In late 2023, a former United States Marine sergeant, a man who’d led a combat squad through battles in Afghanistan with a background in law enforcement, arrived in New Zealand.
He wasn’t here on holiday.
According to court documents, he’d come specifically to train a select group of patched Kancherero members, physical conditioning, selection tests, and instruction in AR-15 rifles, the same weapon carried by American police and military.
The unit he was training had a name.
Court documents call it the Ghost Squad.
Its stated purpose, according to the summary of facts one of its own members agreed to in court, was simple.
To carry out violence on behalf of the commoner to maintain control of the underworld.
That member’s name is Patrick Leonardo Langi.
He’s 27 years old, deported to New Zealand from Australia under section 501.
And by the time this specific training came to light, he was already serving a sentence for something else entirely, helping terrorize the family of a man who’d made the mistake of trying to leave the same gang.
That earlier case is worth understanding first because it’s the one that actually put Langi behind bars in the first place.
Khaled Slimkeel, a former competitive bodybuilder, wanted out of the Kmanto.
He refused to pay what the gang demanded in exchange for his exit.
What followed, according to police, was a coordinated campaign of shootings against his extended family.
Bullets fired into a room where children were playing.
A man shot at and grazed while running from a masked gunman.
Lung pleaded guilty.
So did his codefendant.
And according to reporting on the case, the gang’s own imprisoned national president was investigated over the same attack, though never charged.
Before we go further, a note on how this video is put together.
This account draws on New Zealand court reporting and independent news coverage, cross-cheed wherever possible.
A separate documentary has already covered parts of Langu’s story.
We’re building this account independently from court records and reporting rather than following that earlier structure.
Where a specific allegation hasn’t resulted in a charge, including the investigation into the gang’s own president, we’re going to say so plainly and treat it as exactly that, an investigation, not a conviction.
In this video, we’ll go through both chapters of Patrick Lang’s story in order, the retribution attack that first put him in prison and the considerably stranger, more alarming case that followed it.
A foreign trained paramilitary unit operating inside a New Zealand gang uncovered through the first person ever sentenced for being part of it.
If you’re new here, this channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting.
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We’ll start with a bodybuilder from Deneden and the price he was told he’d have to pay just to walk away.
Before Patrick Langi’s name became attached to any of this, there was Khaled Nessa Slaymanuel, a man whose own path into New Zealand’s common cherro chapter, and his subsequent attempt to leave it sits at the very center of everything this account is about to trace.
Slam’s family arrived in New Zealand from Afghanistan in 1998.
His father, Dr.
Hashim Slim Ankle had worked as a physician in Afghanistan and Pakistan before resettling going on to build a new life in New Zealand as a refugee health worker.
Someone whose own professional identity was built specifically around helping other displaced people navigate exactly the kind of upheaval his own family had already lived through.
It’s worth holding the specific detail in view throughout everything that follows because it shapes how this account understands what happened to this family later.
They came to New Zealand according to court reporting specifically seeking what’s been described as a safer foundation.
That foundation didn’t hold in the way Dr.
Slay Manuel might have hoped.
His son Khaled went on to compete as a bodybuilder in Deneden before his own path took a considerably darker turn.
In 2015, he was found guilty of kidnapping a fellow bodybuilder along with a separate charge of perverting the course of justice.
It’s worth being precise about what this establishes at the outset of this account.
Khaled Slimkel wasn’t by the time this story’s central events actually took place someone with a clean record being targeted purely for the sins of association.
He had his own independently documented history of serious criminal offending predating anything connected to the commoner specifically.
According to his own lawyer speaking at a later sentencing hearing in 2022, the deeper roots of that trajectory traced back to a specific devastating loss.
Slime’s father was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.
It’s worth being careful about exactly what this account can and can’t establish from that single detail.
This channel can’t independently verify the full circumstances of Dr.
Slamuncle’s death or offer any deeper psychological account of how that loss shaped his son’s subsequent choices.
That would require exactly the kind of speculation this channel has consistently avoided across every case it’s covered.
What can be said is that this was the explanation offered on the record in mitigation at Slimkell’s own 2022 Auckland District Court sentencing on drug trafficking charges of further conviction layered on top of the earlier kidnapping matter that continued building his own documented criminal record through the years leading up to the events this account is primarily concerned with.
By this point, Slamunl had become connected to the Comanche New Zealand’s own chapter of the Australian Outlaw Motorcycle Club.
This channel has already documented extensively elsewhere.
Established roughly 6 years before the events this account traces, built substantially through members deported from Australia under section 5001 of that country’s migration act.
What Sliml’s specific role or standing within the club actually was, this account hasn’t been able to establish with full precision from the sources available to it.
What’s clear is that at some point he made a decision that would prove considerably more dangerous than any of his own prior offending.
He decided he wanted out.
It’s worth understanding what leaving an outlaw motorcycle club typically involves because this channel has now documented across several other cases that the process is rarely as simple as a member simply choosing to stop showing up.
Some organizations, as this channel has traced elsewhere, allow departures through formal internally sanctioned processes, a vote, a ceremony, an acknowledge transition.
Others treat departure as something considerably more fraught, particularly for members who’ve reached any meaningful level of standing or knowledge within the organization.
Slayman’s own attempt to leave the common cherro fell into this second more dangerous category.
According to reporting on the case, he refused to pay what’s been described as a hefty fine the gang demanded in exchange for allowing his departure.
It’s worth pausing on this specific detail because it introduces something this account will return to in considerably more depth in its later parts.
The commoner’s New Zealand chapter by this point wasn’t simply operating according to informal underworld custom when it came to internal discipline.
It had as this account will trace developed an increasingly formalized almost bureaucratic internal structure.
One where specific financial obligations, including apparently a genuine tariff attached to leaving the organization, had been established as actual enforced policy rather than simply an unwritten expectation.
Slam’s refusal to pay that specific fine wasn’t on the evidence available to this account treated by the gang’s leadership as a minor administrative dispute.
It was treated as a genuine act of defiance requiring a genuine organized response.
That response didn’t target Slayman directly, at least not initially, according to the specific facts agreed to in court by the men eventually charged over what followed.
The plan that emerged was to punish him by terrorizing his family instead.
A strategic choice worth reflecting on directly because it reveals something about how this specific organization understood the most effective way to enforce its own internal discipline.
Rather than confronting Slay Monkel personally in a way that might have produced a direct containable confrontation between him and whoever came to collect the debt he owed, the plan that was ultimately put into action extended the threat outward to people who had no independent stake in his own decision to leave the gang at all.
His wider extended family, people connected to him purely through blood rather than through any choice they’d made about gang life themselves.
It’s worth reflecting on what this specific strategic choice actually represents because this channel has now documented a genuinely similar pattern recurring across multiple separate cases throughout its coverage of organized crime in both Australia and New Zealand.
Punishing an individual member’s defiance by extending violence to their family rather than confining consequences to the person who actually made the decision the organization objected to functions as a considerably more effective form of deterrence than individual retribution alone.
It sends a message not just to the specific person being punished, but to every other member watching that leaving doesn’t simply put their own safety at risk.
It puts everyone they love at risk as well, regardless of whether those people have any independent connection to the gang or any ability to influence the specific decision that’s now bringing violence to their own doorstep.
This is precisely what happened to the Slim Uncle family, a refugee family already carrying the weight of losing a father to political violence on the other side of the world, already carrying whatever complicated burden came with one son’s own path into serious criminal offending, was about to discover that his attempt to finally leave that world behind wouldn’t end the danger connected to it.
It would instead bring that danger directly into their own home, into rooms where children were still playing, unaware of what was coming.
What this account turns to next is exactly what that response actually looked like once it was set in motion.
The specific coordinated attack two men would eventually admit to carrying out, and the genuine terror it inflicted on people who had done nothing more than share a surname with a man who’ simply wanted to walk away.
The attack on the Slay Manhal family didn’t happen as a single isolated incident.
According to the facts agreed to in court, it unfolded as a coordinated multilocation campaign, back-to-back shootings inside multiple properties connected to different members of Slay’s extended family carried out with a level of planning and logistical preparation that reflects genuine deliberate organization rather than a single impulsive act of intimidation.
Patrick Leonardo Langi, then 26, a West Harbor resident and patched Comanche member, and his codefendant Elijah Mayor, 23, a Papato Toy resident and Comanche nominee, meaning someone still working through the club’s formal recruitment process, not yet a fully patched member.
Were the two men eventually held responsible for carrying out this specific campaign?
It’s worth understanding what their different formal standing within the gang actually meant for how this attack likely came together.
Langi as a patched member held a genuine established position within the organization.
Mayor as a nominee was still in the process of proving himself worthy of that same status.
This account can’t establish with certainty whether Meyer’s own participation in this specific attack was connected to his own effort to demonstrate loyalty and capability during his nomination period.
But it’s worth noting as a plausible, if unconfirmed, dimension of why a still unpatched associate would be directly involved in an attack this serious.
According to the summary of facts, both men eventually agreed to in court, shots were fired into a room where children were present, playing entirely unaware of what was happening around them.
This account isn’t going to describe the specific physical mechanics of that attack in further detail.
What matters for understanding this case isn’t the granular tactical detail of how the shooting was carried out, but the fact that an attack of this seriousness was deliberately directed at a property where young children were known or reasonably should have been known to be present at a separate property connected to the same broader campaign.
A man attempting to flee was shot at by a gunman wearing a balaclava, the bullet grazing his back as he ran.
It’s worth pausing on this specific detail because it illustrates something about the deliberate almost theatrical nature of how this entire attack was apparently designed to unfold.
A balaclava clad gunman firing at a fleeing target isn’t simply carrying out an act of violence in the most efficient contained way possible.
It’s carrying out violence in a manner specifically calculated to be witnessed, remembered, and retold precisely the kind of visible, unmistakable demonstration this channel has now documented recurring across multiple other cases where an organization’s internal discipline needed to be publicly unambiguously reinforced.
The attack also involved a coordinated getaway and evidence destruction effort.
According to court reporting, the vehicle used in the shooting was subsequently set a light, an act of arson serious enough on its own to carry a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment, separate from and in addition to the firearms charges connected to the shootings themselves.
It’s worth reflecting on why destroying the getaway vehicle mattered enough to the men involved to warrant this additional separately serious criminal act.
A burnedout vehicle destroys forensic evidence, fingerprints, DNA, ballistic residue, anything that might otherwise have connected the specific individuals involved directly to the specific weapons used.
It represents exactly the kind of careful, deliberate evidence management this channel has documented other more experienced organized crime figures attempting across its broader coverage, suggesting Langi and Meer, whatever their relative inexperience within the gang’s formal hierarchy, weren’t approaching this attack carelessly or impulsively.
That careful planning ultimately wasn’t enough to prevent their eventual arrest.
Police caught up with Langi and Meyer at 7 minutes past 8 that evening, having spotted them in a third stolen vehicle near a reserve, meaning the two men had over the course of what appears to have been a single extended operation moved between at least three separate stolen vehicles.
A level of logistical complexity worth noting as further evidence of genuine, deliberate planning rather than opportunistic spur-of-the- moment violence.
Gunshot residue was found both inside the vehicle and on both men’s own clothing.
Physical forensic evidence directly connecting them to the firearms discharge, regardless of whatever effort had gone into burning the earlier vehicle to destroy similar evidence from that specific stage of the attack.
Langi’s own response to this evidence once confronted with it is worth including directly because it illustrates something about his own approach to the investigation that followed.
According to court documents, he declined to comment to most questions put to him by investigators, a common legally sound response for anyone facing serious criminal allegations.
When specifically confronted with the gunshot residue evidence, though he offered a more direct response, dismissing it outright and suggesting police must have fabricated it.
This account isn’t going to speculate about what the specific denial reveals about L’s own state of mind or genuine belief in his own innocence at the time.
What it’s worth noting is the simple fact of the denial itself.
Set against everything else, this account has already traced a man facing forensic evidence directly connecting him to a serious coordinated attack on a family with young children present.
Choosing outright rejection rather than any more nuanced legal defense.
The human cost of this attack for the Slamuncle family specifically extended well beyond the immediate physical danger of the shootings themselves.
Victim impact statements were prepared for the court, though the family ultimately chose not to read them aloud during proceedings.
A choice this account respects without speculating about the specific reasons behind it.
What the court did hear through these statements was that the family’s children, who had been present during at least part of this coordinated campaign of violence, were now traumatized, suffering nightmares connected directly to what they had experienced.
It’s worth returning one final time to the detail this account opened its first part with.
This was a family that had come to New Zealand specifically seeking what’s been described as a safer foundation following the loss of Dr.
Hashim slamuncle to political violence on the other side of the world.
Instead, they found themselves living through a different but genuinely comparable kind of violence.
One connected not to any war they’d fled, but to a decision one of their own family members had made to try to leave an organization that according to everything this account has traced, treated that decision as something requiring the kind of punishment this account has now documented in full.
Crown prosecutor Ben Kirkpatre addressing the court directly during sentencing proceedings characterized the entire offending in blunt terms, a matter of grave public concern.
Both Langi and Mayor faced up to 14 years imprisonment for the arson charge and up to 7 years for discharging a firearm with reckless disregard.
Genuinely substantial potential sentences reflecting the seriousness with which the New Zealand justice system treated an attack this coordinated, this dangerous, and this deliberately targeted at people with no independent connection to the underlying dispute that produced it.
What this account turns to next is a detail this channel flagged directly in its own opening hook.
The specific formal investigation connecting this attack to considerably more senior figures within the commoner’s own leadership structure, including the gang’s own imprisoned national president, a man this channel has already documented in detail through its earlier separate coverage of his brother’s own rise and fall within the same organization.
Once Patrick Langy and Elijah Meyer’s own roles in the attack on the Slay Monkell family had been established through their respective guilty p, a further detail emerged that connected this specific act of retribution directly to the very top of the commoner’s New Zealand leadership structure.
A detail that according to reporting on the case could only be publicly disclosed once the immediate legal proceedings against Langi and Meer themselves had concluded.
Pasilica Nafahu, the commoner’s imprisoned national president, a figure this channel has already documented in considerable detail through its earlier separate coverage of his brother Vetakina Nafahu’s own rise within the organization, was investigated in connection with the attack on Slayman’s family.
According to reporting on the case, Naufu was never charged in relation to this specific matter.
It’s worth being precise about what this specific outcome actually establishes and what it doesn’t in keeping with the standard this channel applies consistently across every case it covers.
An investigation on its own isn’t evidence of guilt.
Police routinely investigate figures connected to serious organized crime networks who have genuine established authority over an organization’s broader activities without that investigation necessarily producing sufficient evidence to support a formal charge.
A pattern this channel has documented recurring across multiple other cases throughout its broader work, including its own earlier coverage of Kazm Hammad, whose alleged connection to several serious incidents in Australia similarly never resulted in charges being laid against him personally despite genuine sustained police attention.
What makes Nofahu’s own specific position within this case worth examining in more detail, though, is the broader context this channel has already established about him.
Through its earlier research, Nfahu had by this point already been convicted and sentenced in connection with a separate earlier investigation into the Kancherero’s broader criminal activities.
The case this channel’s own earlier coverage traced in detail, including his brief 2020 conviction connected to money laundering and his subsequent more recent 2026 acquitt on 25 further charges of serious organized crime and drug supply.
What this account can now add to that earlier research is a further data point.
Even while serving his own sentence, even while formally removed from any direct day-to-day physical presence within the organization, he continued to lead.
Now, Fahu remained, according to police investigators, a figure whose potential connection to serious ongoing criminal activity, including, in this specific instance, an attack on a family with young children, warranted genuine formal investigation.
It’s worth reflecting on what this pattern actually reveals about how imprisonment functions or fails to function as a genuine barrier to continued criminal influence.
A theme this channel has now traced across numerous separate cases spanning its entire body of work.
Basam Hamzi directed Brothers for Life’s operations from inside some of Australia’s most secure correctional facilities for close to two decades.
Kazim Hammad allegedly continued directing a violent tobacco war across Melbourne from exile in Dubai and then Iraq years after his own deportation from Australia.
Now Fahu’s own case, as this account is now tracing it, fits squarely within the same broader pattern.
A national president physically confined, allegedly continuing to exercise genuine authority over an organization’s operations, including, according to at least this one specific investigation, its capacity for serious, coordinated, retributive violence against a member’s own family.
This account has to be honest about the genuine limits of what it can establish here.
Nafahu was never charged over the Sleman attack specifically.
This account isn’t suggesting he was guilty of ordering it.
And it’s worth stating that directly and without hedging, the formal tested legal record on this specific matter shows an investigation that didn’t produce a charge.
And this account treats that outcome with exactly the weight it deserves genuine documented police suspicion, falling short of anything resembling proof.
What this account can say with considerably more confidence, drawing on material this channel will trace in full detail in its next part, is that Nafahu’s own broader leadership of the Kmanto during this same general period involved exactly the kind of formalized deliberate organizational structure that would make an investigation into his potential connection to an attack like this one entirely reasonable for police to pursue.
This wasn’t a loosely organized gang where individual members acted purely on their own initiative, disconnected from any centralized direction.
According to court documents this channel will examine in the following part, Nafahu had from inside prison personally established a formal internal governance structure for the entire organization.
One with its own explicit rules, its own explicit funding mechanisms and its own explicit stated strategic priorities.
An organization capable of that level of centralized deliberate coordination is by its very nature exactly the kind of organization where police would have genuine reasonable grounds to ask whether a serious act of internal discipline like the coordinated attack on a member’s family for refusing to pay an exit fine happened with the knowledge or direction of the very leadership structure Nafahu himself had built.
It’s worth closing this part of the account by returning to a detail this channel’s own earlier research has already established.
Nafahu’s own brother, Vetakina, was among the small group of men who originally founded the common cherro’s New Zealand chapter before eventually rising through a considerably more complicated and contested path to hold some version of senior national leadership himself.
Pascilica Nafahu’s own path to the presidency and his subsequent direction of the organization from custody represents a further distinct thread within this same broader family and organizational story.
One this account will now trace directly through the specific governance structure he built and the considerably more alarming initiative it would eventually produce.
In February 2021, from inside custody, Pascilica Nafahu sent an encrypted message to Lihi Vimahi, a figure this account will establish in considerably more detail across the following two parts, but who at this specific point in the story functioned as Nahu’s own trusted representative on the outside.
That message laid down a new formal set of governing rules for the entire Kanchero organization in New Zealand, a structure that would become known both within the gang itself and eventually in the court documents this account is drawing on as the commission.
It’s worth quoting Nafu’s own stated justification for this new structure directly because his own words capture something worth understanding about how he apparently conceived of his continued leadership even while physically confined.
The purpose, according to his own encrypted directive, was to maintain the organization’s position as the number one gang in the underworld, and in his own explicit framing, most of all to protect the club and its members.
He went further, stating directly that war within the underworld was, in his own assessment, inevitable.
A framing that positioned everything that followed not as opportunistic aggression, but as necessary defensive preparation for a conflict Nofahu apparently believed was already coming, regardless of anything the Comanche itself chose to do.
It’s worth reflecting on what this specific framing reveals about Nafahu’s own leadership style because it connects directly to something this channel has now documented across several other organized crime figures throughout its broader coverage.
A leader who frames aggressive expansionist organizational activity as fundamentally defensive necessary preparation for an inevitable conflict rather than a deliberate choice to escalate tension that might otherwise have remained contained is engaging in exactly the kind of self-justifying logic this channel has traced repeatedly across its documentation of gang warfare in both Australia and New Zealand.
Whether Nahu genuinely believed conflict was inevitable or whether this framing simply provided convenient cover for a considerably more calculated aggressive strategy.
This account can’t determine with confidence from the evidence available to it.
What can be established with considerably more confidence is the concrete practical structure the commission actually built.
According to court documents, members were required to pay a specific formalized commission $5,000 for every kilogram of drugs sold, funding a centralized pool of resources the organization’s leadership could then direct toward its own stated priorities.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider what those stated priorities actually were, because they reveal something genuinely more complex than a purely predatory extractive criminal enterprise.
Funds raised through this system were directed towards supporting the families of members serving time for the club, covering legal expenses for members facing court proceedings, funding polytenic study fees for any member wanting to pursue further education, financing formal patching ceremonies, and even covering the costs of an annual Christmas party.
It’s worth sitting with the genuine uncomfortable complexity this specific detail introduces into how this organization should actually be understood.
This wasn’t simply a criminal enterprise organized purely around violence and drug distribution with nothing resembling genuine internal welfare or community structure.
It was an organization that had under Nfahu’s own direction built something considerably more institutionally sophisticated, a formal internal taxation system redirected toward genuine mutual support functions that considered purely on their own terms wouldn’t look entirely out of place within a legitimate community or professional organization.
Polytenic study fees in particular represents a genuinely striking detail to sit alongside everything else this account has already traced about this same organization’s capacity for serious coordinated violence.
A reminder that criminal organizations of this scale rarely operate as purely simply predatory and that understanding how they actually function requires holding both their genuine internal welfare structures and their genuine capacity for serious harm in view simultaneously.
The commission’s financial infrastructure extended beyond simple internal fund redistribution into genuine sophisticated money laundering.
According to court documents, an accountant working with the organization incorporated a company in March 2023, registered in the name of a common cherero associate identified as Hava.
Over the following 6 months, millions of dollars were laundered through this newly established business.
The proceeds were subsequently used to purchase two hospitality businesses in a small town north of Oakland.
Businesses that were later sold, completing a genuine multi-stage laundering process that transformed illicit drug proceeds into legitimate seeming commercial assets before those same assets were eventually liquidated back into clean, usable capital.
It’s worth connecting this specific laundering structure to a broader pattern this channel has now documented extensively across its coverage of major outlaw motorcycle clubs in both Australia and New Zealand.
The deliberate use of legitimate seeming small businesses, particularly in the hospitality and service sectors as vehicles for converting criminal proceeds into genuinely clean, usable wealth.
This channel’s own earlier coverage of the Hell’s Angels Australian operations traced a similar pattern involving gyms, tattoo parlors, and security firms.
The common cherro’s own New Zealand chapter under Naru’s direction from custody appears to have built a genuinely comparable infrastructure adapted to New Zealand’s own specific commercial landscape.
Beyond funding the organization’s internal welfare functions and its laundering infrastructure, the commission’s resources were also directed toward a considerably more alarming purpose.
One this account has already flagged directly in its opening hook and one that connects directly back to Nafahu’s own stated conviction that underworld war was in his assessment inevitable.
According to court documents, part of the commission’s explicit purpose was funding the creation of a dedicated combat trained unit designed specifically to give the organization genuine professionalgrade tactical capability for carrying out violence on behalf of the broader gang.
What this account turns to next is exactly what that specific initiative actually involved.
A level of deliberate foreign sourced paramilitary training.
This channel hasn’t documented anywhere else across its entire body of work covering organized crime in either Australia or New Zealand.
On the 12th November 2023, a former United States Marine Corps sergeant arrived in New Zealand.
According to court documents, his background included genuine combat experience, tours of duty in Afghanistan, where he’d served as a squad leader alongside a further professional background in law enforcement.
He hadn’t come to New Zealand as a tourist or for any purpose connected to his own military or law enforcement career in any conventional sense.
He’d come, according to the facts eventually agreed to in court, specifically to train patched members of the Common Cerero Motorcycle Club.
It’s worth pausing on the sheer deliberate specificity of this arrangement because it represents something this channel hasn’t encountered anywhere else across its extensive documentation of organized crime in Australia and New Zealand.
This wasn’t a case of gang members picking up combat skills informally through whatever loose network of contacts or shared criminal experience happened to be available to them.
This was a genuine deliberate act of international recruitment, identifying and successfully engaging a specific individual with genuine verified professional combat and law enforcement credentials and arranging for him to travel across the Pacific specifically to deliver that training directly.
Lehi Vimahi described in court documents and subsequent reporting as the common cherro’s national commander and as Nfahu’s own man on the outside implementing the imprisoned president’s directives in the physical world.
Nahu himself could no longer directly access arranged the practical logistics of this specific arrangement.
According to court documents, Vimei personally organized the trainer’s accommodation and secured his access to gym facilities across the roughly month-long duration of his stay in the country.
The training itself, according to the agreed summary of facts, was genuinely comprehensive, extending well beyond simple weapons familiarization into considerably more sophisticated territory.
It included firearms instructions specifically using AR-15 rifles.
The same type of weapon this account notes is commonly used by military and law enforcement personnel in the United States.
A detail worth including because it illustrates the genuine professional-grade nature of the equipment involved rather than whatever more basic weapons might otherwise have been available to an ordinary New Zealand gang.
Court documents describe a formal selection course involving genuine physical training tests alongside a broader curriculum of educational presentations covering paramilitary topics including patrolling, squad tactics, hand-to-hand combat, coordinated raids, and detailed instruction on firearm capabilities.
It’s worth being direct about a further considerably more disturbing dimension of this training that’s been reported in connection with this case.
One this account is going to reference only in the most limited necessary terms consistent with the standard this channel applies to any content touching on genuinely dangerous or harmful technical instruction.
Reporting on this training has indicated it extended into territory, including detailed close combat instruction alongside the manufacturer of illegal weapons, including firearms produced through three-dimensional printing technology.
This account isn’t going to provide any further technical detail about either of these specific elements of the training curriculum.
What matters for understanding this case isn’t the specific mechanics of what was taught, but the fact that training of this seriousness extending into genuinely lethal close comet instruction and illegal weapons manufacturing was being delivered to a New Zealand criminal organization by a foreign national with genuine verified military comet experience.
Of the 16 people who originally began this training program, only six ultimately completed it.
According to the American trainer’s own notes, later recovered by police, it’s worth reflecting on what this specific attrition rate actually reveals about the genuine seriousness and difficulty of the program itself.
A 62% dropout rate suggests something considerably more rigorous and demanding than an informal casual training exercise closer in its selectivity to the kind of genuine special forces or elite unit selection process.
The trainer himself would presumably have been familiar with from his own military career.
Court documents note that this specific final number six trained operatives aligned precisely with the gang’s own originally stated intent establishing two tactical squads, one of four members and one of three.
A structure explicitly designed around genuine deliberate operational planning rather than simply training as many members as possible in a general sense.
The unit that emerged from this training program became known within court documents and subsequent reporting as the Ghost Squad.
Its stated purpose, according to the facts agreed to by at least one of its own members in court, was explicit and unambiguous to carry out violence on behalf of the Common Chero organization, specifically to maintain the club’s control over what court documents describe as the underworld.
It’s worth connecting this specific language directly back to Nahu’s own 2021 directive establishing the commission.
The same stated goal of maintaining the club’s position as, in his own words, number one in the underworld, now given concrete operational form through a dedicated, professionally trained unit specifically built to enforce that position through violence.
Patrick Langi, the same man this account has already traced through his role in the earlier attack on the Slay Manuel family, was among the small group who completed this training.
It’s worth reflecting on the specific trajectory this represents for a man who was by this point already facing serious charges connected to an earlier act of organized violence on the gang’s behalf.
Rather than that earlier case functioning as any kind of deterrent or turning point, Langi’s own continued involvement with the commoner’s most senior, most professionally organized violent capability suggests an organization and an individual member entirely undeterred by the prospect of formal legal consequence continuing to build and to participate in genuinely more sophisticated capacity for violence.
Even while an earlier case connected to exactly that kind of violence was still working its way through New Zealand’s court system.
It’s worth including a further detail worth noting directly.
One this account flagged briefly in its opening hook, but that deserves proper attention here.
Langi was separately arrested in December 2023, the same general period this Ghost Squad training was taking place on an entirely unrelated attempted murder charge.
Police declined to provide further public comment on the specifics of this separate matter at the time.
This account hasn’t been able to establish through the sources available to it how this third separate case ultimately resolved or whether it connects in any direct way to the broader commonro activity this account has already traced.
What can be said is that by this point in his own documented history, Lung’s name had become connected within a remarkably compressed period to three genuinely separate, genuinely serious matters.
The coordinated attack on Sly’s family, participation in a foreign trained paramilitary combat unit, and a separate attempted murder charge whose specific circumstances remain, as far as this account can establish, unresolved in the public record.
What this account turns to next is how this entire operation, the commission’s financial infrastructure, the Ghost Squad’s training, and everything connecting both of these initiatives directly back to Nahu’s own leadership was eventually uncovered, prosecuted, and formally resolved by New Zealand authorities.
New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Costa announced the latest phase of what had become a genuinely extensive linked series of investigations into the Common Churro’s New Zealand operations.
Framing the resulting prosecution explicitly around treating the entire organization as a formal criminal group rather than pursuing individual members purely for isolated individual offenses.
It’s worth understanding why this specific prosecutorial strategy matters because it reflects a genuinely significant shift in how New Zealand authorities had come to understand and address the common cherro’s activities by this point.
Prosecuting individual members for individual crimes.
The specific attack on Slayman’s family, for instance, addressed purely as an isolated act of arson and reckless discharge of a firearm, treats each offense as a discrete, contained legal matter.
Prosecuting the organization itself as a criminal group allows authorities to draw direct legal connections between separate incidents.
Establishing that individual acts of violence, money laundering, and paramilitary training weren’t simply coincidentally connected activities carried out by people who happened to share a patch, but genuinely coordinated components of a single centrally directed criminal enterprise.
Coer’s own public statement on the case was direct about how seriously the organization itself had come to be regarded.
From the moment the gang first established a presence in New Zealand, he stated its members had made clear they considered themselves the country’s number one gang, language that echoes almost precisely Nafahu’s own stated priority in his 2021 commission directive.
Coer characterized the resulting police action as a direct blow to the heart of what he described as the gang’s alleged core activities.
The formal legal resolution of this entire extended investigation arrived only recently.
Within days of this account being compiled, both Pascilica Nafahu and Lehi Vimahi were jailed together in the Oakland District Court over a combined range of charges spanning money laundering, drug dealing, and the ghost squad training program.
This account has already traced in detail.
It’s worth including the specific characterization offered by prosecutors regarding Vimma’s own role within this broader structure because it captures something worth sitting with about the practical division of authority within this organization.
Addressing the court directly, prosecutors stated plainly that if Vime wasn’t a lead offender in this case, they didn’t know who could reasonably be described as one.
A characterization that positions him not as a subordinate simply following Nahu’s distant prisonisssued directives, but as a genuine independently significant architect of everything this account has traced, working in close, practical partnership with his imprisoned president to actually build and operate the structures Nfahu had originally envisioned.
It’s worth reflecting on what the specific sentencing outcome actually represents for the broader question this account has been tracing throughout whether imprisonment genuinely functions as an effective barrier to continued organized crime leadership.
Nafahu, already serving time before the specific set of charges was resolved, has now been formally additionally convicted for activity he directed from custody across a period spanning from at least February 2021 through to the Ghost Squad’s training in late 2023, close to 3 years of continued demonstrably effective organizational leadership delivered entirely from inside a correctional facility.
Whatever specific security measures New Zealand’s own prison system applied to Nauf Fahu during this period, they evidently weren’t sufficient to prevent him from establishing a formal governance structure, directing significant moneyaundering operations and initiating the recruitment of a foreign combat trainer to build a dedicated violent enforcement unit.
Video evidence uncovered by police during this investigation showed Vimei himself directly participating in the combat training program, including the use of what’s been described as illegal weapons visual.
Direct evidence connecting the organization’s own senior at liberty leadership figure not merely to arranging or funding this training but to genuinely personally participating in it alongside the patch members he was ostensibly overseeing on Nafahu’s behalf reflecting on what this specific detail reveals about Vimei’s own genuine investment in the Ghost Squad initiative beyond simple organizational logistics a national commander who personally ly undergoes the same combat training he’s arranged for subordinate members isn’t simply administering a program from a comfortable distance.
He’s demonstrating through his own direct physical participation a genuine personal commitment to the organization’s stated goal of building real professionalgrade violent capability.
This account has already established in its earlier parts the specific connection between this broader commonro leadership structure and the attack on Khaled Sleman’s family now for who investigated though never charged over that specific incident.
It’s worth drawing together at this point exactly how directly connected these various threads actually prove to be now that the fuller organizational structure has been formally established through this most recent sentencing.
The commission established by Nafu specifically to protect the club and maintain its dominant position.
The formalized exit fine system that Slemanuel refused to pay, triggering the retribution attack against his family.
The Ghost Squad established using commission funding specifically to give the organization genuine professional violent capability.
Patrick Langi participating in both the earlier family attack and the later paramilitary training program.
Every thread this account has traced across its previous five parts connects back to the same single centrally coordinated organizational structure.
One genuinely sophisticated enough to fund international recruitment of a foreign combat specialist, launder millions of dollars through legitimate seeming hospitality businesses, and simultaneously provide welfare support for members families and educational funding for anyone wanting to pursue further study.
What this account turns to next in its final part is a broader reflection on what this entire case actually reveals about the current state of organized crime in New Zealand and what it suggests about the country’s own capacity to meet a genuinely evolving increasingly sophisticated threat.
This account set out to trace the story of a single patched commoner member Patrick Langi and found in doing so a considerably larger and more alarming picture of how sophisticated New Zealand’s own organized crime landscape has become.
One that extends well beyond the more familiar patterns this channel has documented across its earlier coverage of gangs in both Australia and New Zealand.
It’s worth returning in closing to the specific detail that opened this entire account of former United States Marine with genuine combat experience from Afghanistan deliberately recruited to travel across the Pacific and deliver professional-grade paramilitary training to a New Zealand outlaw motorcycle club.
This channel has documented numerous instances across its broader coverage of organized crime figures acquiring weapons, building genuine tactical capability, and engaging in serious coordinated violence.
It hasn’t until now documented anything approaching this specific level of deliberate internationally sourced professionalization.
A gang treating combat training not as something to be learned informally [snorts] through shared criminal experience, but as a genuine service worth recruiting and presumably paying a qualified foreign specialist to deliver.
There’s a broader reflection worth offering here connecting this specific case to the wider body of work this channel has built across its coverage of both Australian and New Zealand organized crime.
This account has now documented in considerable detail elsewhere how the section 501 deportation pathway brought a wave of experienced already established Australian outlaw motorcycle club figures into New Zealand beginning around 2015.
Figures who arrived with genuine organizational sophistication already built transplanted wholesale from an established criminal environment into a new country.
What this specific case adds to that earlier picture is evidence of this transplanted sophistication hasn’t remained static since the common chair’s initial New Zealand establishment roughly 6 years before the events this account has traced.
It’s continued actively developing, incorporating genuinely new capabilities, professional paramilitary training, sophisticated money laundering through legitimate hospitality businesses, and a formalized internal governance structure explicit enough to be laid out in writing by an imprisoned president directing operations through encrypted messages.
It’s worth being fair in offering this assessment to what New Zealand authorities actually achieved in response to this specific threat.
This wasn’t a case where police remained unaware of or unable to respond to this escalating sophistication.
The investigation that ultimately produced Langis, Vimeis, and Nahu’s respective convictions represents a genuinely substantial sustained law enforcement effort.
One capable of recovering an American trainer’s own personal notes, uncovering video evidence of Vimei’s direct participation in combat training and successfully tracing a genuinely sophisticated moneyaundering operation through to its final legitimate seeming commercial assets.
Whatever sophistication the commoner’s own New Zealand leadership had managed to build, New Zealand’s own investigative capacity proved in this specific case genuinely capable of matching it.
What remains considerably less certain and worth [clears throat] closing this account with as an open unresolved question rather than a confident conclusion is what this case actually means for New Zealand’s broader capacity to address organized crime going forward.
This channel has now documented across its coverage of Basam Hamzy, Kazam Hammad, and now Pasilica Nafahu, a genuinely consistent pattern imprisonment, even in facilities specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of continued criminal direction has repeatedly proven insufficient to actually sever a genuinely capable leader connection to the organization they continue to lead.
Nafahu directed the establishment of an entire governance structure, a sophisticated moneyaundering operation, and the recruitment of a foreign paramilitary trainer across close to 3 years entirely from custody.
Whatever specific security failures allowed this to happen, smuggled communications devices, insufficiently monitored correspondence, or some other gap this account hasn’t been able to establish with precision.
The practical result was a national president who remained throughout his own imprisonment a genuinely active effective leader of an organization continuing to grow in sophistication and capability.
It’s worth ending on a genuinely difficult question this specific case raises one this channel doesn’t have a confident answer to but that feels worth naming directly rather than avoiding.
If a New Zealand prison system specifically designed to remove dangerous individuals from active criminal life couldn’t prevent Pascilica Nafahu from directing this level of sustained, sophisticated criminal activity from custody, what would actually need to change to close that gap?
This channel has now documented this same underlying question recurring across multiple separate cases in both Australia and New Zealand without ever finding a confident, fully satisfying answer to it.
Whatever the answer eventually turns out to be, this specific case, a national president’s prison directive leading within three years to a former US Marine training an elite hit squad on New Zealand soil, represents about as stark and as urgent a version of that question as this channel has yet documented across its entire body of work.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting rather than speculation.
If you’re new here, that’s the standard we hold to on every case, including, as this account has tried to demonstrate throughout cases where the full picture only emerges by tracing connections across multiple separately investigated threads, rather than treating any single arrest or conviction as the complete story on its own.
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