Oakland, August 2025.
Hundreds of motorcycles roll through the city in formation.
Engines drowning out the traffic.
Police cars flank the procession at a careful distance.
Cameras rolling, radios crackling.
This isn’t a protest.
It’s not a rally.
It’s a funeral.
The man being carried through these streets was known to police files as a lifelong criminal.
To the people riding behind his casket.
He was something closer to royalty.
Within days, the country would be arguing about which of those two things was true and whether it even mattered anymore.
His name was Oola Plete.
Most people who knew him only ever used one word, Rocky.
7 years before that funeral in a driveway in Oakland, something happened that had nothing to do with rival gangs, nothing to do with police, nothing to do with prison walls.
A you ute rolled backwards down a slope and pinned him against a brick wall.
When he was pulled free, doctors told him he would never walk again.
A man who had by then survived New Zealand’s highest security prison, survived decades inside one of the country’s oldest criminal networks, undone in a driveway by his own vehicle.
We’ll come back to that.
First, we need to go back to the beginning.
The King Cobras trace their history back to the 1950s.
New Zealand’s oldest organized gang, older than the Mongrel mob, older than Black Power.
By the time Rocky came up through its ranks, the Cobras weren’t just a street gang.
They were an institution with their own hierarchy, their own code, their own long memory.
Rocky rose inside that structure, not through noise, but through reliability.
The kind of man other members trusted with things they wouldn’t trust to anyone else.
In the 1990s, his criminal records started where a lot of New Zealand gang careers started back then.
Armed robbery, bank jobs, fast cash, and faster risk.
But the ground was shifting under the underworld’s feet.
Cannabis and traditional drugs were losing ground to something new, something more profitable, something more addictive.
Methamphetamine.
Rocky moved with the market.
Import, distribution, supply chains.
What had been small-cale robbery became something with real structure behind it.
There was no going back from this point.
Inside the Cobras, his standing kept climbing.
Eventually, the gang gave him a title reserved for almost no one.
Chief lifetime member.
Not an honorary label, a recognition that he’d built something lasting.
His influence stretched past his own patch, into relationships with rival gangs that most members would never have dared cultivate.
But Rocky never fit neatly into the box marked criminal.
In later years, he’d be seen at peaceful protests, fighting alongside disability advocates for better treatment from New Zealand’s accident compensation system.
He crossed lines other gang figures didn’t between rival patches, between the underworld and the everyday world outside it.
It made him harder to categorize.
It also made him harder to ignore.
That influence eventually caught up with him.
In 2001, Rocky was sentenced to 14 years in prison for directing a drug operation worth close to a million US, allegedly run using a smuggled mobile phone from inside his own cell.
14 years should have taken him off the board entirely.
It didn’t.
By 2011, Rocky was inside Per Morrimmo, New Zealand’s only maximum security prison, the country’s most secure building for the country’s most dangerous inmates.
And according to the investigation that followed, known as Operation Web, that’s precisely where one of the most sophisticated drug operations in New Zealand’s history was allegedly being run.
Investigators would later detail over 600 phone calls and nearly 4,000 text messages allegedly disguised as religious council during Islamic prayer sessions.
The operation was said to involve importing pseudo ephedrin from China hidden inside lollies, clothing, shoes, ordinary packages moving through ordinary mail.
What made it remarkable wasn’t just the scale.
It was who it allegedly brought together.
Rival gangs like the head hunters and the mongrel mob working the same supply chain as the cobras.
Asian crime syndicates on the sourcing end and investigators alleged corrupted prison staff on the inside, moving what needed to move.
If the allegations were accurate, a maximum security prison built to cut men off from the outside world entirely had instead become a boardroom.
What doesn’t show up in court documents is the years themselves.
14 years, then more, stacked one on top of the other, while a life outside kept moving without him.
Whatever it cost him personally, the record is quiet about it.
What we do know is that when Rocky finally walked out of prison in 2017, he was walking into a life he’d been absent from for most of two decades.
He had less than a year of freedom before the driveway.
His own ute rolling down a slope outside his Oakland home, pinning him against a brick wall.
The man who had run drug networks from inside the country’s most secure prison, who had built alliances across rival gang lines, who had survived years behind razor wire, was left paralyzed from the waist down by an accident that had nothing to do with any of it.
What came after surprised a lot of people.
Rocky didn’t disappear.
He moved to a property in Henderson and from a wheelchair became something closer to an elder statesman of the underworld.
Visited by members of rival gangs who years earlier might have been enemies.
He put his remaining energy into a very different fight.
Advocating publicly for better disability support, taking on New Zealand’s accident compensation system, standing literally in a wheelchair at protests for people the system had failed.
He was by every account done running networks.
What he wasn’t done with was being rocky, which brings us back to August 2025 and the motorcycles moving through Oakland toward Wanihunga Cemetery.
Police tracking every block of it.
For some, that funeral procession was a tribute owed to a man who’d spent 40 years earning loyalty most people can’t imagine.
Loyalty that outlasted prison sentences, rival gang lines, and a body that had stopped working.
For others, it was something harder to watch.
The public glorification of a man whose business for decades had been methamphetamine, a drug that has left a trail of damage across New Zealand communities that Rocky himself was never made to answer for in full.
Both of those things happened on the same afternoon in the same procession behind the same casket.
New Zealand has spent the weeks since arguing about which version of Ulaasi Ai Plete deserves to be remembered.
The truth is probably that neither side is entirely wrong and that the country still hasn’t decided what to do with men who exist uncomfortably in both stories at once.
