by Yoni Bashan
Michael Ibrahim didn’t share his John’s optimism. He was fuming that someone had taken a shot at their family. That’s the way he saw it; there had been threats and fights in the past, but nothing like this – this was a targeted, calculated assassination attempt that appeared to send a message to the entire family. Michael wanted action, but John urged patience; the attack seemed too personal to be targeting the rest of the family, he said.
John never played the hothead. He never had to; Sam, his older brother, and Michael, the youngest, took care of all that. John was always the coolheaded hustler, the street-smart businessman. At the time of Fadi’s shooting, he reportedly owned more than twenty nightclubs in Kings Cross – the neighbourhood that had taken him under its wing when he first showed up as a teenager, still living in his mother’s fibro and wagging class at Merrylands High School. It was Sam the tough guy and John the wise guy in those days when they went to work for the Bayeh brothers, Bill and Louis, the Bigs of the Cross. This was the late 1980s in the area’s heyday of smokey nightclubs, burlesque and vice.
Working with the Bayehs created immense opportunity. Sam handled security while John played the gofer, driving the cars and running errands. He watched. He listened. Legend has it that he’d stepped into a fight on the Bayehs’ behalf and got knifed in the process. The scars tell the story; they start at his waistline and stop at his sternum. If not for that, who knows what might have happened? But from then on, his future had been redefined, his loyalty affirmed. If he’d been shown the ropes before, then after the stabbing he was thrust into the action, buying into the local nightclub trade at the age of nineteen with his first venture, The Tunnel, a venue nestled on a quiet alley between Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street, the main drag. From there he expanded: plans for a gaming licence, strip clubs and more real estate. Police attention followed – they suspected drugs. How else was he making his money? It was a question that would trail him for years. During the Wood Royal Commission in the mid 1990s it was put to him that he’d become the lifeblood of the Kings Cross drug trade. His response? ‘It would seem that way,’ he told the commission, ‘but no.’
Drug dealing in the Cross tended to follow a formula back then. There were two main factions driving the trade – the Bayehs were on one side and Danny Karam, the gangster, was on the other. A handful of syndicates operated beneath them, paying tax or protection money to have their street dealers work the area.
Things got faster around 1996. This was when John and Sam had fallen out with the Bayehs. The Royal Commission had turned people against each other. Rumours of police assistance had spread throughout the Cross. Everyone was co-operating. Then, no one was co-operating. When Bill was hauled off to prison for drug supply, his strip club The Love Machine, a key piece of real estate, went up for grabs. Sam and John moved in fast, seizing the club with both hands in what was to be the beginning of an aggressive expansion.
Police were circling, but they were flush with other priorities. Strike forces looking into the Ibrahim brothers were shelved as their focus shifted. An emerging problem known as Middle Eastern organised crime was starting to rear its head. Danny Karam was still alive and causing havoc with his group, DK’s Boys. An open-air drug market had appeared on Telopea Street, Punchbowl. With those guys hogging the limelight, John kept his head down. He quietly built an empire, accrued wealth and took on police suspicions with a come-at-me-with-everything-you-got type of attitude. Sam was less discreet. He joined the Nomads and climbed the ranks – chapter vice-president, then president – his arrival in the gang signalling a new era for the bikie culture. Once, they had been notoriously racist, an exclusive realm of white Australian men of Anglo-Saxon heritage. But now, with Sam’s arrival, a new era had come to pass, opening them up to Middle Eastern and Islander recruits.
The death of Karam and the dismantling of his crew created a power vacuum in the Cross and the Ibrahims walked into it. More nightclubs and expansion followed. Their control of Kings Cross moved into Darlinghurst. Then Double Bay followed. They bought into venues like UN Nightclub, Dragonfly, Embassy, The White Blue Room, Mylk and China White. There was The Love Machine, of course, and also Porky’s, another Kings Cross institution. In conversation, John was easygoing, but in business he was ruthless, a savage character who demanded it all. During one telling conversation at the Mr Goodbar nightclub, noted in police files, John revealed this side of his character, telling someone: ‘I don’t care if I own ten per cent or one per cent,’ he said. ‘I own the club.’
By the mid 2000s police tried their hand again at the Ibrahims. At least two separate drug strike forces had looked into John and members of his family – Strike Force Sombre and Strike Force Lancer – but the police could never prove anything. No one ever went on paper with any complaints against John. On 21 June 2009, the Sunday Telegraph reported that John observed this himself during a conversation secretly recorded by police in 2003: ‘I’ve been on charges for murder, f****** attempted … it doesn’t mean they get me. Because they come up with all this bull**** to get you charged, and then; but the time you get to court, everyone’s gone, you know what I mean?
By the time Fadi was shot, John had virtually left that world behind. He was done with the headaches of the underworld and cringed at the unflattering news articles that appeared in print anytime one of his brothers got arrested. For John, life had evolved. His family had been looked after, everyone had a house, and life was pretty good. Even the police seemed to have given up on caring; it’s the other brothers, they said. John’s gone clean.
And that was that: John had gone from the police pages to the social pages, turning up at beachside parties and rubbing shoulders with celebrities. In photographs there’d be one hand around a stunning bombshell and the other holding a drink. Meanwhile, Sam was in prison on a kidnapping charge, Michael was serving out a manslaughter sentence, and Fadi, who was described in the media as a loan shark but who called himself a builder, was driving a new prestige car every few weeks.
Detective Sergeant Brad Abdy was a new addition to MEOCS CI, Team 1. He’d moved over from a detectives’ office in the suburb of Liverpool where a corruption scandal had poisoned morale and motivated some police to seek a transfer. He caught the Fadi Ibrahim case the morning after the shooting, showing up at the crime scene at about 7am dressed in a suit and carrying a notebook. Forensic crews had been working all night, photographing the car and swabbing it for fingerprints and DNA. There had been few witnesses located during the initial canvass of the street and those who had been found said they saw nothing of substance. For Abdy the scene itself gave away no secrets: the gunman had left no calling card, there was no scent for the Dog Squad to follow. Everything about the shooting had been perfectly executed. Its only failure had been that Fadi, now in a coma, had survived. He was Abdy’s prime witness, or would become one once he was brought out of his coma. That would be weeks away. As Abdy moved through the crime scene outside the house he looked for links, a stray footprint in the grass, a cigarette butt. He studied the golf course facing the house and examined each tree for its adequacy as a hiding spot.
Central to the case were a handful of questions: How did the assassin get to the scene? Was there an accomplice? Did the gunman wait for Fadi to arrive? Or was he followed from the restaurant?
Every investigation, no matter how dismal it may first appear, gets a small leg up – it’s a witness sipping tea as the gunshots go off, or a jogger who hears the screeching tyres and glances at the licence plate. In Abdy’s case it’s a CCTV camera located just above the garage of Fadi Ibrahim’s home. It captured the entire shooting on video, recording it onto a tape that Abdy watched again and again, somewhere in the vicinity of 400 times in his search for answers. This was 2009, a time when camera technology was in its infancy. The tape was poor quality, infrared and too far away to capture facial features, but it was still full of subtle hints. Each replay gave Abdy a little more insight into the weight and stature of the grainy assass
in in the images. It was clearly a man, he thought. Shadows on the road hinted at the height and the gunman seemed relaxed as he walked, striding casually like this had all been practiced, or done before. Abdy paused the tape and enhanced segments, dialling up the light sources where he could, mulling over questions between each replay. He could only hope ballistics would match the bullets pulled out of Fadi with another same-calibre shooting, one where the suspects were already known. If not, this would turn into another gangland hit – one where the walls go up, the victim says nothing, and no one goes down.
The footage was poor quality but almost redeemed itself by revealing a potential witness – a passing motorist who’d driven past the Lamborghini just as the gunman crept up to the car. Maybe they saw something? Abdy later learned the motorist had been picked up during the intial canvass, a young man on his way to a party. He hadn’t seen anything; he couldn’t even remember seeing a Lamborghini that night. Just my luck, Abdy thought – had it been a less affluent suburb, where Lamborghinis aren’t as common, it’s possible the kid might have paid more attention.
His team reviewed every traffic camera from Catalina to Castle Cove, watching the Lamborghini in real time to follow its route and painstakingly track every car around it. This was gruelling work and hours upon hours of camera footage had to be trawled through and scrutinised to try to spot a tail, a pattern, someone stalking Fadi Ibrahim through the Cross City Tunnel or over the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It took days and gave him nothing in the end; the gunman was starting to become a wraith-like apparition that appeared on Neerim Road just as Fadi’s Lamborghini slowed down.
The only other witness to the shooting was Shayda, Fadi’s girlfriend, who had little to offer in her statement; all she could remember was the gunshots. She didn’t see a face. Her previous boyfriend, Faouxi Abou-Jibal, a friend of Fadi’s and accomplice in Michael Ibrahim’s manslaughter case, had been murdered three years earlier.
Within the first twenty-four hours partner agencies like the NSW Crime Commission began sending Abdy reams of intelligence from their sources in the field, their existing holdings, and tip-offs they’d received that were, at times, years old. These ranged from rumoured gripes to known conflicts that stretched as far back as the early 2000s. Informants loyal to MEOCS were reporting in with gossip picked up around the café tables of Bankstown where groups of excited men were hashing out their own theories. Abdy was deluged with possible motives, too many, most of them speculative: the shooting was a message to John Ibrahim; the shooting was a warning over the nightclub trade; the shooting was a show of force that the family members weren’t invincible. Others suggested old scores being finally settled. A man who’d fallen foul of the Ibrahims and had his leg broken with a claw hammer was mentioned several times. Abdy took note but, as this speculation continued to pour in, he was working on one of his own theories that no one else knew about.
Abdy had started at MEOCS in April, two months earlier, walking into a new assignment that was already running into the Ibrahim family, a secretive investigation known as Strike Force Bellwood. It was an intelligence probe much like the cold start that Memmolo’s team had tried on the Kalache family a year earlier – the idea was to gather information and then look for angles into the targets.
Bellwood had already been running for two months and had made inroads into Fadi’s older sister, Maha Sayour. She lived in a two-level property on Pearson Street in the Sydney suburb of South Wentworthville, a house that had been midway through renovations for too long; it was perpetually unfinished. Barely days into Abdy’s tenure at MEOCS, Sayour’s house was raided by a team of detectives, including Abdy, who found himself standing in the middle of her living room as ninety-five heat-sealed bags of cash were pulled out from a roof cavity in the kitchen, a hole that seemed to have been purpose-made for the property. When the money was counted back at the station the cash totalled $2.86 million. Sayour insisted she had no idea how the money got there and said she had never seen it, telling the detectives cheekily, ‘If I had big sums of money I would have finished the bloody house, trust me.’ Unable to prove that Sayour knew the money was hidden in her kitchen, the police case struggled at trial and Sayour walked on all charges. Abdy, however, could see a bigger picture.
He knew all along the money most likely didn’t belong to her; whether she knew it was hidden in her house or not was beside the point. Abdy believed the money most likely belonged to her youngest brother Michael. Even though he was in prison, Michael needed the money more than she did, Abdy thought.
It had been widely confirmed that Michael Ibrahim was the architect behind the street gang known as Notorious, a group that was using Kings Cross as its base of operations. Various theories were tossed around about why Notorious was formed but the prevailing one was that it had been set up to protect the Ibrahim family’s interests in the red-light district; with Michael in jail and Sam in and out of prison, there were few safeguards to insulate the family from a war in Kings Cross. In the eighteen months leading up to Fadi’s shooting, tensions had been brewing through the area. The Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang had already made their interests well known by showing up unannounced in great numbers at Ibrahim-controlled clubs and attempting to buy up real estate in the area. Rumours of contract killings began circulating.
To be sure, Notorious appeared to have been formed in response to this posturing. The group’s membership base was growing and was largely a mix of Islander and Middle Eastern men, most of them young and trigger-happy types who were reckless and willing to carry out crimes to make a name for themselves. The perks waved under the noses of these men to recruit them into the club included payment of legal costs and other bills should they ever be arrested or charged. Along with these costs were other tangential expenses, including clubhouse leases, vehicles and weapons. In other words, a gang like Notorious needed a big sum of cash behind it; and that’s where Abdy believed the money in Sayour’s house came into the picture.
In his mind, the $2.86 million was Michael’s war chest, a fighting fund to pay for his gang’s expenses. Without that money, pressure would build on its hierarchy to come up with a new source of income, and Abdy could already see the tension building between Michael Ibrahim, the gang’s notional founder, and Notorious’s notional president, Allan Sarkis, who’d been having dinner with Fadi on the night he was shot. Michael regularly used the prison phone at Broken Hill Correctional Centre to call Allan Sarkis. These were monitored and recorded calls. In the immediate aftermath of Fadi’s shooting, Michael had joked with Sarkis that he might have set up his brother for the shooting, tipping off the gunman when he left the Catalina restaurant. Sarkis didn’t see the funny side to the joke, but Michael reassured him.
‘If I thought it was true,’ he said, ‘mate, you’d be dead already.’
A new lead walked into the frame on day three of Abdy’s investigation. His name was ‘Jack’, a police informant, his true identity suppressed by a court. He was a drug dealer, a stylish one, a playboy who wore designer clothes and jumped the queues outside nightclubs, slapping hands with the bouncers as he walked inside. He wasn’t a gangster – he had a degree in property economics – but he liked to be around them, loved the notoriety and all the spoils that came with it. And they liked him – he knew how to find houses that were perfect for cooking speed and, if things got desperate, knew the kind of people who could cook up a batch.
Becoming an informant hadn’t been part of Jack’s plan, but that’s just the way things worked out. It was all thanks to his brother-in-law, ‘Tommy’ (a pseudonym). He’d been running a speed lab that caught fire and aroused the attention of police, landing him in Long Bay Correctional Centre where, in late 2008, Michael Ibrahim was serving out part of his manslaughter sentence. Michael still had another five years until he could make parole.
He and Tommy became friends in prison and whenever Jack would visit, which was most weeks, they would all get together in the visiting yard and trade gossip about
people up in Kings Cross – who’s been arrested, who’s out of prison, what’s going on up at the strip. Michael hung onto this stuff and Jack was happy to oblige with offers to smuggle contraband into the prison – DVDs, drugs, anything that could feasibly be snuck past the guards in the minimum-security centre.
When Michael was moved to Broken Hill, Jack stayed in touch with him, agreeing to fly the two-and-a-half-hour journey to visit and keep up the relationship. Sure, they didn’t really know each other that well, but that was Jack’s personality – he admired Michael in some ways and wanted to be friends with him. Call it awe; a mix of fear and respect. But there was another side to this relationship as well.
What Michael Ibrahim didn’t know was that Jack was a Gangs Squad informant with a set of handlers who he reported to regularly: Mark Gorton and Sharon Smithers. They were collecting intelligence on Notorious, the street gang that Michael Ibrahim had founded. What better way to get information about Notorious than for Jack to mine his new friend for tidbits of information. Gorton and Smithers told him that if he could provide useful intelligence about the street crew, it could assist his brother-in-law, Tommy, with his case when it came up for sentencing. It was a fair deal, Jack thought. Besides, he could pick and choose what he gave them.
About three days after Fadi got shot, Jack called Smithers from a payphone and told her he had information about the shooting, if she wanted it. He said it was too early to say who was behind the attack – no one knew for sure – but suspicions were rife within the Ibrahim family. He read out some names of potential suspects and said he would contact her again later.
Smithers called Brad Abdy, the head of the investigation, when she got off the call. She told him she couldn’t identify her source, but had names of suspects she could provide. Abdy wrote them down in his police notepad.