Police chip away at $1.2m Mob assets
One of New Zealand’s most famous fish and chips shops is the battlefront in a police campaign to seize $1.2 million in criminal assets from the Mongrel Mob. Bevan Hurley investigates.
Police plan to place a very large takeaway order at a famous fish and chip shop purchased by a Mongrel Mob boss fighting a $1.2m assets seizure. From Master-Chef winners Kasey and Karena Bird to its eponymous meat pies, the Bay of Plenty township of Maketu¯ has become the capital of Kiwi kai.
For the locals and tourists who visit the stunning seaside community, fish and chips from Unclez Maketu¯ Takeaways has been the most popular meal in town for more than 40 years. The business, Unclez Maketu¯ Takeaways Ltd, was owned by local Mobster William ‘‘Willy’’ Nicholas. Owing more than $100,000 to the IRD in unpaid tax and penalties, Nicholas put the business into liquidation, but not before he had sold it to his brother Valentine Nicholas, president of the town’s Mongrel Mob chapter.
A new company, Maketu¯ Takeaways Ltd, was incorporated a few days after the sale in February with Valentine Nicholas as the sole director and shareholder.
The sale has attracted the attention of liquidators and police, who are trying to seize more than a million dollars’ worth of assets from Valentine Nicholas for what they say are the proceeds of his criminal offending.
Nicholas has been in a decadelong, protracted legal scrap with police. In 2015, he was found not guilty of money laundering at trial, after a jury couldn’t decide his fate at a first trial. After being cleared of the criminal charges, he claimed outside court he was the victim of a ‘‘personal vendetta’’.
Using the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009, which has a lower legal threshold than criminal charges, police obtained a High Court order in 2016 to confiscate five properties owned by Nicholas and his partner Sheila Payne, including three adjoining waterfront properties in Maketu¯ where Nicholas lives with his family, a 123ha forestry block, along with cash and motor vehicles.
Nicholas had argued that large sums of money in bank accounts were gambling winnings and that the police assessment of $1.2 million gained from criminal activity was wrong.
He claimed four of the five properties confiscated were his whanau’s ancestral land.
The Court of Appeal allowed Nicholas to challenge the High Court finding. He argued that the land is of cultural, spiritual and whanau significance to him. His mother is buried on one of the properties, as are the placenta of family members, he said.
Police believe the three properties owned by Nicholas along the Maketu¯ waterfront – which include a gym, a workshop, a sauna, and recently hosted a children’s birthday party complete with Spiderman-themed bouncy castle – are actually a gang headquarters.
A police spokesman said they were aware of the ‘‘apparent acquisition’’ of Maketu¯ Takeaways. They would look at ‘‘all options’’ and ‘‘any means’’ to retrieve the $1.2m they say Nicholas earned from drug dealing.
Although the takeaway store was immortalised in a celebrated painting by Kiwi artist Dame Robin White, Fish and chips, Maketu, liquidator Kim Thompson said they were unlikely to find much of value in the takeaways business.
‘‘They’d be welcome to the two or three fridges that the business owns,’’ he said.
‘‘This is not a goldmine. It’s a fish and chip shop store in a small community. The community needs it and someone will run it.’’
Thompson said he would be looking at whether the business had been sold at fair market value.
White’s oil painting of the Maketu takeaways was purchased by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Ta¯maki in 1975.