Risky business: Life as an Undercover police officer
SUNDAY STAR TIMES
Kelly Dennett
Oct 03 2021
Mark van Leewarden, left, while on undercover assignment with the police. Pictured with an associate.
A new book written by a private investigator uncovers the murky world of covert policing in New Zealand in the ‘70s. Kelly Dennett reports.
In movies, the undercover police officer wears a leather jacket, smokes a cigarette, and negotiates with his fists. In New Zealand, undercover police officer Mark van Leewarden was also buying drugs, hoarding stolen goods, keeping a shotgun under his bed, and landing chairs over rivals’ heads. By the end of his stint embroiled in Auckland’s underbelly, he’d also be linked to a murder.
“None of this stuff is particularly exceptional,” says van Leewarden over the phone. “I knew I was having a ride as I went through life, you know, that it was a life less ordinary, and I’ve been privileged to experience those things and that sort of work (but) it never jumped out at me that it was special.”
That was, until, a famous Kiwi author learned of his story.
In 1978 van Leewarden was a young police officer, a law school drop-out, working a dull beat in Dunedin, attending traffic accidents by day and doing burnouts at quarries with boozed colleagues by night. His life changed forever when he was plucked by a Detective Sergeant who apparently sensed van Leewarden was sick of being in uniform, and invited him into undercover work.
Covert investigations are now a different kettle of fish. In recent years the public has learned more about the convoluted and controversial Mr Big investigations that in rare circumstances are activated to snare particularly tricky targets. They’ve been activated less than a dozen times – that we know of – leading to scrutiny of police actions.
It was a bit more casual for van Leewarden. A visit to a psychologist and an undercover policing seminar later, he became Mark Munro, a rich kid living off family money who had become embroiled in Auckland’s mean streets. Or at least that’s what he told members of its drug and gang scene.
For a year, van Leewarden was, for all intents and purposes, a member of the criminal fraternity, gathering intel on dangerous criminals and, as van Leewarden tells in his book, Crimetime: From Undercover Cop to International Investigator, trying not to get discovered, and killed.
Van Leewarden writes of the bone-chill fear of being sprung – and his near misses. That woman who recognised him from his pre-police days at the pub, a side eye from an associate, and suspicions from Pauline Lewis, the girlfriend of dangerous senior kingpin Ricki Goodin.
Mark van Leewarden, pictured in 1989, when he was with the Nationwide Investigation & Security Group. (Dominion Historic Collection)
“In the scene, women can be your most dangerous threat,” wrote van Leewarden. “In my case, Paula was at the top of the list. You learn from operating undercover that female intuition is real and dangerous.”
Van Leewarden kept a shotgun under his bed and to this day has tight security, more so for his private investigative work. He says over the phone: “The reality is, you can never be prepared for what it’s going to be like; you have to pretty quickly sort of adapt. You find your way as you get going. You don’t know it yourself, [but] you’re changing, your personality is changing, your appearance is changing.”
True crime buffs will recognise appearances from figureheads like drug lord Waha Saifiti, Mr Asia safecracker and burglar Peter Fulcher, and the syndicate’s high-profile lawyer Eb Leary. Van Leewarden writes of Auckland streets transitioning from a place awash with heroin and cocaine, to desperate addicts turning to injecting themselves with crushed pills; and furtive glances and deals being had in dark-lit pubs. It’s all a bit cinematic.
“You’re living like a criminal,” van Leewarden agrees. “When they call it undercover [you imagine] someone puts on a leather jacket, buys drugs, takes the jacket off and goes home. [But] you don’t go home for a year. Inevitably, you develop a criminal persona, you become a criminal.”
Just 20 at the time, van Leewarden learned that the people whose trust he engendered were “just people”, and actually he writes of becoming fond of some of them – like Pauline.
It was Pauline’s murder, at the hands of Ricki Goodin, that unravelled van Leewarden’s true identity in the end. In a significant complication, and a personal shock to van Leewarden, Goodin stabbed Lewis to death with a switchblade that van Leewarden had just returned to him. The police operation was terminated and van Leewarden became a prosecution witness, and his identity revealed.
Now 62, van Leewarden admits he has not written a “politically corrected” account of that time. The women are described according to how sexy they are, sex workers are called hookers, and tangata whenua are individually identified as “a Māori”.
Mark van Leewarden as a police officer.
Van Leewarden recounts a fast and loose police force. In Dunedin, he accompanies a detective on a mission to “terrorise some c...s” (the detective deliberately loosens wires on a member of the public’s car, van Leewarden writes of just being along for the ride), and tells the story of an Armed Offenders Squad colleague kicking down a girlfriend’s door in full regalia, ordering her to stop a dalliance with another man. And on a historical, unspoken policy on drink-driving as an undercover officer: “Drive p...., but don't get caught.”
The book is unusual – it’s perhaps a first in New Zealand to have a former undercover officer go into such unflinching detail, so publicly. Van Leewarden doesn’t seem particularly concerned with what his former colleagues, or current serving officers, may think of his unapologetic unveiling of that time.
“If some of the attitudes make you feel uncomfortable, they should. That’s what it was like, then,” the book’s marketing paraphernalia states. Van Leewarden says the book is as much for his former colleagues as it is for himself.
“...For all the undercover agents that have come before me, and after that. Their story can never be publicly acknowledged, so it’s for them as well.”
Van Leewarden left the police under a cloud, in 1984, when a traffic stop saw him ousted from the force after allegations of assault and obstruction, of which he was convicted, and then acquitted.
He finished his law degree, travelled, and then became an international fraud investigator – a unique career path that’s taken him around the world, duelling with Russian mafia and attempting to wrangle back millions for wealthy and high profile clients. Van Leewarden likens it to hunting humans. “[You’re] there in a spy role, people not knowing what you’re doing, and it’s sort of on-the-edge type stuff.”
Years ago his story caught the eye of celebrated writer Alan Duff, author of Once Were Warriors, and the pair met. Duff thought van Leewarden’s life could be the stuff of a terrific novel that he would write himself, even going as far as travelling internationally to research locations of interest. But Duff soon realised that the story had to be told as a non-fiction, by van Leewarden himself.
“There was nobody better for it. It would have been impossible,” admits Duff. “I think one of the brutal truths of any writing is, if you lose your authenticity, you’ve got nothing.”
He supported van Leewarden through six years of writing. “Reading the manuscript and the redrafts, it was like, ‘oh my god’... He was chasing scam artists and fraudsters all around the world. The fact he could enter that criminal world as a 20-year-old – you make one slip, and you’re gone.”
Says van Leewarden: “You’re young, and your risk modulator is not that well-developed.”
He thinks friends and family will be getting their first real insight into his life back then. That they probably hadn’t quite come to grips with what he went through.
“You can’t have a good handle on it. This will be the first time people will have seen what it’s like out there. You can explain the bare facts, but it’s still hard; you can’t comprehend what it’s like unless you’re there.”
