Underbelly Page 2

  Even before she was really hooked on the gear she was hooked on the sick thrill of it, the guilty secret of chasing, of being a member of the fraternity of users.

  When she ran out of ways to stretch her pocket money – to beg, borrow and steal from family and friends – she started hooking to support her habit: blowing gutter crawlers in cars and back streets, shucking up her mini-skirt to score money for the next hit. She worked mostly from a car park behind a service station.

  Ask Chris Murphy, the standout criminal lawyer, about the Cross and this is the story he tells. He doesn’t dredge up war stories about all the gangsters he’s known over the years, although he easily could. He knows most of them and has acted for plenty. He’s good at it.

  Instead, he talks about the judge’s daughter because he knew her and her father and because her story is the real story of the Cross: underneath the night-time glitz it’s about as romantic as a road crash and just as dangerous.

  For Murphy, hers was a tragedy that sums up the fatal attraction of the street life. He tells how he arranged for the girl to go to a friend’s island off the Queensland coast to get her away from the scene, to dry out and start again, far from the sordid seductiveness of the street’s predators and scavengers.

  ‘But when it came to it, she wouldn’t go,’ he says. ‘Two days later she was back there, in her high heels. The heroin was too good. The life just too exciting. Everything else too boring by comparison. That’s why they can’t give it up until it’s too late.’

  If Murphy knows what happened to the judge’s daughter later, he doesn’t give it away. But if she ended up dead, or wrecked, she would be only one of hundreds of victims washed up on the Golden Mile, addicted to the thing that will kill or crush them.

  Just another story from the naked city. There were plenty more – but not many happy endings.

  EVEN other bad men didn’t like Jimmy Locchi. Some crooks called him the ‘Loch Ness monster’ – not because he was tough but because he was a nasty piece of work. ‘Slimy and grubby, a bully and a big noter,’ was how a former policeman describes him.

  A contemporary of the infamous crim Neddie Smith, Locchi ran street prostitutes in Kings Cross and paid the women in heroin. This was convenient, as he was also a heroin dealer. He was also a sadistic rapist.

  ‘He would abduct women and gang bang them in motels,’ says the former policeman. Abduction and rape was his idea of entertainment. In business he was predictably ruthless – and surprisingly innovative.

  He set up a system that became known around the Cross in the 1980s as ‘Locchi’s window’. It wasn’t always the same window – sometimes he had two going at once – but the same trick.

  He would rent a run-down ground floor apartment from a compliant landlord, fit bars on the windows and door and a buzzer intercom system so anyone at the building’s entrance could talk to the flat’s occupants without seeing them.

  A buyer would ring the buzzer, order drugs, go to the barred window, poke the money in and get the drugs out the same way. It was highly secure, centralised marketing – and it made it hard for undercover police (or marauding criminals doing a ‘run through’) to get into the flat or identify the people handling the heroin. The iron bars made raids slow, and meant there was enough time for the occupants to get rid of evidence.

  Locchi recruited a roster of clapped-out hookers, preferably addicts, to staff the place, earning more cash in relative safety and comfort than they could on the street. Many would work for a regular ‘taste’ of heroin and were willing to hide the drug inside their bodies, making them difficult to search. And they were easy for him to stand over, too frightened to steal money or drugs.

  The success of ‘Locchi’s window’ of course, relied partly on Kings Cross police keeping a polite distance. In that time and place, that was almost a foregone conclusion. Even honest cops talked about ‘managing’ crime rather than the impossible dream of wiping it out. The upshot was that neither the local police nor the drug squad seemed concerned that Locchi was selling drugs in a street behind the Coca Cola sign, close to the then brand new police station.

  This apparent immunity infuriated a task force operating independently of the Kings Cross network. This was Operation Hobby, run by the New South Wales Crime Commission. Their idea was to catch crooks, a novelty in a district where crime had been franchised for decades.

  The Hobby investigators set up in a flat about 100 metres from Locchi’s window. The idea was to film undercover buyers to gather enough evidence to make arrests.

  But there was a problem: a tree in the footpath obscured the view of the window. They either had to move position, which was nearly impossible, or move the tree. A detective called Mick Kennedy volunteered to move the tree. He had a chainsaw and a utility. At dawn one summer morning he swapped number plates on the utility in case someone noted the registration and reported him, parked around the corner and approached the tree with the chainsaw.

  It had been a warm night and the street was crawling with people, so there was no chance of doing the deed unseen. So he decided to be as public as possible.

  There were plenty of eccentric, drugged or deranged people wandering Kings Cross, ignored or avoided by other pedestrians. He pretended to be one of them.

  ‘I behaved like a mad bloke and had an argument with the tree,’ Kennedy recalls. ‘I shook my fist at the tree and said “I’ll show you!” then grabbed the chainsaw and cut it down.’

  Being Kings Cross, everyone minded their own business. Not even keen Greens argue with lunatics with chainsaws.

  The operation was a success. The investigators were able to film an undercover operative buying drugs at the window, then break into the fortified apartment.

  Inside, they found retired prostitutes handling the heroin for Locchi. One was willing to testify against him after being reassured that he would get a hefty jail sentence.

  ‘He pays well but he’s dangerous,’ she told the detectives.

  She explained why she and others hated the man who supplied her with money and drugs. He carried a cordless electric drill so when he caught a prostitute who owed him money he would drill her knee – or her skull – as a warning.

  It was DIY, Kings Cross style. But in the end, a chainsaw beats a cordless drill.

  2

  TEFLON JOHN, THE NEW KING

  ‘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.

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bsp; 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.’