Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (18 page)

MIKE DOOLAN DID NOT DISAGREE. IT WAS THEREFORE
with ‘some delight’ that he set about bringing the show he oversaw to an end. But first, he realised, he had to try to take his colleagues, not least the managers of the institutions, with him. The best chance of doing this seemed to be in bringing them together in the one setting, challenging them to rethink, as he later explained it, their ‘precious precepts’. A showdown. But he was nervous: it wasn’t only the managers who were probably going to be up in arms, but the hundreds of others employed around the country by the department. For the first time in a generation the national unemployment rate was creeping up. Perhaps some of these employees weren’t doing such a great job in looking after other people’s children, but they surely had their own families to provide for, so this would be tough for them.

In 1986 Doolan convened a residential principals’ conference in Wellington. This, he realised, would either be the most courageous gambit of his career or a supreme blunder. That fact alone called for some kind of suitably auspicious venue. In the end the gathering was held at the Chapel of Futuna, a picturesque Catholic retreat centre in Karori whose central pole, rib-like rafters and low eaves consciously evoke the traditional marae setting — a nice touch in light of Doolan’s own Catholic background, the Maori theme that was certain to figure large in the discussion and the message he ultimately wanted to convey.

If anything, though, the ecclesiastical setting was most conducive to the fact that attendees were about to experience their own Last Supper, if not their last rites, as the message went out that it was past time for the system to be wound down.

By the third day inside the church, plans for the residential burial were complete, albeit with no possibility of resurrection; all the national training institutions would be destined for closure by 1990, the attendees decided (or were told, depending on which
version one listened to), and that was pretty much that. On the final evening the Social Welfare minister, Ann Hercus, arrived for dinner. She thanked everyone present for their commitment over the years and wished them well for their future plans.

Many of those in attendance were devastated. Career chiefs of any kind, like champion boxers, are notorious for overstaying their welcomes, plying their ideas long after they have exhausted their usefulness, doggedly holding on to their positions when common sense dictated it would be best for everyone if they moved on. Yet their disappearance is rarely sudden, and the closure of an entire line of work — which effectively was what the Futuna gathering meant for these men and women — came as a bolt out of the blue. ‘Was there a better way it might have been done?’ Geoff Comber later reflected. ‘I don’t know. Something had to happen, yes, but I certainly observed a process of putting pressure on people; subtle it may have been but it was very real, and done without a lot of debate.’

Comber’s former colleagues at Epuni, which at the time was still operating at full capacity, were not so sanguine. Suddenly everybody had become very expendable. Maurie Howe had only recently stepped down from the position he had held since 1959, and now it seemed they, too, would be following him into some form of retirement. Shortly after the Futuna meeting, an unknown hand scribbled the following message on the Epuni noticeboard: ‘The floggings will continue until morale improves.’

Apparently that would mean a long wait, for the same year also saw a slew of similar-sounding recommendations to the Futuna gathering put forward by a ministerial advisory committee convened to chart a distinctly Maori course for the future of residential care. Its advice was threefold. One, it recommended that the official focus return to nurturing kids wherever possible within their family and tribal group. Second, it proposed that any
additional funding be allocated directly to tribal trusts working in this area. Third, it demanded that per-child payments be increased to a more ‘realistic’ level.

Taken together with the other developments, this really meant that there could be no turning back. The process of emptying the existing residences, which began almost immediately after the conference, was already seeing to that. Given that so many of the institutions were effectively run on child labour they were bound to implode for lack of workers, and soon enough this occurred. First it was at the 120-bed Kohitere after its cohort shrivelled to around 40, and then everywhere else, including the Riverside Drive operation, where the first to go had been the on-site school and its three teachers after it became clear that there would shortly be an insufficient number of pupils to justify its continued existence. No doubt the inmates were happy about the accelerating trend. But the men and women who had dedicated their lives to the system were anything but.

Effectively, Doolan admitted, ‘we were saying to a lot of people that we no longer need you to do what you were doing for us’ — he laughed ruefully — ‘and I can’t say I was the most loved person within child welfare for having done it. More like the Angel of Death, I guess. But it had to be done.’ And the residential workers were frustrated, too, even frightened, for many of them were not equipped professionally for other positions within the department, let alone the wider workforce.

‘It was a funny time,’ Comber agreed. ‘I mean, you had a lot of very, very upset managers … their confidence was busted.’ What upset them the most, he recalled, were ‘these allegations about [ethnic] propriety. They felt they’d been let down by their national officers who, they thought, hadn’t really stood by them.

Lorraine Katterns, the Auckland social worker, was among the holdouts who always believed the change couldn’t have come fast
enough. ‘You build the institution and you create the need, don’t you?’ she later reflected. ‘But what were they being created for? They were created for these kids that were seen to have offended and gone off the rails, or that needed care and protection. But they were actually just shunted into this building and herded around, you know.’

She laughed bitterly at her own recollections of the Auckland girls’ home. ‘I can remember things like, there was a gardener at Bollard and when they were looking for activities for the kids to do, they came up with this idea that he on his ride-on mower would mow all these lawns and the activity for the kids would be to get out there with rakes and rake up all this grass.’

So why, over and above the issue of job security, was there such resistance to closing down the institutions? ‘I think the challenges were too great for them,’ Katterns said of her erstwhile colleagues. ‘They were kind of coerced by the system to comply. And in those days residential social workers were extremely well paid compared to others in the community. So there were staff who didn’t really want to be there but they stayed because they wanted a good compensation, a payout, because they were going to lose their jobs but actually, I knew a lot of them came out of it really very well off financially.

‘Unlike,’ she added, ‘so many of the kids.’
 

I
t was all over. In February 1990, almost 30 years to the day it first opened its doors, Epuni, which had processed just 82 admissions in the preceding year, officially reconstituted itself as a youth centre, a mixed-gender facility devoted to the needs of what the promotional material described as relevant community groups with a stake in developing further initiatives for youngsters. Whatever that meant. Within a year the historical operation would be completely mothballed.

Among the first of the female residents during the final phase was Kelly Blomfield, one of three girls shipped in from a similarly shrinking Kohitere, where she had initially been placed after being discovered living in the public toilets in Masterton. ‘I never wanted to leave,’ Blomfield said of the environment she experienced at the radically refurbished institution. ‘It got so relaxed that the staff got a bit complacent,’ she recalled with a smile, mentioning an occasion when Social Welfare minister Ann Hercus dropped by to see the workers and offer a pep talk to the wards. ‘We all took off. I remember a staff member saying to me, “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” and I said, “Wherever the hell I please, see ya!” And out I went. That was the kind of place it was.’

Times had changed. What stood there now — essentially a very large ‘family home’ — was a product of the shifting environment created not only by the events of the mid-1980s but also the previous year’s passage of the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act. The new legislation pointed away from the old institutional regime to one in which a ‘maximum possible use of
placement within family groups, and in cases where family group placement was not possible then the use of community-based
placements
’ would become the norm.

An internal departmental report found that the ‘risk’ population among 10- to 16-year-olds had dropped by as much as 11 per cent during the 1980s. Also in decline over the same period had been the number of children and young people appearing before the courts, down by as much as 40 per cent, a figure well in excess of the reduction in the at-risk population overall. The number of kids becoming state wards was also down by at least half during the 1978–88 period; and among those who
did
fall under the guardianship of the state, thanks to the initiative led by Mike Doolan and John Grant, fewer and fewer were now being placed in institutions. Given the probable population projections, the likelihood of any dramatic change to that trend seemed remote. Not that young people had fundamentally changed; rather the manner in which they were being dealt with had.

Besides, in the wake of the Futuna conference, new facts had been created on the ground; only nine residences were now left operating around the country, and soon there would be fewer. Hokio Beach School had already shut down and the rolling fields of Kohitere were soon to fall silent. Miramar Girls’ Home was gone, too, while the two residential centres in the south, in Christchurch and Dunedin, were in the process of being significantly downsized.

In other words, as of February 7, 1990, Epuni — and the culture it represented — was essentially gone.

Up to a point. Other battles remained to be fought. Thirty years after their objections first began flying thick and fast, the harried residents of Epuni finally had their chance to resolve one of the major issues that had dogged the institution from the start: had it ever really been within its rights to describe itself as a ‘home’? As far as the c was concerned the name had always been mostly
subterfuge, with perhaps a little irony thrown in for good measure. But it was a question of some continued relevance for them in light of plans to turn the buildings into a new-fangled youth justice facility. The Environment Court agreed to hear the arguments.

What the court was prepared to look at was in fact only a relatively specific matter. It was not prepared to rule, as some from the neighbourhood might have hoped, whether Epuni Boys’ Home had never been anything more than a state-sanctioned crash pad for bad kids. Instead it would examine whether, in the context of the recently drafted Resource Management Act, which set more stringent standards than in the past for how an operation could describe itself, a correctional facility could tout itself as a ‘home’. Its deliberations would be of significant interest locally in light of the government’s plan to alter and add to the existing building by about 45 per cent in order to create a fully fledged youth prison that would house around 200 younger people a year, about 5 per cent of them female. Given the reluctance of the courts to hand down convictions the way they used to, and the general move away from housing anyone but the most serious offenders in institutions, virtually all of the new inmates would be taken from the ranks of the country’s worst offenders. People living nearby could hardly be expected to view this development with equanimity.

Ostensibly at issue was whether an operation could call itself a ‘boys’ home’ when it now counted girls among its charges, and also in light of its newfound purpose as a custodial detention centre staffed by youth justice workers. As Adrian Olsen and the other local residents who petitioned the court saw it, this was tantamount to false pretences. The court appeared to agree. In considering the case, it examined a number of related issues of longstanding interest. The infamous cellblock, for instance: ‘The secure unit, putting to one side modern euphemisms, is a security prison,’ Planning Judge W.J.M. Treadwell noted in his 20-page
ruling of April 11, 1995. Not only that, but the prison cells the institution still used were totally out of keeping with ‘modern-day trends for the housing of prisoners no matter how bad the crime may be’. As for the kitchen facilities, these, too, appeared ‘suspect from a health viewpoint’. And the institution’s history within the wider community was just as bad: ‘In the past,’ the ruling noted, Epuni had simply not been managed ‘in a way which has enabled people in the community to provide for their social and cultural wellbeing and for their safety’. The department’s arguments to the contrary were ‘largely unsatisfactory’.

Turning to the question of whether the facility had ever been a ‘boys’ home’ in the first place, the judge ruled that the term had not ‘in any sense alert[ed] the public to the type of activity being carried out at 441 Riverside Drive’, especially with regard to ‘the custodial detention’ of children. The institution was therefore ‘well past being accommodated by the expression’, and indeed the evidence seemed to suggest that, ‘even from its inception, the expression “boys’ home” did not accurately describe’ its activities or purpose.

On the other hand, the fact that a small percentage of inmates had been girls was found to be ‘of little consequence’, although ‘for what it is worth we are prepared to make a declaration that a boys’ home is not a place for the care and protection of girls and young women’. But on the subject of the escapees who had plagued the suburb for 30 years, this, combined with acknowledged incidents whereby cars had been tampered with or broken into and residents frightened, represented ‘the very antithesis of the sustainable management model,’ Treadwell continued. ‘We were also greatly concerned with evidence given to us that at times when residents have reported escapes, institution management were either unaware of such an escape or fairly terse in dealing with the complaint.’ The court didn’t exactly have the authority to
tell the department to look for another site, but it dropped a heavy hint that this might not be a bad idea. As the ruling noted, there was no particular reason why such an institution needed to exist in Epuni, or indeed any residential area in New Zealand, and the government’s arguments to the contrary simply sounded ‘evasive’.

All in all, then, it was a miserable ruling for the Department of Social Welfare and those who had been closely involved with Epuni, and perhaps it might have been more closely contemplated had it not been for another unexpected navigation of the past that was to begin some months later, when Maurie fielded a telephone call from a local reporter. How did he feel, the woman from the
Evening Post
newspaper in Wellington wanted to know, about the news that his old schoolteacher from Epuni had just been found dead inside a Wellington jail cell?

THE COPS HAD BEEN ON CALCINAI’S CASE FOR SOME
time, but if he sensed it he certainly didn’t let it show, certainly not to his new colleagues, many of whom regarded him as an intellectual on stilts whose only apparent deficiency seemed to be his lack of shortcomings. It had been a remarkable personal reinvention for the disgraced educator: Calcinai had become, against all reasonable expectations, one of the most successful of the former Epuni employees.

After going to ground for most of the previous decade, including his stint behind bars, he reinvented himself as a journalist, and by 1987 had scored a plum position as a corporate communications adviser at the Department of Health. His professional reputation by the early 1990s was good and becoming better. In addition to deftly handling the usual round of media enquiries for the department, he produced a well-regarded
AIDS Diary
, a chronology of the then deepening AIDS crisis, as well as editing an internal monthly newsletter that quickly became a hit with staff members, thanks
largely to a snappily written gossip column penned in a vaguely similar fashion to
Metro
magazine’s Felicity Ferret.

‘Molesworth Mole’, as Calcinai dubbed himself in these dispatches, was a creature confined to a dark corner of the department’s basement with an alter-ego named ‘Wendy
Water-rat
’. Sometimes he complained about the darkness ‘and other strange goings on in the basement’ of this life. ‘I’m looking over my shoulder as I write this,’ he confided in May 1992. ‘When doors start to operate independently I must admit my imagination starts to run into overtime. Is there something lurking in the basement luring innocent victims into a trap?’ Elsewhere in the same newsletter, Calcinai published an interview with himself, written in the third person, and extolling his accomplishment as the author of a recent novel ‘presently with an agent in the States’ and, with slightly more justification, the creator of ‘numerous radio plays’, which was substantially true.

Helpfully, the piece also explained his absence from the workforce during the mid-1970s as a period when ‘Vince took four years off to work fulltime as a writer’, a creative spin on the time he spent in jail after being found guilty of six charges of sodomy and eight of indecent assault on three boys he taught shortly after his time at Epuni.

The same piece didn’t neglect its main readers entirely, however. ‘In facing and implementing change,’ the author quoted himself as telling colleagues, ‘the department is constantly in the public gaze and therefore it’s important that it’s seen to conduct itself properly — to be proactive, knowledgeable and articulate to maintain public confidence.’ Nobody could accuse Vince of lacking in these qualities.

Soon he switched to working at the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, where he held a similar position pumping out media releases highlighting the government’s work in promoting
corporate transparency. In 1993 he was also named one of four runners-up in the BBC World Service Playwriting Competition for a play,
Horse on the Stairs
, set in a boarding house owned by an old woman whose only visitor is a blind retired doctor. The work was later produced for radio by the British network.

But these outward successes were tempered with no small personal frustration. Among the ongoing problems faced by any committed paedophile is that as one’s sexual preferences grow up a new supply always has to be arranged. An additional inconvenience for Calcinai was that his taste ran to Maori boys, and here, one supposes, the residential system must have come as a blow. The usual sources where he might have got lucky — institutions for the intellectually disabled or places like the old Epuni — were no longer options. So he concentrated on the next best thing, befriending families with youngsters and hoping that sooner or later he could persuade one of them to entrust him with their kids. And soon he got lucky.

But Calcinai’s time was running out. On November 10, 1996, John van den Heuvel, who was then a rising star in the Wellington police force, received an anguished telephone call from a young mother out in the Hutt Valley. A couple of days earlier, she told him, a new friend of the family appeared to have molested her son at the man’s house in the Wellington suburb of Brooklyn. Van den Heuvel, a boyish-looking cop with penetrating dark eyes, was a young man on the way up; after three years on the regular beat he had switched to investigating child abuse, and this sounded like the kind of case he had taken his latest position to energetically pursue. As van den Heuvel put it many years later while reflecting on the Calcinai case, ‘Catching people like this — removing them from society and making them accountable for what they do — is what it’s all about.’

Maybe so, but after interviewing the boy the 29-year-old
detective felt drained. This was no run-of-the-mill molestation. The episode had come to light after the woman discovered her four-year-old was suffering from a bloody bout of diarrhoea. It transpired that the Maori kid had been violently raped; the alleged assailant, as well as being a family friend, was a well-regarded civil servant. What was more, a background check revealed the man had previous convictions for similar offences committed in Wanganui. It seemed an ominously open question as to when he might strike again.

Yet even a tiny amount of additional time to investigate Vincent Calcinai, van den Heuvel realised, could make all the difference to obtaining a successful prosecution — if it allowed him and his colleagues, for example, to discover the whereabouts of a pool table that had been described in the child’s testimony. Over the next five days he kept in constant touch with the family as the investigators scoured the Hutt Valley and Wanganui for what they needed in order to convince the court to issue a search warrant.