Inside the luxurious life of half-blood gangster Josef Armani Heart

Two years ago, Joe Edmonds, a member of the Mongrel Mob, was deported from Australia to New Zealand. Now the muscular Edmonds is called Josef Armani Heart and wears designer clothes, eats at fancy restaurants and lives in A palatial house in Thailand overlooking the water. His ostensible lifestyle is proudly displayed on social media, as an example of a generational culture shift in the gang world known as “Nike Bikie.”

A mixed-race mob gangster who was once deported from Australia now lives a life of luxury in Thailand.

Josef Armani Heart, who was once known as Joe Edmonds, regularly posts photos and videos of himself with his young family and friends on Instagram.

A palatial hilltop villa with ocean views and infinity pool is described as “our new home” in Thailand, with numerous images of the muscular and tattooed heart, which has a distinctive Mongrel Mob Waikato insignia inked on the back, working out in the gym or on the beach.

With designer brands and Rolex watches, Heart is published enjoying meals in excellent restaurants, boat trips with her young friends and family, vacations in Greece and France, as well as driving expensive cars and Harley Davidson motorcycles.

His flamboyant lifestyle displayed publicly on social media is an example of the generational shift in gang culture, a new generation of gangsters nicknamed the “Nike Bikie” in Australia.

While the first generation of gang members were often sloppy and dressed in scruffy leather, the modern gangster is clean cut and is more likely to wear Gucci and Louis Vuitton.

“They wear a lot of jewelry, heavily tattooed, gym bunnies, with attractive girlfriends dangling from their arms,” ​​Deb Wallace, a former detective superintendent in Sydney, previously told the Herald.

“It seems like a very glamorous lifestyle.”

The recently retired Wallace was in charge of the Strike Force Raptor, a specialized police squad that targeted gangs in New South Wales after a horrific fight at the Sydney airport in 2009.

Strike Force Raptor devised new tactics to disrupt gangs, such as using council rules to shut down clubhouses for violating building permits or taking driver’s licenses if they didn’t pay traffic tickets.

Wallace said the proactive measures were designed to create a “hostile environment” for gang members; critics called the strategy police harassment.

The unofficial exchange of ideas soon turned into a formal council – Morpheus National Taskforce – with officials from different police forces and government agencies.

One such “opportunity” mentioned by Wallace, who sat in Morpheus, was the ability of the Australian Border Force to cancel anyone’s visa or have someone deported.

It is a tough measure based on the “grounds of character” test of Australia’s immigration laws, section 501 to be exact.

It gave Strike Force Raptor another “hostile” tool and over the past five years, dozens of high-ranking members of Australian gangs, such as the Comancheros and Mongols, have been deported to New Zealand as ‘501s’.

His arrival has radically changed the criminal underworld in New Zealand, as police allege that he has established links to transnational organized crime and sophisticated counter-surveillance techniques to thwart investigations.

The rise of the new Australian gangs comes as a time of unprecedented growth of gang members in New Zealand, now numbering more than 7,000 for the first time.

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That’s a 50 percent increase between December 2016 and December 2019.

Tension between the gangs has also escalated, as Comancheros and Mongols have squeezed into rival territory and strategically “patched up” high-ranking members of other gangs.

The introduction of the “501” has also brought the distinctive “Nike Bikie” style to New Zealand, like Josef Heart.

Heart was deported from Western Australia in 2018, where the Mongrel Mob was trying to establish a chapter.

He is close friends with Sonny Fatu Junior, Sonny Fatu’s nephew, who is president of the Mongrel Mob in Waikato.

The Waikato chapter has made headlines in the past two years for establishing an all-female chapter, protecting its local mosque after the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, and organizing community events.

Fatu snr, a member of the Mongrel Mob for 33 years, says his chapter walked away from the gang’s national council two years ago to forge a new empowerment kaupapa for the marginalized in society.

He was also one of the first New Zealand gang leaders to warn of the threat posed by incoming Australian motorcycle gangs, which Fatu described as a “modern land grab”.

However, in a vivid illustration of the rapidly evolving gang scene in New Zealand, Fatu’s own brother, Dwight Fatu, and eponymous nephew Sonny Fatu Junior defected from the Mob Mongrel to join the Comancheros.

Fatu has not commented on the patch, or if there is a division in his chapter, although police believe the two rival gangs are “closely aligned”.

To further muddy the waters, Heart regularly posts Christmas photos with Sonny Fatu Junior.

One explanation could be a subtle shift in the gang hierarchy from the traditional “chapter and pad” to a more modern “brand loyalty,” according to a police intelligence report released under the Official Information Act.

One of the drivers of the “uncontrolled growth” to more than 7000 gang members was the change in gang structures to “cells” instead of the traditional hierarchy, which means that not all gang leaders know what they are. doing the other members.

“The older model, based on chapters and notebooks, is likely to be gradually being replaced by a shared loyalty to the ‘brand’ or ‘franchise’,” says the 2019 intelligence report.

“Under this system, members tend to operate more independently.”

A Weekend Herald investigation in April released new police data on the gangs, broken down by region, as well as some of the