by Yoni Bashan
This all came to symbolise what the Darwiche family said was a systemic targeting and scapegoating of their family for crimes they did not commit. They pointed to Abdul’s acquittal as proof that both he and Adnan were innocent of the crimes police had been accusing them of committing. The only reason Adnan had been found guilty was because of Khaled ‘Crazy’ Taleb, they said, calling him a liar who had framed Adnan in the witness box in exchange for an indemnity and financial reward.
But what angered them most in the aftermath of Abdul’s murder was the police protection being offered to the Fahda family. They were moved into safety amid concerns for their welfare; meanwhile, the Darwiches had received no such support. If anyone needed protection, they argued, it was them; they were the ones at risk of further violence. Given that it was already their long-standing view that authorities had a vendetta against both Adnan and their broader family, this decision to protect the Fahdas seemed to aggravate their fragile relationship with police even further. When rumours later surfaced that Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda had also somehow slipped out of the country, it cemented their loss of confidence in the police.
In the days following Abdul’s murder, MEOCS detectives received word that reprisal attacks against the Fahdas were close to being carried out. Detective Senior Sergeant Paul O’Neill, the officer in charge of the proactive team trying to stop this retribution – Strike Force Lieutenant – noted in one report: ‘Investigators are aware of volumes of source information indicating further shootings are imminent.’
If any reprisal were to happen then O’Neill figured it would take place after the three-day mourning period following Abdul’s burial. In Islam, as O’Neill had learned through years of working in the realm of Middle Eastern organised crime, this is the period when normal life is put on hold, when visitors bearing food are received into the home, and decorative clothing or jewellery is generally shunned. On the third day, however, the formal grieving process ends and, in MEOC circles, generally, retribution follows.
On 19 March, on the third day of mourning, detectives mobilised in unmarked vehicles around the Darwiche family home on Petunia Avenue, Punchbowl, where dozens of people had converged.
O’Neill watched the house from his car with another detective, Belinda Dyson, sitting next to him. More detectives were parked around the corner waiting for a radio call to start following cars. The plan was to observe Abdul’s younger brothers – Albert, Michael and Mohamed – and trail them as they left the property.
Around 9pm a car pulled away from the house and started moving in the direction of O’Neill and Dyson. There were two men inside; in the passenger seat was Michael Darwiche.
O’Neill radioed the backup team. ‘Dark-coloured BMW,’ he said, reading out the licence plate, putting them on notice to pull over the car once it rounded the corner.
The BMW slowed down alongside the unmarked police car and came to a stop right next to it, seemingly lining up alongside the driver’s seat in the tell-tale way of letting a surveillance cop know they have been burned. O’Neill froze. Dyson didn’t breathe. The windows of their car were tinted but not completely blacked out. Had Darwiche seen them? Had they been burned? O’Neill slowly pressed himself into his seat and stared straight ahead until he heard what sounded like a conversation taking place over the top of his car.
What O’Neill hadn’t counted on was that his vantage point was directly outside the home of a ‘friendly’, a neighbour who had come outside to share a few words with Michael Darwiche, unwittingly it seemed, over the top of two detectives. O’Neill waited until the conversation ended, then watched as the BMW kept moving past him. He radioed Detective Jonathon Findlay and another officer, telling them the car was on its way. When they pulled the car over within a minute on Salvia Street, two streets over, they introduced themselves and asked both men to step out of the car.
The driver handed over his licence, identifying himself as Michael Darwick, a 36-year-old construction worker from Punchbowl. He and Michael Darwiche worked for the same company. Their names sounded similar but they weren’t related. Asked where they were going, both men said they were heading to McDonald’s for dinner.
Findlay searched the car as his fellow officer recorded the scene on a video camera. With gloved hands Findlay went through the centre console and glove compartment, finding nothing of any real value. The back seat looked normal except for a seat cushion that was out of place. Findlay lifted the cushion and found a Glock 23 handgun loaded with fifteen rounds of ammunition. By the time the search had ended Findlay had also found a street directory with a White Pages printout of four Fahda family addresses jammed inside as a bookmark. It looked like a hit-kit: a gun, a map and a list of addresses to Fahda family homes. At Bankstown Police Station both men invoked their right to silence and were charged with eight offences ranging from gun possession to the most serious: armed to commit an indictable offence.
When they applied for bail the next morning, a police prosecutor tendered documents written by Findlay stating both men were ‘on their way to carry out a reprisal shooting when stopped by police’. Lawyers for both men called the police case weak, slamming it all as speculation; there was little evidence, the lawyers said, to prove either man knew there was a gun in the car. The gun, the bullets and the map had all been sent for trace evidence and DNA testing at the Division of Analytical Laboratories in Lidcombe, a twenty-minute drive away from the courthouse. Much later, as a result of these tests, it would emerge that Darwiche’s DNA was found on the trigger of the Glock, which inextricably linked him to the weapon.
The magistrate agreed to give Darwick bail, but opposed it for Michael Darwiche despite a clean criminal record, an offer of an $800,000 surety, and an argument from his lawyer that he posed no threat to the community. His brothers, sitting in the court watching, left without saying a word to the waiting media.
Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda, who police believed was responsible for the murder of Abdul Darwiche, went underground immediately after the Bass Hill shooting. And he stayed missing, unable to be located despite surveillance operations and surprise raids on homes belonging to his family members. His father, sister and cousins were spoken to several times and they always told police the same thing: we don’t know where he has gone. In desperation, police released his mugshot to the media, but this, too, was unhelpful. As the weeks and months passed and interest in the case died down, so too did the manhunt to find him, though by then new rumours had surfaced suggesting his possible whereabouts.
By September, almost six months after the murder, police strongly suspected that Blackie had somehow made it out of the country despite warnings on his passport and his mugshot plastered through the media. For members of the Darwiche family, this was further proof that the police didn’t care and were, in their minds, complicit in his escape. ‘They knew it was Fahda who shot Abdul from the day it happened, so if they really wanted him, they could have had him,’ Abdul’s sister, Khadije, told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper on 5 September 2009.
Three weeks after those comments were printed, a phone rang in the office of the NSW Homicide Squad informing detectives attached to Strike Force Solomon that Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda had been found in Tonga and placed under arrest by local security forces. Intelligence provided to the Tongan Police suggested Fahda had boarded a cargo ship as a stowaway, the MV Captain Tasman, and then jumped off the side into the ocean as the vessel approached Queen Salote Harbour. A local man was waiting for him in a boat and took him ashore.
Hiding in Tonga, Fahda slept on the floor of a drug dealer’s house in Nuku’alofa and made attempts to buy a false passport to fly out to Saudi Arabia. In meetings with locals he identified himself as ‘Mike’ and, quite foolishly, told people he was wanted in Australia for the murders of two people, a boast that eventually made its way back to Tongan police officer Sosefo Tabueluelu, who set about trying to verify the information. Tabueluelu drove out to the drug dealer’s villa on the side of a high
way and set up a surveillance operation. He’d been told that the character known as Mike was hiding out there. Tabueluelu knew the dealer well enough to spot his wife and children inside the house and, sure enough, they were there with a man whom Tabueluelu had never seen before.
A Tactical Response Group team surrounded the villa the next afternoon, raiding the property and finding Fahda, or Mike, lying on the floor of a room watching television. Hauled back to the station, he blundered his way through an interview by telling officers that his name was ‘Micky Bondo’ and that he was on holiday from Fiji. He said he’d lost his passport, an answer that only became suspicious when he couldn’t remember basic details that it might have contained, such as his birthday or address in Suva, where he had apparently boarded his flight. Finally, an officer decided to lay a trick question.
‘What colour is the Fijian passport?’ they asked.
‘Dark maroon,’ he answered, quickly and confidently, as if he’d known the answer for years. Except it wasn’t correct. The Fijian passport, the officer said, is light blue in colour.
They kept Fahda in the Tongan station house for another week while his extradition was organised by Australian authorities. His fingerprints identified him by his real name and revealed he was wanted for one murder in Australia, not two as he had bragged to people. At one point, two men walked into the station offering a large bribe to break him out of his cell, prompting security to be beefed up on the order of the country’s police chief.
Fahda arrived back in Sydney on 5 October handcuffed to Officer Tabueluelu after what had been a largely uneventful flight. At one point Fahda turned to the officer and said it was his dream to return to Tonga someday.
‘When?’ Tabueluelu asked.
Fahda thought about it for a moment. ‘Twenty to thirty years,’ he said.
He was met on the tarmac by detectives Joe Maree and Peter Hogan from the NSW Homicide Squad and taken back to the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills to be interviewed. There, he was given two phone calls. He used the first on his parents and the second on his lawyer. He agreed to be interviewed but mostly invoked his right to silence.
Detective Maree turned on the tape at 5:05pm and put the regulation questions to Fahda, asking him to spell out his name and confirm his date of birth before quickly settling into the point of the interview: the murder of Abdul Darwiche.
‘Is there anything you’d like to tell us in relation to that here this afternoon?’ Maree asked.
‘No,’ said Fahda, cutting off the interview. ‘I don’t want to go any further.’
Michael Darwiche and Michael Darwick went on trial over the apparent hit-kit found in their vehicle on 19 March 2009. Darwiche had already pleaded guilty to one of his offences by the time the hearings began – possession of an unauthorised pistol. Despite this, he and Darwick were contesting their charge of being armed to commit an indictable offence.
In the witness box, Darwiche was asked about the weapon and why he was armed with it in the first place. His explanation was simple.
He’d found the weapon behind a bag of baby clothes in a garden shed at Abdul’s house, which he’d come to visit in the hours after the murder. It had been an accidental find, Darwiche told the court. Abdul had been carrying the gun around before his murder, but stopped doing so on Michael’s advice, something that now left him with pangs of survivor’s guilt because he might have been able to use it to protect himself at the service station. With the police apparently giving his family no support, Michael was hoping to use the gun in the event that his brother’s attackers tried coming after him next.
‘I was hoping if I was attacked … that if I held it out [the gun], it might buy me a few minutes to get away, to run,’ he told the court.
The Crown’s case aggressively pursued the alternate theory: that Darwiche and Darwick had only revenge on their minds that night – what other explanation could there be, the prosecutor asked, for having a Glock handgun, a street directory and a White Pages printout of Fahda family addresses all in the same car?
Darwiche’s explanation seemed to put these circumstances back into some perspective. Taking the stand in front of the jury, he said that both he and Darwick had gone to Rookwood Cemetery that afternoon to visit Abdul’s grave. As a mark of respect, he left the gun in the car, hiding it under the back seat’s cushion when his friend wasn’t looking. Darwick, he said, didn’t know he was carrying a weapon.
‘I have wrecked his life,’ Darwiche told the court, turning to his friend in the dock. ‘I made a mistake and he is paying for my mistake and I’m sorry.’
As for the White Pages printout of Fahda family addresses, Darwiche said that had been done to form part of a dossier the family was compiling for a private investigator. With the police being unable to find Fahda, his family had been hoping to contract a private investigator to help track down Fahda for arrest, he said.
The jury didn’t take long to deliberate. They found both men not guilty of being armed to commit an indictable offence. Darwick walked free while Darwiche was ordered to serve a minimum sentence of fourteen months over his guilty plea to the gun possession charge. The sentence was backdated to the time of his arrest, which made him eligible for parole within a month of his trial finishing.
Having been extradited, Mohammed ‘Blackie’ Fahda pleaded not guilty to the murder of Abdul Darwiche and took his case to trial, arguing that he was acting in self-defence at the time of the shooting. He told the court that seeing Darwiche and talking to him at the petrol station had triggered a chain reaction of events that created a belief in his mind that he was going to be killed.
Fahda outlined how he had tried to leave the petrol station before the shooting but was unable to get out of the driveway because Darwiche had blocked it with his car. Minutes earlier when they had spoken, Darwiche had allegedly threatened him.
‘He [Abdul] said he’s going to kill us the way he killed my brother Ahmad,’ Fahda told the court, though whether this was actually said or not is open to interpretation. Some witnesses heard Darwiche shouting out words that suggested he was the one under threat, including the line, ‘What are you going to do? Shoot me in front of my fucking family?’
Some psychologists who gave evidence during the Fahda trial said the effect of seeing Abdul Darwiche at a service station not unlike the one where his brother Ahmad was killed, coupled with the blocked driveway and the alleged threat that had been made, would have created a paranoid delusion in Fahda’s mind that he really was about to be murdered.
Fahda reiterated this in a letter sent to the judge from an isolated cell at Lithgow Correctional Centre where he was being housed for his own safety, a place where his only means of communicating with anyone was by shouting over a brick wall. ‘It was not revenge that day,’ he wrote to the judge. ‘I panicked. I am still traumatised by my brother’s death.’
He was found guilty of murdering Abdul Darwiche and sentenced to a minimum term of fourteen years in prison. An appeal against this sentence was dismissed in 2013. He will be eligible for release on 28 September 2023.
CHAPTER TEN
THE SHOOTING OF FADI IBRAHIM
CASTLE COVE, 11:35PM, 4 JUNE 2009
Fadi Ibrahim, the second youngest of the Ibrahim brothers, brought his Lamborghini to a stop outside his home in Castle Cove, a spit of land north of Sydney Harbour. It was Friday night and the nightclubs were just warming up. Friends were waiting to party with him in the city. In the passenger seat was his girlfriend, Shayda Bastani-Rad, a 23-year-old student upset about being dropped off at home. The plan was to have a boys’ night out.
Dinner had been a lavish affair at Catalina, a restaurant on the water at Rose Bay, a place popular with visiting celebrities. Jay-Z and Beyonce had once dined there, as had Al Pacino and also Leonardo DiCaprio. By contrast, Fadi’s dining companions that night were characters like Allan Sarkis, president of the street gang Notorious, and several other tattooed men in finely tailored clothes. At the end of t
he meal, Fadi threw down his credit card and picked up the $1200 bill before driving off with Shayda for the 25-minute journey back to Castle Cove, a route dotted with speed and traffic cameras.
It’s also a world away from the western Sydney fibro where he had grown up with his five siblings. He lived in a designer pile with pruned hedges along its border and a wide driveway leading to a spacious garage. Everything about the property’s design hinted at privacy: its windows were no larger than laptop screens. Evergreens guarded the main window view of the street.
As the Lamborghini idled, Fadi and Shayda continued their argument, oblivious to the gunman sneaking up alongside the driver’s side door. Five shots slammed into Fadi’s body through the open window – two in the chest, two in the arm, and another through his right shoulder. The assassin said nothing, and then disappeared.
Shayda dialled Triple 0 as Fadi lay dying, applying pressure on his chest wound as she spoke to the operator. ‘My boyfriend’s been shot,’ she said, giving them the address.
At hospital, doctors wheeled Fadi into emergency surgery and placed him in an induced coma. The operation removed each bullet and most of his stomach as family and friends gathered in the waiting room. Menacing men with tattoos kept the press at bay; a photographer was kicked in the stomach as he tried snapping a picture of John, one of Fadi’s older brothers and something of a revered figure within the family. As Fadi remained in a coma, John updated his other two brothers, Sam and Michael, on his condition.
‘A bullet went through his liver but it didn’t hit the main artery,’ he said to Michael, the youngest brother, a 31-year-old prison inmate serving a manslaughter sentence in Broken Hill Correctional Centre.
‘So he’ll be fine,’ John said, trying to keep the conversation light-hearted. ‘He’s not going to be able to eat as much as he did, which will probably do him good anyway.’