Operation Silk: Inside the biggest gang trial of 2022

• Published date: 07 January 2023
• Publication title: Bay of Plenty Times

Blackened metal husks and burst tyres were all that remained of the destroyed ute, van and car

Frightened residents of the street told of waking to loud bangs and a car alarm blaring. One thought someone was breaking into her home.

“I went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, but then I saw the light from the flames,” the woman said.

“I was s****ing myself.”

The official line from police was the fires were considered “suspicious”, but you didn’t need to be a trained detective to figure that out. Three cars don’t just spontaneously combust.

The police didn’t need to look far to work out why the property had been targeted.

Living at the address were senior members of a new gang: the Mongols.

Established by a group of 501 deportees from Australia, this Mongols chapter was the first in New Zealand and had muscled in on territory long held by the Greazy Dogs gang.

For the most part, rival gangs in New Zealand exist side-by-side in relative peace.

Conflict is bad for business. But the arrival of these 501s soon challenged the local pecking order.

In this case, the Mongols had ignored established boundaries in the Bay of Plenty without paying dues.

The Papamoa arson was the start of a tit-for-tat conflict involving three different gangs, in scenes more reminiscent of Sydney’s infamous turf wars than suburban Tauranga.

Watching this unfold was a small group of detectives running a covert investigation into the Mongols, Operation Silk, which led to the biggest criminal trial of 2022. THE FIRST chapter of the Mongol Nation was started in Southern California in 1969. The club’s name was inspired by the fearsome Mongol Empire, which conquered Eurasia under the leadership of Genghis Khan. The Mongols even put the warlord on their black and white patch, with a cartoon of him astride a humming motorcycle.

“This was a lifestyle, a culture, and a way of life for the brothers riding around on their chopped Harley-Davidson motorcycles on the streets of East Los Angeles showing power and solidarity,” according to the Mongols’ official website.

“The majority of new members were Vietnam veterans ... and were accustomed to a strict disciplined, regimented programme that was about honour, loyalty, respect and camaraderie. This made them a force to be reckoned with.”

Within five years, new chapters had sprouted in California and spread across the US. Eventually they established a presence in a dozen far-flung countries including Thailand, Germany and Australia. As their numbers grew over the decades, so did the conflict between the Mongols and other outlaw motorcycle gangs.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (ATF) designated the Mongols as “the most dangerous and violent” gang in the US after their undercover agents infiltrated the group.

In December 2018, a decade-long prosecution ended with a Californian jury finding the Mongol Nation to be a criminal enterprise guilty of racketeering, conspiracy to murder, attempted murder and drug dealing.

The case was the result of an investigation, Operation Black Rain, in which four undercover agents successfully infiltrated the Mongols to become full-patch members. Four women agents also went undercover to pose as their girlfriends. The undercover agents developed and maintained biker personas, and had to undergo rigorous scrutiny by the Mongols to be accepted as members.

When one of the agents received his patch, one of the gang’s members said: “Being a Mongol promises you one of two things — death or prison”.

The first New Zealand chapter of the Mongols was established in the Bay of Plenty in the middle of 2019. There were also a handful of patched members in Auckland, Hastings and Christchurch. The gang’s New Zealand president, Jim David Thacker, better known as JD, was deported from Australia five years earlier, after a biker brawl on the Gold Coast in 2013.

Back then, Thacker was a member of the Bandidos — another US motorcycle gang that had set up in Australia — and rose to be president of its chapter in Beenleigh. He was one of dozens arrested in a rolling scrap in the Broadbeach dining precinct.

A “lynch mob” of nearly 30 Bandidos stormed a restaurant hunting for a gang rival, forcing police to fire their tasers as brawling bikers spilled out of the venue and on to the footpath in front of terrified diners. The Bandidos laid siege to the local police station to demand the release of comrades who had been arrested.

Thacker, who had been on the periphery of the violence, was sentenced to just 150 hours’ community service. But that was...