How did she eat?
‘I stole chocolates from Deka.’
The friend who took her to meet King was ‘doing jobs’ with him — street slang for prostituting herself. ‘We went there, and a couple of other street-kids were sitting around and they were like, “Give us a fucken cigarette, Derek, you fucken prick.” That’s how they all spoke to him.’ She remembers an outing in the Jaguar to smoke dope in the Domain; the girls in the back seat burnt his hair with their cigarettes.
Nikita began prostituting herself to him, too. She was just his type: a thin, lost child. The rate was $60 for 30 minutes. ‘After I did a job with him, he was like, “Oh, come and live with The Family, darling. You’ll get an allowance.”’
Eight other ex-street-kids gave evidence against King. They were grown-ups, just, with kids of their own, several each; they were defensive, bewildered, aggressive. One girl accused another girl of stealing her cellphone at King’s townhouse, and said, ‘It was kind of obvious that she would of tooken it.’ Some of them told wicked lies, like the girl who claimed King paid her a staggering $200 each time they had sex, which was sometimes four times a day. His lawyer protested he didn’t have that sort of money. He could also have said that it was out of character, because King was a shocking cheapskate. Several other girls said he welched on the $60 fee, and paid them $40, sometimes only $20.
They were runaways from Blockhouse Bay, Glen Innes, Papakura. They revealed their Auckland — sex work in city backstreets (Turner Street, Cross Street), sitting for hours in internet cafés on Facebook, drinking in Myers Park, starving, stealing, everyone ending up at ‘Derek’s place’. They were 12, 13, 14, but were told by friends to lie about their age, and say they were older. They told much the same story — a friend would introduce them, they’d smoke pot, and King would say, ‘You’re a pretty young girl.’ Then: ‘Would you fuck me for $60?’ One girl demurred, so King upped the price: ‘Would you fuck me for $60 and a bottle of whiskey?’ No, she said. He went all out: ‘Would you fuck me for $60, a bottle of whiskey, and some weed?’ Still she said no, and punched him in the jaw when he tried to kiss her.
Most girls took the money and did the job. No one was innocent, and everyone was damaged. Morality lay outside the door. Inside that rancid den, everything was consensual, force was never applied, there was demand and supply. ‘The Family’ were a kind of family. Generations of girls found a place to sleep, and were safe from beatings, starvation, bad weather, loneliness. Operation Elephant, the police investigation, succeeded in locking up King, but it also took away a rare offer of warmth.
I spoke to a youth worker, Faith Atkins, who knew all about King and his ‘Family’, and asked her whether she conceded that King had done the girls some good. ‘Shelter and food are a very kind gesture,’ she said, ‘but the bottom line is they’re kids and it’s against the law.’
What use was the law to the girls? They hated their CYFS homes in Pakuranga, Blockhouse Bay, Otahahu, Manurewa and Te Atatu; they really hated the 20-bed ‘protection residency’, Whakatakapokai. They all ran away to ‘Derek’s place’. It can’t have been too bad. Some of it must have been pretty good. King was eccentric, funny, an enthusiastic stoner (‘I’m very precious about my beautiful outdoor cannabis,’ he said in court). There were daily allowances, bus fares, snacks, outings — the court heard about a day drinking Steinlager in a park near the airport, and the time he took two girls to visit his sister in Taupo. What did he say? Family, this is family?
There were sometimes glimpses of logic and a kind of decency when he delivered speeches in court, viz: ‘I resent the implication I’m hiring the girls as prostitutes, I mean, prostitutes are someone you pick up and dump back on the street when you’ve used them, I mean, how bizarre to make, that comparison, it’s just ridiculous.’ One girl talked about visiting King for the first time with two friends who had known him for years. She described the scene: ‘Derek was just having a brief catch-up with them, just seeing how they were, where they had come from, how they’d been.’
But as head of The Family, King held the purse strings. A girl who lived with him for five years told the court, ‘I did form a relationship with him, but you can tell where he was coming from, because as soon as I had kids and put on weight I was straight out the door. I couldn’t even get $5 off of him. He’d tell me, “You’re out of The Family.” He does it with everyone. He does it over generations.’
Police found a stack of porno DVDs at King’s house — Once Upon a Girl, Innocent Bystanders, Private Gladiator. They also found a CD by Maria Callas. King made fleeting references in court to attending poetry nights and folk clubs, to people from the outside world, adults — ‘an architect mate’ from Christchurch, ‘a famous violinist’. But he was most himself with little girls. In bed, he asked them to remove their pants, and kneel in front of him ‘like a dog kind of thing’, as one girl told the court. Nikita said she was always stoned ‘doing a job’
