"Can you share with me one of the scariest times in your life?"

"One of the scariest experiences that I have had was when I was in maximum security prison at Paremoremo. I got shipped there when I turned 20. ‘Pare’ was the place you go when you get kicked out of other prisons in New Zealand, so it’s kind of like grad school for badasses.

I wasn’t a gang member so I was in a very small minority in the block where I ended up. At the time the Nomads were running the block and fortunately I knew the kingpin who was running the block as I had been on remand with him. But after being there for about 4 months the dynamics changed when some of the Nomads got moved out. Now there was more equal numbers across the Nomads, Black Power, and Mongrel Mob in the block. This resulted in a lot more gang politics and tension.

One day I was in the yard with another one of the neutral guys. The yard in ‘Pare’ is like a massive empty Olympic size swimming pool right. All you can see is the blue sky and the cell blocks on either side. It was just us two in the yard and then this new Black Power guy came in. He hadn’t been on the block long. I had never interacted with him or anything. He was one of these guys with the physique of someone who should have been playing sports professionally, and the full facial tattoos that show a real commitment to jail.

We were just walking up and down the yard minding our own business and sort of saw him talking to the other black power members in the block next to us, ‘A’ block. As we were walking down he had sort of moved away from the window and was headed over to our block sort of intercepting where we were walking. Didn’t think anything of it but what I didn’t realise at the time was when he had been talking to the guys in ‘A’ block they had passed him a short iron bar that was used for weights.
As we walked passed him he turned around and swung the iron bar. The guy next to me was closer to him and he managed to just put up his arm to stop the bar hitting him in the head but broke his arm. Then he took a swing at me, I managed to step backwards out of the way of the swing.

Both of us retreated back to the other end of the yard. As you can imagine, hearts pounding the adrenaline was just, ya know going through the roof! When we were at the end of the yard, I said
“OK man – we can definitely take this guy, there’s two of us, let’s go and take him out!”. But this was the scary part, not getting the iron bar swung at us, but when the guy with the broken arm, who been in Pare for 8 years and knew the politics and knew the lay of the land said to me

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