‘He’ll end up wearing the bracelets or a bullet.’
TO hear John Housain Ibrahim tell it, he’s never lost a fight. That’s a good thing around Kings Cross because anyone who loses fights there doesn’t get much back up. ‘Loyalty’ in the Golden Mile is for winners only – and there’s usually a price tag attached.
Ibrahim learned to fight early in life – but he also learned something even more valuable. That is, when not to fight.
An example that seems to have slipped his mind is when a tough Melbourne gunman (and ex-boxer) called Tony Brizzi came calling on a club the young Ibrahim was running in Kings Cross in the early 1990s. Brizzi was the ‘muscle’ for one Bill A., who wanted to negotiate taking over the club. As soon as they stepped into the room with Ibrahim, Brizzi pistol-whipped him and told him to quit the club, because Bill was taking it. Even Bill was surprised by this. Ibrahim said he was going to complain about the hostile takeover bid to his friend, a senior police officer he named.
Brizzi knocked him down again for impertinence, took his wallet and emptied the till. He said he was disgusted with both of them for even considering bringing police into a man-on-man confrontation.
But before he left he warned Ibrahim: ‘You come near me and I’ll kill you. I’m from Melbourne and we don’t shoot below the knee caps.’
Ibrahim got the message. Brizzi would eventually die of lupus but he never lost a minute’s sleep over flogging someone he called a ‘little Arab upstart’.
Ibrahim, the second child of poor Lebanese Muslim immigrants from the port city of Tripoli, was never going to have it easy. And he was never going to stand by while others took the lion’s share of the world’s riches. But whereas too many of his contemporaries – including his older brother ‘Sam’ – relied only on violence to get their way, John had other tricks as well.
He has not only punched but charmed, beguiled and traded his way to the top of Sydney’s nightclub scene. As an entrepreneur he is a little like a riverboat gambler – behind the poker player’s calm gaze and ready joke is the lingering suggestion he is quick on the draw when the chips are down. In fact, Ibrahim has negligible convictions for violence or anything else, but implied menace is a tool of his trade. Whatever that trade is, exactly. All that can be said with certainty is that it must be highly profitable.
In an underworld full of Armani-clad gorillas fuelled by drugs, ego and stupidity in equal measure, Ibrahim stands out because of his tenacity and ability to roll with the punches, qualities that have helped him survive a quartercentury in a notoriously rough game.
He can also lay claim to being, perhaps, the subject of the most surveillance and monitoring in the history of Australia. He claims that more than a thousand intelligence reports have been written about him by nearly every law-enforcement body in the country. But at the same time he denies the picture painted of him by law enforcement and the media, describing his reputation as a criminal overlord as hyperbole, myth and rumour-mongering.
Undisputed, however, is that the nightclub entrepreneur and property developer has been involved with some of the highest-profile crime figures in Australia. In the Cross, that goes with the territory.
He was once a driver and errand boy for the Kings Cross drug baron turned convict, Bill Bayeh, and is often seen with the sons of Sydney’s infamous illegal bookmaking and race-fixing king, the late and mostly unlamented George Freeman. Ibrahim often says he was a bodyguard and driver for Freeman senior – although, given he was barely out of his teens when Freeman died of an asthma attack in 1990, that claim might be one of his trademark exaggerations.
Like many before him, the narcissistic Ibrahim is not one to let facts stand in the way of a good story – especially one that adds to the mystique that helps him stay at the top of the pile in a dangerously fickle business. Besides, the more mud he can throw in the pool, the harder it is for others to see the bottom. But he is at pains to ensure that his reputation as a businessman is kept separate from his brothers’ penchant for crime.
The official line runs like this. John Ibrahim is a nightclub promoter, entrepreneur and ‘consultant’ who works with seventeen (some say more) clubs in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, and owns multimillion-dollar properties in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
According to his lawyer, Stephen Alexander, Ibrahim’s reputation as a ‘criminal mastermind’ is undeserved – the result of rumour and innuendo.
‘John always says, “Either I’m the smartest criminal out there, or I just run a legitimate business and people want to fantasise”,’ Alexander told the Sydney Morning Herald’s ace crime reporter Dylan Welch in January 2009.
‘Go back to the many hundreds of police intelligence reports that do not even substantiate one iota of any allegation. All you’ve got is an illogical quantum leap. Everyone tries to assume that it’s XYZ … but [where’s the] evidence?’
The hundreds of police reports, intelligence briefs and secret strike forces are nothing more than the proof of a police obsession with him, he said. ‘At the end of the day it’s just rumour and innuendo, because if you don’t have a colourful character to have a go at, well, it’s not going to be the Cross.’
But police don’t buy his line and, in these enlightened days, they say that the kings of the Cross can no longer buy them, which makes a change after the corruption entrenched there for most of the 20th century.
In February 2009 the latest ‘Ibrahim unit’ was launched, named Strike Force Bellwood. Officially, its job is to ‘to investigate alleged criminal activity involving a Middle Eastern criminal group.’ But the twenty-odd detectives staffing the strike force know exactly what their job is – to bring down the Ibrahim family – especially John.
‘The accused is a major organised-crime figure, the subject of 546 police intelligence reports in relation to his involvement in drugs, organised crime and associations with outlaw motorcycle gangs,’ states a police allegation contained in court documents tendered during a 2005 trial.
‘He has previously been investigated for intimidation, extortion and organised crime. He was also the subject of a similar investigation by the Wood Police Royal Commission.’
To be fair, Ibrahim’s official criminal record hardly exists. The only crime he has ever been convicted of was assault for hitting another teenager when he was fifteen. As an adult he has been charged with manslaughter and witness tampering, but both charges were thrown out of court before trial.
Another indicator of Ibrahim’s success is the large sums of money that seem to emerge in unexpected places. In mid-2009 around $3 million cash was found in the kitchen roof of a house belonging to John’s sister, Maha Sayour. While the late crime boss Lennie McPherson boasted that his undeclared nightclub earnings gave him the title ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, Ibrahim has been known to call himself ‘Mr 50 Per Cent’. That’s progress.
But fame has come with a price, and by 2009 Ibrahim and his family were taking hit after hit in the media and on the streets. His lawyer, Stephen Alexander, has said that while John loves his brothers, he isn’t involved in their criminal acts. But 2009 was a year of living dangerously for the Ibrahims and saw the nightclub king inevitably linked with the sins of his brothers.
Whether he deserved it or not, he got a reputation as a gangster because his brothers have never been able to balance the tightrope between legitimacy and their inclination to associate with controversial alleged crime figures.
In October 2004 Ibrahim was secretly taped by an associate, Roy Malouf, at the urging of police investigating John’s youngest brother, Mick. While the resultant charge – witness tampering – was dismissed in the Supreme Court, it revealed John’s view of ‘family business’.
‘I’ve never done any crime. I don’t have a criminal record,’ he railed to Malouf. ‘It’s all my fucking – my brothers’ fuck-up. They think they are all working for me. [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.’
Evidence of John’s lack of control over his brothers was provided in abundance by the events of June to September 2009. On 5 June, John’s younger brother Fadi, 35, was shot five times as he sat in a Lamborghini outside his multi-million dollar home in Sydney’s exclusive northern suburbs. He survived, but lost most of his stomach.
When police investigated the shooting, several suspects emerged. But inquiries were hampered by the refusal of Fadi and his brothers, including John, to be interviewed.
As Fadi lay in the intensive care unit of the Royal North Shore hospital, John’s lawyer, the tireless Alexander, turned up to make a brief statement.
‘My client’s sole concern is for the welfare of his beloved brother Fadi,’ Alexander said. ‘My client wishes to dispel any speculation that there will be retaliation by, or on behalf of, the Ibrahim family … My client has absolute faith in the police investigation and is confident that the police will bring the perpetrators to justice.’
Unfortunately, it seemed Fadi did not agree with his brother’s pacifist views. In late September 2009 officers from the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad suddenly arrested Fadi, the youngest Ibrahim brother Mick and three other men allegedly plotting to kill a man they suspected of being behind shooting Fadi – and putting blood and bullet holes in a perfectly good Lamborghini.
It is hard to get the smell of blood out of the upholstery and some believe it can cause rust.
In an exclusive interview, this time not with Dylan Welch, John Ibrahim confided to the media that he was sick of media and police scrutiny and wanted to slip back into the shadows to run his businesses.
Ibrahim also said he had lost $50,000 in a friendly bet with his young mates, George Freeman’s pretty-boy sons Adam and David.
In the interview, ‘a relaxed and at times jovial’ Ibrahim candidly admitted he hated the attention.
‘Dressed in a black, military-style jacket and a dark, lowcut T-shirt, a smiling Ibrahim’ told The Sunday Telegraph reporter: “I don’t need it … I need to keep a bit of a shadow on me at the moment”.’
The reporter was speaking to him at the launch of a Kings Cross club called Lady Lux, where he’d made a rare public appearance without Tongan Sam.
The club had reportedly undergone an $800,000 makeover funded by Ibrahim’s ‘proteges’ the Freeman brothers. ‘Ibrahim has been a father figure to both since their dad died in 1990 and was happy to help relaunch the club,’ the paper said.
‘Although Ibrahim spoke freely and posed for pictures with the Freeman brothers and their mother Georgina, he was guarded about the ongoing war that has engulfed his family.
‘He stuck to his line that it had brought unwanted attention.
‘He said he was making a concerted effort to stay out of the spotlight for the good of the family and, presumably, his business interests. Smiling, Ibrahim said he didn’t like the publicity but accepted it was beyond his control. He said: “I don’t even need to say anything and you guys will put me in the paper.”
‘He also laughed at reports during the week that he would write an autobiography.
‘ “Today was the first I’ve heard about it,” he said in reference to the media reporting of the claim. “But I’ve had calls and offers from four book publishers today. And 60 Minutes called.”
‘He smiled again and offered no response when asked if he had accepted any of the offers.’
It was all part of Ibrahim’s public relations offensive. He told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I didn’t shoot my way to the top, I charmed my way there.’
In public, he relies on his charisma, his apparent humorous disregard for the world around him, and his ability to attract beautiful women. He’s been doing it for years.
When Daily Telegraph journalist Kate de Brito interviewed him several months after his appearance at the Wood Royal Commission in 1995, she clearly found him engaging.
‘Tanned, fit and small in stature, John has full lips, sleepy eyes and a subtly engaging persona. When he speaks, people listen,’ she gushed. A well-known Lothario around Sydney’s nightclubs, John has escorted a steady stream of beautiful young blondes. He is rumoured to have a live-in hairdresser to maintain his styled and streaked hair, and his gleaming white teeth and gym-toned physique appearance testifies his love of self.
He has also featured heavily in the social pages of Sydney papers.
Not content with being a backroom businessman, he has, since 2008, been photographed with Paris Hilton, her oil-heir boyfriend Brandon Davis, a recent ‘Miss Mexico’, Georgio Armani, and the showbiz sisters Cheyne and Tahnya Tozzi.
Those close to Ibrahim say he has spent two years doing his best to ‘whitewash’ his past; to reinvent himself as a legitimate, if not respectable, businessman.
He has always had an extraordinary self-regard, which is not unusual in gangster circles. But he is more articulate than most – or gets good help – as can be seen in a quote he gave, aged just 21, to a book called People of the Cross:
‘Society conditions you from the minute you go to school to be a good citizen, work and keep quiet. You live out your life, pay all your debts to the government, and you really haven’t enjoyed any of it. It’s the people who don’t listen to that, the ones that break away, who let their minds grow, who end up getting somewhere. I still live in about four different worlds, but I think my time is still coming.’
Maybe it still is. But, as an observer of the Sydney underworld scene told the authors off the record: ‘He’ll end up wearing the bracelets or a bullet.’
AS the second of the Ibrahim children, John was the first of them born in Australia, shortly after his parents, Wahib and Wahiba, moved from Lebanon in the late 1960s. The eldest of the six children, the former bikie Hassan ‘Sam’, was born in Tripoli five years earlier.
When the children were young, Wahib was largely absent from the family home in Merrylands, near Parramatta in Sydney’s west, and Wahiba, a traditional Muslim woman, had little to do with the boys’ life outside home.
An absent father and timid mother left Johnny, as he was known for the first two decades of his life, the freedom to hang around with Sam – as a teenager already developing a reputation as muscle-for-hire at strip clubs and night spots – and Sam’s friends.
In People of the Cross, John described his beginnings with the Sydney nightclub scene, when the then sixteeen-year-old Sam started working as a bouncer at a Parramatta strip club.
‘He thought it was magic,’ John wrote. ‘I just followed in his footsteps, learning martial arts from the age of nine until I was fifteen. My brother and I aren’t exactly bouncer material – we’re not tall – so learning how to defend myself was definitely a plus.
‘ … When I was fourteen I used to have my own little group I moved with and we’d always end up in the Cross, even though we lived out west near Parramatta. We’d come up here at least five nights a week for the bright lights and night life. We liked to think that we were Sam’s back-up. He used to think of us as little pains in the arse.’
But John and Sam were hugely different people, even back then. Sam was a heavy puncher rather than a heavy thinker and would hit first and ask questions later, if ever. But John had the intelligence to realise that at least a bit of learning would go a long way.
‘Most days I’d go to school. I used to avoid it as much as possible – roll up late all the time. School wasn’t for me. It’s just buying time ’til you’re mature enough to get out and work. All I needed was to learn how to read and write and multiply. I’d come to the Cross and they’d teach me something completely different. I had a few teachers that hated me with a passion. They’d constantly throw me out of the classroom because I couldn’t agree with anything they said. The principal made the best sort of prediction. He said I had three options – I’d be a very wealthy man, or I’d be in gaol, or dead.’
John left school the moment he got his School Certificate at the age of fifteen. He took a job as a bricklayer but chucked it in within six months.
While he still lived at home, his life seemed to be revolving around Kings Cross more and more. That was undoubtedly because, while John was still at school, Sam had begun to work for the Bayeh brothers, Bill and Louie.
In the 1980 and 1990s the Bayehs, Bill in particular, were big players in the Cross. During the Wood Royal Commission, Bill Bayeh was exposed as a major heroin and cocaine dealer. He was charged in 1996 and later sentenced to a long prison sentence.
But in the late 1980s, Bayeh was at the top of his game, and when Sam started working for him, the Ibrahim brothers were drawn into the heart of Sydney’s organised drug distribution scene.
Sam was later to describe his role in the Cross at the time as an enforcer for drug dealers like Bayeh. He said he had known the Bayehs since he was a child.
‘My job was if there was any trouble in there, someone was causing trouble, the boys were to call me. I would have to come in and stop the trouble,’ Sam told the Royal Commission. He did not specify what ‘trouble; was but it was unlikely to be helping old ladies cross the street.
It was through the Bayeh association that John became involved in the illicit networks at the Cross. In his book, he described how if he and his friends were ever short of money, they would go there.
‘My brother’s boss (Bayeh) would slip me a fifty or a hundred, give me a pat on the head and tell me to go and do whatever I wanted.’ While Bayeh’s ‘charity’ might seem generous, it paid off a year later, when John’s loyalty saw him almost killed while protecting the older man.
Bayeh was on the Darlinghurst Road strip, on his own, and was being harassed by two men. John, then a month shy of his sixteenth birthday, came to his rescue and received life-threatening stab wounds as a result. It was this near-death experience that set John on a path that today sees him hailed as the latest King of the Cross.
Ibrahim recalls the incident like this: ‘Two men were harassing him (Bill Bayeh) and I sort of came to his rescue. I hit one man so he couldn’t do any more damage, then broke up the other two who were still fighting. The guy that I was helping ran off. I had this other guy pinned up against the wall. I didn’t want to hit him because it would have been too easy, and I think he just acted out of reflex. He had a kitchen knife wrapped up in newspaper behind his back, and suddenly he just stuck me with the knife.’
Though it left him with a punctured lung and hundreds of stitches, the stabbing was the making of John Ibrahim. He spent six months in hospital, but when he came out he was suddenly a player.
‘Getting stabbed certainly changed things … the person I’d helped (Bayeh) gave me opportunities. People liked having me around, they knew I’d always be there for them. They figured I had brains.’
Describing himself as a ‘kept man’, he said he and his friends were soon reaping the benefits of being ‘in’ with the Kings Cross criminal underworld.
‘Wherever we went – in the coffee shops, the clubs, the discos – we’d get everything we wanted because of our association with certain people. At sixteen that was a big thrill.’
But over the next three years John began to see that being a gofer for the Cross crooks wasn’t what he wanted for himself.
‘If someone said, “Look, we’ll be there for you – you can count us,” that was good enough for me. But I came to know that it was all make-believe; that if the time and politics didn’t suit them, they wouldn’t be there, no matter what favours you’d done for them. I was getting burnt by all the conniving and lies and it started chipping away at me, a little bit at a time. I began to think, “This is ridiculous. These people aren’t so magic. They’re thugs and they’re using me as their bat, that’s all”.’
True to John’s reputation for foresight, he began to realise that life as Bill Bayeh’s bodyguard wasn’t going to bring him the success he yearned for. Bayeh was an illiterate, violent man who, despite being the head of a large drug syndicate, was eventually caught ‘bagging’ his own drug deals. John knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and started eyeing off his own piece of the pie.
He got his security licence, created a company and made nice with a Surfer’s Paradise nightclub owner. ‘I liked him because he was his own man, a person I could learn from. On a holiday up at Surfers we looked him up and, after sorting out a blue outside his club, we got to talking. I suggested opening a nightclub in the Cross. He’d always wanted to but he was cautious because he didn’t know the right people. I did, so we decided to go into partnership.’
At the age of nineteen, John borrowed $70,000 from a friend and bought a stake in a nightclub on Earl Place, in one of the seedy side alleys off the ‘Darlo’ strip. It was called Tunnel Cabaret. John signed onto the books in mid-1990, a month before his twentieth birthday, and is unofficially recognised as the joint’s owner even today, despite removing himself from the club’s books in 2001.
That club, which has since changed name three times – to Silva, EP1 and finally Dragonfly – remains the headquarters of the John Ibrahim clique, and on any given Saturday you can find John on the door or inside, mixing with his current crop of bad boys.
Some of the ‘boys’ have been by his side since the early days. Semi Pouvalu Ngata – better known as Tongan Sam, Uncle Sam or Sam the Taxman – has been the Ibrahim family’s minder-in-chief for the better part of two decades. One of the most feared men in the Cross, Tongan Sam is known for his gangster look. He’s not hard to pick – although only a fool would pick him. Men like Tongan Sam pre-date metric measure: he’s a ‘six-foot four’ islander with a long black mullet and wears a black trench coat that makes people nervous. The close relationship between Tongan Sam and the Ibrahims is such that his son, Nimilote ‘Nim’ Ngata, has even begun to work for the family, as an apprentice standover man and bodyguard. Job security in a security job – all in the family.
Other well-known Ibrahim family hangers-on include Mehmet ‘Turkish Mick’ Gulasi; ‘Big Fadi’ Khalifeh; the current licensee and part-owner of Dragonfly, David Auld; David ‘Samoan Dave’ Lima; Alen Sarkis. And, of course, the photogenic sons of the deceased colourful Sydney identity George Freeman, David and Adam.
All can be seen at Dragonfly. Anyone wanting to speak to Ibrahim has to walk past at least one of these men. The club has been shut down on occasion since he became boss, and some new plaster and paint has disguised the night in 1999 when the club was sprayed with bullets.
In 2001, following a series of well-publicised raids, police applied to have the club shut down, alleging it was part of a well-organised drug trade in the Cross.
The people on the club’s books at the time challenged the action and the closure application was thrown out of court, the drug dealing allegations never proven.
TWO men who haunt the back corners of Dragonfly, ‘Samoan Dave’ Lima and Alen Sarkis, have been key players in a new group linked to the Ibrahim brothers. This is the crime gang Notorious, which became a notorious crime gang after being just a little infamous.
Formed by the youngest Ibrahim brother Mick in 2007, the gang was originally a street gang known as the Notorious Scorpions. When Michael was jailed over the manslaughter of the brother of an Australian comedian and actor, George (Fat Pizza) Nassour, the group morphed into a well-organised band of crooks resembling a bikie gang with an image consultant.
With Sarkis, a former drag racer and chicken shop owner, as the putative ‘President’ and Lima as the sergeant-at-arms, the group began to push and shove to justify its name. It finally hit the police radar in mid-2008 during raids on city nightclubs linked with the Ibrahims.
Then, in mid-2008, residents of a quiet, affluent estate on Sydney’s North Shore were woken by a bomb going off. The bomb exploded under a late model black Jeep Cherokee owned by Sarkis, who had been living at the Lane Cove North Estate.
While the bomb didn’t do much damage, it threw the spotlight on the gang, and marked the beginning of a six-month period of drive-by shootings and violence. Houses were shot at, young men were gunned down in dark places. It had taken time and effort but Notorious was now truly notorious, a name muttered among crooks and cops alike. Of course, the gang members immediately said they didn’t like it.
In March 2009 Sarkis spoke to the Sydney newspapers to correct what he said were a series of misapprehensions.
‘We don’t want to be portrayed to the public as we’ve been. We want to be acknowledged and respected as a motorcycle club, not as gangsters. We’re a group of likeminded friends that formed as a motorcycle club not to be dictated to by the other clubs – that’s all we are,’ he said.
He said the frustrations of police and other motorcycle clubs about Notorious were simply because the club represented the ‘new age’ of bikies.
‘Australia has been used to the clubs that have been around for a while and the appearance of a new club has maybe been taken as a threat to them.’ The only threat Notorious posed, Sarkis said, was to the fashion sense of the traditional bikie clubs.
‘We ride bikes but we dress well, we shave and we train. If that’s a problem, I apologise. If you want us all to be overweight and bearded – sorry, it’s not going to happen.’
Since that meeting, and perhaps as a result of the New South Wales police’s crackdown on the outlaw clubs, Notorious has evaporated, with not a single sighting of their ‘colours’, even on a Vespa in Paddington. Samoan Dave is still an important part of the Ibrahim family inner circle of guards but Sarkis has all but vanished.
Well before Notorious, the Ibrahim clan had a much bigger and meaner gang on their side – the Nomads Motorcycle Club. The second biggest outlaw club in New South Wales, with more than 200 members across nine chapters, the Nomads were for a long time a powerful force in the Cross, and it was only a matter of time before they either clashed with the Ibrahims or brought them into the fold. History shows it was the latter.
In mid-1997 a secret police operation pounced on Sam Ibrahim and three members of the Nomads – the national president Greg Craig, his brother, and Scott Orrock, national sergeant-at-arms.
Only days before, on Wednesday 9 July, Greg Craig handed control of the Nomads’ Parramatta chapter to Ibrahim.
It was a key moment in the evolution of both the Ibrahim crew and the outlaw clubs. For the Ibrahims, it meant they could tap into a powerful national biker organisation; for the clubs, it was the beginning of an ethnic influx of Lebanese, Turkish, Egyptian, Iraqi and Islander men. An experiment in multiculturalism that many of the ‘establishment’ bikies would later say they regretted. It is the same with many Gentlemen’s Clubs.
Sam took over the chapter and the Granville clubhouse soon became not only an ethnic melting pot, but a rogue’s gallery of men who have since become some of the most dangerous in Sydney.
A Sydney Morning Herald article by literary figure Malcolm Knox and Dylan Welch quoted a person who was part of the Auburn scene in the late 1990s and had been involved with the Parramatta Nomads:
‘The way Sam ran it was: “Here are your colours, I’m your power base now, you’ve got the whole club behind you. Do what you want – you’ve got no one to answer to.” Everyone joined. To our boys, the bikies were so up high in the crime world that if you were one of them, it’s like you were so powerful that you were untouchable.’
The chapter quickly grew to become one of the most feared outfits in Sydney, and ‘Sam’ Ibrahim was the unquestioned chief of what police repeatedly alleged in court was an organised crime outfit.
Here, in the real world outside the social pages, ‘Sam’ was not playing the media-friendly game. He was, in fact, proving a headache for smooth-talking John because of his long involvement with the outlaw motorcycle club and his reputation as a violent standover man with a hair-trigger temper. If not a hair-trigger, full stop. Bikers were always big on guns.
The Nomads went to war with the Rebels – Sam even went so far as to challenge Rebels national president Alessio ‘Alex’ Vella to a ‘fight to the death’ – and feuded constantly with Mahmoud ‘Mick’ Hawi’s Comanchero City Crew.
But in the end it was an internal feud, between members of the Newcastle and Parramatta chapters, which crippled the club.
In September 2004 a group of Sydney Nomads travelled to Newcastle and attacked a group of senior Newcastle members, believing their colleagues were ‘not properly catering for the financial needs’ of a jailed member and his family.
Two men, Newcastle sergeant-at-arms Dale Campton and member Mark Chrystie, were bashed and shot in both kneecaps. This seemed unnecessarily robust, even by western suburbs standards. Sam Ibrahim, Orrock and Sydney West chapter boss Paul Griffin were charged over the double shooting two years later, when Campton agreed to give evidence. All three were eventually found not guilty by a jury in late 2008, but it meant that Sam, placed on remand in December 2006, was off the streets for almost two years.
In April 2007, only a few months after Sam’s departure to jail, a van was driven through a roller door of the Parramatta chapter’s clubhouse and torched. The fire destroyed several motorcycles and caused extensive damage to the building. The Nomads hierarchy, perhaps tired of the continual warring, disbanded the chapter and its members dispersed, filling the ranks of the Bandidos, the Rebels, other Nomad chapters … and, for a small group of hardcore Ibrahim supporters, the newly formed gang, soon to be Notorious.
SOME dirt sticks even to Teflon. One of the reasons John Ibrahim has not been able to whitewash his past the way he would have liked is the voluminous contents of the Wood Royal Commission in the mid-1990s.
More specifically, a single sentence has haunted Ibrahim since his two days in the witness box at the age of 25.
Both Sam and John were called to give evidence before the Commission and John, with his trademark insouciance, seemed almost to enjoy being grilled by counsel assisting the commission, John Agius, QC, even when the prominent prosecutor dropped this bombshell: ‘Well, you’re the new lifeblood of the drug industry at Kings Cross, aren’t you?’
With a smirk, Ibrahim replied: ‘So it would seem, but no, I’m not.’ But what he perhaps did not realise then was that Agius had placed on the record the central allegation that has dogged John and his brothers ever since: that they were – and remain – involved in the illicit drug trade.
A quick scan of newspaper articles reveals Agius’s sentence has been referred to or quoted more than 40 times since, and has become the reflex allegation against the nightclub baron.
But that sentence wasn’t the only revelation about Ibrahim contained in the pages of the Commission’s transcripts, and his evidence gave an insight into his business life and his falling out with the Bayeh brothers.
Early in his examination of Ibrahim, Agius asked him whether the Tunnel nightclub had a bank account.
‘We had one until four months ago,’ John replied.
Q. What happened?
A. We were in the process of renewing the lease and we didn’t know we were going to be there. The chances of renewing the lease weren’t very good at the time, so we’d stopped …
Q. With which bank was the account?
A. Kings Cross State Bank.
Q. What was the name of the account?
Q. So you closed that account, did you, four or five months ago?
A. Could be longer.
Q. Since then you’ve not operated any bank account for the Tunnel Cabaret?
A. No, sir.
Q. Or for any business that’s conducted there?
A. No.
Q. It’s run as an entirely cash business for those last four, five or more months?
A. Yes.
Q. Is there any drug dealing going on there?
A. No, sir.
Q. Definitely not?
A. Never.
Q. Do you have trouble keeping the drug dealers out of the Tunnel?
A. Six years ago we had a bit of trouble, but there’s been no drug dealers, there’s been no mention of drugs in the place.
Q. How are you able to keep them out?
A. Well, by monitoring who they are and just not allowing them into the club.
The examination then turned to a tape recording of a telephone conversation between ‘supergrass’ cop Trevor Haken and Bill Bayeh, in which Bayeh was recorded saying he wanted Sam Ibrahim, associate Russell Townsend and a man called ‘John’ out of the Cross.
Q. What comment do you have to make about what Mr Bayeh was saying in those two pieces of tape? Did you suspect that he was referring to you when he spoke of Sam Abraham and John?
A. He’s definitely referring to my brother, but I have no idea what Bill was talking about. I’m not sure that Bill has an idea what he’s talking about half the time.
Q. Well, he seemed to be quite sure that Russell – which we interpret as Russell Townsend – and Sam Abraham and someone called John had lots of people working on the streets in Kings Cross in the context of selling drugs. Have you had any such involvement?
A. No, sir, I haven’t.
Q. Definitely not?
A. Never have.
Ibrahim treated the entire process derisively, and when asked by Agius what his relationship was like with Bill Bayeh, he was blunt. ‘After hearing that tape conversation, not very good,’ he said. He did not shrink from the persistent questioning, and when asked if he found the recent performance of a police officer forced to discuss corrupt activity ‘amusing’, John said: ‘I find the whole thing very amusing, to be honest with you, sir.’
Q. What do you find amusing?
A. That this is all – the way it is unfolding, it is just very amusing to me.
Q. What aspect of it is amusing to you?
A. Well, the police are finally sort of seeing how it is for your friends to dob on you, which they’ve been doing for years, managing to get friends to dob on each other and set each other up. Exactly the same thing is happening to them.
In People of the Cross, John described the effects of the Commission in another way. ‘Four years ago about six or seven people used to organise everything that happened in the Cross. They were always against each other but they were making so much money then that they controlled what opened, what closed, who worked, who sold the drugs. If you didn’t go along with it, these people had the muscle, and the know-how, to make your business life hell. Unless you were one of them, there’d be nothing you could do about it.
‘In the last three years, things have changed. The organisation element has gone. You can now actually ring up a policeman, tell him what the problem is and count on him to help you. Before, that policeman would probably know the person you’ve got the problem with and it would cause you even more trouble.’
JOHN Ibrahim is now one of the most instantly recognisable faces at the Cross.
On any given Saturday night he can be found standing outside Porky’s with Frank ‘Ashtray’ Amante and the usual muscled strip-club touts. If not there, then on the door at his latest and greatest nightclub, the Piano Room, schmoozing with the A-listers. Or, sometimes, he’ll be deep in conversation in a corner of Dragonfly, where it all began.
With Tongan Sam, Turkish Mick or Big Fadi in tow, John will walk the Golden Mile like a latter day mafia don, shaking hands, greeting people and checking on his businesses. Most Cross identities are loathe to talk about the sawn-off ‘King of the Cross’ but if pressed will simply say he’s a ‘well-respected businessman’.
At the time of writing, he was poised to be even better known, following his portrayal in the third of the drama series Underbelly.
When it was first announced that the show would portray crime and corruption in King’s Cross, John was offered a consultant role but, at least officially, he declined. The ubiquitous lawyer Stephen Alexander was later quoted as saying the third series might present certain difficulties regarding his client’s interests and activities.
‘It’s a lot easier to make movies or documentaries with people that have passed on,’ observed Alexander, showing a remarkable grasp of the obvious. ‘It’s a free country and people are entitled to do what they do, but I hope they have their facts right.’
You may, Stephen. But does John?