This is the way the world ends: in a candy store. When I asked Kim Dotcom for his address in Queenstown so I could sit with him a while and interview him about his views on how to survive the coming apocalypse, he replied that he would send someone to collect me on a Thursday at 4pm at the Remarkables Sweet Shop on the main street in nearby Arrowtown. I got there early. It was a cold, fresh winter’s day, with black ice and low snow, and birds shivered in the trees above the pretty Arrow River. Tourists filled the candy store. I stood there lurking among the trays of Aniseed Twists and Cola Fizzballs. As soon as I stepped onto the pavement, a big black Mercedes pulled up. It was four o’clock on the dot.
The rendezvous had come about because Dotcom got in touch after reading a story I wrote for The New Zealand Herald about preparing for Doomsday. “The end of the world as we know it is coming,” he emailed. “We are close, I think.” I thought so, too. I wrote a year-long series of stories about end days; the subject occupied my mind day and night, I was sleepless, worried, a wreck, but I fancied that I was also practical and methodical, and kept busy by laying down provisions and supplies to protect my family when the world spiralled towards Hell in a fiery and terrifying hat.
The particular story that Dotcom had read was based on a far- sighted study commissioned by the government in 1987. It looked at ways New Zealand would – and wouldn’t – survive a nuclear war. He asked for a copy. I got a PDF made of the 342-page report and sent it his way in exchange for an interview. And so to the rendezvous in a sweet shop, where I took the opportunity to lay down a few more provisions for Doomsday – who wouldn’t be grateful to suck on a tin of Pac-Man Ghost Sours as eternal night closes in?
The drive to Chez Dotcom took about 10 minutes. It was at the end of a long, straight road on a tussock flat. The mountains of Coronet Peak loomed to the north, the mountains of the Remarkables loomed to the south. There was a lot of looming going on, and there was more to come as we drew up to the house on a small rise: Kim Dotcom suddenly appeared, vast, mountainous, loomsome.
It was immediately apparent that there was even more of him than the last time we met. That was in 2016, in an Auckland court, during his extradition hearing. A special leather chair was brought into the courtroom to support Dotcom’s bulk during the weeks that his legal team argued against the full, awesome might of the law agencies of the United States of America, which sought to ship Dotcom to American soil so he can rot in an American jail. Dotcom, as the former head of Megaupload, was accused of copyright infringement, racketeering, money laundering and fraud. He waited over two years for the Court of Appeal to decide his fate. Like a raven of doom, I flew into Queenstown on the very morning that the appeal court finally made its ruling.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Never feel sorry,” Anthony Hopkins’s millionaire character says in that great movie The Edge, “for a man who owns a plane.”
Dotcom’s wealth was beyond anything I could even imagine. The FBI had seized something in the region of $60 million in its worldwide raid of his businesses. He was still able to operate in superb luxury. But when I met him in Queenstown, I saw him as a tragic figure, marooned and under constant threat of imprisonment, and felt ashamed that I’d routinely seen him for so long as merely a ridiculous figure.
Yes, I always felt the case against Dotcom was a shocking disgrace and a black mark on New Zealand constitutional law, that we were the willing dupes of the US law enforcement military complex, that the US law enforcement military complex was itself the willing dupe of Washington via Hollywood and the income it lost to Dotcom’s home entertainment site which allowed users to watch movies for free; and that all of it conspired to deprive Dotcom of his basic human rights. This was the guy whose house was invaded by gun-toting goons, for God’s sake. A black-ops Special Tactics Group burst in on his Coatesville mansion at dawn and hauled Dotcom’s ass to jail. He’d been spied on, raided, royally shafted.
Equally, though, I found it hard to care. By the time of his extradition hearing it felt like Dotcom had worked hard and very successfully to make himself look silly. He repelled widespread sympathy and support when he financed a weird, terrible political party, and staged the infamous Moment of Truth rally at the Auckland Town Hall during the 2014 election campaign. He promised it would reveal [then prime minister John] Key as a crook. It didn’t. The only thing I can remember from that night was an appearance made by Julian Assange via Skype at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London – not because of anything Assange said, but because just as he began his monologue a cleaner from the embassy arrived and did the vacuuming behind him.
It was around about then that Dotcom was lumped with just about the worst term of abuse that a visitor to New Zealand can suffer: overstayer.
This is an edited extract from Missing Persons: Twelve extraordinary tales of Death and Disappearance in New Zealand, by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins NZ, NZ$35)