For 21 years, an innocent man sat in a New Zealand prison for a rape and murder he didn’t commit.
The real killer wasn’t a stranger to the case.
He was a former member of one of the country’s oldest and at one point largest outlaw motorcycle clubs.
A man who’d already patched out of that club by the time police finally connected him to the crime.
This video isn’t about that wrongful conviction specifically.
We’ve told that kind of story before and we’ll tell this one properly another time.
It’s about the club itself.
Highway Xiaomi founded in Auckland and the five decades of violence internal betrayal and organizational survival that connect a 19year-old member shot dead at a gang property in Milam to a woman sentenced for smuggling methamphetamine inside a steering wheel almost 50 years later.
In between.
This is a club whose own national president disbanded an entire chapter over killing his members carried out.
Whose next president was years later stabbed to death inside the club’s own headquarters by a man that same president had once forced out.
Whose members have been charged with murdering a rival gang leader’s brother after a rugby league match and who at different points across five decades have been named by police as one of the two largest outlaw motorcycle clubs operating anywhere in the country.
Before we go further, a note on how this video is put together.
Everything here is drawn from New Zealand court reporting, police records, and Garrett Gilbert’s academic history of the country’s gangs patched, cross-cheed across independent sources.
Some of what this club’s own former members have been convicted of involves serious sexual violence.
We’re going to mention that it happened because it’s part of the documented record without describing it in any further detail than that.
In this video, we’ll go through Highway Shamui, most history in order, its founding and early violent rivalries, the internal killing that split the club in two, the murder that drew police attention to one of its own former members years after he’d already left, and where the club actually stands today, nearly 60 years after it started.
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.
No dramatizing, no glorifying.
Hit subscribe and turn on the bell if you want to see where this one goes.
We’ll start in Auckland in with a club that would go on to outlast almost every rival it ever fought.
Highway Shamiote didn’t emerge into an empty landscape when it formed in Auckland.
It was following a structure that had been set in place just a few years earlier in when a Hell’s Angels chapter in Auckland formally affiliated with its American counterpart becoming according to New Zealand’s own official encyclopedia the first Hell’s Angels chapter ever chartered outside California that affiliation brought with it a formal template most subsequent New Zealand gangs would go on to adopt almost wholeles sale.
An elected leadership structure of president, vice president, and surgeon at arms.
Membership denoted through a circular back patch with a top and bottom rocker and a strict rule common to outlaw motorcycle clubs internationally that only men could hold full patch membership.
Highway Xiaomi arrived as part of a specific closely bunched wave of clubs adopting that same structure.
The head hunters, a club this channel has already covered elsewhere in its documentation of New Zealand organized crime formed in Shia Highway Xiaomi Mo followed the next year in founded in Auckland.
Sources differ slightly on the exact year with some accounts placing it in as well is the date most consistently cited.
From that starting point, the club expanded steadily across the following decades into Hastings, Wellington, Rotorua, Northland, and Chris Church, eventually establishing an international presence in Australia from around with a formal Brisbane chapter following the club’s visual identity.
A skeleton gripping ape hanger handlebars above a stretch of open road rendered in the club’s black and gone colors became one of the more recognizable patches among New Zealand’s outlaw motorcycle scene over the following decades.
So did the club’s actual standing within that scene.
New Zealand’s Tamimo Committee on Gangs report commonly referred to as the Cumber report identify Highway Shiaimo as one of the two largest of the 20 separate outlaw motorcycle gangs than operating in the country by the according to research compiled in Jared Gilbert’s patched widely regarded as the definitive academic history of gangs in New Zealand.
Highway Shamimo had grown to become the single largest outlaw motorcycle club in the country outright a position it would at various points continue to hold well into the following decade.
That growth wasn’t peaceful.
One of the earliest serious incidents connected to the club’s history took place on December at a highway property in Auckland’s Mount Eden suburb.
A 19-year-old club member Bradley Erhara was beaten and then fatally shot in the head with a son of shotgun during a confrontation with members of the Hell’s Angels.
The same organization whose own formal structure had a decade and a half earlier effectively provided the template highway Shiaimop itself was now operating under.
It’s a detail worth sitting with because it captures something that would recur throughout this club’s history and across New Zealand’s outlaw motorcycle scene more broadly.
Shared organizational structure and shared subcultural identity didn’t translate into shared peace between rival clubs.
If anything, clubs built on the same basic template, competing for the same limited territory and the same poon of potential recruits, often had more immediate reasons to come into direct conflict with each other than clubs with less in common.
Further violence followed as the club continued expanding through the following decade.
In at a Martyr Grass event held in Nelson.
Highway Xiaomi Mo Wellington chapter clashed directly with a rival club, the Lost Breed.
Boom.
People were injured in the confrontation and 21 lost breed members and associates were arrested in its aftermath.
A scale of arrests that reflects just how significant the disorder actually was.
Even by the standards of a subculture already well accustomed to interclub violence by the early Tamuz then highway Shamimo had already established the basic pattern that would define much of its subsequent history.
Rabbit growth, genuine organizational significance within New Zealand’s gang landscape, and a documented willingness to meet conflict, whether from rival clubs or from within its own ranks, with serious sustained violence.
What happened over the following two decades, including a killing that would eventually split the club’s own leadership in two and a former member whose crimes would intersect with one of New Zealand’s most significant wrongful conviction cases is where this account turns next.
Not every act of violence connected to Highway Shiao across the came from outside the club.
Some of the most significant moments in its history came from disputes.
The organization was forced to manage internally and the way it chose to manage them would eventually come back to cost the club one of its own most senior figures.
In August, high two members of the head hunters, Dave Smith and Jason Ruka were charged with murdering a highway Shiaimok member named Steven Bliss.
Is a case worth pausing on briefly because of how it ended rather than how it began.
The charges against both men were later dropped after witnesses withdrew the statements they’d originally given police.
This channel has now documented this specific pattern.
A case built on witness cooperation that collapses once those same witnesses retreat from what they initially told investigators across multiple organized crime cases in both Australia and New Zealand.
And Bliss’s case represents one of the earlier less thoroughly documented examples of exactly that dynamic playing out inside New Zealand’s own gang landscape.
By the early Kevin Weavers had emerged as one of Highway Shia Mo’s most senior and consequential figures, eventually rising to lead the club’s Auckland chapter and according to most accounts of this period, effectively serving as the club’s most senior national figure.
More broadly, inang Weavers was convicted of theft and receiving stolen cars with the total value of the vehicles involved reaching close reaching close to a million dollars.
It’s worth noting what this conviction establishes about Weavers specifically, distinct from anything connected to the wider club.
He wasn’t simply a figurehead holding a ceremonial leadership title.
He was someone with his own, independently documented history of serious property crime, operating at a scale substantial enough to draw a criminal conviction years before the events that would eventually define the rest of his public record.
Weaver’s authority within the club extended well beyond his own personal criminal activity.
According to later police characterization of his role as national leader, Weavers would have effectively masterminded much of the club’s broader criminal activity.
Described specifically as heavily involved in the manufacturer and distribution of mathamine at the same time and this is a detail worth including because it complicates a simple picture of weavers as purely a criminal opportunist.
Pulis also noted that he was known to actively discourage certain kinds of behavior among the club’s members, suggesting a leader who drew his own internal lines around what conduct he considered acceptable even while directing serious organized crime activity himself.
That capacity for internal discipline was tested directly in the incident that would come to defy much of highway Xiaomi Mo’s reputation for the following decade.
A member of Highway Shiaomi Mo carried out what’s been consistently described in reporting as an execution style killing of Malcolm Muns, a member of the rival nomads gang.
It’s worth being precise about what execution sty signals in this context.
Language generally used to describe a deliberate targeted killing rather than one arising from an unplanned altercation consistent with the kind of premeditated gang violence this channel has documented across other cases in both countries.
What Weavers did in response is genuinely notable and it’s worth understanding why.
As national president, he made the decision to disband the club’s entire Otahu chapter following the killing.
A chapter led at the time by Kelly Robertson.
Available reporting doesn’t specify in full detail whether the disbandment was a direct disciplinary response connected to the Muns killing specifically a broader move to reassert central control over a chapter weavers considered to be operating outside acceptable bounds or side acceptable bounds or some combination of both.
What’s clear is the practical effect.
An entire branch of the organization along with the man who’ been leading it was formally cut loose by the club’s own national leadership in the direct aftermath of one of the most serious acts of violence connected to the club’s history.
It’s worth pausing on what this decision actually represents because it cuts against a common assumption about how organizations like outlaw motorcycle clubs typically respond to violence carried out in their name.
This wasn’t a club closing ranks around a member responsible for a serious killing, treating the resulting police attention as an external threat to be managed collectively.
It was the club’s own national leadership choosing to formally severise with an entire chapter in what reads based on the available record as a deliberate act of internal accountability.
Even if the specific mechanics and full reasoning behind that decision remain incompletely documented in public reporting, that decision didn’t resolve cleanly.
And it’s worth being honest about what happened to the relationship between Weavers and Robertson in the years that followed because it sets up everything that would eventually happen to Weavers himself.
According to later court reporting connected to Weaver’s own death, the relationship between the two men in the years after the otahoo.
This otahu disbandment was genuinely disputed.
Some accounts, including from defense witnesses in later proceedings, maintain that Weavers and Roberson had actually retained a degree of mutual respect for each other despite the formal rupture.
Other accounts describe something closer to a simmering unresolved hostility.
Had come to detest had come to detest each other in the years since Robertson’s chapter was cut loose.
Water’s chapter was cut loose.
Whatever the true nature of that relationship, it clearly hadn’t been fully settled by the early hangs.
A separate unrelated dispute would eventually bring the two men into direct catastrophic conflict.
One connected not to gang politics or the earlier Mun’s killing directly, but to a much more mundan grievance over property.
A man named Michael Britain had reportedly been taxed by weavers at some point.
A term used with an outlaw motorcycle club culture to describe a senior figure forcibly claiming another members or associates property as a form of punishment or assertion of dominance.
In Britain’s case, that meant losing a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a car, his tools, and according to court reporting, his partner’s wage packet as well.
Britain, badly injured enough from whatever confrontation produced this outcome to require hospitalization, spent his time in hospital telling anyone who’d listened that he intended to kill the person responsible.
Rather than acting on that alone, Britain approached Kelly Robertson.
The former Otahu chapter president Weavers had disbanded years earlier for help.
His own lawyer would later insist when the matter eventually reached court that Britain hadn’t recruited Robertson to physically harm Weavers at all, but simply to use his skills as a negotiator to persuade Weavers into returning the property.
Whatever Britain’s actual intention in bringing Robertson into the dispute, what happened next would bring together in a single violent event.
Two threats this account has now traced across nearly a decade and unresolved grievance from a chapter disbandment and an entirely separate more immediate dispute over a stolen Harley-Davidson.
There is a broader pattern worth drawing out from this entire stretch of Highway Shiaomi Mo’s history.
One that connects directly to themes this channel has traced across other organized crime cases in both Australia and New Zealand.
Formal leadership within an outlaw motorcycle club doesn’t operate through the kind of clean hierarchical accountability a legitimate organization might use.
When Weavers disbanded Robertson’s chapter in he was in one sense exercising exactly the kind of internal discipline that distinguishes a functioning organization from a loose collection of individually violent people.
But that same act of discipline rather than resolving the underlying tension it was meant to address appears to have simply displaced it.
Turning a formal institutional rupture into a personal grievance that both men apparently carried in some form for years afterward, waiting for an unrelated dispute to eventually bring it back to the surface.
By the early Hangands, Highway Xiaomi Mo had survived and in some ways grown stronger from close to three decades of exactly this kind of internal and external violence.
A club whose own national leadership had proven willing to discipline its members even through drastic measures like disbanding an entire chapter and whose members had in turn proven capable of carrying old grievances forward for years before finally acting on them.
What happened next in September would test whether that same capacity for internal discipline could actually protect the club’s own leadership once a genuinely determined former member decided the time had come to settle an old score on September Kevin Weavers was found mortally wounded at highway Shiaimok’s headquarters on Hols Road in the south Oakuckland suburb of Manura he’d been stabbed with a 22 cm knife the plate opening a wound to his thigh that struck his femoral artery in two separate places.
He died soon after.
He was 43 years old.
Police arriving at the scene identified a yellow Toyota Land Cruiser seen speeding away from the property immediately after the attack.
Detective senior surgeon Mark Gutri leading the investigation told media in the days that followed that evidence was pointing toward the vehicle having carried the people responsible for planning the killing, including investigators believed members of Highway Shamimote itself.
Asked whether the motive traced back to internal club politics or a falling out over drugs or other criminal activity.
Gutri declined to specify saying only that police were actively working through exactly that question.
The investigation moved quickly.
Hine man, a 49year-old described in reporting as a businessman and a 53 year old described as unemployed, both associated with Highway Xiaomi Mo, were arrested in a coordinated dawn raid conducted by armed police across properties in Auckland and Wanganger.
Bevers and knives were seized during the operation along with a small quantity of methamphetamine found at one of the one of the addresses searched.
No, police were careful to note at the time that they hadn’t yet established whether that specific fine was directly connected to Weaver’s killing.
It’s worth pausing on how police handled the period immediately following the murder because it reveals something about how seriously authorities took the risk of what might happen next.
Officers were candid in public statements at the time about their primary concern shifting almost immediately from solving the killing itself to preventing retaliatory violence connected to it.
Police has spoken directly with Highway Shiaomi Mo members in the aftermath, communicating clearly what would happen if the club attempted any form of retribution.
That any retaliatory violence would be vigorously investigated with the explicit warning that ordinary members of the public risk being caught up in exactly that kind of escalation if it occurred.
According to police statements from the time, the club had to some degree cooperated with this specific message even as most individual members continued refusing to cooperate with the broader murder investigation itself.
A distinction worth noting because it suggests an organization capable of drawing a lie between between maintaining its own code of silence around an internal killing and recognizing that opened retaliatory warfare carried risks even its own leadership wasn’t prepared to accept.
As the investigation progressed, the picture that emerged connected Weaver’s death directly back to the unresolved tension this account traced in its previous part.
Three men were ultimately charged in connection with the killing.
Kelly Robersonson, the former Otuhu chapter president whose chapter Weavers had disbanded years earlier following the Moyang killing of Malcolm Muns along with Highway Shia member Michael Good and associate Michael Britain, the man whose dispute with Weavers over stolen Harley-Davidson had apparently set the final sequence of events in motion.
When the matter reached the Oakuckland High Court, Robertson’s defense rested on a claim of self-defense raised from the opening day of the trial.
Crown prosecutor Brian Dicki laid out the broader context the jury would need to weigh.
Britain’s own stated intention, voiced repeatedly during his hospital stay to kill the man who’ taken his motorcycle, car, and tools.
His subsequent approach to Robertson for help resolving the dispute and the specific contested question of what Robertson’s own intentions had actually been in agreeing to get involved.
Robersonson’s defense meant he hadn’t set out to kill Weavers at all and that whatever happened at the Manurea Clubhouse that day reflected a response to a genuine threat to his own safety rather than a premeditated act of revenge connected to events reaching back 6 years.
The jury’s eventual verdict split the difference between these two competing accounts in a legally significant way.
Robersonson was convicted of manslaughter.
A finding that reflects the jury accepting Weaver’s death was Robinson’s doing while stopping short of accepting the crown’s case that it met the higher threshold required for a murder conviction which would have required proof of a specific intention to kill or cause really serious harm.
It’s a meaningful legal distinction.
And when this account is careful to preserve accurately, a manslaughter conviction establishes criminal responsibility for a death without establishing the same level of premeditated intent that a murder verdict would carry.
There’s a further detail connected to Robertson’s own activities around this period worth including because it adds a genuinely significant dimension to understanding what might have actually been driving the broad attention between him and weavers by hang security camera footage reportedly captured Robertson meeting with members of the bandidos motorcycle club around the time of Weaver’s death with investigators coming to believe he’d been in the process of establishing a New Zealand chapter of that rival organization.
If accurate, this reframes the entire dispute in a way that extends well beyond a simple grudge over a disbanded chapter or a stolen motorcycle.
A former Highway Xiaomi Mo chapter president expelled years earlier, apparently working to establish a rival international clubs presence in New Zealand, New Zealand, coming into fatal conflict with the very national leader who’d once cut him loose.
This is a genuinely different, more organizationally significant kind of conflict than a personal dispute alone would suggest, closer to the territorial and structural rivalries.
This channel has documented between competing outlaw motorcycle clubs elsewhere in both Australia and New Zealand.
Weaver’s death and the specific circumstances that produced it left Highway Shamimo in a genuinely weakened position.
Montipo independent sources describing the club’s subsequent history note that the killing caused a significant internal rift removing not just a senior figure but the specific national leader who’d spent years actively working to maintain the kind of internal discipline this account has already traced back to is worth reflecting on the layered irony sitting at the center of this entire sequence of events.
Weavers disbanded an entire chapter in in what reads as a genuine act of organizational accountability following a killing carried out in the club’s name.
That same act of discipline rather than resolving anything appears to have set in motion a chain of grievance and resentment that took 6 years to fully play out.
And when it finally did, it claimed the life of the very leader who tried to enforce that discipline in the first place, delivered by the man whose own position within the club that discipline had originally ended.
It’s worth being careful in drawing this connection, not to overstate what the public record can actually confirm about Robertson’s specific motivations.
His own defense maintained the killing arose from immediate self-defense rather than long-held premeditated revenge, and the jury’s manslaughter verdict rather than a murder conviction reflects at least some acceptance that the crown hadn’t fully proven a clear premeditated intent to kill.
What can be said with confidence is the broader sequence of documented fact.
By dispensman.
A yearslong relationship variously described as either retaining mutual respect or simmering hostility, an entirely separate dispute over stolen property that brought the two men back into direct contact and a fatal stabbing that ended with the club’s own most senior leader debt at its own headquarters at the hands of a man he’d formerly expelled from the organization 6 years earlier.
By the time this specific chapter of Highway Shiaimok’s history closed with Robertson’s manslaughter conviction, the club had lost within the span of roughly two decades a 19-year-old member to a rival club’s shotgun an entire chapter to its own leadership’s internal discipline and finally that same leadership’s most senior figure to the very man that discipline had originally been imposed on.
What the organization actually looked like once it absorbed all three of these losses and how it managed to continue operating at all in the years that followed is where this account turns next.
Malcolm Riwa was at various points a member of Highway Shiaomi Mop.
This account hasn’t been able to establish precisely how senior a figure he was within the club or exactly when his membership began or ended.
But by the early Mu.
While his connection to the club was documented in reporting at the time, Riwa was already living a second entirely separate life as a serial rapist operating across Auckland using a consistent method, breaking into women’s homes alone.
At night, wrapping his victims heads in blankets or duvetses during the attacks.
Oniba March Finey old Susan Berdett was raped and murdered in her home in Papto in South Auckland.
She was struck repeatedly with a softball bat she kept in her home for her own protection.
Her body was found 2 days later wrapped in a duvet on her waterbed.
Exactly one year later, to the day, a 17-year-old named Tanapora, a mongre mob prospect with no connection whatsoever to highway Shiaim Mo was arrested on unrelated charges.
Learning there was a $20,000 reward on offer for information about Burd’s death, Pora told police he’d been present when the murder happened, he was convicted at trial, based substantially on that confession and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He was by any reasonable account an extremely vulnerable defendant.
It would later be established that Pora had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder caused by his mother’s drinking during pregnancy.
A condition that made him highly suggestible under police questioning.
The kind of condition that helps explain in retrospect why a 17-year-old with no actual connection to the crime would confess to it for a cash reward.
Dire evidence recovered from the scene was matched to Mammi.
It’s worth being direct about what this should have meant for Pora’s case and what it actually meant instead.
Riwa was by this point already the subject of a dedicated police investigation into a string of similar rapes across Auckland between all sharing the same distinctive method.
His pattern consistently documented across every other case connected to him involved acting entirely alone.
He denied ever knowing Tanapora.
Faced with n evidence directly linking a known prolific serial rapist to the crime scene and a documented pattern showing the same rapist never worked within a complice, a straightforward within a complies, a straightforward reading of the evidence would have pointed toward Pora’s original conviction being fundamentally unsafe.
Instead, when Pora’s case was retrieded in Hyang, following an earlier court of appeal decision that had thrown out his first conviction, prosecutors changed their theory of the case rather than abandoning it.
The new argument put to the jury was that Pora and Ria had committed the crime together, a joint venture, despite Riawa’s own denials, despite his established pattern of acting alone in every other documented case connected to him, and despite the absence of any evidence placing the two men in contact with each other at all.
The jury convicted Pora a second time.
He would go on to spend a total of 21 years in prison for a crime the physical evidence increasingly suggested he had nothing to do with.
Riwa, meanwhile, faced his own separate legal proceedings over the same case, and it’s worth understanding how strangely those proceedings unfolded alongside Perez continued imprisonment.
In a jury found Rewang guilty of raping Susan Berdett.
On the specific question of whether he’d also murdered her, that same jury couldn’t reach a verdict.
A second trial addressing the murder charge specifically produced the same result.
Guilty of rape, deadlocked on murder.
For close to two decades, New Zealand’s justice system held both outcomes as simultaneously true.
An innocent teenager convicted of murdering a woman whose actual rapist had been identified through DA evidence while that same rapist’s own murder trials repeatedly failed to produce a verdict.
Either way, it took until hanging home for this to be properly resolved.
Pretend Privy Council at the time still New Zealand’s final court of appeal for certain matters formally quashed all of Pora’s convictions having already granted him parole the previous year after 20 years in custody.
Ler delivering the decision pointed specifically to expert evidence about Poras fetto alcohol spectrum disorder as a significant factor in the ruling.
Evidence that helped explain why what’s now understood to have been a false confession had ever been considered reliable enough to convict him in the first place.
The following year, the New Zealand government paid Pora just over ba nam million in compensation alongside a formal apology from the justice minister.
At the time, the largest payout the crown had ever made for a wrongful conviction.
With Pora’s own conviction gone, the path was finally clear to properly resolve the question of who had actually killed Susan Berdett.
Police requested a review of the earlier decision to stay further prosecution of Riawa specifically over the murder charge and were granted charge and were granted permission to pursue what legal commentators at the time described as a genuinely rare third trial on the same murder allegation.
Intuin Bay years after Susan Berdett’s death.
A jury finally found Malcolm Riwa guilty of her murder.
He received a life sentence to be served alongside the 22-year preventive detention term he was already serving for his broader pattern of rape convictions.
It’s worth pausing on the sheer scale of what this timeline actually represents because the individual dates can obscure just how extraordinary the underlying sequence of events was.
A crime committed in den evidence identifying the likely perpetrator by a wrongful conviction upheld regardless through a retrial built on a theory contradicted by the very evidence that had originally undermined the first conviction.
21 years of a wrongfully imprisoned man’s life.
While the person deny evidence had already identified continued facing repeated inconclusive murder trials of his own and finally a resolution that took until Hangin to arrive.
Handy 7 years after Berdett’s death and well over a decade after most of the evidence needed to reach that resolution had already existed by Hyang.
Highway Shamimo had expanded well beyond its Oakuckland origins, establishing a presence in Christ Church significant enough to produce its own local leadership.
Matthew Bernard Grand held that position described in later court reporting as the self-appointed leader of the club’s Christurch chapter, a phrasing worth noting for what it suggests about how formally or informally some of the club’s regional leadership structures actually operated by this point in its history.
Onam August hang Shannon a member of the rival black power gang and brother of that organization’s national president Tony Shannon was shot dead while sitting in his car on Sylvester Street in the Chrisurch suburb of Woolston.
He just come from rugby league practice.
The attack was a drive by shooting and it was according to the crown’s later case a deliberate planned killing rather than an opportunistic or spontaneous one.
Six people were originally charged in connection with Shannon’s death.
One Murray Arnold Sims pleaded guilty ahead of trial.
The remaining numf faced a jury at the high court in Christ Church in a trial that ran across six weeks.
One defendant discharged partway through proceedings.
Another, Donna Wright, ultimately acquitted.
Of the rest, three men, including Grant, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
A further defendant, Dean Noble, was acquitted of being an accessory to the murder itself, but convicted of unlawfully possessing a pistol connected to the broader incident.
When the high court came to set minimum non-parole periods for the three men convicted of murder, Justice Kishhm didn’t mince words about what the killing represented.
He had described it as displaying utter contempt not only for the law, but for public safety more broadly.
Language reflecting the fact that Shannon had been shot dead in an ordinary residential street in his own car rather than in any setting connected specifically to gang activity itself.
The judge characterized the killing as another example of the intergang conflict that had by this point become a recurring documented problem for Chris Church specifically.
Grant received a minimum non-p parole period of 14 years.
His co-acused Dean Nathan and G Bucknell received 13 years each.
Sims having pleaded guilty received 11.
It’s worth following Grant’s story forward briefly because it offers a genuinely different kind of ending different kind of ending than most of the figures covered elsewhere in this account.
In hango after serving five din years, Gran was granted parole.
He told the parole board he left the gang many years earlier and expressed a specific set of intentions for his life going forward.
Completing a university degree and working as a mentor to young people at risk of following a similar path into gang life.
His parole conditions included attending a treatment program with a psychologist and a strict prohibition on associating with any active member or associate of his former gang.
Whether that stated intention has actually held in the years since it’s something this account can independently verify.
But it’s worth including as a genuine data point alongside everything else this account has documented that at least one of the men responsible for one of Highway Shia Mo’s most serious killings has on the available record attempted a documented pathway from the organization entirely.
The years following Shannon’s murder brought further evidence that Highway Shia Mo’s criminal activity extended well beyond the string of killings this account has focused on in detail.
Lehi police uncovered a methamphetamine operation run by former club president Kelly Roberson, the same man who would the following year kill Kevin Weavers alongside associates including a filthy few member and two further individuals generating an estimated backcom through the operation.
It’s a detail worth including because it adds financial texture to Robertson’s own story.
By the time he killed weavers in Leba.
He wasn’t simply a man carrying a year’s old grievance over disbanded chapter.
He was actively running his own significant drug operation.
And according to the CQDV evidence covered earlier in this account, apparently apparently working to establish and entirely separate rival clubs presence in New Zealand at the same time.
Highway Xiaomi Mo’s more recent history stretching from the Midam Hyang through to the present reflects a club that’s continued operating without producing another single incident on the scale of the Muns killing, the Weaver’s assassination or the Shannon murder, but one that’s remained a consistent documented presence in New Zealand’s criminal justice system regardless.
Inhum, former member Dean Noble, the same man acquitted as an accessory in the Shannon case, but convicted of the related firearms charge, was convicted of raping a fellow inmate while himself in prison, a conviction that continued to factor into subsequent parole decisions connected to his broader gang history.
In March, member James Hioki received a 9-year sentence in the Wanganui District Court, having caused his own brother’s death while driving disqualified after evading prior warrants.
In September, New Zealand police carried out raids in Ashbertton, Canterbury, arresting 18 people connected to the club’s activity in the region.
The club’s most recent documented case, as of when this account was put together, involves a notably different kind of figure than most of the men covered throughout this history.
In my ley described in Christ Church District Court as self-p perceived gang royalty through her affiliation with highway Xiaomi mo was sentenced to Steven years and 11 months for importing methamphetamine concealed inside a vehicle steering wheel assembly.
It’s worth noting the shift this represents if only briefly.
Highway Shamim most documented history across every incident this account has traced in detail has been overwhelmingly a history of male violence killings assault and internal club discipline enforced almost entirely by and against male members.
Wigh’s case reflects something closer to the broer more diffused reality of how organized crime actually operates around a club like this one in its later decades.
Not only patched members carrying out gang business directly, but a wider network of associates, some of whom evidently have found their own routes into serious drug offending connected to the club’s name and reputation.
While outside the club’s own formal membership structure, there’s a further genuinely tragic threat connecting this club’s history across an even longer span thank the decades already covered.
Malcolm Muns the nomad’s member who killing this account traced back at the very start of highway’s most significant internal crisis had a son Tyrone Muns in March Tyrone Muns was himself found critically injured at a Christurch property and died at the scene having been the victim of what police treated as a targeted attack.
A 29-year-old man was arrested and charged with his murder.
This account hasn’t been able to establish through available reporting any direct connection between Tyrone Mun’s own death nearly three decades later and the original killing of his father.
The two incidents appear based on what’s currently documented to be entirely separate matters connected only by the same family name and the same city’s gang landscape.
But it’s worth including here regardless as a genuinely sobering reminder of how long the consequences of this specific world can continue rippling outward.
Well beyond the people directly involved in any single incident and well beyond the time frame most true crime coverage typically considers when telling a story like this one.
Taken together this stretch of Highway Shia Mo’s most more recent history.
Spanning a convicted killer’s stated attempt at redemption, a string of comparatively a string of comparatively smaller individual convictions and a modern methamphetamine case involving a member’s own self described gang royalty status paints a picture of an organization that settled in its later decades into something closer to ordinary sustains the ordinary sustains criminal activity.
Thank the era defining violence that characterized its first three decades of existence.
That’s not to suggest the club has become less dangerous or less criminally active in any meaningful sense.
It’s simply a different, less dramatically concentrated pattern than the one this account has spent most of its length tracing.
A club that having survived internal assassinations, rival gang wars, and the departure of one of its own members into one of New Zealand’s most significant miscarriage of justice cases has continued operating regardless close to 60 years after it first formed in Auckland.
There’s a specific detail about Highway Shiaimok worth returning to now because it sets the club apart from almost every other organization this channel has covered in its documentation of New Zealand’s gang landscape.
Highway Shiaimo wasn’t imported.
It wasn’t founded by a deport sent across the Tasman after losing a fight with Australian immigration law.
And it wasn’t established as a New Zealand chapter of an already existing Australian club with its own decades of history and reputation behind it.
When it formed in Oakuckland, following the same organizational template the Hell’s Angels had brought into the country 7 years earlier.
It was a genuinely homegrown organization built from the ground up by people who had no prior international club to draw legitimacy, funding or reputation from.
That distinction matters for understanding how differently Highway Xiaomi Mo’s entire trajectory has unfolded compared to the clubs this channel has spent considerable time documenting elsewhere in its coverage of New Zealand organized crime.
This channel’s account of Vetkin and Pasilica Noahu traced how the Comancheros arrived in New Zealand almost fully formed in Hangen Kumta an established Australian club with existing international networks, existing operational sophistication and an existing reputation transplanted wholesale into a new country through Australia’s section Namop deportation policy.
Investigative journalist Jarrett Savage, whose research this channel drew on in that earlier account, described the effect of that kind of transplantation in plun terms.
That clubs like the Comanchos and Mongols arrive with a slicker, more professional etch supercharging New Zealand’s existing organized crime landscape almost overnight.
Highway Shamimok never had that advantage and never needed it.
It built its own reputation slowly, violently, and almost entirely within New Zealand’s own borders across close to six decades.
A 19-year-old member shot dead by a rival club in Milam, a chapter disbanded by its own national leadership in that same national leadership’s most senior figure killed by a former member 6 years later and running alongside all of it, one members entirely.
Separate personal crimes intersecting with one of the country’s most significant wrongful conviction cases.
None of this required an important reputation or an assisting international network.
It was built the slow way, incident by incident over multiple generations of members in a way the newer Australian imported clubs this channel has documented elsewhere simply haven’t had time to replicate yet.
There’s a genuine question worth raising about what that slower homegrown model of growth actually produces compared to the rapit imported expansion this channel has documented in its coverage of the Comancheros arrival in New Zealand highway Salimot’s worst individual incidents the Mun’s killing the Weaver’s assassination the Shannon murder are each serious genuinely significant acts of violence in their own right but they’re also spread spread across nearly three decades interspersed with long stretches where the club’s documented activity looks closer to the kind of sustained lower intensity criminal activity this account traced through its more recent history.
Individual convictions, a meth operation here, a firearms charge there rather than the kind of rapid concentrated escalation this channel documented in its coverage of the Nofahu brothers rise where an entire chapter went from formation to a ba ba million multi- agency police raid within roughly 3 years.
It’s worth being careful not to draw too clean a distinction here because Highway Xiaomi Mo’s history contains genuinely severe violence by any reasonable standard.
And this account isn’t suggesting a slower growing homegrown club is somehow a lesser threat than an important one.
What the comparison does illustrate, no, is something about how differently organized crime can actually develop depending on its origins.
A club built from nothing over multiple generations of New Zealandborn members develops its patterns of violence and internal discipline organically shaped by its own specific internal politics and personal grievances.
The kind of yearslong deeply personal resentment that connected chapter disbandment to a assassination is a genuinely different phenomenon than the more imminent than the more immediately commercial drug trafficking focused violence.
This channel documented in its coverage of the Nofahu brothers arrival and ravalo and rapit rise.
There’s a second threat worth drawing together here.
One that connects highway Shiaim Mo’s own internal history of self-discipline to the broader failure this account documented in its coverage of Malcolm Riwa and Tanapora.
When Kevin Weavers disbanded the Ou chapter in he was exercising exactly the kind of internal accountability an organization builds for itself when it has no external authority it can rely on to enforce its own standards.
New Zealand’s actual justice system over that same broad period proved considerably less capable of holding itself to an equivalent standard.
It took 21 years and a foreign court sitting on the other side of the world.
To correct a conviction, the physical evidence had already substantially undermined highways own capacity for internal discipline.
However violent, however imperfect, however much it ultimately cost the man who tried to enforce it, moved considerably faster than the formal justice system did when both were confronted with evidence that something inside their own structure had gone seriously wrong.
That’s not offered as praise for how outlaw motorcycle clubs govern themselves, and it shouldn’t be read that way.
Weaver’s method of accountability was violent expulsion delivered outside any formal legal process to a group of people who had no right of appeal or due process in the way the burdened case eventually belatedly afforded Tanapora.
But the comparison is worth sitting with regardless because it highlights something genuinely uncomfortable about the two institutions this account has spent its length examining side by side.
An outlaw motorcycle club that formed its own harsh justice within months of a killing it considered unacceptable and a formal justice system that took over two decades to correct a wrongful conviction it had every opportunity to catch considerably sooner.
What Highway Shamim actually represents taken as a hold across everything this account has traced isn’t easily reducible to a single verdict.
It’s an organization whose own worst violence was at multiple points directed inward against its own members over its own internal disputes as often as it was directed at rival clubs or the broader public.
It’s an organization whose formal leadership proved capable of genuine internal accountability even as that same accountability ultimately failed to prevent the very kind of violence it was meant to guard against.
And it’s an organization whose individual members personal crimes entirely separate from any club business ended up connected to one of the most consequential failures of New Zealand’s own formal justice system.
A connection that says considerably more about the limits of nay evidence against institutional inertia than it does about highway Xiaomi Mop itself.
Nearly 60 years after its founding, Highway Xiaomi Mop remains active.
It survived rival gang wars, the disbanding of its own chapters, the assassination of its own national leadership, and the departure, willing or otherwise, of members whose lives took them into some of the most significant individual criminal cases in the country’s recent history.
Whatever comes next for the club, it arrives with a genuinely unusual institutional memory behind it.
One of the few organizations this channel has documented across its coverage of Australian and New Zealand organized crime that built everything it has for better and for considerably worse entirely on its own.
Highway Xiaomi Mo story laid out across everything this account has traced doesn’t resolve into a single tidy narrative and it shouldn’t.
It’s a story spanning close to 60 years, multiple generations of members, and enough genuinely separate incidents that treating it as one continuous plot, building toward a single conclusion would misrepresent what actually happened.
What this account can offer instead is a clearer sense of the patterns that recur across that entire span and what they reveal about how an organization like this one actually survives for six decades.
The first pattern is violence directed inward almost as consistently as violence directed outward.
A 19-year-old member beaten and shot by rivals and chapter formerly disbanded by its own national leadership in that same national leaderships most senior figures stabbed to death six years later by the man whose chapter had been disbanded.
This isn’t the story of a club that built its reputation purely through conflict with outside rivals in the way this channel has documented other organizations elsewhere.
Clubs whose defining violence came almost entirely from territorial disputes with competing gangs.
Highway Shami Mo’s most consequential internal history came from within its own structure playing out over years sometimes decades before finally resolving in blushed.
The second pattern is a genuinely uncomfortable one and it’s worth restating plainly one final time.
This organization’s own capacity for internal accountability, imperfect, violent, and delivered entirely outside any legal process.
Moved faster than New Zealand’s formal justice system did when confronted with comparably serious evidence that something had gone wrong.
Weavers disbanded a chapter within months of a killing he judged unacceptable.
It took the country’s actual courts over two decades and intervention from a court sitting on the other side of the world.
To correct a wrongful conviction, the physical evidence had substantially undermined years earlier.
Neither institution comes out of that comparison looking straightforwardly good.
But the contrast itself says something worth sitting with about the genuine limits of formal legal process even when it’s working roughly as designed against an organization’s own internal extrajudicial sense of right and wrong.
The third pattern is survival itself which is in its own way the most significant finding this account can offer.
This channel has now documented several organized crime groups across Australia and New Zealand, whose leadership structures proved remarkably fragile once tested.
Clubs that cycle through multiple presidents in rapid succession, absorb founding members one by one into the justice system, and in at least one case this channel has traced in detail, saw an entire founding leadership group convicted.
Within a handful of years of establishing itself, Highway Shiaimok’s history looks different.
It lost a national president to internal assassination and continued operating.
It lost an entire chapter to its own internal discipline and continued operating.
It watched one of its own former members become central to one of the country’s most significant miscarriages of justice and continued operating regardless, entirely unconnected to that specific failure.
Whatever this club actually is, structurally, it’s proven considerably more durable than the sum of its individual crisis might suggest it should have been.
It’s worth returning one final time to the specific case that opened this account because it’s the threat most likely to outlast everything else this video has covered.
Tina Poras spent 21 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
While Malcolm Riwa, a highway Salimo member whose nay had identified him as the actual perpetrator years earlier, continued facing repeatedly inconclusive murder trials of his own.
That case has nothing to do with Highway Shiaimop as an organization and everything to do with what happens when a formal justice system faced with evidence contradicting its own earlier conclusions chooses institutional consistency over correcting course.
It’s a genuinely separate story from the rest of this account and it deserves its own fuller telling which this channel intends to give it in the account of Tain Paras’s own case this video has referenced without fully exploring.
What connects it back to everything else covered here is simpler than it might first appear.
Highway Shamimo across nearly six decades has functioned as something close to a microcosm of New Zealand’s broader organized crime history.
Homegrown rather than imported, built slowly through internal grievance and individual violence rather than rapit.
Imported expansion and through the entirely separate actions of one former member connected to one of the most significant failures of the very just a system meant to hold organizations like it accountable in the first place.
There’s no clean lesson to draw from that and this account isn’t going to manufacture one for the sake of a satisfying ending.
Highway Xiaomi Mo remains active today close to 60 years after a small group of Auckland motorcyclists adopted a formal structure borrowed from the Hell’s Angels and build something that would go on to outlast rival gang wars, its own internal assassinations and the individual crimes of its own members.
Whatever comes next for the club and this account has no way of predicting that.
It arrives carrying the full weight of everything already documented here.
Ain-year-old shot dead in a chapter disbanded in a president killed by his own former member.
A wrongful conviction stretching across 21 years that had almost nothing to do with the club itself and running through all of it.
An organization that simply kept going decade after decade regardless of what it lost along the way.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verify public reporting rather than speculation.
If you’re new here, that’s the standard we hold to on every case.
No dramatizing, no glorifying, and no pretending a story this long and this genuinely complicated resolves into something simpler than it actually is.
Subscribe and turn on the bell if you want to see where this one and the case it opened with go next.
It’s also worth being precise one final time about what this specific case does and doesn’t say about Highway Shiaimop as an organization distinct from Riwware as an individual.
There’s no evidence in any of the reporting connected to this case that Highway Shamimo as a club had any organizational involvement in Riwa’s crimes or that his offending was connected to gang business or club activity in any way.
This wasn’t a killing carried out at a club’s direction in the way this account has documented other highway connected violence.
The killing of Malcolm Muns or the killing of Kevin Weavers.
Riwa’s crimes appear to have been entirely personal and separate from his gang affiliation, carried out alone, exactly as his broader pattern of offending across multiple other victims consistently showed.
What connects this case to Highway Shiaim Mo’s story at all is simply the fact of Rw’s own membership.
A reminder that an organization’s formal criminal activity and an individual member’s personal unconnected crimes can exist alongside each other without one necessarily explaining or driving the other, without one necessarily explaining or driving the other.
That distinction matters for how this account treats the rest of Highway Xiaomi Mo’s history because it would be a genuine misrepresentation to suggest the club itself was somehow responsible for organizationally connected to one of New Zealand’s most significant wrongful conviction cases.
What the club is responsible for based on everything this account has already traced in detail.
The killing of Malcolm, the internal chapter disbandment that followed it, the killing of its own national leader is substantial enough on its own terms without needing to fold in a case where the connection to the club itself was on the available evidence essentially incidental.
What this specific chapter of the broader story does add no is a genuinely important reminder that runs through everything this channel covers.
The people connected to organizations like highway Xiaomi mo Xiaomi mo don’t stop being individual human bean beings capable of entirely simply because they also belong to a structure personally motivated crimes simply because they also belong to a structured criminal organization and the New Zealand justice system thus spent decades investigating, prosecuting and eventually convicting members of clubs like Highway Shamimo for their organized criminal activity was during those same decades.
Also capable of the kind of catastrophic 21-year failure this account has just traced.
Convicting an innocent, vulnerable teenager and keeping him convicted even after the physical.
Evidence pointed clearly elsewhere because changing course would have meant admitting the system itself had gotten it badly, publicly wrong.
