The Squad

by Yoni Bashan

  One name was Mark Buddle, the head of the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang. Daniel Callahan, a bikie associate, was another one, along with Hugo Jacobs, a man who owed money to Fadi Ibrahim. The last was John Macris, a name which Abdy hadn’t heard before. He already knew about the others, but discounted them as suspects; Abdy just didn’t believe those men had the kind of tensions with the Ibrahim family that would lead them to attempt murder. It was known that the Comancheros had taken out contracts on John Ibrahim in the past, but Fadi? It seemed too unlikely. Abdy wrote all four names down anyway and hung up the phone. He tapped his pen against the name Macris and then drew an asterisk next to it.

  On a Friday afternoon, the week after Fadi was shot, Jack flew to Broken Hill Correctional Centre for another one of his usual meetings with Michael Ibrahim. Joining him was ‘Ayman’, whose real name has also been suppressed by a court order. Ayman was a shonk, another middleman in the drug trade who was on bail for a trafficking offence in Victoria.

  Michael sat in front of them at a table in the visiting area, and was angry and agitated about the shooting. He was certain that whoever had gone after Fadi had done so to intimidate the entire family. He leaned in close when he spoke, whispering his sentences and switching between English and Arabic, which Jack couldn’t understand.

  At one point, after an extended conversation with Ayman in Arabic, Michael turned to Jack and said that he knew who shot Fadi, mouthing the word ‘Macris’ to him across the table.

  Jack was skeptical. He knew John Macris and his history of conflict with the Ibrahims but the notion still seemed unlikely. ‘He doesn’t have the balls,’ Jack said. Michael assured him it was true. He’d worked out the logic in his head using his deductive leaps that couldn’t be questioned; they were foolproof and brutally simple.

  ‘He hates us and we hate him,’ Michael said, a fact that, in his mind, seemed to seal his argument. He asked Jack if he knew where Macris could be found, the implication being that a reprisal would follow.

  Jack said the cops were all over the case and looking at everyone; it was a bad idea.

  At this, Michael snapped. ‘Do you think I wanna do this? I’m forced into a position now here, I have to do something about it. I’m dirty on my brother Fadi for bringing this drama to us, buying his Lamborghini, buying his Bentley, showing off all his money, bringing heat on the family and terrorising Macris. Fadi thinks he’s a gangster but he’s not, he’s a wimp. Even with all his money he’s too much of a tightarse to pay a couple of coconuts to walk around with him and protect him and now I’m left with the problem and I’ve gotta do something about it or people are gunna think that they can take the Cross.’

  Jack reeled from the shouting. He figured it was pointless arguing and he placated Michael, telling him he’d once seen Macris in a chicken shop around Woollahra, a leafy, affluent suburb of Sydney’s east known for its high concentration of wealthy retirees. ‘If I bump into him I’ll call Ayman and tell him where he is, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll even see him again,’ Jack said.

  Later, when he got back to Sydney, Jack called Smithers and told her about his conversation at the prison. He omitted most of the important details, specifically the parts of the conversation where Macris’s name had been mentioned and the part where he’d been asked to track him down. Instead, he told Smithers there was still uncertainty about who shot Fadi, which wasn’t true, and he volunteered Ayman’s name as the likely triggerman for any future revenge plot to be carried out. What neither Jack nor Smithers knew, however, was that Ayman himself was also a police informant.

  His handlers worked at MEOCS and had reached out to him within days of Fadi Ibrahim’s shooting. As far as sources went, he was a godsend, a grass who sat within the Ibrahims’ inner circle of family and someone who was far more forthcoming with information than Jack had been with Smithers. Through Ayman and his handlers, Abdy was given a full rundown of the history between the Macris and Ibrahim families, including the catalyst for their acrimony, recent developments in this feuding and, of course, the tentative plotting to seek retribution against them, which at that stage Abdy wasn’t too concerned with. And why would he be? From what Ayman was telling his handler, no one even knew where to find John Macris.

  From what Abdy could gather, the conflict had started over a nightclub refurbishment, but the story went back much further, back to the mid 1990s when John Ibrahim was running the EP1 nightclub and John Macris was a club guy who hung around the Cross on the weekends. The two Johns met through the club scene and saw each other on most weekends, eventually becoming friends and drinking together whenever they bumped into each other. A stint in prison took Macris out of this circuit for a while; it was a drugs charge that saw him arrested in 2000 and dragged through the courts – he was sentenced, then appealed, then retried, then finally released in 2006.

  Once out of prison, he got back into the building trade, which is what he’d been doing before his arrest. He hadn’t seen or heard from John Ibrahim in years until suddenly, just months after his release, Ibrahim reached out with a proposition. He needed someone to remodel his nightclub on Oxford Street, Mr Goodbar, and he figured Macris, fresh out of jail, would be interested in the work.

  Macris hesitated. He didn’t want to be involved with the Ibrahim family or John’s hot new club. It wasn’t personal, but there had been stories.

  Ibrahim twisted his arm, gently.

  By Christmas 2006 Macris had dropped nearly $300,000 on the Mr Goodbar fitout and still hadn’t received a single payment in return. He approached Ibrahim to talk, telling him the club needed another $100,000 before it would be finished.

  According to evidence later given by Macris, Ibrahim shrugged and said he didn’t have the cash to pay him for the work he’d done. That would only happen, he said, once the club had opened and they could spin a profit from the drink sales. But, Ibrahim continued, if Macris was prepared to finish the job using his own money, then he could become a partner in the venture and take a share of the profits indefinitely.

  Macris figured that Ibrahim was a showman of sorts and his clubs generally appeared to be extremely successful. He took the deal and kept his mouth shut, funnelling more cash into the business and holding out for the big payday when the club finally opened. When that day came, however, all that arrived was bitter disappointment. Whenever Macris asked about his share of the weekly takings, Ibrahim told him there was nothing to hand over. The club was barely breaking even each week – no one knew why it wasn’t taking off.

  Things got more complicated when Macris’s younger brother Alex entered the picture. He was nine years younger than his brother and had become close to the Ibrahims while John Macris was in prison, at one point even working for Michael Ibrahim as a driver, or so Michael had told people, and had done some work as a money collector for the family.

  Alex had his own business ventures running independently of his brother, including one with Michael Ibrahim. When the deal went sour, resulting in a debt of $1.2 million, the Ibrahims turned to John Macris to step in for Alex and pick up the debt.

  This was hammered home to John Macris one day when he sought out another meeting with the Ibrahims about the $400,000 he was owed over the Mr Goodbar nightclub refurbishments. Instead of being given back his money, he was told that his equity was being taken away to pay off the debt Alex had incurred – the precise nature of this debt cannot be printed; suffice to say it was a business deal of sorts.

  Macris didn’t understand the logic. It wasn’t his debt to pay, he said, but he was told it didn’t matter. Alex wasn’t capable of paying back the money, so John Macris was told he would have to cover him. Once the $400,000 share was factored in, John and his brother were told they now owed the Ibrahim family a balance payment of $800,000.

  From then on, both the Macris brothers avoided Kings Cross, staying away from the Ibrahims and their clubs across the city. It didn’t stop the Ibrahims finding them, however. One afternoon John Macris was sit
ting in traffic when someone leaned through his open window and tried to punch him in the face. When he looked up he saw Fadi Ibrahim standing by the car with a group of burly Islander men behind him. They ran off a moment later, possibly due to the moving traffic; the fight was over before Macris had any time to react. There were other incidents, a drive-by shooting, a kidnapping, which law enforcement had discovered.

  But the most critical incident happened a few weeks prior to Fadi’s shooting when a fight broke out at the Ivy nightclub in Sydney’s CBD. Fadi had spotted his girlfriend, Shayda, speaking to Alex Macris on the dancefloor. They were old friends, so this wasn’t unusual. In fact, Alex had introduced Shayda to her ex-boyfriend, Faouxi Abou-Jibal, not long before his untimely murder in March 2006.

  As Alex and Shayda continued talking, Fadi emerged from the darkness and threw a punch, hitting Alex in the face and putting him on the floor. As far as motives went, at least for Detective Abdy, the fight seemed like one of the strongest lines of enquiry yet for the shooting that followed a few weeks later, far greater than any of the other historic feuds or theories touted so far. From that moment on, Abdy began looking far more closely at the Macris brothers as his chief line of enquiry.

  The investigation into Fadi Ibrahim’s attempted murder was given the codename of Strike Force Proudfoot. It was split into two competing tranches of enquiry on the basis of Ayman’s incoming intelligence. On one side was the need to solve the shooting, which had a field of suspects and a couple of good leads. On the other side was the payback hit against the Macris brothers, particularly John Macris, that was gathering steam from behind the bars of Broken Hill Correctional Centre.

  Ayman couldn’t say exactly how, but Michael Ibrahim had managed to get his hands on a smuggled phone in the prison, which allowed him to call out at all hours and check on the progress of the Macris plot. It also gave him more control.

  The original plan had been to use Ayman as the triggerman, but this had now changed, Ayman told his handler, explaining that Michael thought of him as an unreliable character, someone who didn’t always answer the phone and disappeared for days on end. And he was right: Ayman had no intention of shooting anyone and, being a police informant, he planned to stifle the plot at every turn. Frustrated by Ayman, Michael had contracted a new hitman to go get Macris once he’d been located, someone he considered to be a professional in this field: his name was Rodney ‘Goldie’ Atkinson.

  Michael spoke about Atkinson in glowing terms. During one call to Allan Sarkis, the president of Notorious, he described the debt collector as a ‘good kid’, someone who could get any job done like a soldier. ‘You tell him go, he’ll go,’ Ibrahim said in the recorded conversation. ‘He won’t come back till it’s done.’

  It had only been a few weeks since Fadi had been shot and Abdy still regarded any talk of reprisal as premature. For one thing, none of Ibrahim’s cohorts had been able to locate Macris or where he lived and, secondly, immigration records suggested he was out of the country on holiday for at least another month, or so Abdy had gathered from the departure card Macris had filled out at the airport.

  Still, he had concerns, particularly with the entry of Atkinson to the frame. His involvement raised the stakes and showed a much stronger level of commitment to carrying out some kind of retributive plot. Until then, it had all been just talk. Abdy had seen it a hundred times before: a big-noting crook swears revenge on an enemy only to sleep on it and move on within a week when it becomes apparent that a gun and triggerman aren’t so easy to find.

  Of course Abdy had heard of Rodney Atkinson, the famed underworld enforcer. He had been one of the key targets from the Strike Force Skelton investigation into Bassam Hamzy during 2008. He was also under investigation by the NSW Crime Commission over the unsolved murder of Todd O’Connor, a manager of the Mr Goodbar nightclub in Paddington. O’Connor, aged forty-one, had been mysteriously gunned down at a park in Tempe on 5 October 2008 while picking up a debt, which police claimed was being collected on behalf of Fadi Ibrahim. The autopsy pulled three bullets from his head and seven of a different calibre from his body, indicating two gunmen, neither of whom have ever been caught.

  Atkinson hadn’t been arrested or charged by Memmolo’s team over his dealings with Bassam Hamzy. Not yet, anyway. At the time of Fadi’s shooting in June 2009, he was still a free man, still out on the streets and meeting with Michael Ibrahim at Broken Hill Correctional Centre, or so the jail’s visitor logs revealed. Records would show that Atkinson turned up at the jail twice – on 1 July and 5 July. On both occasions he’d arrived under the name Castro Gard’e, an alias police had on file.

  Meanwhile, Abdy turned his attention back to Fadi, who doctors had brought out of his induced coma. A 24-hour police guard had been posted outside his room for protection. Listening devices had been hidden inside to record conversations, but they had picked up nothing of value to the investigation.

  Fadi’s recollection of his shooting, which he agreed to recount to Abdy, was vague. He hadn’t recognised the attacker and couldn’t remember much at all, save for the gunshots. Abdy wasn’t surprised. He didn’t expect that Fadi would be much help to the investigation – the code of the street and all that – but he also believed that, as a victim, Fadi was probably telling the truth about having a memory lapse. Most shooting victims suffer the same thing from the trauma of being shot; Abdy had seen it before.

  The detective dropped the names of certain people to try to stimulate Fadi’s memory and gauge his reactions. John Macris and Alex Macris were mentioned in passing.

  ‘I don’t think it was them,’ Fadi said. ‘I’ve got no clue who it was.’

  Was he being truthful? Abdy couldn’t tell. Did Fadi know a reprisal attack was being planned? Had he been told in advance to play down his suspicion of the Macris family? Anything was possible, Abdy thought. The rest of the hospital visit was spent listening to Fadi justify every dollar he’d ever earned as he implored Abdy to stop viewing him as a gangster. ‘I’m a builder,’ he said. Abdy laughed. ‘You’ve never built anything in your life.’

  Later he would hear Fadi talk candidly about the shooting in subsequent phone calls to his brothers, always sticking to the same line about doubting Macris. Abdy remained skeptical, but Fadi’s tone suggested he was genuinely clueless about why he’d been shot. Then again, Abdy thought, Fadi probably knew his calls were being monitored.

  The next time Jack called Smithers, his handler at the Gangs Squad, he’d just come back from another visit to Broken Hill Correctional Centre. It was 17 July and his role by then had been dialled up significantly. Previously Michael Ibrahim had asked Jack to find Macris’s address. Now he wanted him to get a photograph of his face as well. Jack mentioned none of this to Smithers. All he told her was what Abdy’s team already knew: that Macris was a target for retribution and plans were being made for a get-square.

  In doing this, Jack was playing both sides. He was pretending to help Michael Ibrahim plan his conspiracy plot, and he was also pretending to help police by feeding them inconsequential details. What he didn’t realise was that Ayman had been steadily feeding back the real story to Abdy’s team, which put Jack squarely in the frame as a middleman in the plot, even though he was, technically, assisting police.

  Not that Abdy was aware of this assistance. He didn’t know that Jack was an informant working for the Gangs Squad; all he knew was that Smithers had a source somewhere in the Ibrahim camp providing intelligence. Conversely, and somewhat ironically, Smithers didn’t know that Jack had become a central target of Abdy’s investigation, or that his mobile phone calls were being intercepted – she was just taking down the information and passing it to Abdy, whose days were being spent listening to incoming and outgoing telephone calls from several numbers; it was one of the few ways he could monitor the conspiracy plot against Macris and how it was developing. Weeks passed in this way. In addition to Jack’s phone, he had intercepts running on Michael Ibrahim’s smuggled jail phone,
Rodney Atkinson’s phone and Fadi Ibrahim’s phone. Whenever they changed numbers, Ayman would come to the rescue.

  Fadi’s calls seemed to indicate a growing frustration at the progress of Abdy’s investigation. The field was wide open with persons of interest, including the Macris brothers, but there were no firm suspects in the mix. Abdy had even shown Fadi the CCTV footage of the attack in the hope it might jog his memory, which it didn’t.

  But Fadi’s main gripe was being stuck at home; here was a guy who drove fast cars and ate out in fancy restaurants and now, because he’d been shot, even simple tasks had become a burden.

  ‘I’m like a fuckin’ disabled person,’ he said to his brother Michael during one call in early August. ‘I don’t want to leave the house, I can’t defend myself. It stresses the fuck out of me. Before … I could defend myself. It’s shit.’

  Abdy was paying close attention to these conversations. He wanted to know if Michael would make admissions about the plot against Macris. He also wondered if Fadi was already aware of it. At that stage, it wasn’t clear. Abdy waited for Macris’s name to be mentioned, but there was a conspicuous lack of dialogue about him, which in itself was suspicious. Why weren’t they mentioning him? Michael was actively trying to find him and yet he was saying nothing over the phone. Two reasons for this sprang to mind: either Michael was taking care of the matter quietly and keeping Fadi out of it, or the conversations were staged. Abdy kept listening as the men vented their frustration and confusion about the identity of the assassin.

  ‘When your little brother Mick gets out he’s going to find him,’ Michael said of the gunman. ‘I’m going to cut off his head, I’m going to stick it on the front post of his house.’

  ‘But that’s the thing, Mick,’ Fadi said. ‘None of us know who he is.’

  Michael moved to reassure him. ‘In time, brother. In time it will come out.’