. I fell pretty heavily. It was the usual grandiose thoughts of a forty-seven-year-old with a twenty-three-year-old.’

  Had he ever tried Viagra? ‘Once. About five years ago. I took one tablet. And it gave me a massive,’ he said, ‘headache.’

  Poor, stupid, bungling, unlovable Auckland. New Zealand’s biggest city works hard and likes a drink, always puts on a show and never takes itself too seriously, enjoys a mild climate and lots of shops – but it only ever seems to attract wretches to run the place. In this mayoral race, the two likeliest candidates to wear the robe and drag the chain are that gentle incompetent Dick Hubbard and the barking John Banks.

  Crow is polling third. His mayoral opponents dismiss his bid as a publicity stunt. Actually, he does have political views. ‘I believe in individual freedom,’ he said. Like most people who follow libertarian doctrine, the quality of his mercy was strained.

  His views on Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui: ‘Deport him.’ Why? ‘Why not? He’s not a New Zealand citizen. Do we need the grief?’

  Does he believe in tougher sentences for criminal offending? ‘Very much so. I don’t believe in parole.’ He didn’t mind the homeless sleeping outdoors: ‘It’s a life choice that they make.’ Were long-term unemployed exercising individual freedom too? ‘No. That’s just being a bum. I wasn’t put on this world to support someone who chooses not to work.’

  Yes, he said, he was sticking to recent statements that he backed the Dubai consortium’s bid to buy Auckland International Airport: ‘I would hazard a guess it would prosper much better under the ownership of a United Arab Emirates corporation with pretty much bottomless coffers. Who owns an asset doesn’t concern me at all. As long as the asset can’t be picked up and taken away – I mean, I don’t think you should be able to sell off our antiquities and our … um … tree houses and things like that, and transport them offshore.’

  Tree houses! There was something about Crow that was impossible not to like – a kind of oafishness. He was probably just nervous. Yes, he said, he was a very shy person. He had a panic attack the first time he talked in public; that wa
s way back in about 1990, at a conference in Hong Kong – Crow lived in South-east Asia for many years, working on oil rigs as a marine biologist. He once went two hundred and seventy days at sea. He said he’d always been a workaholic; these days, he gets to work at about 7.30 a.m. and stays until maybe 8 p.m., 9 p.m., six days a week, some times seven. I asked him whether a motive for working long hours is that he avoids contact with people. ‘That’s an interesting perspective,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. But then come to think of it, I spent a large part of my career under water with no contact at all.’

  For the mayoral campaign, he will refuse to door-knock: ‘It’s intrusive.’ He said, ‘Banks and Hubbard are both out to garner popularity, and I genuinely don’t care.’ He will also refuse to advertise his mug on hoardings: ‘I’m not particularly pleasant to look at.’ Well, he was no oil painting, but beneath his naked head was a nice, soft, quite vulnerable face. He said, ‘I’m a touchy-feeling person. I hold hands with my wife at restaurants.’ I asked about his mother. ‘I love mum to bits. She’s very disappointed with what I do for a living.’ He grew up in Inglewood. I tried to picture him as a young man, and saw him with long fair hair. ‘No, I had long brown hair with a slight auburn-red tinge,’ he said.

  I tried to picture him as Auckland’s mayor. I could not. Gently, I said to him that voters would want a man who has a firm hand on the tiller. ‘Oh, you’ll have that,’ he said. Less gently, I said to him that he didn’t have a clue where the tiller was located. ‘I’ll find it quick,’ he said. ‘And I’ll move it into where I want it to be. Put it this way: I’m not interested in being mayor of Auckland under the current system. Unless there is a mechanism, or a legislative way for me to make some serious changes, I don’t want to be involved. Because it’s a hiding to nothing. The current mayor is just a figurehead. He has very little power.’