Hundreds of motorcycles rolling across Auckland on a September morning in 2025 from Henderson in the west all the way south to a cemetery in one hunga.
Police shut down traffic along the routes.
Officers watched from the sidelines, careful not to intervene, just documenting who showed up.
On the coffin painted in bold letters.
Chief Rocky, lifetime members.
That’s how New Zealand said goodbye to Ulasi Pullete, known across Auckland’s underworld simply as Rocky, one of the most senior and respected figures the King Cobras gang had ever produced.
The King Cobras aren’t just another gang.
Formed in Ponenbi back in the late 1950s by young Samoan men navigating a city that offered them very little.
They’re New Zealand’s oldest patched gang older than the head hunters.
[snorts] Older than almost anything else operating in the country’s underworld today.
By the time Rocky Pulate came up through their ranks, the Cobras had survived five decades of police pressure, rival wars, and internal shakeups, becoming something closer to an institution than a street gang.
Pulite’s own path into that world started with something almost old-fashioned by modern organized crime standards, bank robbery, back in the early 1990s.
It didn’t take long for his ambitions to grow considerably larger.
By 2001, he was behind one of the more brazen operations New Zealand prisons had seen.
Organizing a drug shipment worth close to a million dollars, coordinated entirely from inside custody using a phone smuggled past the guards.
It earned him 14 years.
Prison didn’t slow him down the way it was meant to.
In 2011 while still serving that same sentence at Parmoro, New Zealand’s highest security facility.
Pulate was convicted again, this time for conspiring to supply methamphetamines.
Standing trial alongside Arthur Taylor, one of the country’s most recognizable long-term inmates.
Two convictions, one sentence served almost entirely behind the same walls.
When Pullete finally walked free in 2017, it should have been the beginning of whatever came next for a man who’d spent so much of his adult life incarcerated.
Instead, fate had something else waiting.
In 2018, an ordinary moment at his own Auckland home turned catastrophic.
His oot rolled down the driveway and pinned him against a brick wall.
He survived, but he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
A King Cobra’s leader who’d outlasted rival gangs, police task forces, and two separate prison sentences, ultimately slowed down by nothing more dramatic than his own driveway.
He kept his standing inside the gang anyway.
Right up until his passing in August 2025 at 57.
After a long battle with illness, Rocky Pullete remained one of the King Cobra’s most senior and genuinely respected leaders, a reputation reporting suggests extended even to rival gangs.
An unusual mark of standing in a world built almost entirely on rivalry and territory.
So, how does a bank robber become a lifetime chief inside New Zealand’s oldest gangs?
What does it actually take to earn respect from your own rivals in a world like this?
And why did an entire city’s underworld turn out?
Motorcycles and alls to bury a man who spent more of his adult life behind bars than most people spend at a single job.
That’s what we’re getting into today.
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What made Rocky Pulate different from most senior gang figures wasn’t just longevity.
It was how he actually built his influence.
Largely from inside a prison cell rather than out on the street, he came up through the King Cobras during a specific window of opportunity.
The early 1990s saw him running with bank robbery crews, standard territory for an ambitious young gang associate at the time.
But by the end of that decade, the entire criminal economy around him was shifting.
Methamphetamine was becoming the drug that mattered in New Zealand, replacing older, less profitable rackets almost overnight, and Pulate moved with it from robbing banks to importing and distributing product, riding the same wave that would eventually define organized crime across the country for the next two decades.
What set him apart wasn’t simply making that transition.
It was what he did with the enormous stretches of time he ended up spending behind bars because of it.
Rather than treating prison as dead time to be endured, Pulite used it deliberately cultivating relationships with other inmates, building trust across gang lines, positioning himself as someone genuinely well-connected within New Zealand’s prison system itself.
That’s a different kind of power than the standover reputation most senior gang figures rely on.
It’s relational, patient, built conversation by conversation across years inside the same facilities.
And it explains how a man who spent so much of his adult life incarcerated still managed to orchestrate serious criminal operations from a cell.
Not once, but on multiple documented occasions.
Inside the King Cobras themselves, that kind of standing mattered enormously.
The gang’s own culture built around a motto of loyalty enduring to the ends rewarded exactly the type of long game trust building Pulite specialized in.
Formal leadership inside an organization like this doesn’t come from a single violent act or a single successful deal it accumulates over years through members watching how someone handles pressure prison time and the loyalty of people around him.
By the time most of the public ever heard his names, [snorts] Pulate had already spent nearly two decades proving exactly that inside some of New Zealand’s toughest facilities.
His public court appearances during this period reflected a man who’d stopped hiding what he was.
A 2009 photo outside Northshore District Court taken not long before his second major conviction shows him exactly as most of the country would eventually come to recognize him unbothered by the cameras.
A fixture of the justice system by that point rather than someone still trying to avoid it.
The King Cobras themselves operate on a lifetime membership structure, distinct from clubs where members can formally retire or transfer allegiance easily.
Roughly 20 to 30 senior lifetime members historically carried the gang’s full back patch tattooed permanently into their skin, a level of physical commitment matching the kind of institutional loyalty the club expected in return.
Pitee belonged to that innermost circle.
A status that had less to do with any single crime and everything to do with decades of exactly the kind of quiet relationshipdriven influence that doesn’t always make headlines, but tends to matter far more inside a gang’s own hierarchy than any single dramatic act of violence ever could.
Paramoreo is New Zealand’s only maximum security prison built specifically to hold the country’s most dangerous offenders under conditions designed to strip away exactly the kind of criminal capability.
Rocky Pulite somehow kept exercising from inside it.
What police eventually uncovered there wasn’t a minor breach of prison discipline.
It was, in the words of investigators who spent years building the case, something closer to a functioning business school for organized crimes.
Operation Web launched in January 2008, built around 18 months of monitored phone communications after police identified a pattern too coordinated to be coincidental.
What they found was a genuinely sophisticated import operation run almost entirely by inmates who weren’t supposed to have phones at all.
Pseudoephedrin, the key precursor for manufacturing methamphetamine, was being smuggled in from China, disguised inside ordinary packages of chocolates, cakes, drink mix, shoes, and clothing sent in kilogram lots to an entire network of associates operating outside prison walls specifically to receive them.
The scale of what investigators documented was staggering for an operation supposedly contained within a single wing.
Pulite’s own phone alone recorded almost 600 calls and close to 4,000 text messages across just a few months in 2007.
Police alleged he used prayer sessions connected to his own adopted Islamic faith as cover for making those calls, turning a moment of genuine religious observance into functional camouflage for running supply and distribution from a cell.
Most New Zealanders would assume was completely isolated from the outside world.
The division of labor inside the operation reflected genuine organizational sophistication while a co-acused allegedly controlled the manufacturing side.
Pulee directed supply and distribution different roles requiring different networks coordinated together despite neither man ever physically leaving Pereamo’s walls.
Profits discussed in intercepted communications ran past a million dollars for individual participants.
Figures that made clear this wasn’t opportunistic side business between more serious offenders.
It was functionally a real drug importation enterprise simply relocated behind bars rather than shut down by them.
What made it possible, according to sworn evidence later put before the courts, extended beyond the ingenuity of the inmates themselves.
Affidavit alleged pullet used prison staff directly to help move drugs and phones in and out a level of institutional compromise.
Serious enough that the head of the corrections association publicly stated afterward that some prisoners were effectively running the facility through intimidation of the guards meant to be controlling them.
It wasn’t simply that Pulate had found a clever workaround.
Part of the system meant to contain him had, according to that testimony, been bent to serve him instead.
The web of gangs connected to the operation, extended well past the King Cobras alone, the head hunters and the Mongrel mob, both linked to the same network by investigators alongside Asian organized crime figures operating the international supply side.
That breadth mattered.
It showed Pulite’s influence wasn’t limited to his own patch.
Rival organizations, competitors in almost every other context were apparently willing to work directly with him when the profit potential justified it.
A rare kind of cross gang cooperation that says as much about his standing as any single conviction ever could.
By the time Operation Web’s evidence finally reached a courtroom years later, prosecutors weren’t describing a prisoner who’d occasionally broken the rules.
They were describing a man who’d built an entire second criminal career from inside the one institution specifically designed to prevent exactly that.
What happened next took seconds.
His own oot parked on that sloped driveway began rolling without him behind the wheel.
Pulate ended up caught between the moving vehicle and a brick wall pinned there, the full weight of the truck pressing against him.
In the kind of accident that happens in ordinary driveways across the country, more often than most people realize, almost always without consequences this severe.
He was rushed to Auckland City Hospital.
Surgeons worked to address the damage, and Pulate went under anesthetic, not knowing what he’d wake up to.
When he did, the news was as final as it gets.
He couldn’t move his legs.
A man who’d survived armed robbery, two separate prison sentences, years inside New Zealand’s toughest maximum security facility, and decades at the top of one of the country’s most established gangs, had been brought down entirely by his own vehicle, rolling 20 ft down his own driveway.
What followed was 12 months at Middlemore Hospital, working through a recovery that Pit himself would later describe, in his own words, as worse than a 12-year prison sentence.
A striking comparison from a man who genuinely had years of custodial time to measure it against.
The first month, he admitted candidly, was pure frustration, adjusting to a body that no longer answered the way it always had.
After a lifetime spent relying on physical presence and reputation wasn’t something willpower alone could push through quickly.
But something shifted after that in his own words shared later on social media.
That difficult first stretch eventually turned into what he called the most beautiful journey of his life.
Doctors told him plainly he likely wouldn’t walk again.
His response leaned on his faith rather than denial.
Never say never, he wrote.
Inshallah, accepting the medical reality in front of him while still holding on to something beyond it.
That period marked a genuine turning point, not just physically, but in how Pulite positioned himself publicly for the years that remained.
He moved to a rural property out in Henderson, [snorts] West Oak Auckland, supported by full-time caregivers who would remain with him for the rest of his life.
The King Cobra’s leader, who’d once directed drug distribution through smuggled prison phones, was now navigating something entirely different, daily physical care, ongoing medical needs.
[snorts] a body that required constant support rather than the physical dominance that had defined so much of his earlier reputation.
He didn’t hide from that new reality either.
Rather than disappearing from public view once the wheelchair became permanent, Pulate spoke openly about his disability in later interviews, choosing visibility over the kind of quiet retreat many men in his position might have preferred.
For a man whose entire adult identity had been built around toughness, [snorts] standing, and physical presence inside one of the country’s most demanding criminal hierarchies.
That openness about vulnerability marked something genuinely different from everything that had come before it.
The first real sign of a chapter in his life that had nothing to do with prison, gangs, or the reputation he’d spent 30 years building.
The years between Rocky Pulite’s 2018 accident and his eventual passing in 2025 traced a genuinely unusual path.
A man who’d spent three decades near the center of New Zealand’s organized crime landscapes, gradually shifting toward its edges without ever fully leaving it behind.
Daily life on that rural Henderson property revolved around care needs most people his age wouldn’t yet be facing.
Pullete found himself locked in ongoing disputes with AC, New Zealand’s accident compensation authority, over exactly what level of support his condition entitled him to an unglamorous, bureaucratic battle that had nothing to do with gang politics or prison hierarchies.
The kind of fight ordinary disabled New Zealanders navigate every day, regardless of who they’d once been.
Beyond that, Pulate found other causes to direct his energy toward.
He joined public protest marches addressing the conflict in Gaza and separately.
Demonstrations opposing New Zealand’s proposed treaty principles bill political engagement that placed him at least publicly in spaces built around civic participation rather than criminal enterprise.
Whatever his personal motivations, it marked a visible departure from the version of his life that had defined nearly every headline about him before 2018.
What didn’t change was his standing inside the world he’d technically stepped back from.
Police and criminal sources who spoke about him afterward were consistent on one point.
Despite no longer taking any active role in organized crime, Pullete remained trusted throughout the underworlds and remained someone widely regarded as deeply knowledgeable about how that world actually operated.
That’s a distinction worth sitting with.
Plenty of retired criminal figures fade into irrelevance once they can no longer participate physically.
Pulite’s reputation apparently didn’t work that way.
Trust built over decades doesn’t necessarily require ongoing activity to sustain itself, particularly for a man whose earlier influence had always leaned more on relationships than raw physical enforcement.
That continued standing showed up most clearly in who kept showing up at his door.
Even confined to his wheelchair, even years removed from active criminal involvement.
Pulite was regularly visited by friends with genuinely complicated histories of their own alongside members of gangs that would ordinarily have counted as rivals for men from opposing organizations to make that same pilgrimage out to a Henderson property year after year.
Said something about where Pulate actually sat by that point less a competitor in an ongoing turf war.
More a kind of elder figure whose company transcended whichever colors a visitor happened to wear.
His relationship with journalist Jared Savage captured something of that same shift.
Savage, one of New Zealand’s most established organized crime reporters, had featured Pulity in his book Gangland.
And rather than resenting that kind of public documentation, Pulate reportedly wanted his own copy signed, posing for a photo with the author in 2021.
A man who’d spent years being hunted through police investigations, was by that stage of his life, comfortable enough with his own place in the country’s criminal history to treat being written about as something worth marking rather than avoiding.
Friends who spoke about him after he passed lean toward exactly that kind of framing describing him using the term OG, original gangster, a title that in gang culture carries genuine respect rather than simple notoriety alongside repeated mentions of kindness and generosity that sat awkwardly next to decades of drug trafficking convictions.
Whether that tension ever fully resolved for the people who knew both versions of him is impossible to say.
What’s clear is that by the time illness finally caught up with him, Rocky Pulate had spent his final years occupying a strange singular space respected physically diminished.
Politically engaged and still somehow one of the most trusted names in New Zealand’s underworld.
Understanding what senior King Cobra’s leader actually meant by the time Rocky Pulate reached that status requires stepping back to look at the gang’s own trajectory, one shaped as much by geography and displacement as by crime itself.
For nearly 50 years, Ponenmbbe functioned as the King Cobras’ genuine home base, the neighborhood where the gang had formed in the 1950s and remained rooted through decades of police pressure and rival conflict that changed as Auckland’s property market transformed the suburb from one of the city’s poorest areas into one of its wealthiest.
By the mid 2000s, the Cobras found themselves priced and pressured out of their own spiritual homes, losing their long-standing clubhouse lease as landlords chose gentrification over renewal.
It was a different kind of defeat than anything police had managed to inflict directly.
Not a raid or an arrest, but an entire neighborhood simply becoming unaffordable to the organization that had called it home longer than almost anyone else living there.
That displacement forced the Cobras to rebuild their territorial presence elsewhere across Auckland, a process that inevitably meant friction with whoever already controlled the areas they moved into.
Tensions with rival organizations flared periodically over the following years, occasionally boiling into open conflict.
As recently as 2021, a serious turf dispute broke out in Mongere between the King Cobras and the Rebels Motorcycle Club, escalating into driveby incidents and firebombing attacks as both groups fought to establish dominance over contested territory.
A reminder that even New Zealand’s oldest gang wasn’t immune to the same kind of violent competition that has defined outlaw motorcycle and street gang rivalries across the tasm.
Underneath nearly all of that friction sat the same economic engine that had propelled Pullet’s own rise decades earlier.
Methamphetamine.
New Zealand’s relationship with the drug had transformed dramatically from the late 1990s onward, moving from a relatively minor presence to what became for years one of the most expensive retail meth markets in the world.
A combination of geographic isolation, limited local production capacity, and sustained demand that made importation exactly the kind of high margin business Pleta and his PMO Ramo associates had built their prison operation around.
New Zealand’s government response evolved alongside that threat, though [snorts] considerably more slowly than the gangs themselves adapted.
Legislation banning gang insignia from government premises passed in 2013, later expanding to cover additional organizations as authorities identified new groups worth restricting.
Patch bans, insignia restrictions, and enhanced police monitoring around funerals and public gatherings.
All of it reflected an ongoing incomplete effort to limit gang visibility and influence in public life.
Even as groups like the Cobras continued operating largely undisturbed in the spaces those laws didn’t reach.
What all of this context makes clear is that Pulite’s own career didn’t unfold in isolations.
He rose during a specific window when meth was reshaping New Zealand’s entire criminal economy, operated within a gang that was simultaneously being pushed out of its historic territory and fighting to hold new ground elsewhere.
And built his particular brand of influence.
Patient relational prison forged inside an organization that had already survived 50 years of exactly the pressures that break most criminal groups apart within a single generation.
Whatever made Rocky Plete unique as an individual, none of it happened separately from the much larger, messier history of the gang he’d spent his entire adult life belonging to.
Rocky Pulate’s passing didn’t just generate tributes.
It generated a genuine public argument about how New Zealand’s media should be covering figures like him at all.
A debate that played out publicly within days of the news breakings.
NZ Herald crime reporter Jared Savage who had built a longunning professional relationship with Pulite over the years wrote the PAP’s obituary style coverage in notably respectful terms describing him as a major figure within the criminal underworld.
Someone highly regarded across the wider criminal fraternity, detailing his life with the kind of careful, humanizing detail usually reserved for far more conventional public figures.
That framing didn’t sit well with everyone.
Media commentator Carl Dren published a sharp public rebuttal arguing the coverage had crossed a line from reporting into something closer to reverence treating a man convicted twice for orchestrating drug operations as though his passing deserved the same tone typically applied to a respected community leader or public figure.
Dur friend’s core objection centered on absence.
No real acknowledgement, he argued, of the harm caused by the drug trade pullet had spent decades profiting from.
No mention of the communities affected by the methamphetamine he’d helped move through the country.
Nothing accounting for the ordinary victims whose lives that trade had touched along the way.
That tension points to something genuinely difficult about covering figures like Pulite.
Honestly, he was by every measure available in the public record a serious organized crime figure twice convicted of orchestrating major drug operations.
A lifetime member of a gang whose broader history includes serious documented violence.
He was also, according to people who knew him personally in his final years, someone capable of real kindness.
Someone who navigated profound physical loss with genuine grace.
Someone whose funeral drew hundreds of people who considered him in some real sense worth mourning.
Both things are true and neither cancels the other out.
That’s not a contradiction unique to Pullete.
It’s a pattern that runs through how organized crime figures get remembered generally.
From outlaw bikey funerals across Australia to exactly this kind of underworld sendoff in Auckland.
Communities built around loyalty and shared history will always remember their own with more warmth than the public record alone would suggest is warranted.
Outside observers, particularly those focused on the harm caused along the way, will always see something closer to whitewashing in that same warmth.
What makes Pulite’s case slightly different is how openly that tension played out in public.
Rather than staying confined to private disagreement, a mainstream newspaper ran coverage genuinely questioned in public by another media professional over whether it had struck the right balance between documenting a life and glorifying one.
That’s not something that happens with most organized crime figures once they’re gone.
Usually, the tributes run one direction inside the community that knew them.
And the critical accountings, if it happens at all, stays confined to older court records nobody revisits.
For Plete, both versions of the story ran simultaneously in public within the same week.
Hundreds of mourners riding across Auckland to honor a man they called an a.
And a newspaper being publicly challenged over whether it should have used that same word at all.
Behind the name Rocky, the one hundreds of mourers rode motorcycles across Auckland to honor, sat a birth name that carried an entirely different weight.
Ulasi.
That distinction became the most quietly powerful detail of his entire funerals.
As his final moments approached, his caregiver reportedly told him something that a reverend would later repeat to the full funeral procession.
That he was no longer Rocky.
He was Uli Iici.
Again, it’s a small sentence carrying enormous meaning.
The underworld persona built over three decades of bank robbery, prison sentences, and gang leadership finally set down at the very end, leaving behind the name his own family had given him before any of that began.
That tension between two identities ran through his life in ways that went beyond simple nicknames.
Reporting from his years inside Paramore described him practicing an adopted Islamic faith using prayer sessions as a genuine part of his daily routine.
A routine police alleged he’d also used as cover for coordinating drug operations.
Faith and criminal enterprise occupying the same quiet moments of his day.
Years later describing his accident recovery, he leaned on that same faith directly in his own words, choosing Insha Allah to express hope about a body doctors had told him would likely never walk again.
And yet his funeral when it finally came carried unmistakably different spiritual language a reverend invoking Psalm 23.
Traditional Pacific morning garments.
The kind of service that suggested a broader perhaps evolving relationship with faith across different chapters of his life rather than a single fixed belief systems.
[snorts] Whether that reflected genuine spiritual searching, family tradition asserting itself at the end, or simply the reality that a life this long and complicated doesn’t resolve into one tidy narrative isn’t something the public record can settle.
What it shows clearly is a man whose inner life was considerably less simple than gang leader ever suggested.
Physically, Pulate was often described in terms that leaned into legend as much as literal description accounts, referring to him as a genuinely large, imposing presence.
Someone whose size alone contributed to the reputation that preceded him into any room for decades.
That kind of physical mythology tends to attach itself to senior gang figures, regardless of the specifics.
But it mattered here, too.
A big man reduced later in life to a wheelchair.
His physical presence no longer doing any of the talking his reputation once relied on.
What friends kept returning to in the tributes that followed his passing wasn’t the size or the reputation at all.
It was gentler language entirely.
Kindness, generosity, warmth from people who’d known him personally rather than through police files or court transcripts.
That’s the gap that sits at the center of understanding who Rocky Pullete actually was.
A man capable of orchestrating multi-million dollar drug operations from behind maximum security walls.
And according to the people who spent real time with him, also capable of the kind of personal warmth that makes people travel across an entire city just to stand at a graveside.
Maybe that’s the real cost of a name like Rocky.
Not just the legal consequences or the physical toll, but the way an entire second identity can end up eclipsing the first one so thoroughly that it takes someone’s final moments.
And a stranger’s voice at a funeral to remind everyone listening that Ulasi had been there underneath it the whole time.
A man who spent decades building an empire from inside a maximum security prison and whose final years were spent fighting a government agency over how much home care he was owed.
That gap between one of New Zealand’s most senior organized crime figures and an ordinary disabled man arguing with AC paperwork might be the truest thing anyone ever wrote about Rocky Pulate because that’s what actually happened once the reputation stopped requiring daily maintenance.
The bank robberies, the multi-million dollar meth operations run through smuggled prison phones.
The standing that let rival gang members walk through his door without hesitation.
All of it eventually gave way to something far more mundane.
A wheelchair, full-time caregivers, and a body that needed exactly the same kind of practical support any disabled New Zealander needs, regardless of what they’d once been capable of.
That’s not a small irony.
It might be the whole point of this story.
Reputation inside the underworld is built on exactly the things Pulite spent 30 years accumulating fear, connections, the kind of trust that survives prison sentences and rival wars.
None of that translates into anything once a body simply stops cooperating.
No amount of respect from rival gangs changes how many hours of caregiving a person actually needs.
No amount of underworld standing gets you out of an argument with a government compensation scheme.
Rocky Pulet found that out the hard way in an ordinary driveway in 2018 and spent the rest of his life navigating a version of vulnerability that had nothing to do with anything he’d built his name on.
So, here’s what’s actually worth sitting with.
Hundreds of people, including members of rival organizations, rode across an entire city to bury a man convicted twice of orchestrating serious drug crime genuine harm by any reasonable measure.
Done to communities and individuals who never got a tribute, never got a procession, never got a reverend speaking gently about who they really were underneath a nickname.
Does loyalty like that reflect something real about how these communities function?
Or does it just show how easily decades of harm get reframed into warmth once someone’s gone?
Rocky Ulasi, a prison empire, and an AC claim form.
New Zealand’s underworld buried all three versions of him on the same afternoon in one hunga.
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