Gang promises to be orderly and well behaved

A Mongrel Mob gathering in Hastings involving 400 past and present members will not be "just a big piss-up", according to the president of the local chapter. Rex Timu promised Saturday's gathering of past and present gang members would be orderly and well behaved when he spoke at an application for a special liquor licence today. The gang is holding a gathering on Saturday that involves a motorcycle "memorial run" to various cemeteries around Hawke's Bay, then a "celebration" in a paddock behind the Te Aute Tavern, south of Hastings. The event, which was three years in the making, will also mark the 50th anniversary of the Hastings chapter's formation. If the application is declined there is a Plan B, but it won't be a very good one. It would involve the 300 attendees gathering at the chapter's gang headquarters, which is a house in the Hastings suburb of Camberley, and neighbours were unlikely to be happy about that. So this may well be just one of those times when the naysayers will just have to sieg heil to what the Mongrel Mob wants. And speaking of sieg heil, I'd advise the Mongrel Mob, who are largely Maori and have been known to use that phrase, to be careful around that phrase because the man who first used that phrase would have put them all in concentration camps.