1 Proudly brought to you by... Tonight on Sunday, do the crime, do the time? How old are you now? > Just turned 36 last Monday. Vicki Letele was dying from cancer inside jail. We are still human beings and deserve to be treated like human beings. Now, what's on her bucket list? It's something that I believe my children can look back on and be proud of their mum. Yeah, I took it personally. Fail. > Fail. Scandal brought Kevin Roberts down. I failed in ways that are very upsetting to me. I failed in ways that were very embarrassing to Saatchi & Saatchi. Bugger! The Kiwi king of world advertising in his first interview since his fall from grace. This storm was... tsunami-like. Captions by Anne Langford. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Kia ora. I'm Miriama Kamo. Mother-of-three Vicki Letele is the first to admit she's done wrong. But should her prison sentence become a death sentence? Vicki was in jail for fraud when doctors discovered she was dying of cancer. But getting compassionate leave became a battle with a system that was keeping her inside. Tonight, reunited with her children, we hear Vicki's version of what happened inside prison and how she wants to spend her last days making a difference. Here's Ian Sinclair. Although we've all made mistakes, we're still human beings and deserve to be treated like human beings. There you go! Vicki Letele, mother of three,... He's recording you and your moves. Awesome. ...just released early from prison on compassionate grounds, only to serve another much tougher sentence. The doctors have said to me that the type of cancer that I have is an aggressive form of gastric stomach cancer. How old are you now? > Just turned 36 last Monday. 36? > That's young to have cancer, isn't it? Mm. Yeah. But the release from prison didn't come easily. There was argument against it. Vicki was serving three years and two months for mortgage fraud. You were convicted of 10 convictions,... Mm. ...of false documents,... Yeah. ...and plus the court found you took half a million dollars. Mm. We spoke to somebody who bought a property off you, as well, just this morning. He said he's sorry about your condition but he still believes you committed an offence and, therefore, you should serve your time for that. What's your response to that? First of all, you know, to everybody that bought a house during that time and on those convictions that I was convicted of, I am deeply sorry. I know now what I did, the way I did it was wrong. At the time I really thought I was doing something good. OK. you've accepted you've done wrong. You do the crime, you do the time. Yeah, and I believe that and I was doing... doing my time. But earlier this year she fell ill. I was spewing up what looked like coffee grains, sometimes black too. I knew something was definitely wrong. Yet Vicki says seeing the prison doctor was not so easy. You can't just ring up and make an appointment and go and see the doctor. You've gotta fill out paperwork, you've gotta tell them what's wrong with you, then you put it in the post. And then they come and collect it, and then they'll get back to you within seven days. Even then, her problems were far from over. Sunday has obtained Vicki's medical records, and they show prison doctors diagnosed her illness first as heartburn, then an ear infection. It was one of the prison guards that said to the medical team, 'She's to go to hospital. There's something wrong with her.' I mean, the people themselves, the guards, you know, even the nurses, all good people, but it's the process and the system that you have to go through. I mean, just seven weeks, eight weeks to get me to a hospital. So let me just get this straight. You had the symptoms of cancer... < Yeah. ...for seven or eight weeks before you got treated for it? Yeah. Could that have made a difference? We'll never know. Could it have saved your life? We'll never know, you know, but I would have liked to have had that opportunity. And the verdict once she got to Middlemore? That it was possibly cancer. They removed my stomach. And then four days later, they confirmed that it was terminal. I've been only given six months to live. Tough with three kids at home. So how did you feel about you being inside with, OK, let's be blunt, a death sentence, and them outside,... Yeah. ...separated from you? Just heartbroken. Mm. All I could think about was my children. Vicki applied for compassionate release, but Corrections opposed it. This despite submissions from Middlemore staff that a correctional facility is unlikely to provide adequate healthcare. Just broke me. What I'm told is that you're only granted compassionate leave once you're two to three days away from dying. Then you get released to hospice to die, really. I didn't want my children to see me like that. I want them to remember me how I am now, and I didn't want to be given back to my family in a bedridden state. ALL CHANT: Free Vicki. After the parole board turned down her early release, her family went public. I'll never forget the support and love from not just the outside, but the support and love that I received from` from murderers, from... arsonists, from violent people that were in support of me` me going home. All good, Sis? > Then last month, Corrections dropped its opposition, requesting the parole board to approve her release on compassionate grounds, eight months into her three-year sentence. It's just amazing. Hey, Mum. > I know that I only got home because of the support from... from NZ, from people I didn't even know. What's your message to those people? Thank you so much. Thank you so much. God bless youse. But Vicki still has unfinished business with the prison system. I'd say the biggest problem that the prison has is their communication. The left doesn't know what the right's doing, and, therefore, it's just chaotic. To be fair to them, they're dealing with people often with chaotic behaviour, aren't they? Yeah. And the way to fix that chaotic behaviour's not by adding more chaotic behaviour. (LAUGHS) There are some prisoners there that have done some wrong. I myself have done wrong. We're still human. The family are together again ` for now. < How would it have been for you if they had decided, < 'No, we stick to the rule book here. She stays inside until she is nearly dead.' I think our family just would have... I don't know. Our family would've fallen apart big time. It's kind of hard to think that she's got six months left with her positive... vibes. I don't think she'll die in six months. Even though she's now on the outside, Vicki wants to use what time she has left to change the system inside. I'm in a position to use my story, to be a voice to everyone that is in prison. We're in a system that needs changing. I believe that anyone that's been given a terminal diagnosis should be granted compassionate leave, compassionate release. I know of many that have gone through this already and ended up dying in prison. And I know that there'll be many more that'll come after me, and... prison is no place for a dying person. Wouldn't it be easier for you to just go, 'Now I've got bigger things on my mind ` my family. I don't have time for all of this'? I have a conviction in my heart to do something for the brothers and sisters back in prison. And it's something that I believe my children can look back on and be proud of their mum for making a difference. It's something my kids can be proud of me for. So, in a statement to Sunday, Corrections chief executive, Ray Smith, says he does not agree there were avoidable delays in Vicki's diagnosis or poor communication. Prisons have nurse-led healthcare, and the time taken to see a GP depends on the severity of their symptoms. Corrections believes Middlemore staff were not aware of the level of care provided in prison and he considers that Ms Letele's care generally met the obligation to prisoners to receive a similar level of health care as they would in the community. Well, next up, one minute he was one of the world's most famous and highly paid ad men ` head of Saatchi & Saatchi worldwide; the next, he was gone after being at the centre of a global controversy about gender diversity. So this was about gender diversity in the advertising industry, > and what you said was, 'The debate is all over.' That was the problem, wasn't it? That was the problem. Bugger. 5 Welcome back. As one of the world's most famous ad men, Kiwi Kevin Roberts knows how to capitalise on controversy. Take his famous 'bugger' ad for Toyota, for instance. He earned millions as the boss of Saatchi & Saatchi worldwide, but three months ago, the mouth that's fired off a thousand winning tag lines suddenly misfired. And Roberts was out of a job. So, what happened? He's kept silent until now. Janet McIntyre with this candid and exclusive interview. You say you've got four rules you live by ` be impeccable with your word. Pass or fail? Fail. Don't take anything personally. > Absolutely fail. I took it personally. Don't make any assumptions. Fail. Always do your best. > I was tired, fatigued in the middle of interview number four, and was not at my best. Fail. That's pretty unusual for Kevin Roberts, isn't it? Four fails. Four out of four, yeah. It's not my finest three minutes. 'IN THE AIR TONIGHT' PLAYS He makes a lot of noise ` # I can feel it coming... # the man at the top of some of the world's most iconic ad campaigns... Bugger! ...until a lapse of judgement saw him toppled. Bugger! Oh, it's appalling judgement, yeah. I broke all the four agreements I've been living with for 20 years. Yeah. I'm an Aucklander as much as anything else. I love living in Auckland. The ad business has been good to him. He has a mansion on a 1.5ha site, including a bush walk. Can't believe that we're right in the centre of Remuera. It's astonishing. It's the beauty of NZ, the beauty of Auckland. It's a great place to just kind of sit and reflect. A gallery of the finest modern art. Everything's very personal. He's got Warhols, John Lennon sketches, Billy Apples and Max Gimblets. Max made this. He calls it the spirit drawer. And this nod to his days as head of Lion Nathan. Superman flying across the brewery, and, of course, I found that an irresistible thought. Obviously because you see yourself in that picture. Absolutely right, and it's very difficult for me to get into that position for all kinds of reasons. And into that suit. Into the suit, especially. Very tough. Upstairs is a sports memorabilia museum. This jersey was worn by Michael Jones in the 1987 World Cup when he made his name. He took the jersey off and came back and gave it to me. They wash it, presumably. They don't wash it. No. There's a jersey over there. Nick Farr-Jones' Wallaby jersey. You can still see the grass stains on it. He gave me that straight after playing against NZ at Eden Park. How does all this compare to what you grew up with? Well, I grew up in a council house. I never had my own bedroom till I left home ` till I was 16, 17. Born in Lancaster, England, to working-class parents, he left school when he was 14 with nothing. I had no money. I had no food. But Kevin Roberts had a gift for being in the right place, with the right idea, at the right time. He hit 'swinging' London in the '60s, landing a branding job with miniskirt inventor Mary Quant. He drove the Pepsi explosion of the '80s... OK, who's first? ...before he flew to NZ, head-hunted by Lion Nathan. This is about coaching, inspiring and building brands, and I've had a lifetime of doing that. When I first met Kevin in New York two decades ago, he'd just been hired to turn around a struggling Saatchi & Saatchi, dividing his time between there and Auckland, home for his three children and wife, Rowena. Is it true that he really buys all your clothes? Oh yeah. Make-up, shoes, clothes, bags. He's brilliant. In the back of his diary he's got all my sizes. He's got such an eye. He's brilliant. But the marriage recently ended. Which is something I really regret. You know, I put 35 years into a relationship that couldn't stand all the levels, so failed. Was that because you were working too hard, the distance was too great? Or we were different people or we grew into different people. I dunno. If I'd known what caused it, I probably would have stopped it. But there was no stopping his professional life. As the head of Saatchi's and its parent group, Publicis, he led 80,000 people worldwide. The whole spirit of Saatchi is 'nothing is impossible'. Can you imagine going to work at a place where everybody believes that? Under Roberts, Saatchi's boomed. No brief was too tough. Even constipated babies could front ads. SOUNDTRACK FROM 'A SPACE ODYSSEY' What makes a good ad? It has to do three things. It has to either make you laugh, make you cry or make you act, so a great ad, and some of the great ads from NZ have made me laugh. Some of them have made me cry. His all-time favourite? A Saatchi NZ telecom ad about staying in touch. # It's not time to make a change. It shows a father and son being together, and they get older and older and older, and then the final shot shows the father no longer in the shot. # There's so much you have to know. # And I think about that just simple thought ` stay in touch. When I show that in theatres and speeches, 30% of the audience pick up their mobile straight away and call Dad. It's a wonderful thing. He's built a career out of reading the public mood. He's one of the very few people on record as having called the American election result three months in advance. Why did you pick that? I took the view that I felt Trump was being written off, and there were some very important elements that he had going for him. He had a dream that we could all communicate with, you know, 'make America great again'. That really tapped into the emotions of the people of America. Mrs Clinton had not a dream, really. She had a slogan that said 'stronger together', and if you were living in America at the time as I was, that wasn't terribly credible. Do you like Donald Trump? I've only met him once, and uh, I found him to... that he took up a lot of the oxygen in the room we were in. TRUMP: Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything. How, when he got it so right it about Trump, did he get it so wrong, talking about gender diversity in his own industry? A few months ago, a straightforward interview to promote his latest book about leadership, 64 Shots, turned into a PR disaster. I went to the UK, got off a plane overnight from New York to London, had a raft of interviews. Did four interviews back to back. In one of those interviews with influential trade magazine Business Insider, the questions turned to women in advertising and why they were represented in only 11% of top paid roles as creative directors. Roberts' response created a firestorm. So this was about gender diversity in the advertising industry, > and what you said was, 'The debate is all over.' That was the problem, wasn't it? That was the problem? Yeah, and what I meant was that we should stop debating it and stop talking about numbers and start doing something about it, and I then went on to say that Saatchi & Saatchi had 65% of jobs filled by women. Our worldwide creative director was a woman. So how important do you think it is that women achieve in high places. I think the most important thing for society is that we have leaders in the right jobs, doing the right things in the right way whether they are men or women, right. Many people today, irregardless of gender ` male, female, millennials, in particular ` are going, 'You know, I want a life that is much more rewarding to me than up or out. 'I want a life where I can make a contribution and do.' This was covered at length in the interview but didn't get reported, OK. So I spend a lot of time talking to young people and talking to young executives and have never encountered this kind of furore before. Kevin Roberts was called sexist, a dinosaur. This storm, right, was... tsunami-like. I couldn't help notice that in the very book he was promoting at the time, in a collection of 64 photos of people who've inspired him, only seven are women. It never crossed my mind. I've never counted them. Having thought about it, I suspect it's because of the time I grew up in ` in many ways, uh, what I was exposed to in working-class England on a popular level. So it was an unintentional bias rather than an intentional one? Yeah. I don't think it was a bias at all. I just think it was a choice, an honest choice of people that I was exposed to. But it was the Business Insider interview that was his undoing. After 18 years at the helm of Saatchi's, surrounded in controversy, he fell on his sword; he handed in his resignation. How much did that hurt you? > A lot. Yeah. A lot. Did you absolutely have to take that action? I thought at the time, you know, one of the things I've always believed in is fail fast, learn fast, fix fast. There is no one else to blame in this area, you know. I miscommunicated, misspoke. I didn't mean that. I was taken out of context. Whose fault is all that? Mine. How can I fix it? By removing myself from the battlefield and leaving the companies that I care about and the people I care about safe. But don't feel sorry for Kevin Roberts. He's busier than ever he says, travelling the world, dividing his time between four houses and consulting on dozens of business projects ` as always, unstoppably positive. It's the new beginning, right. Now my calendar's my own, so it is living life, uh, more freely and more liberally. But with a couple of tweaks. I may want to reflect upon sometimes the things that I say are not construed in exactly the way that I mean them. Just a timely reminder. And in this case, keep the foot out of the mouth. > That would be very good advice that I hope I am going to learn from. And ever positive, Kevin Roberts says this has given him the opportunity to spend more time in NZ. Well, after last week's story on Cliff Robinson and his lifelong devotion to his two intellectually disabled children, Marita and Johnny, many of you want to help the family. Leila Harre has set up a 'Give A Little' page. There are details on our Facebook page. After the break, we revisit our story about a Gisborne couple fighting for millions of dollars in compensation from a multinational oil company. This is how we last left them. You can't just go in and take something by force. It's like a movie, really. Clyde, Sharon and Ron have been left financially crippled. The whole situation has destroyed all our lives, really. Staying on top can take an extra boost. Sometimes you need an energy drink with something more - something smarter, healthier. Introducing new Berocca Forward. We've added vitamins, minerals and the natural energy of guarana. Now that's forward thinking. Berocca Forward - more than just energy. You might only drive short distances to work each day. You might park securely at work. You may not drive your car to work at all. At Youi, we tailor your insurance premium to how you use or don't use your car. It could save you lots. Call: 1 Welcome back. Clyde and Sharon McGrory had an extraordinary story to tell us here ` one that took us 5000km into Bougainville's remote jungle to find answers. Oh! Yeah, that's the oil in there. Oh, yuck. So, every` all this place is` It's everywhere. Everywhere. It is everywhere. The oil was left over from mining operations in Bougainville. The McGrorys had a deal with mining company BCL to remove it. I guess we've spent... in excess of, probably, half a million dollars on it. The sale would help fund a clean-up of the area covered in leaked oil. It sounded awesome. It was really good. I was nervous about it being Bougainville, but it was` it was the` it was big oil. We could make good money. Clyde and Sharon had found an Indian buyer who offered US$5.5 million. It was just gonna make life so much easier, so much better for us. Was this going to be the game changer for you? > Yeah, definitely. But before they could ship the oil, multinational company Integra swooped in and seized it, claiming they had their own deal. We approached the Singapore-based company for answers, but it's refused to comment about the case while it's before the courts. So, following our story, Integra returned to mediation in Singapore in September. The details are confidential, but we can tell you that the case has been settled. Clyde says it was the best deal they could hope for, and he and Sharon would like to thank people who got in touch with offers of support. Well, that's our show for tonight and for the year. Do have a safe and happy holiday season. Ka kite i a koe i te tau hou. Nga mihi nui.