Angus Gillies began his career in journalism at The Gisborne Herald in 1986. Every day it seemed the newspaper was filled with increasingly weird and outrageous stories about the Rastafarians. Since then he has always wanted to find out what really happened in Ruatoria and why. He later worked as a reporter for The Dominion, the Auckland Star and the Sunday News. He switched from print to television in 1993 and is currently a producer on 3 News. He has previously had published a novella, The Lizard Song, three best-selling sports biographies on Justin Marshall, Adam Parore and Matthew Ridge, and a book about Kiwi pop star John Rowles. But he considers the three volumes that make up Ngati Dread his most important work to date.