Barbarians in Paradise / Terror Comes to Maui

BARBARIANS

IN

PARADISE

TERROR COMES TO MAUI

By

Kurt Butler

Writing as Alicia Clemens

Copyright © 2018

by Kurt Butler

All Rights Reserved

All Rights Negotiable

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used in reviews and critiques.

This is a novel, a work of fiction. Names, characters, settings and incidents are products of the author’s imagination.

E-book version published in 2018

Distributed by Smashwords

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About the Author

Kurt Butler grew up in Hawaii and lives there now on the island of Maui. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology from the University of California and a Master of Science degree in nutrition from the University of Hawaii. Several of his books have been published by major publishers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication: To Linda Lingle

Prolog

1. North Shore Rave

2. Maui Bliss

3. Super Sex

4. Suddenly in Jail

5. The Prison Industrial Complex

6. The Hellish Side of Paradise

7. Rescued

8. Invitation to Vengeance

9. The Wild Guys

10. Aka’s Agenda

11. The Vandals Escalate

12. The Killer Lab

13. The Napili Bay Massacre

14. Eureka!

15. Aka’s First Strike

16. Aka Goes to War

17. Jason’s Last Letter

Epilog

Appendix with Manifesto

Bonus Short Story: Why I Killed the Mayor

Dedication to Linda Lingle

This book is dedicated to former Maui mayor and Hawai’i State Governor Linda Lingle because for twenty years she has embodied the irrational and tyrannical tendencies common among island politicians.

In 1994 Lingle, then Mayor of Maui County, conspired with a coven of quacks to defraud thousands of people of Hawai’i, as well as visitors from other states and nations. They organized an all-day festival of fraudulent medicine that they called a women’s health conference. I attended along with several hundred others. There I sampled a smorgasbord of preposterous and hilarious quackery, including a talk by an obviously delusional crystal healer. Lingle also happened to be in the audience.

When the woman had run out of tall tales about her crystals healing diseases and making appliances and vehicles run better, and about an angel who tells her which crystals heal which diseases, she asked if anyone had any questions. No one else did, so I stood up and politely asked whether she had any kind of evidence for her claims. She rudely rebuffed me. I politely asked how she knew that the angel advising her wasn’t a dream or fantasy.

At that Lingle hurried out of the auditorium to tell a security guard to call the police. I was to be arrested for disrupting the conference. The security guard told me this when I left the auditorium. I heard sirens. Within minutes several police officers arrived, but I managed to evade them.

Lingle later became Governor. A couple years later, following an unlawful arrest, I was tortured for ten days in one of her prisons. A misdemeanor suspect, later exonerated, I was treated like an enemy combatant. During her two terms she has continued to pursue her bizarre iron-fisted, flower-fascist agenda, and has kept Hawai’i on a collision course with the Bill of Rights and with rational, liberty loving people. If this novel proves prophetic, she would be a logical person to thank.

—Kurt Butler, Author, writing as Alicia Clemens

Prolog

Jason’s troubles started shortly after he arrived on Maui a little more than ten years ago in the first hour of January 1, 2020. He had moved from Boise to The Valley Isle to work and to surf. His plans would be savagely derailed.

The Best Island in the world. That’s what Maui was called. For decades the travel media and the real estate industry had raved about the beauties and wonders of Magical Maui. Small wonder that the last remnants of small town Maui were being crushed. Newly discovered fresh-water lenses, deep in the West Maui mountains, more than tripled the island’s estimated reserves and eliminated the single biggest barrier to rapid, massive development. Big developers and their political friends secretly projected a population that would rival that of Honolulu, well over one million.

Environmental concerns were banished by visions of profit. Key legislators and regulators were easily bought, and the floodgates were opened. An unprecedented building boom threatened to Los Angelize the island. Real estate prices soared, squeezing out locals and other non-wealthy people. Speculators poured money in and a few lonely voices warned of a bubble.

In the fall of 2020 a global financial crisis, worse than the crisis of 2008, popped bubbles all over the world. Being leveraged to good times and heavily dependent on imported energy and food, Hawai’i’s economy tanked hard. The visitor count dropped more than a third in a couple years, and visitors noticed the shabby airport, crumbling roads, empty commercial buildings, for-sale signs, run-down schools and homeless people everywhere.

The mood was dark. Residents seemed less friendly and outgoing, as if too weary to exhibit the welcoming aloha spirit. Sullen and rude were appearing more often in travel commentaries. The Best Island awards from travel magazines were history, as were half the travel magazines themselves.

Maui County was rough on the thousands of young homeless and semi-homeless locals, those who had occasional shelter with relatives and friends. Almost a third of the young local males, at least fifth generation, between 18 and 30, had been arrested at least once and a quarter had at least one conviction. This was more than the percentage who voted. Suicide was the major cause of death among youngsters. Young local women fared only slightly better. Even youths with jobs had it hard and were growing restive.

The County was also rough on non-local homeless people. Most of them had ridden the waves of prosperity to Maui during recent boom times and now were suddenly broke, out of work, sitting on inventory from a busted small business or holding underwater mortgages. Their growing numbers damaged the image of Paradise. They had been urged to visit by the government-supported visitor industry, and urged to settle by the government-supported real estate industry. Then the world crashed and they failed. They came to be considered undesirables.

The County pressured their ilk to leave by running roughshod over their rights and making their lives even harder. But with no money to move and resettle they were trapped in homelessness. So the County, with the help of the State, ignored due process rights and found ways to keep many of them locked up and out of sight.

My kid brother Jason Blue knew little about all this, about the real Maui. (Neither did I until I researched the period to write this book.) An avid skier and snowboarder, he had dreamed of surfing in Hawai’i since he was ten. He still envisioned the Magical Maui he had always seen in surf magazines and films, though he was dismayed in recent years to learn how crowded the water was becoming. Fights over waves were common, and feuds simmered for months and years. Several surfers had been seriously injured in Hawai’i surf turf battles, and on Oahu two had been killed. Jason was anxious to fulfil his dream of surfing Hawai’i before the day when every wave would be solid with surfers.

I was ten years older than Jason and I babysat him so often that I came to be more his mother than Mom was. She and Dad worked long hours to keep us in a nice neighborhood, so it fell on me to help raise Jason. I didn’t mind. I loved him. He was beautiful, with red hair, hazel eyes and a dazzling smile. And he was funny and fun to be with. He matured into a smart, athletic, popular young man, and a good young man, honest, dependable, hard-working, and thoughtful of others.

After high school he shined at culinary school in Boise, our home town, and became a sous chef in an upscale restaurant. He worked for five years and saved money. Then, on December 31, 2019, when he was 25, he left Boise with a few boxes and bags of clothes, cookbooks, professional cooking utensils and other basic items. He had the resume that would open doors on Maui. And he had a large cash cushion so he could take his time finding a good job while he learned to surf.

I married my high-school sweetheart, and we stayed in Boise and raised a family. I also did free-lance writing and blogging on environmental and health issues. After Jason left for Maui he and I kept in close touch by phone, email and mail. But a few months later he abruptly stopped writing and answering his phone. I was worried and I called the Maui police, but they would not help me.

* * *

I was planning to go to Maui and hire a private investigator to help me find him when Jason finally called me. He sounded nervous and spoke quickly in short phrases. He said he had been through hell, and that Maui was about to implode. The Great Conflict, or Ka Pilikia Nui was starting. I gathered he had become involved with radicals of some sort. His prediction seemed absurd at the time, but it would prove to be accurate.

In the decade since the conflict began in 2020 there has been a great deal of debate, mostly confused and uninformed debate, about which person or group did what during the conflict. Here is an outline of the facts.

Hundreds, and later thousands, of Maui dissidents who considered themselves victims of a police state called themselves Shadow People. They felt they had long lived in the shadow of what they called the Injustice Juggernaut. Also known as the Maui Machine or the Beast, it was in the service of even larger forces intent on turning Maui into an exclusive playground for the wealthy, with just enough of the best-behaved non-wealthy to serve the wealthy, and no more. They had dreams of the island as the highest of high-end visitor destinations with the wealthiest residents (many part-time) in the nation. All those in the lowest income brackets, unless they were useful, were being encouraged by various means to leave.

The Shadow People fought back in creative ways, posting online action and music videos that portrayed their movement as romantic and fun. It became cool to be one of the Shadow People, and hoards of energetic young people rallied to the movement. Their zany antics were both entertaining and alarming. They put the rad into paradise as they fought the Juggernaut by creating chaos and documenting their actions online. They gradually shed the Shadow People identity and became known as the now infamous Video Vandals.

Another group of angry dissidents resisting the Juggernaut also used the shadow concept, but in a different way. These people had similar grievances, but very different methods. They had no interest in fun; they were mostly older and deadly serious. Aka (Hawaiian for Shadow) was a very small group, just five people, but it was ultimately more successful than the Video Vandals. By being more lethal. Unlike the Vandals, Aka did not seek publicity and public support. On the contrary, they had to be very secretive. Aka saw itself as a shadow justice system that quietly, invisibly and anonymously cast its own deadly shadow directly on the agents of the Juggernaut rather than on society or on the local or state government as a whole.

Debate still rages about the Video Vandals and Aka, and the roles they played in the strange and violent events that ensued. Did my sweet little Jason, working with Aka, really pioneer ghastly new methods of murder, then personally use the methods? Did he really become the group’s assassin -- Aka’s Hammer -- as persistent rumor has it? Did either of the groups’ radical actions accomplish anything? Are the groups now defunct or just dormant? What became of the core members?

My recollections, my notes, and the many letters and emails he sent me hold the answers to these and other intriguing questions. This book’s purpose is to inform the debate and set the record straight for history. It is based mostly on Jason’s words.

Neither my words nor Jason’s can match, in concise eloquence, those of Aka itself in its manifesto, printed in full in the appendix. The chapters tell the story of how Aka’s manifesto came to be, who wrote it, the personal tragedies that drove them to their extreme actions, the murderous means by which they attempted to enforce their demands, and the results of their actions. This story is fascinating, but Aka’s Manifesto itself is the key to understanding Maui’s Ka Pilikia Nui, The Great Conflict.

Some of the quoted dialog is, of necessity, conjecture. Though the conjecture is mostly based on first- and second-hand knowledge, and on reasonable assumptions and deductions, some critics will consider this work more historical drama than journalism or history, or at least an odd mixture of the genres. Perhaps they will be right, but I have done my best to be both a good journalist and a good historian in this one important respect: to simply tell the truth.

To government lawyers who think I might be vulnerable to charges of complicity and conspiracy: I’ll save you the trouble. The statute of limitations clock has run out. Please don’t waste your time and mine.

—Alicia Clemens, Boise, Idaho

1 – North-Shore Rave

At about half past ten on New Year’s Eve, three animated high school seniors ride in a four-door sedan, going east on Hana Highway. Passing through the town of Pa’ia toward Pau’wela Point Todd is at the wheel of his old but reliable Volt, his girlfriend Cheryl leans against the door to face him, and her best friend Tulsi sits behind him. I told my parents we were going to watch fireworks at the stadium, Cheryl says.

Me too, Tulsi says. My mom would kill me if she knew I was going to a rave.

The Rave Mobile will be there, Todd says, so I had to come. It‘s totally tubular. Alright! There’s the lighthouse. He slows and turns left onto the pineapple road, the dirt road that leads to the lighthouse. I don’t want to park too close. Might get penned in. He pulls to the far side of the road and turns off the electric motor and the headlights. We can walk from here. But first.... He pulls a joint from his shirt pocket, fi res it up, takes a hit and passes it to Cheryl. She takes a hit and offers it to Tulsi.

No thanks, she says. I heard Garrett would be here and I don’t wanna be all shit-faced if I finally meet him. You know what they say about first impressions.

Cheryl passes the joint back to Todd and says, I don’t know what you see in that guy. I think he’s creepy. And he’s too old for you — maybe 23.

Something about his eyes, Tulsi says. When he smiled at me that time at Pa’ia Bay I almost fainted.

Todd laughs and coughs out the smoke he just inhaled. He composes himself and says, "You can’t be serious! Garrett Souza?

He’s a narc."

He is not! Tulsi replies. He’s a surf photographer.

That’s just his cover, Todd retorts.

Yeah, Cheryl pipes in, and his zoom lens mostly takes in the beach bunnies, not the surf action. Any girl who’s ever been topless or worn a thong on a Maui beach now has his pecker tracks on eight by ten color prints of her bod. He’s a total perv, I tell you. Why do you think he’s never had a girlfriend?

Plus, don’t forget Todd says, his dad is Police Captain and got him fast-tracked through narc training. He’s been undercover for a year. He’s a perv and a narc.

As they all get out Tulsi says, No he’s not; that’s such a dumb rumor. He’s just a loner. He’s shy. She slams the door in a huff and quickly walks a few yards ahead of them toward the fl ashing lights and thumping music. The bright gibbous moon high in the east makes it easy to stay on the dirt road between the abandoned pineapple fi eld on one side and the wind-swept scrub brush on the other.

Fluffy clouds dot the clear sky. It’s a cool night, perfect for a party. Cheryl jogs ahead of Todd to catch up with Tulsi and takes her arm in arm.

Hey, girlfriend, she says. Are we okay? I didn’t mean to put you down. Different strokes for different folks, my grandparents used to say. It’s just that you’re a beautiful girl and you can do better than Garrett Souza.

Tulsi smiles and says, Yeah, we’re okay. I appreciate your looking out for me and for being honest. But sometimes the heart rules and you have to go with it.

Todd catches up to them and takes Cheryl’s other arm in his. They all laugh and skip together towards the music, the lights and the crowd.

As they approach the party circle in the clearing near the lighthouse (really just a platform perched on a steel tower) they hear the crashing surf melding into the techno-rock blaring from the Rave Mobile. This instant party on wheels, a sleek black van, sits in the middle of the clearing pumping out fog and bristling with strobe lights, disco balls and large plasma screens bright with a light show. A crowd of dancers in various stages of intoxication surrounds it.

While booze, buds and XTC are present, the main intoxicant is the music itself – the hybrid they called Pacific trance beat, a techno rockin’ rap with English, Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese vocals. The beat is infectious and impossible not to dance to. The three friends start out together, but Tulsi is soon separated from the couple and swept into the good-vibe crowd of 300-odd revelers. The music never stops as the long cuts loop and merge seamlessly into each other. The strobes, globes and black lights work with the hypno-beat to put the revelers into a dance trance.

Losing herself in the music, Tulsi sways and spins through the crowd, her long brown hair and purple pleated skirt whirling around her. She is oblivious to the pair of eyes fixed on her sensuous form. A half hour later, now on the ocean side of the crowd, she is jarred out of her reverie by a bump from the rear. She urns to apologize and there he is, facing her with a sly smile, the smile that buckles her knees. She blushes and stammers, I’m sorry, over the loud music.

He takes hold of her elbow as if to steady her, leans toward her ear and says, No harm. Hey, I’ve seen you around. What’s your name? He’s a little taller than Tulsi, with poodle-perfect curly black hair, lips like Elvis, and big blue eyes. Except for a small soul patch and thin moustache, he is clean shaven. He wears dark slacks and a black tee shirt. And that smile.

I’m Tulsi Kalama, she says, her heart pounding.

Hi, Tulsi, I’m Garrett Souza. Nice to meet you. Wanna take a break so we can catch our breath?

Okay. I could use a break. And some water. I think my friends have some.... She turned toward where she last saw them.

No, come, I have something ice-cold stashed in the bushes. He leads her to the edge of the clearing, reaches behind a bush,