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do you think you are? ”

The invitation for coffee was followed up with other emailed offers to visit and say hello. The Dotcoms tried, awkwardly. Staff were put on alert for possible visitors. Dotcom was a little pensive, waiting. In the end, nobody came. In fact, some neighbours took Dotcom's other options. One gentleman, in his 80s, contacted Interpol to raise concerns. He also rang the electorate office of Prime Minister John Key, pointing out a “master criminal” had moved into the neighbourhood.

Others approached the Prime Minister’s electorate office — one of a number of delegations there John Key later said he was never told of — to warn about Dotcom’s interest in buying the house and obtaining New Zealand residency.

“None of them has ever come to see me, or spoken to me or has any idea who I am,” says Dotcom, “but there is this group of a few dozen people who wanted to organise a movement to get me out of the country. I was so shocked by that.”

Dotcom talked about it with Mona. “How we talked about just forgetting about living in New Zealand and we were looking at other opportunities, Canada and Switzerland, we talked about Germany. Imagine if we had just said, ‘Fuck all this bullshit, all this negativity, people not liking us, staff acting like they are in constant war with everybody, all this negativity, all these problems, the media wanting to take us down.’ It is almost like signs, like there was a higher power telling us not to stay here. We should have just listened to that.”

But they didn’t.

“In the end we decided for the family. This was the best option for the kids. We didn’t want to give up on New Zealand. We felt like this is still the right place to grow a family. But in hindsight, thinking about our headspace at that time, thinking about leaving here . . . It would have been the best thing for us.”

BY OCTOBER 2010, pressure was being put on Immigration NZ. Malcolm Pacific’s Cooper wrote: “Mr Dotcom intends to be in NZ in December and would like to (be) entering as a resident so there is a growing concern around timing.” Cooper extolled the benefits of Dotcom, setting out a list for officials.

There was: the $10 million Dotcom would invest in an immigration category in which “the number of applicants is low”; the money he had already spent in NZ; the invitations he made to others to join him in New Zealand “adding to the tourism industry”; jobs for New Zealanders

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