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Nobakht was 41; Rye, 36. When I first saw them in court, I assumed they were a couple. Their heads were close together as they sat in the little crate of the defendants’ box. Actually, they loathed each other.
To return to that boring surveillance film: police contended that it showed Nobakht lingering at the arrivals lounge to follow a drug courier bringing in the crystal meth to New Zealand. The courier was a Godot who never arrived. He’d already been arrested, at Customs. By the time he was released, to play out his new, undercover role given to him by police, Nobakht had left the airport.
Nobakht was later arrested, and when he appeared at the High Court, enough evidence had been accumulated for the prosecution to label him as ‘the overseer’, the man in charge of the P once it arrived in New Zealand. He was charged with importing and supplying a Class A drug. The buyer, according to prosecution, was Gina Rye. She was charged with supply of a Class A drug. Like Nobakht, she denied the charges, and pleaded not guilty. Nobakht presented himself as a Hawke’s Bay apple-picker. Rye said she ran an escort agency. She could have called herself a madam, but her mischief ran higher than that; the title she preferred was ‘mama-san.’
Rye — long-haired and wide-faced, described as ‘solidly built’ by one police officer who had kept her under surveillance, and, less flatteringly, by another cop on the surveillance team, as ‘plump’ — was loose, liked a good time; Nobakht was upright, no fun. From his cross-examination:
How do Iranian men view prostitution as a business, run by a woman?
I cannot tell you how bad it is, but it is very very very bad.
His pieties did him no favours. Of course the jury could only consider the evidence presented in court, and the evidence against Nobakht was damning. But it was obvious they found him difficult to like or understand. Closed off, a mysterious Other, he was too . . . Iranian. He had come to New Zealand in 1998 for political asylum. He had been a lieutenant in the Iranian Air Force. In the New Zealand social pecking order, an Iranian refugee is near the bottom of the heap; Rye, too, was identified in court as a low-life, a Maori woman with tattoos on her back, a ‘mama-san’ who ran hookers, and who described herself as a ‘transient’, but she was one of us, as recognisable by her skin as her speech. Police had intercepted her texts to family: Luv ya heaps, she wrote.
Nobakht had no redeeming informalities. From the evidence of a police officer sent to arrest Nobakht at his house in Napier:
Are you able to tell the court anything of Mr Nobakht’s demeanour?
He was concerned that we had not taken off our shoes inside his house.
A woman who had visited Nobakht also gave evidence.
You would know that in the toilet you had to put on a pair of slippers to go into the toilet?
Yes.
And step out of them when you left the toilet?
Yes.
Your New Zealand style and Mr Nobakht’s eastern style had its differences, do you agree with that?
No, I think that when two cultures come together, people have to learn about each other’s cultures and he wouldn’t give me time to learn about his culture and he would never try to learn about mine. He expected every New Zealander to become eastern and he would never try to westernise himself. You’d think if he came to this country he should try and do that a little bit.
Her whining reply was the authentic voice of middle New Zealand. It judged Nobakht guilty of another kind of crime: resistance to mend his foreign ways, failure to observe and share in the New Zealand way of life.
When Nobakht elected to give evidence, he asked for a translator. This was repeatedly mocked by the prosecution, who implied it was a put-on, a tactic to give him time to prepare his answers while the translator muttered to him in Farsi — Nobakht had lived in New Zealand for eight years, surely he knew enough English? In any case, it clearly vexed the jury, because it dragged out the trial even more. Even the translator seemed as though he found Nobakht repulsive. Forced to act out his role in court as Nobakht’s confidant and amanuensis, he scowled his way through the onerous translation, and couldn’t move from Nobakht’s side fast enough whenever recess was called.
Nobakht wouldn’t speak English, wouldn’t assimilate; he wasn’t a New Zealander; he wasn’t even human — he was likened to a grasping, scuttling, creeping creature of the underworld. From the cross-examination of an arresting officer:
Is it customary for the police when dealing with a large operation to give such an operation a name?
Yes.
And the police have named this operation, that this trial is about, Operation Precious, is that right?
Yes.
Was this name taken from—
Prosecution: Objection, Your Honour. Relevance.
Her Honour: I don’t see any relevance.
Defence: As Your Honour pleases. I will move on . . .
What this concealed is that Operation Precious was taken from The Lord of the Rings. Gholem, an abbreviation of Nobakht’s first name, sounds like Gollum: ‘My preciousssss . . .’
And yet this Gollum who appeared in the High Court of Auckland had a wife and daughter. They sat in the public gallery. Now and then so did someone who knew Rye, a young Maori guy who wore his address tattooed on his forehead: EAST COAST. His presence may not have won the hearts of the jury. But Nobakht’s wife was a
