John describes his years in the criminal underworld of Kings Cross, London.
A talk at the Auckland Buddhist Centre
During my years in London, I lived just a few minutes’ walk from Charles Dickens’ old house in Doughty Street, on the southern edge of Kings Cross. In those days, it was one of the most notorious red-light districts in Britain—ruled by a cabal of Glaswegian drug lords who ran the heroin and prostitution trades with ruthless efficiency. Their violence kept the streets quiet, but not safe; neighbours were often too afraid to open their doors.
I was 25, a recently arrived Kiwi with more zeal than commonsense. Somehow, I found myself entangled in that world—watching, tracking. I thought if I could understand the movements of these criminals, maybe I could get them off the patch of ground where I lived. It was a high risk strategy.
The police had long since abandoned Kings Cross. The unofficial message seemed to be: If you live here, you probably deserve to. That sense of abandonment—of neglect—fuelled me more than anything else.
But first a bit about how I ended up in this god-forsaken place, and what made me stay there for ten years.
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| Kings Cross now ... |
I grew up in a poor, large family, in Morrinsville, my father was a classical musician and when we outgrew our shoes, we would send them to the Fraser family up the road, who were writers, and they would send their children’s shoes down the road to us. I remember my mother quietly weeping at the dinner table from the burden of raising five children on a music teacher's income. We didn't own a car until I was 16, and never owned a television. I should say the family home, despite our income, was rich in books, music and discussions of history, culture and politics.
When I was at school in the 1970s, Waikato schools—and likely schools throughout the country—were well known for rigid pecking orders and frequent violence. By the time I was 17, I had witnessed dozens of attacks on vulnerable students: those with disabilities, overweight boys, or anyone a little different.
I wasn’t gay, but I noticed that gay or effeminate boys were especially targeted.
In response, I founded a school newspaper and set out to make trouble. I wrote to every one of the 280 school boards in the country, asking if they’d consider including a student representative. I believed that the bullying stemmed from a power structure reminiscent of the novelist William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' where the authorities—teachers and headmasters—were unheeding of the violence going on around them, leaving the victims voiceless. The school's policy of caning children, leaving lurid purple and red scars and welts on their legs and buttocks, was likely contributing to the problem.
Violence, I've discovered, simply breeds more violence.
The response was overwhelmingly hostile: only one school was open to the idea, while another board even demanded I be censured for my audacity. Little did they know, I had strategically placed my own mother on the Morrinsville College Board to keep me safe—for a while.
This experience marked the beginning of a commitment to writing and journalism, and especially writing that challenged unaccountable power. It was another 15 years before the Labour Government’s Tomorrow’s Schools policy finally mandated student representatives on school boards.
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| Nga Tama Toa HQ. JC far right. |
At university in Wellington, I lived for three years in the headquarters of Nga Tama Toa, the Māori youth activist movement, where I was exposed to the wonderful richness of Māori culture, a whole different and fascinating world to me, but also to the story of colonisation that had been left out of my schooling. Although I grew up within a few kilometres of the first Māori Parliament, its importance and intention had been erased from history. I understood for the first time the reality of the land wars that had stripped Māori of their land, their dignity and their mana, and which lay behind their appalling statistics in the realm of suicide, imprisonment, mental and physical health issues.
I studied politics and sociology, focusing on human rights and grassroots activism, and was able to understand that the real history for Māori had been hidden because it is the victors who write the history books. Later in life, after I had published my own first book, I became friends with the historian Michael King, whose wonderful History of New Zealand opened up the reality of our past to many ignorant pakeha like me.
After graduating, I left for London on my OE and found a flat in Kings Cross—an astonishing and diverse neighborhood that was home both to native Cockney Londoners, but also to many immigrants and refugees fleeing oppressive regimes in nations like Ethiopia, Iraq, and Chile. What struck me was the humility, kindness, and beauty of these people, even amid hardship.
Kings Cross was also the U.K.’s most notorious red-light district, run by Glaswegian criminals who controlled drug and prostitution rackets. It was something of a war zone—one where the Five Precepts of Buddhism were pretty much absent. Yet, amid such bleakness, many immigrants managed to create lives filled with warmth and mutual support.
I became the caretaker of a 350-person estate called Hillview, right in the heart of the Cross. It soon became clear that two criminal figures dominated the estate and the area: Sparky—a man known for launching Molotov cocktails at the homes of rival drug lords—and Big Jo, a massive former SAS soldier who roamed half-naked in lurid green shorts, a machete tucked into his waist band, and whose flat he’d painted entirely pink as if it were his personal kingdom.
Michael Corleone said in the movie the Godfather, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” So, after taking up my prestigious new post as caretaker on perhaps London’s most notorious housing estate, I made a point of getting to know these men. Big Jo once told me, “I’m like a vampire—I only go out at night.” That slip led me to craft my own clandestine plan for his future.
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| Hillview - Victorian grime & crime |
One night, as I looked out my window, I witnessed Sparky attacking an underling with a carving knife. The victim smashed the windows, one by one, in a desperate bid for escape. Sparky looked up directly at me, and I knew I had to move quickly. I rang 111, packed a bag, and took the tube out to Heathrow and then caught a flight to Sicily—figuring that the home of the mafia was the one place where Sparky wouldn’t seek me out.
Yet, amid the squalor, violence, and degradation, beauty was also in evidence. Artists, writers, painters, and musicians lived on the estate. Even the Pogues—long before they achieved international fame—called it home, and I once found myself dragging a drunken Shane McGowan back to his bed on Midhope Street. Then there was Sally Potter, an emerging international filmmaker, who lived in Tankerton House with her white grand piano and her Siamese cat. At her place I encountered the movie star Julie Christie, a stunning presence who left me momentarily speechless as I fumbled a compliment about the poinsettia on the table.
After a year of gathering intelligence and lulling the drug lords into a false sense of security, I set my plan in motion. Late at night, when the pimps patrolled their territories, I organized work gangs to descend on their flats and install solid steel doors and windows. I spaced these raids over many months, keeping the criminals off balance. When my girlfriend had a hand-gun waved at her, I realised it was time to take serious precautions, so I slept with a rope ladder under my bed and reinforced my door with a steel letterbox, to repel Spark’s special cocktails. Being a kind of de facto enforcer in the area had its own price, and two occasions I was sent to hospital after being beaten up.
However, after four years of careful strategy, during which I tried to match the drug lords for cunning, I had arranged and carried out the last eviction.
With the terror subsiding, beauty began to reemerge in Southern Kings Cross. We established an annual pensioners’ party at Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street and organized a festival in the newly cleaned Whidbourne Courtyard. The festivities included jugglers, balloons, bubble baths, and even a quirky competition to “throw the wet sponge at the head of the policeman.” As the honorary policeman, I suffered a mild concussion for weeks afterward—a small price compared to the alternative.
Over the following years, we transformed the rundown, violent estate into a model tenement complex with planted courtyards, trees, play spaces, bicycle sheds, and recreational zones. After ten years I left Hillview, which was later voted the best housing cooperative renovation in London by the London Evening Standard—the same paper that had once pilloried us as the ‘Kings Cross Estate of Shame’ on its front page.
Before I left London, I encountered Sparky again in Southwark Crown Court, where he stood in the dock for one of his many crimes. I was there for a trial of another denizen of the Cross who had attacked me and sent me to hospital. When our eyes met once again, I saw a flicker of uncertainty, of vulnerability as he recognised me, something I never dreamed I would see on the face of Kings Cross's most ruthless drug lord. I wondered if he suspected my role in his downfall. I often reflect on how I survived those tumultuous years, thinking perhaps an angel— I called her the Angel of the Cross—watched over me.
I wrote my first book while living on the estate—a collection of stories centered on those at the margins, those whom society has spurned or rejected, still clinging to a thread of hope amidst degradation and despair. My manuscript was rejected by all the main Auckland publishers, who I think found it’s realistic depiction of ugliness and violence too much, but couldn’t see the moral beauty there. Andrew Campbell at Heinemann, himself a Kiwi recently returned from London, eventually picked it up and published it locally and then it went on to be published in London and Paris, and to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. One of its stories was used in the French national Baccalaureate exam, and another was adapted into a film that screened at international festivals, including Venice.
Just a five-minute walk from Hillview on Doughty Street was the home of Charles Dickens. Dickens, whose own life was marred by childhood poverty and humiliation, always inspired me with his empathy for the downtrodden. I like to believe that my book resonated because it too revealed the moral beauty hidden among society’s most vulnerable.
Returning to New Zealand, I underwent years of counselling to deal to the trauma I had experienced, including the violent assaults. I gradually overcame my dependency on alcohol, which had once been my escape during those dark times. I was well on the way to following in the footsteps of my father and grandfather, both of whom had been traumatised by war and its aftereffects and who had both drunk themselves to death.
The American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in his wonderful book The Body Keeps the Score, describes the crippling effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly among those who have returned from war zones. PTSD was ill-understood until the 1980s, when studies on Vietnam War veterans began to uncover the full extent of the pathology. Sufferers are prone to long periods of emotional shut down, punctuated by sudden outbursts of emotion. I recognised this pattern in myself. It took me about ten years to lay the ghosts of Kings Cross, and the process is never fully complete.
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| The Creative Hub Writing Centre |
Once I recovered enough, I founded the Creative Hub Writing Centre. Here, published writers from Aotearoa teach others how to tell their stories. We model our narrative approach on the Hero’s Journey—a timeless storytelling template found in all the great religious narratives including the Buddha’s own path to enlightenment.
Amongst our recent students are a typical cross section of people who have found a place of refuge with us: an Iraq War veteran from the U.S. who drew attention to evidence of murder of civilians, and was drummed out of the army for his pains. A Thai woman who was subjected to sexual abuse and violence and then obliged to marry the perpetrator of these crimes. A Māori who was taken into care as a child, abused, descended into addiction as happens to so many abused children, then as an adult had his son shot to death in a drug fracas. A young boy who suffered from undiagnosed autism and depression, and attempted suicide before his 16th birthday.
These people come to the Creative Hub to tell their stories in a place of support and trust. They don't get judged, and they are listened to with care. Some have broken down in class, and said they feel they have finally been heard for the first times in their lives.
Many of our graduates have transformed this profound suffering into inspiring tales of emancipation, some winning national prizes and others achieving international recognition.
My mission has always been to excavate, rehearse, and celebrate the moral beauty that endures even in suffering.
Some student details have been changed to protect identities.
