Bill Bayeh, who changed his name to Bill Michael, is nearly two years younger than his brother Louis. In the late 1960s, a year after his father and brothers had migrated, 13-year-old Bill accompanied his mother to Australia. He had little time for school and once in Sydney followed Louis into the world of crime and illegal gambling. Like Louis, Bill can neither read nor write. Unlike him, Bill shunned the opportunity to fall in with the Lebanese godfather Frank Hakim and his partner Lennie McPherson and went his own way—though he was happy enough to accept protection and the odd job via his older brother.
The drug trade was Bill’s focus from at least the late 1970s, but he was still a small-time operator when he and Danny Georges Karam began their volatile criminal relationship in the mid 1980s. Karam was born in Lebanon in 1962. He left home at the age of 11, joined the Lebanese Christian Army and fought against the Muslim militia. He remained in the infantry for several years before joining the commandos and later ‘another elite group within the army’, according to the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service (1994–1997). Karam moved to Australia in 1979 but remained only a short time before returning to Lebanon where he rejoined the army. Four years later he moved to Australia permanently for reasons ‘associated with his safety’ (they concerned his political associations) and entered the local drug trade.
Introduced to heroin by friends, Karam quickly became addicted and developed a $1000-a-day habit. He claimed that he and Bill Bayeh made a living ‘rolling dealers, grabbing them, keeping them in their room till their drugs had been used, then letting them go, getting another one when I needed another one’. Karam also provided muscle and protection to illegal gambling clubs in the Sydney suburbs of Marrickville, Campsie and Belmore. He had an arrangement, he said, with Bill’s brother Louis, who was also providing protection: ‘If I looked after something, he kept away from it and I kept away from something he looked after.’ The arrangement continued until November 1985 when Karam went to jail for six months over a stolen car, using heroin and possession of a replica pistol.
Karam was out of jail for only a few weeks when he was arrested for robbery and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Convicted, he was sentenced to 12 years’ jail. On his release three and a half years later, Karam found the Cross had changed. The protection of clubs ‘had become a tight organisation [and] Louis [Bayeh] had quite a grip on it’. Within months Karam was back in jail; his parole had been revoked. It was early 1991 before Karam was again released on parole.
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By the early 1980s two longtime friends and fellow countrymen of the Bayeh family, Sam and John Ibrahim, had begun to work at Kings Cross. Sam and John were born in Lebanon and during the 1970s migrated to Australia with their family and settled in south-western Sydney, where they became friends with the Bayeh family.
As with Louis and Bill, Sam’s schooling was limited. His first job as a doorman and bouncer was at an illegal gambling club at Fairfield: he was 13 years old and had been kicked out of school. Within two years he was working as a doorman in Kings Cross and providing muscle at several clubs. He became Louis’s driver and minder for several years during the early to mid 1980s and also collected protection and debt money for Louis from illegal gambling clubs and massage parlours in Kings Cross, Parramatta and other places. At the Wood Royal Commission Sam Ibrahim boasted of his skills in fighting and martial arts and explained how he used these skills to make a living.
By his early teens Sam’s younger brother John was also providing muscle at nightclubs around Kings Cross. At the age of 16 he incurred his only criminal conviction. Arrested for assault, John overstated his age and was convicted as an adult in the Parramatta Local Court. By the late 1980s, aged 19, John became the licensee of the Tunnel nightclub at Kings Cross. Appearing at the Wood Royal Commission, John claimed that he never worked for the Bayehs but had done ‘favours’ for Louis that included taking his side in disputes and fights with other factions in Kings Cross and elsewhere, and had ‘given him money’ from time to time. None of this was business, John said—it was just ‘family friendship’.
During the late 1980s Bill was still doing drug rip-offs and street-level dealing as he tried to change the drug of choice at Kings Cross from heroin to cocaine. He explained to Thierry Botel, one of his distributors and a long-term heroin and cocaine user, that ‘heroin junkies only had one shot every day or if they got a bad habit, a couple of shots or three shots a day, but with cocaine apparently the junkies had to shoot up every twenty minutes, so you got much bigger turnover [and profits].’
About 1990 Sam Ibrahim went to work for John at the Tunnel nightclub. He also provided protection to drug dealers working out of other nightclubs and on the streets. According to Sam, ‘[I] wasn’t actually employed [by drug dealers] like there was a set wage. It was, like, if someone was getting hassled by somebody else, I’d tell them to lay off and then look after them, but there wasn’t a set wage where I worked for someone.’ Sam explained that at times he ‘got paid in drugs. I had a habit before, a coke habit, and that’s the reason why I used to protect them. I used to look after them in the street and they used to give me my drugs free.’ Sam claimed that he had never been involved with Bill Bayeh in drugs, but that he had looked after Lasers nightclub for Bayeh and protected the drug dealers who worked out of there. Despite what the Ibrahims said, everyone else thought they worked for Louis and Bill.
In May 1989 Detective Sergeant Trevor Haken arrived at the Kings Cross Local Area Command. Well experienced in corruption and, in particular, corruption in the drug trade, Haken set about identifying opportunities. He and Bill Bayeh quickly formed an alliance. It was the start of a relationship that was to see them both prosper for several years.
Another police officer, Charlie Staunton, based at Darlinghurst Police Station, had befriended Bill in the mid 1980s and was soon receiving corrupt payments from him. After leaving the police in 1988 Staunton continued to help Bill in his bid to take control of the local drug trade and protection rackets. Staunton used and dealt in cocaine, paid bribes to Haken on behalf of Bill and others, and was present when Bill paid Haken thousands of dollars in bribes. He also helped Bill rig evidence in court cases. Staunton was also increasingly involved with an international cannabis trafficking network that imported shipments of tens of tonnes into Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia.
On 7 November 1990 the police raided a room used by Bill at the Bondi Beach Inn and found cocaine with a street value of around $12,000, plastic bags, a set of electric scales and cash. Bill was charged with possessing and supplying cocaine and goods in custody and bailed. His and Haken’s operation was now so big that the police raid was little more than an annoying distraction.
According to Karam: ‘From about 1991 things started changing for [Bill], I guess, and he went on to bigger and better things.’ Bill Bayeh and Sam Ibrahim ‘wanted to make a move on the street dealers and take them under their wings and sort of turn it into an operation, a proper drug operation’ and they could do this with the help of Haken. One of their first moves was to take over Lasers and several other nightclubs and turn them into ‘twenty-four by seven’ drug-dealing operations.
Arguably, the biggest problem for Bill was his reputation. As Karam explained: ‘Bill didn’t have a great name. He’d robbed every dealer in this country and he was trying to get . . . people to start trusting him again and doing things.’ He also ‘employed’ dealers rather than taking a commission from them, keeping the lion’s share of the profits for himself. It was an arrangement that the dealers disliked, Karam told the commission. ‘They’d been put on wages and when people take chances like that, I guess, they’re risking their lives on the street, they don’t want to be put on a wage. They’re entitled to the profits. The person giving the protection should only be entitled to a wage themselves, but it was done the other way around, I guess.’
Karam claimed to have taken his own advice when setting up a protection racket in opposition to Bill. He put himself on a ‘wage’ of $100 a week from each dealer in return for protection. It was worth $100 a week to be left alone and not hassled by other organisers, such as Bill. It was also a cost that was more than covered by increased sales. If anyone did attempt to stand over protected dealers, Karam would sort out the matter—using violence if he had to.
Others, such as Sam Ibrahim, gave the commission a very different picture of Karam: ‘Danny wanted to belt everybody in the street and everybody was feared from [sic] him so everybody ran back to me, “Please get him off my back,” so that’s what I done.’
Ongoing competition and disputes between Karam and Bill Bayeh were seen as just the way business was done in the drug trade in Kings Cross. Disputes usually started with an outbreak of violence followed quickly by a negotiated if uneasy and, for the most part, short truce. These truces, however unstable, were critical to the functioning of the Kings Cross underworld. They allowed the players to get back to the main business of selling drugs.
Around mid 1993 Karam spoke to Bill about ‘doing shifts’ to sell drugs at his nightclub, but Bill rejected the proposal and ‘a bit of pushing’ followed. Once again he called on his older brother, Louis, who had a meeting with Karam. An altercation followed, and in the ensuing brawl Louis was beaten up. Later that night Karam was stopped by police while driving his car. Taken to Kogarah Police Station and charged with possession of heroin, Karam later pleaded guilty and was given a bond. Despite the guilty plea, Karam told the commission that the police had loaded him and that he believed it had been done at the request of Louis. The facts did not support this claim.
A few nights after his arrest, an intermediary arranged a meeting between Karam and Bill. Bill proposed that they work together and offered Karam $5000 a week ‘to clean the streets [and] to make sure every drug dealer who worked the streets worked for him’. Karam accepted the offer. He hired his own muscle and ‘anybody who wasn’t working for Billy were [sic] moved along’. At this time, Bill had up to eight street dealers a shift working for him and a number of nightclubs and other places where off-street dealing was conducted.
Bill now controlled the streets. He was known as ‘the boss’ and demanded to be called the boss—‘otherwise you got sacked’. His team included such colourful names as Kiwi Michael, Shifty Sam, Shifty Tony (also known as the Inspector because he liked to pretend that he was a police officer), the Frenchman (also known as French Thierry), Tongan George, Chinese Kim, Lebanese Danny, Italian Danny (also known as the Little Fella), JC (also known as Fat John and Greek John, he was Bill’s driver in the early 1990s), Roly Poly Roland, Skinny Steve, Fat Steve (also known as Fatso), American Mark (who wasn’t an American but put on an American accent and, like Shifty Tony, pretended to be a police officer).
In return for regular cash payments to Detective Haken and some of his colleagues the police got rid of Bayeh’s competition and picked up easy arrests. Karam described it as a good deal for everyone. ‘The police’s main concern through all this was that people wouldn’t be hurt in the street and they were happy to go along with whatever happened.’ By and large Karam was right: as long as things were peaceful the police didn’t intervene.
At this time Robert Daher ran the only other major drug operation in the Cross. Although there were ongoing disputes between the two groups, they mostly left each other alone. For a while everyone—those supplying drugs and protection, street dealers, users and police—was happy. Each was getting what they wanted, or most of it. But the peace did not last long. By mid July 1993 Louis and Bill Bayeh were again at loggerheads with Robert Daher. Daher threatened to kill Bill. Sam Ibrahim tried and failed to negotiate a truce. Louis’s Ermington home was shot up after he slapped Daher around for making insulting remarks about his and Bill’s mother. With honour seemingly satisfied, business demanded—as always—that the antagonists pull back. A fragile peace returned.
The drug business was thriving and Karam was now a recognised and well-paid player in Bill’s network, but violent challenges from rivals in the drug trade remained a constant threat. In 1993 a hit was ordered on Karam. Describing the contract to the commission, Karam casually pointed out that there had been several attempts on his life. ‘I’d had priors before that,’ he said. Explaining the February 1993 shooting, Karam said: ‘Somebody had attempted a shooting, I believe, on my life and ended up getting a neighbour of mine . . . [I] lived at 50 Moons Avenue, Lugarno, and the two people came to 15 Moons Avenue, Lugarno, and shot the person that lived there . . . [H]e was an older person, a retired person; he lived across the road from me.’
Sixty-one-year-old Leszic Betcher died from a single shot to the chest when he answered his front door. Betcher was not involved in crime and had no involvement with Karam. The Supreme Court described Betcher as ‘a recently retired gentleman of unquestioned respectability . . . who . . . lived with his wife.’
Karam claimed he did not know who ordered the hit or what it was for, other than it was something to do with the Cross. However, on 24 March, a month after the shooting, an ambulance was called to a drug overdose in a Potts Point flat. The patient was 36-year-old Jon Leslie Baartman, a career criminal and well-known freelance standover man. In the course of treating him, an ambulance officer came upon a .32 calibre Beretta pistol. The officer contacted the police, who confiscated the pistol. Ballistic testing found it to be the weapon used to kill Betcher.
Three months later Baartman and 29-year-old Paul Thomas Crofts—who had a long criminal record that included jail sentences for assault and rob, robbery in company, possessing a shortened firearm, and breaking and entering—were charged with Betcher’s murder. Both were convicted and sentenced to 20 years’ jail. In court they claimed they had been contracted by ‘Chris’ to carry out the shooting, which they said was intended to be a wounding. Chris was never identified.
As the trial approached for Bill Bayeh’s 1990 drug arrest, one of his sellers, Thierry Botel, swore an affidavit that the cocaine, plastic bags and scales were his, and that he had been using the Bondi hotel room with Bayeh’s permission. In March 1994 Bayeh pleaded guilty in the District Court to a lesser charge of knowingly taking part in the supply of the cocaine and was sentenced to 300 hours of community service.
Around the same time, Bill told Karam that he could no longer afford to pay him $5000 a week to keep the streets clean and suggested dropping the payments to $1500. Karam was not happy. At this time Bill was, according to Karam, the biggest heroin dealer in the Cross with about 40 dealers operating out of clubs and drug houses. There was little competition and business was good. However, Bill insisted and Karam was told that he could take the offer or leave it. Karam left it and set up his own drug protection business.
Unknown to Karam, Bill had a problem that was nothing to do with drugs. For nearly a decade Bill had been a serious gambler. His losses had begun to outstrip the profits from his drug operations. By the mid 1990s he owed about $2 million to various people, including $80,000 to his bookmaker. In less than 12 months Bill lost $1 million more than he won. In addition, he was spending about $400,000 a year, not including payments to police. His declared income to the Taxation Office was around $36,000 a year.
Karam approached the street dealers and offered them protection in return for $10 for every cap they sold. He also lured back to the Cross a number of dealers who had left because they did not want to work for Bill. Before long, Karam had eight to ten dealers and was getting between $10,000 and $12,000 a week, but he had overheads. He ‘hired a few people to be up at the Cross 24 hours, just as muscle, because at that time there was a lot of tension’.
Bill quickly lost control of street dealing. But Karam wasn’t the only one trying to grab a share of the Kings Cross drug trade. Local muscle working for rival drug groups and police were also harassing Karam’s dealers. His solution, like Bill’s, was to pay the police. Three thousand dollars a week was enough to stop the police harassment.
Karam also went into business with Russell Townsend, one of Bill’s main competitors and a man with a reputation in the Cross. A former two-time Mr Australia and world record power lifter, Townsend weighed in at 130 kilograms. In intercepted telephone calls played to the commission, Bill was heard complaining to Haken that Townsend, Sam and John Ibrahim were making over $100,000 a week and were becoming too big.
Early in 1994 Karam’s parole was once again revoked. With Karam in jail Townsend took over the business, but a few days later he was shot in a Kings Cross street. It was Friday 25 February 1994 and the shooting was payback for the assault of George ‘Tongan George’ Akula, a muscleman for Bill Bayeh. The assault had been triggered by an earlier rip-off. ‘He [Akula] ripped off somebody in the street,’ said Sam Ibrahim ‘and he got bothered for it and that was the argument.’ Karam, Townsend and two others were charged over the assault of Tongan George.
A few months later the charges were dismissed. Tongan George decided that his original statement to police, in which he identified the attackers, was wrong. The men he had named were not his attackers but his friends, he told police. The thought of living under a police protection program did not suit Tongan George’s lifestyle (How would he earn a living? Would the police sell him out?) and, once again, the gangs agreed to settle their differences.
In the underworld survival was what mattered and you could not survive if you were known as a police ‘dog’—even though, behind the scenes, many were. To have given evidence against Karam and Townsend would have been severely detrimental to Tongan George’s health. Despite his acquittal, Karam freely admitted to the commission that he had bashed Tongan George, but denied stabbing him or knowing who did stab him. He casually explained that after one of his dealers had been assaulted and ripped off by Tongan George he had to do something—after all, he was being paid to provide protection. If he couldn’t protect a dealer, the least he could do was dish out retribution.
Released from jail in May 1994, Karam returned to the Cross and resumed his drug operations and his payments to police, but declined the offer of further police protection in return for increased payments. Karam’s return to the streets did not last. Four months later his parole was again revoked and he was returned to jail. Six months later he was convicted of assault and sentenced to a further 18 months’ jail with a six-month non-parole period.
If Karam was having a bad run, life for Bill Bayeh was even worse. By 1995 his drug operation was starting to fall apart: profits were shrinking and he was deeply in debt to both his drug suppliers and his gambling associates. Both were known for their willingness to use violence against those who failed to pay up. To add to his problems, there was a change in the police leadership at Kings Cross. Superintendent Mal Brammer, an experienced drug investigator, had taken command and was cracking down on drugs. The Wood Royal Commission was also underway. Unknown to Bayeh, his partner in crime, Detective Sergeant Trevor Haken, had already rolled and was reporting Bayeh’s every move to the commission. In addition, telephone intercepts and listening devices were recording both Bayeh’s desperation and his corrupt dealings with Haken. The intercepts revealed Bayeh giving up both his opposition and his partners, asking Haken to get rid of them and to install him at the top of the drug heap—to make him not only the ‘boss’ but the ‘godfather’.
In a series of telephone conversations Bayeh told Haken that there was too much violence at the Cross and that it was in everyone’s interest for it to be controlled. ‘It used to be controlled but now it isn’t,’ he complained. At one point Bayeh even offered to guarantee the quality of heroin sold in order to prevent drug overdoses. It was his competitors, said Bayeh, not him, who were responsible for the the rise in drug overdoses and violence in the Cross. ‘What happens, everybody laughing and say to me, your old boys are not good any more. They’re all saying your boys are nothing, they’re finished . . . Fuck the younger generation . . . They’ve got to wait for their turn.’
Haken responded to Bayeh’s lament by goading him: ‘Now you tell me which ones have got to go.’
Believing he had a deal, Bill eagerly rolled off a list of competitors who had to be dealt with: Karam, Townsend, John and Sam Ibrahim and Robert Daher. Townsend was ‘looking after’ Lennie McPherson and Tony Vincent. He’s ‘looking after the whole world’, Bayeh complained. He urged Haken to speak to Superintendent Mal Brammer and tell him they should go back to the days when ‘nobody got murdered and there was no violence’. Brammer would be ‘well rewarded’ if this happened.
The ‘old days’ Bayeh referred to were all in his imagination. Murder and violence had been part of Kings Cross culture since at least the 1920s, when it was called Darlinghurst and the razor gangs controlled the streets. In conspiring with Haken to eliminate his rivals, Bayeh was honouring timeworn Kings Cross traditions of treachery and double-cross. At one time or another Bayeh had been in business with all those he named and had used them whenever it suited him. Now he had no qualms about sacrificing them to ensure his own survival. It was Kings Cross at its most brutal.
Bayeh told Haken that Sam Ibrahim was making big money, ‘doing heaps down there, eckies, speed, everything’. Yet only months earlier he had employed Sam as muscle and taken advantage of Sam’s reputation to intimidate competitors. John Ibrahim had also stood up for both Bill and Louis. Before hearing the tapes, John had described how he and Sam had regarded Bill as a family friend for ‘11 to 12 years’. He then told the commission, ‘After hearing that taped conversation [our relationship is] not very good.’ In spite of this, John Ibrahim maintained that he was not involved: ‘I have no idea what Bill was talking about. I’m not sure that Bill has any idea what he’s talking about half the time.’
Trying hard to enlist Haken’s support, Bayeh explained that Tom Domican was in his corner and would be willing to deal with any repercussions: ‘If I had any trouble, Tom will help me, yes . . . Yes, he’s my friend. He’ll help me if I’m in a fight.’ It was not the first time Bayeh had traded on Domican’s name and reputation. He had a habit of telling business partners and competitors alike that he was paying Domican $1000 a week to stay on side and keep out of the Cross. Bayeh denied these claims to the commission, insisting it was all talk designed to boost his influence with partners and intimidate his enemies. But Bayeh did have a business relationship with Domican and feared him.
Despite the commission’s daily exposure of police corruption and drug networks, and despite his own appearances before it, Bayeh continued his drug operations. Commission or no commission, the Cross had a voracious appetite for drugs and its needs had to be met. Throughout the first half of 1996 he sold cocaine and heroin through a network of runners operating out of the Cosmopolitan coffee shop—known as the Cosmo. One former dealer involved in the operation estimated that 80 to 120 caps, mostly cocaine, were sold each shift, while another estimated that at the peak of Bayeh’s operation some dealers were selling ‘more than 120 caps every shift’. The runners sold each cap of cocaine for $70 to $80. Of that Bayeh received $50—totalling between $4000 and $6000 a shift from each runner—while the runners and the supervisor split what was left.
Estimates varied of the number of runners Bayeh had on the streets at this time but four runners—the lower end of the estimates—gave Bayeh a weekly income well in excess of $100,000 while 15 runners—the higher end of the estimates—gave him a weekly income in excess of half a million dollars. Despite his income, Bill still had financial problems. He was gambling on the horses and at the Sydney casino and, as usual, was losing heavily. His debts to his drug suppliers were increasing and he was having trouble getting supplies.
One of Bill’s suppliers, a violent criminal living in Balmain who had been heavily involved in the gang war a decade earlier, had to be paid: he had a reputation for murder. Bayeh collected cocaine from him in person. The cocaine was then taken to Michael ‘Kiwi Mick’ Wills’s flat in Potts Point—one of Bayeh’s cutting and packaging points. Kiwi Mick and Bayeh had known each other since the late 1980s and were bound by their common interests in gambling and drugs. Kiwi Mick became one of Bill’s most trusted distributors but his own drug habit would cause problems for both.
As Bayeh struggled to keep his drug business going, the commission began Operation Caesar, which targeted Bayeh’s operations out of the Cosmo café in Kings Cross. Four weeks later Bayeh and several of his distributors met at a Gladesville hotel, where they cut and packaged another supply of drugs for delivery to the streets of Kings Cross. The next day, 18 July 1996, Bill Bayeh, Kiwi Mick and others of the group appeared before the commission. Later that day they were arrested for heroin and cocaine trafficking. Kiwi Mick’s Potts Point apartment had been under surveillance for about a month. Around 1500 capsules of cocaine and heroin were estimated to have been packaged at the apartment and sold during this time.
Bayeh was also charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to his 1990 Bondi drugs arrest and conviction. The affidavit made by Thierry Botel, which caused the charge and sentence against Bayeh to be reduced, had been false. Bayeh had offered him $50,000 to say the cocaine was his. The former police officer Charlie Staunton had helped Bayeh fabricate his defence.
In 1999, after several trials, Bayeh was convicted of supplying drugs, perverting the course of justice and other offences and sentenced to 18 years’ jail. His 1994 conviction and 300 hours’ community service sentence were quashed and replaced with jail sentences. He is not due to be released until 2014. In jail Bayeh quickly attracted a following among Lebanese inmates and became a gang leader, but his time as a powerbroker in the jail didn’t last long. Regarded as a high-risk prisoner, he was moved to Lithgow Correctional Centre to serve his sentence. Bayeh’s time as a major Kings Cross player and crime figure was over.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Candace Sutton quoted a small-time crook and former associate of the Bayehs as saying, ‘Louis is the older brother, the big, dumb brother. Bill Bayeh is smaller, smarter and better dressed, not that either of them is really smart.’ Time would prove that assessment right.
The conviction and jailing of Bill Bayeh were a major success for the commission, but Operation Caesar would have tragic consequences. The operation had begun after the commission rolled one of Bayeh’s main street dealers, known by the code name KX15. After giving up Bayeh and others, KX15 was allowed back on the streets to continue buying and selling heroin and cocaine. His activities were to be monitored both electronically and physically, in the hope of trapping not only other drug dealers but also corrupt cops. But it wasn’t long before the operation started to go horribly wrong.
In a 2004 paper ‘Who Guards the Guards’, former New South Wales Police detective Mick McGann describes the heroin sold by KX15 as being ‘of a higher purity than the average street junkie was used to’. New South Wales Police Task Force Bax, which was not aware of the commission’s operation, was also surveilling KX15. It picked up a conversation between KX15 and another dealer. ‘[The heroin] is too strong,’ the second dealer tells KX15. ‘We have to cut it down, they’re dropping [overdosing] in the streets.’ In another recorded conversation, a commission investigator was heard telling KX15 to use one part heroin to three parts of whatever substance was being used for dilution of the drug, before adding: ‘We [the Royal Commission] do not have the authority to sell drugs where people are OD’ing.’ During the period KX15 was back on the streets the number of overdoses increased dramatically and in just three weeks 13 addicts died in Kings Cross.
In a District Court drug trial relating to the operation, Regina v Peter and Roula Kay, Judge Viney said of the commission’s role: ‘It would be at least improper for people in the position of the Royal Commission investigators and their advisers to permit and encourage that man to continue with his drug dealing. That is what they did.’
The commander of Task Force Bax, Detective Superintendent Jeff Wegg, spoke about the operation in a March 2003 60 Minutes report called ‘Dirty Work’:
What did shock me was the fact that he [KX15] was still allowed to sell drugs without supervision, without any accountability, without any accountability for the drugs, the quantity of the drugs, the strength of the drugs, the money that was involved, [or] the profits that he was making . . . from those particular sales. There was no accountability on their [the commission’s] behalf . . . it just went against standard procedures. It was not the right way to do it.
These exposures, made in the lead-up to a state election, led to the then police minister, Michael Costa, declaring that ICAC should investigate the allegations about KX15. However, the election came and went and nothing was done. The allegations were referred to at least ten state and federal bodies but all of them declined to investigate.
The combined effects of the Wood Royal Commission between 1994 and 1997, and the jailing of Bill Bayeh in 1996 and Louis Bayeh in 1997, created a void in the Kings Cross drug trade. Task Force Bax had been set up in early 1996 to target the drug gangs fighting for control of the Cross. During its 18-month operational life more than 80 major drug dealers were arrested. Twenty faced charges carrying life imprisonment. All were convicted. However, Bax was disbanded after it became the subject of corruption investigations by the Special Crime and Internal Affairs Unit and the Police Integrity Commission.
In Peter Ryan: The inside story, written by Sue Williams, Ryan, as the police commissioner at the time of the Bax investigation, claimed personal leadership of the operation to clean up Bax: ‘It was set to be one of the most daring [anti-corruption] operations ever undertaken by a Commissioner of Police in Australia . . . Ryan had led a massive covert surveillance program . . . within one of its [the police service’s] most prized squads, Task Force Bax.’ The result, Ryan declared, was a ‘triumph’.
The truth was rather different. The Police Integrity Commission inquiry exposed managerial shortcomings in the conduct of the task force and found that one Bax drug investigation had been compromised. Of the task force’s 30 members, one was eventually charged with various criminal offences and jailed. A second detective, not a member of Bax, was also jailed on related matters.
Twelve members of Bax launched civil action against the police and the government, claiming they had been negligently treated and falsely imprisoned as a result of the covert investigation led by Ryan. Three dropped out but nine continued with the litigation. A decade later, in December 2007, the claims of all nine were settled. The terms of settlement were not disclosed but were rumoured to have included a total payout of around $5 million. If correct, that would make it one of the biggest ever made in response to litigation by police officers against the department. Any significant settlement against nine officers was a devastating blow to the credibility of Special Crime and Internal Affairs and to the then commissioner Ryan’s personally led fight against corruption.
There is no support for corrupt police, but arguably the botched investigation into Task Force Bax made life harder for police facing a new wave of criminals eager to take advantage of the openings in the drug trade created by the Wood Royal Commission.
In April 1994 Russell Townsend, John Ibrahim and Ali Sakr, an alleged muscleman for the Ibrahim family, were charged with the manslaughter of Talal Assad in a fight at Kings Cross on 21 April 1994. Assad was a street dealer who worked for Bill Bayeh.
Four years later Townsend was acquitted of Assad’s killing, but convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm and placed on a $1000 four-year good behaviour bond. In the Sunday Telegraph report ‘John Ibrahim gave the kiss of life’, Jennifer Sexton noted that in sentencing Townsend, Justice Abadee told him:
I accept the prisoner’s statement to the jury that the victim said to him, ‘Do you want to score?’ I accept it because, having regard to the prisoner’s enthusiasm for fitness, as further supported by character references tendered before me this morning, that he might well take umbrage at being approached for the purposes of seeing whether he would be interested in buying drugs. Next, there is nothing in the prisoner’s antecedents that I have had regard to which would suggest that he is the sort of person who has in any way, shape or form in the past been involved in drug activities, or even activities, more particularly relevant, involving personal use or abuse of drugs.
The judge can only make findings based on the material presented to him. However, at the April 1996 committal proceedings evidence was given by Robert Daher—a self-confessed drug dealer and heavy cocaine user and a significant witness at the Wood Royal Commission—that Townsend (but not Ibrahim) was ‘selling drugs’. Daher was not called to give evidence at Townsend’s trial. Nor was other evidence available from the commission called to rebut Townsend’s claim that he had no involvement in drugs.
During the commission evidence was given of Townsend’s involvement in the drug trade. In one secretly taped conversation Bill Bayeh is heard telling KX1, a Kings Cross drug dealer, ‘When I come back [from court] I’ll catch Russell [Townsend] and I’ll tell him that he can’t sell the nose thing [cocaine] any more. I want to tell him. If he says no to me he’ll get a beating.’ He went on to tell KX1 that Townsend was a ‘chicken, don’t worry about him’.
In another intercepted conversation between Bill Bayeh and Trevor Haken, recorded around the time of the Assad killing and recounted by Haken in his book Sympathy for the Devil, Bayeh asks Haken to help him get rid of the competition. One of the competitors was Townsend. Townsend was ‘operating out of the Budget Private Hotel (aka the Budget Inn) . . . Townsend was selling every type of drug out of the poolroom in William Street and was making over $100,000 a week . . . Townsend was selling up to 250 half caps of rock heroin per day out of the Budget Private Hotel and his other places.’
Following the Wood Royal Commission the former associate of the bosses who ran the Kings Cross underworld during the 1980s and 1990s declared himself to be a changed man with a new and honest career: professional boxing. By 2002 Townsend was well known on the local circuit. His no-mercy approach made him a crowd pleaser and earned him the nickname the ‘White Rhino’. But despite winning six fights, all by a knockout, Townsend retired without having broken into the big time.
In February 2007 Townsend was found unconscious in a locked toilet cubicle in the Qantas domestic terminal at Sydney airport. An ambulance was called and Townsend was taken to hospital. On regaining consciousness he discharged himself. It was a drug overdose and Townsend was not keen to speak with the police. His luggage was searched, but nothing was found. Townsend missed his flight to Brisbane. It was clear that he was still a heavy user of steroids—and, perhaps, other drugs.
Trevor Haken went into witness protection the day he was publicly revealed as a commission informant. Following the commission he ‘disappeared’. Haken told his story to Sean Padraic (not the author’s real name) who wrote the book Sympathy for the Devil: Confessions of a corrupt police officer. Padraic writes, ‘Life since the Royal Commission has not been good for Trevor Haken.’ According to Padraic, Haken feels anger towards the commission which he believes abandoned him. Haken now lives alone. ‘He does not socialise with anyone. He cannot work.’ He lives ‘under a package of about four different names’. Perhaps it is Haken’s daughter who best sums up Haken’s situation: ‘He would have done less time if he had killed someone.’
In 1995 Sam Ibrahim was admitted to hospital. He told the Wood Royal Commission: ‘I nearly had a collapsed liver. I was in hospital for three weeks and they didn’t think I was going to come out of the hospital because of the coke and I’m just trying to get off it.’ Sam remained a heavy drug user.
The Ibrahims survived both the Wood Royal Commission and the split with the Bayeh family. As the commission laid bare the corruption that fed off the Kings Cross drug trade, Sam set about building an alliance with the Nomads outlaw motorcycle gang. As a result of the alliance, the Nomads emerged as one of the inner-city’s most influential crime groups. Their interests included nightclubs, security contracts and protection rackets, tattoo parlours and a greatly extended drug network centred on the manufacture and distribution of amphetamines. Sam Ibrahim established a new chapter of the gang at Granville (it was known, confusingly, as the Parramatta chapter), becoming its vice president and later its president. Thanks to his close association with some of the Telopea Street Boys (see Chapter 5), several joined Ibrahim’s Parramatta chapter.
The bouts of extreme violence caused by his cocaine addiction made Sam Ibrahim a danger to friend and foe alike. Cocaine was also a factor in some odd encounters with police—encounters that were hard to reconcile with his status as a senior crime figure. Sam’s criminal record went back to the early 1980s when he was a teenager. Despite around 30 arrests for crimes ranging from street offences to murder, he had spent relatively little time in jail. While he beat some charges at court, others were dropped when witnesses refused to give evidence or disappeared.
In 2006 Ibrahim, Nomads national president Scott Orrock and other Nomad members were arrested and charged with a variety of crimes ranging from attempted murder to assault inflicting grievous bodily harm, assault, demanding money with intent to steal, riot, affray and firearms offences—all the result of a fight in Newcastle with the local chapter of the Nomads (see Chapter 9).
Ibrahim was refused bail. While he was on remand in jail, the Nomads’ Parramatta chapter was disbanded and a new gang called Notorious was formed. Its members are predominantly from Middle Eastern and Pacific Islander backgrounds and the gang has members as young as fourteen. Though they wear full colours and claim to belong to an outlaw motorcycle gang, many members do not ride bikes. Notorious, which is in dispute with several other bikie gangs, has a record for violence and drugs and is involved in the protection rackets at Kings Cross and Oxford Street. Sam Ibrahim is believed to be the power behind the gang, although he denies it.
After almost two years in jail Ibrahim and the others beat the Newcastle charges. However, Ibrahim was not long out of jail when, in May 2009, he was arrested and returned to jail for abducting a 15-year-old boy who he accused of attempting to break into his estranged wife’s home in Sydney’s west. Ibrahim is alleged to have assaulted the youth, breaking a tooth and inflicting facial cuts. When he realised he had grabbed the wrong person, Ibrahim gave the youth $100 and let him go.
In court, police claimed that Tongan Sam’s 21-year-old son, Nimilote ‘Nim’ Ngata, and 37-year-old Philip Kandarakis were also involved in the alleged abduction, though neither was charged. Nim had been charged on 2 March with the aggravated robbery and wounding of a man outside the Dragonfly nightclub in Kings Cross. Nim was described by Sunday Telegraph journalist Yoni Bashan as ‘an up-and-coming debt collector and emerging Kings Cross identity who works closely with the Ibrahim family’. He is a patched member of Notorious. While investigating the bashing, police searched Tongan Sam’s home in the western Sydney suburb of Merrylands. They seized a bulletproof vest, ammunition, clothing and paraphernalia related to Notorious as well as around 700 tablets containing pseudoephedrine, a precursor for making amphetamines. Tongan Sam was charged over the tablets.
In June Sam Ibrahim pleaded guilty to four outstanding weapons charges and was placed on two separate good behaviour bonds and fined $1500. At the time of writing, the abduction charge against Ibrahim, the robbery and wounding charge against Nim and the drug charge against Tongan Sam were yet to go before the courts.
In April 2006 John and Sam’s 27-year-old brother, Michael Ibrahim, and their cousins, 22-year-old Mouhamed Tajjour and 25-year-old Sleiman Sion Tajjour, were charged with the stabbing murder of 34-year-old Robin Nassaur and the wounding of his brother, 36-year-old George, in the basement carpark of an apartment block at Chiswick, in Sydney’s inner west, three months earlier. Nassaur’s body was found near a pink Harley Davidson motorbike with the word ‘vendetta’ painted on the mudguard. The cause of the stabbings was an argument on New Year’s Eve between the Nassaurs and Michael Ibrahim at the UN nightclub (formerly known as DCM) in Paddington, which was run by John Ibrahim and where Michael worked as a bouncer.
An arrest warrant was issued for a fourth man, 22-year-old Faouxi Abou-Jibal, who had set up the Nassaurs to be attacked. Three weeks later Abou-Jibal’s body was found in a park off Macdonald Street, Lakemba, in Sydney’s south-west. He had been shot once in the back. A month earlier, Abou-Jibal’s parents’ Liverpool home had been the target of a drive-by shooting by two men.
In April 2008 Michael Ibrahim was sentenced to nine years and four months’ jail for the manslaughter of Nassaur. Sleiman and Mahmoud Tajjour were each sentenced to three years and seven months’ jail for manslaughter.
During the Wood Royal Commission, it was put to John Ibrahim by counsel assisting the commission, ‘You are the new lifeblood of the drugs trade in Kings Cross, aren’t you?’
‘So it would seem, but no, I’m not,’ Ibrahim replied.
Two years later John Ibrahim was charged with threatening a person on the witness protection program who was to give evidence against Sam and others facing cocaine conspiracy charges. It was alleged that John and three other men, believed to be members of the Nomads motorcycle gang, grabbed the woman and told her that if her boyfriend gave evidence she, her boyfriend and her 18-month-old child would be killed. The prosecution eventually dropped the case.
It was not the first time the Crown had lost a case against John Ibrahim. In 1994 Ibrahim had been charged over the killing of Kings Cross drug dealer Talal Assad but on that occasion too the charge against Ibrahim had been dropped.
In June 2009 Sydney Morning Herald journalists Kate McClymont and Dylan Welch wrote that ‘The Wood Royal Commission into police corruption heard that the crooked officer Graham “Chook” Fowler asked for $10,000 to make a 1994 murder charge against John and his then colleague Russell Townsend go away.’ Another officer gave evidence that ‘when John [Ibrahim] was at court for a mention relating to the murder John said to him, “I know that you blokes don’t mind what goes on up here as long as no-one gets hurt. I wish it was like how it was when Chook Fowler and the others were here.”’
In October 2004 John Ibrahim was again charged with threatening a witness in a murder case involving his brother Michael and others. During the proceedings police described John as being ‘a major organised crime figure’ associated with ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’. However, 18 months later the charges were dismissed when the District Court (Criminal Jurisdiction) found that police had obtained the evidence ‘improperly and in contravention of an Australian law’. While criticising the conduct of the police, Judge Finnane QC commented, ‘I have no doubt that [the murdered man and some members of his family] were engaged in criminal activities and that those who attacked them [Michael Ibrahim and his crew] were engaged in similar activities.’ In earlier court proceedings relating to the attacks, John Ibrahim had been described as a ‘major organised crime figure’ who had a ‘team of henchmen at his disposal’.
The inadmissible evidence consisted of secret 2003 police recordings of conversations between John Ibrahim and Roy Malouf in which they were heard discussing the charges against John’s brother Michael for shooting Malouf, Malouf’s brother, Richard, and their father, Pierre. Sunday Telegraph journalist Jennifer Sexton described the evidence in an article headlined ‘Secret recordings reveal Ibrahim world’. Ibrahim was heard telling Malouf, ‘I’ve been on charges for murder, fucking attempted . . . it doesn’t mean they get me. Because they come up with all this bullshit to get you charged, and then; but [by] the time you get to court, everyone’s gone, you know what I mean?’ Later he told Malouf, ‘I know, better than all of youse . . . I’ve been charged 5000 times . . . Unless they have someone else to say that I saw him do this, this, this, they can’t do shit. DNA and all that, they can’t do shit.’
Suggesting it would be unwise for Malouf’s family to give evidence, Ibrahim said: ‘If your brother and dad are thinking about doing that, they might as well move to the moon . . . No point in moving houses . . . So, that’s not a threat. So, you can take that any way you want. Down the track, I’ll stop it. I’ve got my own ways of stopping it . . . And now your brother’s got—oh yes, he’s upset, he’s got a limp, he’s this and he’s that, but he could get a lot worse, bro.’
In a 2009 profile Sydney Morning Herald journalist Dylan Welch described John Ibrahim as ‘Standing in the middle of the Trademark’s Piano Room as an A-list crowd—topped by the rent-a-celebrity Paris Hilton—swirls around him during New Year’s Eve celebrations, Ibrahim looks like the king of the world.’ Welch observed of Ibrahim, ‘After 21 years of wheeling and dealing he is at the top of his game, and he knows it.’ Ibrahim, he wrote, ‘is a nightclub promoter who works with about 17 clubs in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, and owns multimillion-dollar homes in Sydney’s east . . . He wears designer clothes, drives a Bentley and drops astounding amounts of money defending his brothers when they face court.’
John Ibrahim has not been convicted of a criminal offence for more than 20 years. He is now in business with the sons of the late organised crime boss George Freeman, 26-year-old Adam Sonny and 24-year-old David George. They jointly own the Ladylux nightclub in the centre of Kings Cross. The club’s internet site describes it as a club ‘where the big kids come out to play’. In a Sunday Telegraph article, ‘Our Dad, the Underbelly hero’, journalists Sharri Markson and Jennifer Sexton claim that Freeman asked Ibrahim to take care of his ‘boys’. According to David Freeman, ‘John worked for Dad too. He used to drive him around, he did security, ran errands. He was 18 when he started working for him.’ In the article Adam Freeman describes Ibrahim as being ‘like our father figure . . . He’s raised us and has given us everything. He’s always supported us. We’ve lived with him at stages.’ David and Adam Freeman’s business empire extends from ‘property development and building luxury boats in the Mediterranean to event promotions and running nightclubs’.
In February 2009 Adam and two friends were picked up by the coast guard of the Netherlands Antilles on his yacht, I’l Dapprima, with US$190,000 in cash hidden in a compartment on board. Money laundering charges were later dropped, but the yacht and the money were impounded. Markson and Sexton report that Adam is pursuing the return of the yacht through the courts.
John Ibrahim is eager for people to know that he is a person of influence in Kings Cross. He is also eager to assure people that he is different to the traditional people of influence at the Cross, telling the Herald’s Kate McClymont and Dylan Welch in June 2009, ‘I didn’t shoot my way to the top, I charmed my way there.’
John also wants people to know that he is different to his brothers. Jennifer Sexton’s article ‘Secret recordings reveal Ibrahim world’ reports him saying, ‘I don’t have a criminal record. It’s all my fucking, my brothers fuck up . . . They [the police] think they are all working for me . . . They [the police] think my brothers, Sam and Michael, work for me. Work that one out. And I know they’re fucking lunatics. I can’t control them.’
About 11.30 pm on 5 June 2009 a lone gunman shot John Ibrahim’s younger brother, 35-year-old Fadi, five times in the upper part of his body as he sat in his black Lamborghini outside his multimillion-dollar Castle Cove home on Sydney’s north shore. The gunman escaped. Fadi’s girlfriend, 23-year-old Shayda Bastani Rad, who suffered a gunshot wound to the leg, is the former fiancée of Faouxi Abou-Jibal, the Ibrahim associate who was found murdered in a Lakemba park three weeks after Michael Ibrahim and two cousins were arrested and charged with the killing of Robin Nassaur.
Six weeks before the Fadi shooting, the New South Wales Crime Commission had raided the Castle Cove home and seized around $300,000 in cash. Nearly $3 million cash was seized in the home of Fadi’s sister, 39-year-old Maha Sayour, at South Wentworthville in Sydney’s west. Maha was later charged with ‘recklessly dealing in the proceeds of crime’. The cash is the subject of confiscation proceedings by the New South Wales Crime Commission.
At least four operations were needed to save Fadi’s life. Three weeks later, Fadi checked himself out of Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital. He declined police protection: Fadi was safer in the care of his brothers.
Fadi and his brothers expressed full support for the police investigation and Fadi and John promised full cooperation. Unfortunately, Fadi did not see the shooter and had no idea who it could have been. He had no idea who might want him dead. Likewise, John knew nothing. There is an uneasy quiet.
Commenting on the shooting, one old timer observed: ‘These Lebs are going to self destruct. Somebody in John’s position has got four options. He can make peace with those that ordered the shooting, but that’s not likely. He can kill them. They can kill him and his family. Or someone else will kill them both so things can get back to normal. This is bad for business.’
In September Fadi Ibrahim, his brother Michael (who was already in jail for the killing of Robin Nassaur) and 29-year-old former bikie Rodney ‘Goldy’ Atkinson were charged with conspiring to murder John Macris. Atkinson was also charged with drug and firearms offences. In court, police described Fadi as a ‘known associate of people involved in high-level organised crime’ and claimed he had a criminal history that included ‘intent to influence a witness, hinder investigation and pervert the course of justice’. Fadi spent six weeks in jail before being released on $1 million bail. As Fadi left Long Bay jail his brother Sam became involved in an altercation with a waiting media cameraman. Later that day he was arrested and charged with allegedly damaging the man’s television camera and with breaching his bail from an earlier offence. Thirty-seven-year-old Macris and his 27-year-old brother, Alexandros (Alex), had been friends and business partners of the Ibrahim family and of murdered standover man Todd O’Connor. In 2000 John Macris was arrested and charged with possession of amphetamines. He was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to two years and three months’ jail, but released in March 2007. Alex, an alleged associate of Notorious, was arrested in early 2009 and charged with weapons and drug offences. At the time of writing, his court matters had not been finalised. Another nasty shock awaited the Ibrahims within days of Fadi’s arrest when his sister Maha was arrested and charged over the cash found in her kitchen ceiling. The Ibrahims, or so it seemed, were being picked off one by one.
Several criminals expanded their business dramatically in the years following the Wood Royal Commission, but the most dangerous challenge to a traumatised and disillusioned New South Wales police force came from another quarter. Released from jail in October 1995, Bill Bayeh’s old nemesis Danny Karam was content to bide his time while the aftershocks of the royal commission worked their way through the Kings Cross drug trade. By the time the commission closed its doors, Karam was ready to hit the streets with his new and most violent gang: Danny’s Boys.