A rthur Brun was pulling off Kaumualii Highway with a Walmart bag full of meth resting on the shotgun seat when he saw the flashing lights of a police cruiser in his rearview mirror. He took a breath and pulled in front of the Lihue post office, across the street from the palm-lined lawn of the historic county building where he worked Wednesdays as a council member. He had a meeting there in a couple of hours.
The officer walked up to his car. Brun recognized him, a barrel-chested haole lieutenant named James Miller. Kauai, Hawaii, is a small island, and Brun, as a community leader, knew most of the high-ranking cops.
Miller told Brun he’d been pulled over because of the tint on his windows. Brun responded that his front windows had been rolled down. It was the back windows, Miller said, and he asked Brun to roll those down. The officer scanned the inside of Brun’s Honda sedan. Soon, a police dog was barking at the door. Miller asked Brun to step out of the car. “You didn’t stop me for the tint,” Brun said. “This isn’t right.”
Miller reached across Brun to grab the keys from his ignition. Fuck you with this setup, Brun thought, shifting into drive and slamming on the gas. His car lurched forward with Miller’s arm still reaching through the window, briefly dragging the cop down the street. Brun shook him loose, peeling past the council building and through downtown Lihue. He swerved onto a side street toward the airport, with its sign wishing travelers “Mahalo: Until We Meet Again,” past rows of helicopters and tanks of jet fuel, along the bumpy road to the Ahukini Pier. It was a dead end, but it was a place where you could hide something.
For the past two years, Arthur Brun, or “Ata,” had been living two separate and distinct lives. During the day, he was a suburban dad who would umpire Little League games, volunteer at church, and perform the mundane work of municipal government, like championing a bill to expand the definition of guesthouses to allow kitchens.
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
But at night, he was participating in the largest drug-smuggling operation on the island. Through his connections with the shady Hawaii underworld, and the powerful United Samoan Organization prison gang, he moved a pound or two of meth a week. His crew operated with “impunity,” according to John Tobon, who supervised the case at Homeland Security. “It was unsophisticated in a manner that was not normal to the drug world,” Tobon says. “They just assumed that there was nobody there to watch.”
It was not fun or glamorous or particularly lucrative. Most of the dealers and suppliers who worked with Brun were addicts themselves, feeding an island ravaged by meth addiction since the 1980s. Brun was selling, in part, to feed his own addiction, which by 2019 had left him a husk of his former self.
Brun’s October 2019 booking photo Kauai Police Department For years, Council Member Brun and Meth Dealer Brun had somehow managed to coexist. But now, the facade was about to collapse, leaving his community grappling with the fallout. Kauai, a rural island of 70,000 people, is tremendously insular and interconnected. Most locals knew, or at least knew of, the fallen councilman. How could a friend, co-worker, and trusted community member have screwed up so badly? “Arthur did a really great job hiding it,” says Brun’s friend and fellow council member Ross Kagawa. “Nobody had a clue.”
There aren’t many car chases on Kauai. On a small island with no road out, what’s the point? This one ended in less than 10 minutes.
After he turned a corner, when the trailing cop cars didn’t have eyes on him, Brun slowed and tossed the Walmart bag into the thick brush along the roadside. He’d call some guys to pick it up later. With a cloud of red dust trailing behind him, he pulled into the Ahukini Pier parking lot, a local fishing spot that affords a view of the mountainous Kauai coast. Soon the sirens would close in.
Related Content
Was My Teacher Murdered?
Inside the Desperate Search for Nolan Wells
How to Watch the Lindsay Clancy Trial and Documentary Online Without Cable for Free
Zohran Mamdani: ‘If You Aren’t Willing to Fight, You Will Never Win’
UNTIL HIS FALL FROM GRACE, most of Kauai viewed Arthur Brun’s story as an inspiration. He was a local guy of Hawaiian and Portuguese descent from a tough background who had managed to turn his life around without forgetting where he came from.
He’d grown up in Kalaheo, on the wilder, less-developed west side of Kauai. It’s a place that still has the agricultural feel of old plantation Hawaii, where it’s common to find locals wearing camo and cowboy boots, riding in rodeos, and hunting pigs in the mountains. Sprawling acres of largely barren farmland, still owned by the sugarcane plantations that dominated the islands’ economy for a century, line the side of the highway here, gently sloping toward the craggy green cliffs of the Waimea Canyon. Rusted-out sugar mills stand sentinel over streets dusted in a layer of red clay.
“They just assumed that there was nobody there to watch.”
Homeland Security officer John Tobon
As Brun was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Hawaii’s sugarcane plantations were shutting down amid growing international competition and the removal of a federal sugar-industry subsidy. Good union jobs in the sugarcane industry disappeared, not unlike how, across the Pacific, Rust Belt towns were hollowed out by deindustrialization. Kauai’s economy grew more reliant on tourism, and work became more precarious. It was around this time that meth, known locally as “ice” or “batu,” began to burn through the island.
Hawaii was ground zero for the crystal meth epidemic, the first state where the smokable form of the drug really took off. “We’re not proud of it,” Hawaii Drug Court Judge Edward Kubo told Hawaii Public Radio in 2016. “But crystal methamphetamine is our gift to the nation.” By 2004, the state had the highest rate of crystal meth use in the country. It was bad enough to trigger U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearings titled “The Poisoning of Paradise” that year.
Manufacturing meth on-island is pretty much impossible — there aren’t many places to hide a meth lab — so most meth that reaches Hawaii comes from the mainland, as is the case with most products consumed on the islands. It’s generally manufactured in Mexico and transported to California, where it is mailed to the islands in one- to five-pound packages. The sheer volume of mail makes it difficult, if not impossible, to inspect and intercept all of these shipments.
Nearly every Kauai local I talk to has a family member or close friend who has struggled with addiction. “It was so bad, it’s not who did it, it’s who didn’t do it,” says Ross Kagawa, a square-jawed west side baseball coach who graduated Waimea High School a couple of years ahead of Brun and sports his same buzzed salt-and-pepper haircut. “A lot of really good guys got affected. They went to work with it until it got too bad they couldn’t go to work. Then they lost everything.”
As a young man, Brun was pulled deep into this scene, becoming a small-time dealer and user. By 2003, in his early thirties, things began to spiral. One night, he led three men on a car chase through the south side of the island, as they tried to collect a debt he owed. They closed in on him on a dirt road, where they rammed his car and fired shots through his window. The bullets missed, but he was cut by the broken glass.
Brun won a spot on the County Council in 2016. Over the next few years, he was charged and found guilty of second-degree theft, abuse of family members, and threatening behavior, but never served more than 10 days in jail.
Many don’t recover from this sort of start. But for a time, at least, Brun seemed to be the exception. He found a good-paying job as a third-party field coordinator with the agriculture company Syngenta, which leased land on the west side, and he started a business selling smoked meat. “Man-size batch,” he says in a comment on one of his Instagram posts showing a rack of smoked pork hanging in a shed.
When he was sober, Brun was a well-liked fixture of the west side community. You’d always see him around — a former high school football player who looked like it, usually dressed in an oversize aloha shirt and baggy jeans or basketball shorts. Colleagues who knew him during the 2010s describe him as good-natured and funny — “a teddy bear,” one says. “He was known for being really nice,” says another. He was constantly volunteering, and was particularly active helping inmates at the jail where he had once been held get jobs and reenter society. He began to take on the undesirable task of umpiring local Little League games, where he was the sort of guy who made parents think twice before arguing balls and strikes. He’d announce games, too, and he didn’t need a microphone — his big voice boomed across the stadium unamplified.
“We’re not proud of it. But crystal methamphetamine is our gift to the nation.”
Hawaii Drug Court Judge Edward Kubo said in 2016
After his many run-ins with the law and divorcing his first wife in 2004, he repaired a fractured relationship with a girlfriend who he later married. The pair had three kids together, along with two children from his previous marriage. They moved into a house on a quiet street in the shadow of the Waimea Canyon — a suburban-style development with red-dirt-stained Toyota Tacomas parked in the driveways. Brun was a doting father when he was sober, those who knew him remember. He would hunt wild boars with his sons and attend his daughter’s volleyball games, glowing with pride at his kids’ accomplishments in social media posts.
It’s unclear exactly when Brun got back into using and dealing. But everyone I speak with, including the law-enforcement officers who tracked him, agrees it wasn’t until after he was elected to the council. “I just wonder sometimes, was I duped?” says one close friend and co-worker from this time. “I don’t think so. I really don’t.” For more than a decade, the island believes, he really had been clean.
WHILE THOSE WHO KNEW HIM describe Brun as kind and caring in his personal life, in the political arena, he was a brawler. He was pulled into local politics in 2013 because of his job with Syngenta.
The first time Fern Holland encountered Brun, he was on the long lawn of the Kauai County Council building, flipping her off with both hands. “He was talking mad shit to me,” Holland says. “I’ve never had good interactions with him.”
Holland is an environmental consultant and firebrand activist from the more-developed east side of Kauai, who has a talent for shaming corporations, developers, and the politicians who do their bidding. Standing at the same height as most of her male counterparts in a Kauai political scene traditionally dominated by men, she is also the sort of person you wouldn’t want to argue balls and strikes with.
Fern Holland is an environmental consultant and firebrand activist who battled Brun during a fight to regulate pesticides on Kauai. County of Kauai She first encountered Brun at the height of a vicious political battle to regulate pesticides on Kauai. After the end of sugar, the old plantations had begun leasing their fallow cane lands to Big Ag companies, such as Dow, Pioneer, and Brun’s Syngenta, which took advantage of lax regulations to conduct experimental GMO and pesticide testing. Environmentalists like Holland and allies on the Kauai County Council — concerned about health impacts — pushed hard to regulate these companies, sparking an equally fervent counter-movement from west siders worried that regulation would be a job-killer.
Holland remembers hundreds of locals spilling out from the council chambers during marathon meetings, where they set up picket lines on the lawn of the council building. The factions would wear blue or red to signal their allegiance — blue meant you supported the ag companies, and red meant you supported the environmentalists. The battle was significant enough that Pierce Brosnan produced a documentary about it, also called The Poisoning of Paradise.
Brun was at most of these events, always wearing blue. He soon became something of a local champion for his employer Syngenta. He’d give fiery speeches before the council on their behalf, and even did a turn on the catwalk as a Syngenta representative at a 2014 fashion show. He sported an azure aloha shirt and baggy pants, and flexed his biceps when he reached the end of the aisle, to a dancehall version of Lana Del Ray’s “Young and Beautiful.”
Backed by $2,700 in Syngenta donations, Brun made the run for County Council in 2014, representing the blue faction. His history with addiction was an important part of his campaign. “I got nothing to hide,” he told a local blog at the time. “I did what I did. I made some bad choices in life, but I shaped up and moved on.”
It worked. While he lost a close race in 2014, in 2016, he tried again and won, unseating a leader of the red environmentalist faction.
Holland won her own election to council in 2024, and now occupies the same seat where Brun once sat. She doesn’t mince words when I ask about Brun’s downfall. She tells me, in a tone that makes it clear there is no love lost, “People that are OK with pesticides drifting through schools and impacting children are usually OK with methamphetamines drifting through schools and impacting children.”
POLITICS WERE BAD FOR BRUN, those who know him agree.
“We shouldn’t have got him to run,” says Kagawa, who was aligned with Brun in the blue faction and had encouraged his foray into politics. The council was stressful for him, Kagawa says. “The pressure to make people happy. Good people can sometimes go in different directions on certain issues. It’s hard if you’re trying to please everybody.” That, plus the daily stress of raising five children on an island with an astronomical cost of living, contributed to Brun going back to meth, Kagawa believes. “With tourism and rising prices, people are fucking stressed-out on Kauai.”
“I did what I did. I made some bad choices in life, but I shaped up and moved on.”
Brun said when he ran for County Council
Among those in the red faction, there was a general sense that Brun was a pawn of larger interests, the sort of person who would vote how companies like Syngenta told him to. While he was passionate about representing the people of the west side — who often go forgotten in Kauai politics dominated by the more populous east side — he didn’t seem to relish in the tax rates, budgets, and bonds that made up the bulk of the work of municipal government. “A lot of times it seemed like he hadn’t read the bills,” one former council member says. Sometimes, Brun appeared agitated or sweaty at council meetings. Often, he didn’t show up at all.
When Luke Evslin was elected to the Kauai County Council in 2018, after a near-death motorboat accident inspired him to give back to his island, he found Brun to be a uniquely subdued co-worker. “In many ways, council is like theater, people performing,” Evslin says. “He didn’t do that. He was just carrying a heavy weight, and it seemed like it got more and more heavy.”
Slowly, old patterns began to reemerge. By 2018, friends began to hear that Brun was drinking again. Then, that he was using. It’s hard to avoid slipping into old habits, especially on an island. “On the mainland, it might be easier to find another community and remove yourself from the circle of people who are addicted, but on Kauai that just seems so hard,” says Evslin, who grew up on the east side. “The amount of people who ended up overcoming it are vanishingly small, because it’s always there, it’s always around you.”
In addition to his work on the County Council, Brun also umpired Little League games. Eventually, friends remember, Brun stopped umpiring Little League games.
In April 2018, the island’s drug crisis went before Brun and the County Council. The county attorney presented a plan to sue several big pharma companies for the deceptive marketing practices that triggered the opioid epidemic, following the pattern established by lawsuits filed against tobacco companies starting in the 1990s.
Opioids had swept through the islands after meth, with overdose deaths nearly doubling statewide from 2000 to 2016. “The pain is what’s driving them,” said Bruce Hart, a diminutive local reverend and frequent County Council testifier, at the meeting. “When they’re offered something that can alleviate the pain, it is a monumental task to overcome the flesh.”
Council members one by one voiced their support for the lawsuit. Brun spoke last.
“I’ll try to get through this,” he said, his voice heavy. He sighed, leaned back in his chair, and put his hands on the back of his head. Another council member put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Knowing somebody close to me …” he began, before his voice choked up. He stood and walked out of the room. By this time, police believe, Brun had already begun dealing again.
THROUGHOUT 2019, AFTER THE nine-to-fivers went home, a secret detail would begin its shift in a wire room at the Kauai Police Department headquarters only a few blocks away from the council building where Brun worked. The headquarters is a long, beige two-story building with chickens running wild in the parking lot, as they do throughout most of Kauai.
In late 2018, Kauai cops had heard through the local rumor mill, known colloquially as “the coconut wireless,” that Brun was dealing meth. They called in the feds. Led by the ATF, with support from Homeland Security, the FBI, and about 20 local cops, the detail obtained wiretaps on Brun and eight or nine other members of his organization. One team would listen to the wire 24/7, while a team in the field surveilled targets and confirmed deals. Over the course of the year, a picture of his operation began to take shape.
It was hard to believe, says Bryson Ponce, the former Kauai Police Department assistant chief of investigations, who led the KPD’s side of the Brun investigation. We meet at the Starbucks in Lihue, a couple of blocks from Brun’s traffic stop. “At first we thought, ‘That’s just people saying stuff,’” he says. “’Why would he risk it all?’”
Brun and his associates shipped one or two pounds of meth to the island every couple of weeks, sometimes through the mail, and sometimes via plane. They would then distribute it to a handful of trusted associates to sell locally. Brun could buy a pound for about $7,000 and flip it for $20,000 retail. It wasn’t Heisenberg numbers, but it was a big operation for rural Hawaii, and law-enforcement sources describe it as the largest meth ring on the island at the time.
Brun was primarily supplied by Maluelue Umu, a bald Samoan man with ties to the USO prison gang, whom Brun had met during his days volunteering at the jail. Steven Keliikuli, a former football player and west side pal of Brun’s, dealt for him, and sometimes let the council member crash at his house. The intensely loyal, neck-tatted Orlando Manguchei helped Brun collect drug debts. Manguchei, or “Ole,” was sometimes described in the local press as a “Jesse James figure,” because he had twice triggered manhunts after escaping supervised release from the local jail. After a 2016 escape, he was caught with four of his dogs that he appeared to have stolen from the Kauai Humane Society, where they had been placed after his arrest.
Keeping a police operation this large a secret on an island where everyone knows everyone was a near impossibility. By mid-2019, Brun’s activities had become so well-known on the coconut wireless that Ponce began receiving complaints for not investigating him.
Orlando Manguchei in 2019 U.S. Marshalls Service Brun, at least, seemed oblivious to the massive investigation zeroing in on him. On the wiretap, he came across as brash and arrogant, says Ponce, insulting the investigative abilities of the local police. He didn’t seem to be using his role on the council, where he served as the vice chair of the Public Safety Committee, to his advantage exactly. But, Ponce says, Brun’s position helped him craft the perception among his associates that he was untouchable. “It was like, ‘No worries guys, I’m a council member,’” he says.
In April 2019, as the investigation was well underway, a delegation of about half a dozen veteran Kauai cops in full uniform spread out across the gallery of the County Council chambers. They were there to submit a request to receive federal grant funding to target high-level meth traffickers on the island. While it wasn’t explicitly stated in the request, they planned to use the funds to pay for overtime in the Brun investigation. First, Brun and the council would need to approve the measure.
Ponce kept an eye on Brun to see how he would play it. He was feeling uneasy, worried that he might do or say something that would tip off Brun. “I wanted to play it cool, like an everyday request for council approval,” he says. Brun didn’t comment on the measure, but he did chime in on a second measure to receive grant funding for marijuana enforcement.
The council member had dark circles under his eyes, but he was in politician mode — cool and collected.
“I think you hit it right on the head,” Brun said, flashing a faint smile. “Everyone thinks that marijuana is good, and it’s better to do marijuana than everything else. Marijuana is still a gateway drug.” He then took issue with some of the questions that other other council members had been asking about the police plans for how they would operate investigations with the funds.
”Let’s keep … all the intelligence stuff behind the scenes,” he said. “Being a former drug dealer and user, I know how the system works, and the more information you get out, the better it is for the drug dealers.” He voted for both measures.
Brun’s social media posts during this time portray him more as a man in deep distress than a competent drug kingpin. His sister died in early 2019, and his mom had died a few years prior, and most posts are tributes to them, or raw expressions of despair. “Damn why is it so hard? The pain is crazy! WHY? WHY? WHY? #ALLTHETIME,” one May 2019 Facebook post reads.
By the fall of that year, the case was coming together. In September, Brun and an associate sold meth directly to a source cooperating with the detail. The next month, cops conducted their first major raid of the operation, seizing a shipment of meth from the airport. Days later, Brun was caught on the wire plotting to acquire a rifle for Manguchei, who, as a felon, was not allowed to own firearms.
On Oct. 29, 2019, police learned from the wire that Brun would be collecting a re-up at Waimea Park, just a block away from his house — the same field where he used to umpire baseball games. The detail arranged the traffic stop on the other side of the island, in front of the Lihue post office, under the assumption that Brun would surrender peacefully in such a public location. He didn’t.
After the car chase, Brun was booked for assaulting Miller and resisting arrest, but he avoided a drug charge and was let out on bail. On the wire, he appeared confident that he’d managed to hide the pound of meth he’d tossed from the car. “That’s why I ran,” he told Manguchei. He tried to get an associate to pick up the bag from the woods, but they couldn’t find it. Police had got to it first, and the pound of meth was already in the custody of the detail.
UNDER THE BRIGHT FLOURESCENTS OF THE Kauai County Council chambers on Feb. 19, 2020, as police finalized plans for Brun’s arrest, it was business as usual. The seven members, arrayed at a long V-shaped desk in front of a small crowd of gadflies, discussed a measure to renovate a public pool and a bill that would restrict local businesses from using styrofoam products.
Brun, seated next to Kagawa, wore a sling and was clearly in tremendous pain. He seemed unable to stop moving. His body was hunched over, twisting and contorting. He clenched and unclenched his hands and tugged at his goatee and his electric-blue Aloha shirt. The other councilors did their best to ignore Brun’s fidgeting.
After Brun was booked for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest, he showed up to a council meeting with his arm in a sling. For the three months following the car chase, Brun had disappeared. He stopped responding to his council email inbox — now full of questions from reporters and calls for his resignation — and he’d missed most council meetings.
A week earlier, he’d crossed the median on the back road that cuts across the east side of the island, his Hyundai plowing headlong into an Ford F-150, injuring himself and a six-year-old passenger in the other vehicle. The floor of his damaged car was covered in cash. With the federal case pending, police cited him but didn’t bother to arrest him this time. It was almost over.
Still, at the meeting, Brun tried to maintain normalcy as best he could. He became fixated on the idea that biodegradable containers, as a replacement for styrofoam, would spill too easily. “I just called someone yesterday … who was trying to eat shaved ice, and not even halfway through, it spilled all over him,” he said. “You guys live around Lihue — try driving to Waimea with those things,” Brun said later. “It ends up in your soda trays, I promise you.”
After the meeting, Brun called the council members and staff together in private. Before the assembled audience, who had watched him deteriorate over the past year, Brun broke down and apologized. “It was a mixture of emotions,” one council member remembers. “Confusion, regret, anguish, and being afraid.”
“It really was a heartfelt apology,” another says. “Just watching someone’s life unravel in front of you.”
A week later, the indictment went public.
THE ISLAND’S REACTION WAS SWIFT and furious. Social media posts about the indictment garnered scores of vicious comments. “Hope the complete gang [gets] deported,” one reads. “Lol good luck,” says a constituent email in Brun’s inbox on the day of the indictment, under the subject line “meth.”
The indictment was sprawling, accusing Brun of running a drug-trafficking operation along with a range of felonies — among them, acquiring an illegal firearm, obstruction of justice, and assaulting Miller, the officer, during the car chase. Eleven others, including Manguchei, Keliikuli, and Umu were indicted alongside him. Like Brun, most were also addicts themselves. Local police picked up Brun at Keliikuli’s house in Kalaheo, and he was held without bail. “Oh, fuck,” Kagawa thought when he heard. “It’s not good.” He received messages from Brun in jail, but found it too difficult to respond.
“When he gets out, we hope he can just live a good, clean life.”
Ross Kagawa, Brun’s friend and fellow councilmember
As it became clear that Brun would be gone for a long time, the question became what to do with his council seat. Though he couldn’t attend meetings from jail, he was still being paid a full $63,000 council salary until his term expired at the end of the year. Holland began collecting signatures to get Brun removed, but the effort was cut short by the onset of the Covid pandemic. The only way for the county to stop paying him would be for Brun to resign.
But Brun didn’t give up the seat. He didn’t say or do much of anything, until he signed a plea deal the next year. In it, he admitted to running a drug-trafficking organization, along with a range of felonies, in exchange for prosecutors recommending a 15-year sentence. “I got no excuse. I take full responsibility for it,” he said at the time. But federal Judge Derrick Watson decided that 15 years was too light. He rejected the deal and instead sentenced Brun to 20 years without possibility of parole. “The government wanted their pound of flesh and Judge Watson wanted two pounds,” Brun’s attorney said at the time.
The rest of Brun’s crew also got prison time, though their penalties were not nearly as harsh. Manguchei pleaded to conspiracy to possess a firearm and ammunition as a felon, and was sentenced to 44 months in prison. Keliikuli got 41 months for drug-trafficking charges. Umu, also charged with drug trafficking, got 100 months. His lawyer put the blame for Umu’s actions on Brun, whom he described as “a wolf guarding the henhouse,” during his days volunteering at the jail where the two men met.
When Brun gets out, barring a successful appeal, he will be more than 70 years old. Kagawa hopes they can get back in touch then. “We always going to be his friend,” he says. “When he gets out, we hope he can just live a good, clean life.”
Today, the initial flurry of rage toward Brun has subsided. When I ask Kauai locals about their former council member, the word that keeps coming up is “sad.” Brun had been someone who had risen above his past to become a respectable and even a beloved member of the community. A lot of local people could see him in their son, or boyfriend, or high school buddy who had ended up on the wrong path. For the west side, his success had been a source of hope, and his fall from grace hit hard.
Many locals have come to view him sympathetically, as an addict drawn back into a life of drug abuse, that also happened to include high-level drug dealing. Ponce sees it less favorably. “Forty percent is ‘He was just an addict,’” he says. “But I think the majority was that he was just an arrogant, drug-dealing punk who was polluting the island.” Though the investigation was a success by and large, it left him feeling a little hopeless about the drug war. “Whenever one person is eliminated, somebody steps in,” Ponce adds. “I don’t see it getting any better. They’re here because people are wanting it. Supply and demand has not changed at all.”
Brun now sits nearly 3,000 miles away from the barren sugarcane fields of the west side, in a federal prison on Terminal Island, outside of Los Angeles. He’s been working as a clerk and is representing himself in an appeal, which stalled out in November, when Brun stopped filing paperwork. When I reach out to him this past fall, he initially seems interested in talking with me. “I chose not to say my side,” Brun tells me when we speak by phone in October, in a lilting local accent. He’s friendly and personable — it’s easy to imagine him in politician mode, glad-handing voters. “They all said ‘He’s this, he’s that,’” he goes on. “I’m not that guy.” But, after I send him a list of questions, he decides he can’t go through with it. “It just opens up old wounds,” he says.
At her thrift shop under the metal husk of the Coco Palms Hotel, an iconic Kauai landmark that was destroyed by a hurricane in the 1990s, I chat with Rowena Contrades-Pangan, who knew Brun from volunteering and youth football. She’s an advocate for homeless people, and works closely with locals struggling with drug abuse and inmates transitioning back into the community. One of her clients was related to Brun’s supplier. It’s a small island.
“He used to tell the kids to ‘stay away from drugs,’” Pangan remembers of Brun, imitating his gruff voice, and shaking her head. “I love him,” she says. “But I hated what he did.”
