Wairarapa’s locally owned community newspaper
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2018
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Transformed to help others Former gang member gives hope to at-risk youth Emily Ireland Wayne Poutoa isn’t a stranger to the concept of second chances. A former Mongrel Mob patchmember turned pastor, he is now helping at-risk youth see a life of purpose ahead of them. Wayne’s parents moved to New Zealand from Samoa with the dream of providing their children with a great education – “they wanted us to do well in a land in which they were strangers”. By the time Wayne was 11, his parents’ marriage had broken up – “I was totally devastated by that because family was everything to me”. At 15 years old and living in Auckland, Wayne joined the youth gang King Cobras. He went to jail for the first time in 1980 for assault on a police officer. He was 16. Several other jail terms
would follow. “I remember going to Mount Eden prison and man, I was really scared by the characters that were in that space, but I also had these aspirations of, ‘I want to be like them’ – get respect, be staunch, and do all sorts of things.” After moving to Wellington and subsequently to Porirua, he became a patchmember for the Porirua Mongrel Mob. “I made some really terrible decisions.
“I was sitting in jail one time and I was just watching my friends come, go, and then come back again to jail. “Jail can do a couple of things: it can turn you into a career criminal, or you can start to examine yourself and think there needs to be a change. “I chose the second. But it took me a while.” When he came out of prison for the last time, Wayne decided to leave the gang. “I decided, that’s it. I’m
going to leave. “So, I went, and I did what I had to do to leave the gang. “At the end of it, I grabbed my daughter who was only a year old. “When I left the Mob, her mother didn’t want to leave. “I said, well you stay, I’m going, and I took my daughter and went to an emergency accommodation space – this was about 1986.” That’s where he met a Christian man who asked Wayne to live with him. “I was there dressed in red and black . . . I thought, what is wrong with this guy?
Carterton Baptist Church pastor Wayne Poutoa. PHOTO/JADE CVETKOV
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