SKULL FINGERS UP: The Rise, Fall, and Endless War of the Killer Beez

SKULL FINGERS UP: The Rise, Fall, and Endless War of the Killer Beez South Auckland, 3 a.m., May 2022. Seven gunshots crack the night within six hours. A baby’s bedroom wall explodes in plaster dust. A state house burns to the ground while neighbours film on their phones. Sirens wail, but no one dies, yet. Everyone in Ōtara already knows what the rest of New Zealand is only now waking up to: the city is at war. Two gangs born from the same streets, raised on the same corners, are trying to kill each other for the right to call this place home. One rides Harleys and wears red-and-black leather older than most of its enemies. The other wears yellow hoodies, throws a bony middle finger to the sky, and calls itself the Killer Beez. This is not a story about motorcycle clubs versus street gangs. This is the story of a father and his rebellious son, except both are armed, both deal methamphetamine by the tonne, and the son just put the father in a wheelchair for life. It is a story of a lie told so beautifully on national television that an entire country almost believed a drug empire was a record label. Of a mother crushed to death in a mall car park while her eight-year-old watched. Of 124 kilos of crystal meth hidden inside Canadian machinery, and of children sleeping behind walls stitched with thirty bullet holes. It is the story of how a swarm of angry teenagers in Nike TNs outgrew the lions who created them, and how the lions decided it was easier to cripple the king than lose the hive. This is the true, stranger-than-fiction saga of the Killer Beez and the Tribesmen MC, two South Auckland dynasties that turned their own birthplace into a battlefield, and discovered that once the bees leave the hive, they never come back peacefully.