The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  The biggest shift in Bassam’s life can be traced back to this point. He left home at thirteen and moved to Kings Cross where he lived with two prostitutes, both friends of his father. He sold drugs to make money, but then started using them as well to regulate his moods – if he wanted to be happy, he took ecstasy; if he wanted a quick rush, he reached for coke; if he needed to forget, he shot himself with heroin. There was a drug for every occasion. Pot calmed him down, speed gave him energy, and LSD was a trip – a drug for the good times.

  He stayed in school but was shunted around as his aggression increased. It was an unstable period of chopping and changing each year. There were fights, weapons and threats to schoolteachers. He was expelled from Year 7 at Granville Boys High School, then Birrong Boys High School less than a year later. He got his School Certificate from Granville South High School before being expelled a year later for verbally abusing a teacher.

  Jobs were flicked and crushed out like half-smoked cigarettes. He gave two months to a carpentry apprenticeship before calling it quits. Then he tried labouring on construction sites – getting up early and shovelling soil, digging holes and dragging bags of cement in the hot sun – but he eventually grew tired of being ordered around and dropped that job too.

  In his spare time he showed a talent for alternative trades: rebirthing cars, extortion and low-level drug supply. He grew his own pot, then started buying harder drugs from a Vietnamese contact, dealing around Auburn and gathering the attention of police. At sixteen he was charged with resisting arrest. At seventeen it was stolen property, then assault, then weaponry, larceny, driving with a cancelled licence and cultivating drugs. By then it was 1998. He was nineteen. That year, on a brisk night in May, he got his first taste of murder.

  In the shadow of a streetlight, on the corner of Oxford and West streets in Paddington, just outside the Ardino Hairdressing Salon, Bassam stood silently, gripping a 9-millimetre pistol in his jacket pocket. Across the street, dozens of people were spilling out of the Mr Goodbar nightclub and milling about on the footpath, waiting for friends to come outside and jump into taxis to go home. It was closing time, 3am.

  An argument that had started inside the venue migrated onto the street. There were two groups of men, something about a girl. On one side were Bassam’s friends, Nedhal Hammoud and Kader Chakaik. They were trying to goad the other group into a fight, throwing taunts and shoving them. A little older, and with a slightly greater number – five versus two – the others resisted the urge and made a decision to walk away. Their designated driver, Arthur Kazas, tried defusing the situation.

  ‘Mate,’ he said to Hammoud, ‘we don’t want anything to do with what you want.’ With that, Kazas and his four friends – Kris Toumazis, Nick Lambos and two others – started back to their car, a Ford Capri, parked a short distance down the street. As they piled inside, Chakaik ran over and kicked the passenger side door, reigniting the situation. He dashed across the street with Kazas, Toumazis and Lambos chasing him on foot.

  Hamzy watched from the shadows as they came in his direction. As they neared him, he pulled the gun from his jacket pocket, aimed at the trio chasing Chakaik, and let off three shots.

  One bullet went through Lambos’s shoulder. Another struck Toumazis in the chest – he had seen the gun and made a run at Hamzy with his arms outstretched, getting shot from about one metre away. Kazas, who’d made it past Hamzy, turned back at the sound of gunfire. Screams came from the crowd as Toumazis collapsed on the concrete outside the hairdressing salon.

  What Kazas witnessed next stayed with him: he saw Hamzy plant a foot on a low brick wall for balance, aim his gun down towards the ground and put a final bullet into Toumazis’s prone body. Toumazis died in hospital later that morning.

  Hamzy turned back to the crowd. They were watching him. He fired three more shots in their direction and made a run for it, catching up to Chakaik and Hammoud down West Street just as two police officers appeared. They had been sitting in traffic outside the Mr Goodbar nightclub when they’d heard the gunshots. ‘Freeze!’ they shouted. All three men turned around. One officer was aiming his gun. Hamzy raised his own and saw the muzzle flash from the officer’s weapon, sending out a gunshot that missed; the distance was too great.

  Hamzy, Hammoud and Chakaik turned into Holdsworth Lane and started running, managing to shake the cops. They hid out in a motel for the night, and two days later Hamzy and Hammoud flew from Melbourne to Lebanon. Chakaik stayed behind. An anonymous tip-off to police named Hamzy as the gunman a few days later. His brother’s car had been left at the scene too, giving the tip some plausibility. Not long after he became the investigators’ number one suspect.

  Detectives figured they had time on their side – they knew Hamzy was out of the country, meaning they could work slowly and methodically to track down witnesses and build their case. There had been 120 people inside the nightclub and most of them had scrambled when the first gunshots were let off. Each one of them had to be tracked down, interviewed and shown photos and video footage to establish with certainty whether Hamzy was the culprit.

  One problem, however, was how to bring Bassam Hamzy home once charges were ready to be laid. In choosing Lebanon, Hamzy knew he was outside the reach of any extradition treaty, posing a huge problem for investigators. On the other hand, he didn’t know he was a suspect in the shooting, and investigators wanted to keep it that way. They gathered their evidence quietly in the background to avoid tipping off his friends and family. The strategy was simple: build a case, issue an international warrant for his arrest, and then hope he might be lulled into a false sense of security, and make a trip to Vegas or some other hedonistic wonderland where he could be arrested at the border.

  What detectives didn’t know was that tensions were building between Hamzy and Hammoud in Lebanon. Cabin fever had set in. They argued regularly, about what had happened that night, blaming each other. Hammoud’s brother was secretly urging him in phone calls to come home; he’d confided that he’d become a Crown witness – mainly to help Hammoud cut a deal.

  Hammoud felt swayed by his brother’s words and, tiring of the fighting with Hamzy, he quietly made plans to return to Sydney. Within a month he was back in Australia and co-operating with the police investigation. Whether Hamzy was aware of this co-operation or not isn’t certain, though he was also on the move.

  Towards the end of 1998, about six months after the murder, detectives in Sydney received an Interpol advisory document indicating that Bassam Hamzy had departed Lebanon and was currently in the Central American nation of Belize, staying with an uncle. Within weeks he was neck-deep in mischief, capitalising on the low cost of cocaine and arranging exports to Sydney. His method was to have the drug mules come to him, and then send them home with a kilogram each in their luggage. Of course, this was 1998. Email was in its infancy, phone tapping wasn’t a widely acknowledged police methodology, and everyone was using landlines to communicate quickly with people overseas. Detectives had nine different phone lines under surveillance, each one belonging to members of the Hamzy, Hammoud or Chakaik families. By eavesdropping on the phones they had become aware of the cocaine importation Hamzy was attempting to pull off. The need to intercept the couriers was high, but it had to be done carefully – the detectives didn’t want Hamzy knowing his phone was being tapped. At that stage, it appeared as though he was still unaware how closely police were scrutinising him. Strategies were put in place. When he eventually found out that both mules had been caught at Sydney and Brisbane airports, he put the failure of the mission down to bad luck. Then he moved on, unperturbed, to his next plot: busting his father out of prison.

  It was the same story: detectives overheard the plan via the intercepted phones and passed on the details to their colleagues at Corrective Services. The next day prison guards tossed Khaled Hamzy’s cell. He was six years into his thirteen-year sentence. They found wire cutters strong enough to cut through the steel fencing at his minimum-security jail i
n Sydney. Within twenty-four hours he was moved to a high-security prison. Again, for all his nous, Bassam suspected nothing. In the meantime, the criminal case against him had built steam.

  Detectives felt they had a case, but their problem hadn’t changed. Australia had no extradition treaty with Belize, meaning as long as he stayed there he was safe: he couldn’t be arrested, flown home and tried for murder. But Belize was close to Miami – a gangster’s paradise of beach resorts, fast cars, white powder and loose women – and detectives banked on its power of temptation. It was a long shot, but worth the paperwork. On 3 December, a warrant for Hamzy’s arrest was issued in the United States over the murder of Kris Toumazis and the wounding of Nicholas Lambos. Unfortunately, by then, Hamzy had already become well aware that he was suspected of the murder and had been overheard on a phone call telling a relative he would ‘do thirty years’ if captured. With this in mind, the expectation was he’d stay in Belize.

  But barely two months later, on 30 January 1999, Hamzy stepped off a flight from Belize into Miami, Florida, picked up his suitcase and walked into a set of handcuffs. At the time he was on his way back to Lebanon, travelling through Miami for a connecting flight. Three months later he was brought home, tried and convicted of the Toumazis murder. He denied the murder during his trial but eventually told a psychologist: ‘I shot two blokes … one died, one didn’t.’ Bassam Hamzy’s punishment had been a minimum twenty-four years in prison, which would have made him eligible for release on parole sometime around 2017.

  Due to the Strike Force Skelton investigation, the length of his prison time has since been significantly revised.

  Bassam Hamzy’s drug empire, the one he ran from prison, was largely a family affair, relying on his father, his siblings, several cousins and friends, who would physically purchase the drugs and deliver them to buyers in Sydney or Melbourne. It was a flat structure, a dictatorship, with Bassam on top and everyone else beneath him. He was the quintessential despotic ruler: he ruled by fear, exerted cruelty on those who crossed him, and – except in the case of shooting his brother – few dared to refuse his instructions.

  Key to Bassam’s success were several people. Khaled Hamzy, his father, who by 2008 was out of prison, was the financial controller of the syndicate. He was also his son’s proxy on the outside. In some calls, Bassam referred to him as ‘the godfather’. His role was mostly to handle the profits of the syndicate and oversee each transaction for quality control. Occasionally, he also did the buying from the supplier, an Asian man living in Campsie, calling Bassam to quote prices and give an appraisal of the drug’s quality.

  Ghassan Amoun, Hamzy’s younger brother, a twin, was twenty-one years old and a middleman and gofer to the syndicate. Tired of the police attention associated with being a Hamzy, he changed his surname to try and go straight. After school he did a TAFE course and then a painting apprenticeship. He even earned a modest salary. But Bassam wouldn’t have it. He disapproved of the low wage and ordered him to quit painting, threatening to kill him if he didn’t obey. Mostly Ghassan was a go-between who often sourced drugs for his brother, met with buyers, collected cash and worked closely with the courier to ensure everything ran smoothly.

  Mohammed Hamze, Bassam’s cousin, was the man who had taken on the contract to shoot Bassam’s brother Haysam. Mohammed’s role mirrored Ghassan’s in some ways; he stepped in at times to either find drugs or get them to the courier. Every family, every business, is rife with politics and the drug world is no different. Bassam didn’t trust Mohammed as much as his brother Ghassan, or others working for him in the syndicate, and believed he was diluting or ‘jumping on’ the drugs before they reached the buyers. What this meant was that he was effectively ripping off both Bassam and his customers. Because of these suspicions, the relationship between the two cousins eventually broke down.

  The courier, ‘OS1’ (a court-ordered pseudonym), was the odd one out in the syndicate. He was a failing businessman who had transformed his cash-starved refrigerated trucking business into a thriving drug delivery service, getting paid up to $5000 a pop to take kilos of drugs to Melbourne or, occasionally, South Australia. Over time he became a trusted lieutenant of the Hamzy family, liaising closely with buyers, learning about drug purity and the process involved in diluting. He became so good that, after a while, he only had to look at a kilogram of meth to know whether it was quality stuff.

  OS1’s entry into the Hamzy inner circle began with one of his drivers, who happened to know Mohammed Hamze – Bassam’s cousin – and made an introduction to the big man himself on the smuggled phone. Bassam needed a courier and OS1 needed an angel investor to save his business, Parcdel Pty Ltd. When he eventually spoke to Bassam on 8 May they came to an agreement: Bassam would provide OS1 with a financial injection for his company, and OS1 would let the business become a front for other family pursuits.

  With Parcdel in his back pocket, Bassam started looking at much loftier goals – drug supply was just the start of his empire building. Included in these ambitions were plans to start a new street gang, a crew who would take its lead from the mafia structures of North America. It would be just like the outlaw motorcycle gangs of Sydney, but for Muslims only. Instead of motorcycles, they would cruise Sydney in a fleet of stately black Chrysler vehicles, a hat-tip to the Cadillac and Lincoln town cars famously used by members of the Bonannos, the Gambinos and the rest of the Five Families. Overheard conversations suggested plans to set up chapters across Sydney with captains and lieutenants in their charge to draw in recruits.

  Bassam even designed a logo for this group with one of his many cousins, Khaled Hamze, and used stolen credit card numbers to order t-shirts, hoodies, patches and leather jackets bearing the insignia: two AK-47 assault rifles crossed in the middle with the name printed above – Brothers 4 Life, or B4L. The drug dealing was the foundation for this project, a means of raising funds for weapons, cars and a factory clubhouse in which to base the gang’s operations. Their mission would be to hunt in packs, muscle into drug territory, create their own turf and stand over legitimate businesses.

  Bassam’s father was tasked with scouting around for a factory with a cheap lease to use as a clubhouse. When they spoke about it, Bassam reasoned that if thirty people paid a membership fee of $30 a week they would be able to raise enough money to fund the venture. Another idea was to borrow money from a bank, using OS1’s home as collateral, but this didn’t proceed.

  Vigorous discussions took place between Bassam and his cousin, Khaled Hamze, about putting his name on the lease. He’d be perfect, Bassam thought: he had no criminal record and would, therefore, make the perfect ‘cleanskin’ to put on the documents. Khaled, however, didn’t love the idea; he had never worked a day in his life or paid a dollar in tax. He thought a sudden leasing arrangement would garner some heat. ‘They are gonna look that up,’ he said. Undeterred, each day Bassam rifled through newspapers, raiding the classified sections and looking at vehicles for sale, properties on the market, to cut out and analyse.

  The first drug deal Bassam Hamzy brokered from prison – the first one picked up by Skelton detectives in any case – was for seven kilograms of cannabis leaf sitting in Melbourne for $37,500. A deal like that created havoc on the listening posts at MEOCS HQ. Hamzy went into overdrive with phone calls, settling the deal, organising the pick-up, cold-calling buyers. That’s how he worked – he invested, he sold, he retained a small balance, and then he moved on to his next big venture. His courier, OS1, retrieved the cannabis from Melbourne mostly without a hitch – his truck broke down along the way and a separate car had to be organised to finish the journey. Again, more phone calls, more micro-management, more screaming fits when things didn’t go his way. Police watched the truck the whole time and took notes.

  Selling the cannabis wasn’t so easy. It took another week to get rid of it all, by which time Hamzy was already brokering his next play.

  This time it was crystal methamphetamine, the drug known as ice
. With the profits from the cannabis sales, he put a down-payment on $120,000 worth of ice and found a buyer in Con Bodiotis, a Melbourne supplier and soon-to-be one of his regular customers. Bodiotis told Hamzy he’d make an upfront payment of $25,000 and then the rest would come two days later. Hamzy agreed to the deal and put Ghassan on standby to fly to Melbourne for the $95,000 pick-up.

  That night OS1 drove his ten-pallet Nissan truck to a McDonald’s restaurant in the suburb of Granville where Mohammed Hamze was waiting for him. He had a sealed plastic bag packed tight with ice crystals. Together they lifted the dashboard console and pushed the bag deep down until it hit the air vents. Hours glided by as OS1 drove through the night to Melbourne, only stopping once he’d reached Bodiotis’s unit in the suburb of Carlton the next morning.

  The first thing Bodiotis did was take the bag, open it up and prepare for a crude cookback – the street method of testing a drug’s purity. He measured out one gram of ice crystals and put them in a saucepan with water, boiling the product and then weighing it again once the water had evaporated, taking any cutting agents with it. OS1 was sitting down and didn’t see the cookback’s results, but Bodiotis was impressed, telling him the delivery was tip-top. Part ritual, part necessity, he smoked some of the drug vapour, inhaling it through a glass pipe about the length of a biro. High and satisfied, he then handed over the $25,000 as promised. Bassam’s net profit from the deal, once all the cash had arrived, was about $30,000.

  Despite his reputation, Hamzy was not immune to the pitfalls of the drug industry. The supply game has always been high stakes, a realm where product is provided on loan, stashes are jumped, and obscene interest rates are applied on late payments. While the Bodiotis deal went smoothly, Hamzy soon found himself caught out when some of his own customers fell short on their payments. It wasn’t just about face-saving; he, too, often borrowed from his supplier. When customers didn’t pay, this pressure built and violence followed.