Underbelly Read online

In public, he relies on his charisma, his apparent humorous disregard for the world around him, and his ability to attract beautiful women. He’s been doing it for years.

  When Daily Telegraph journalist Kate de Brito interviewed him several months after his appearance at the Wood Royal Commission in 1995, she clearly found him engaging.

  ‘Tanned, fit and small in stature, John has full lips, sleepy eyes and a subtly engaging persona. When he speaks, people listen,’ she gushed. A well-known Lothario around Sydney’s nightclubs, John has escorted a steady stream of beautiful young blondes. He is rumoured to have a live-in hairdresser to maintain his styled and streaked hair, and his gleaming white teeth and gym-toned physique appearance testifies his love of self.

  He has also featured heavily in the social pages of Sydney papers.

  Not content with being a backroom businessman, he has, since 2008, been photographed with Paris Hilton, her oil-heir boyfriend Brandon Davis, a recent ‘Miss Mexico’, Georgio Armani, and the showbiz sisters Cheyne and Tahnya Tozzi.

  Those close to Ibrahim say he has spent two years doing his best to ‘whitewash’ his past; to reinvent himself as a legitimate, if not respectable, businessman.

  He has always had an extraordinary self-regard, which is not unusual in gangster circles. But he is more articulate than most – or gets good help – as can be seen in a quote he gave, aged just 21, to a book called People of the Cross:

  ‘Society conditions you from the minute you go to school to be a good citizen, work and keep quiet. You live out your life, pay all your debts to the government, and you really haven’t enjoyed any of it. It’s the people who don’t listen to that, the ones that break away, who let their minds grow, who end up getting somewhere. I still live in about four different worlds, but I think my time is still coming.’

  Maybe it still is. But, as an observer of the Sydney underworld scene told the authors off the record: ‘He’ll end up wearing the bracelets or a bullet.’

  AS the second of the Ibrahim children, John was the first of them born in Australia, shortly after his parents, Wahib and Wahiba, moved from Lebanon in the late 1960s. The eldest of the six children, the former bikie Hassan ‘Sam’, was born in Tripoli five years earlier.

  When the children were young, Wahib was largely absent from the family home in Merrylands, near Parramatta in Sydney’s west, and Wahiba, a traditional Muslim woman, had little to do with the boys’ life outside home.

  An absent father and timid mother left Johnny, as he was known for the first two decades of his life, the freedom to hang around with Sam – as a teenager already developing a reputation as muscle-for-hire at strip clubs and night spots – and Sam’s friends.

  In People of the Cross, John described his beginnings with the Sydney nightclub scene, when the then sixteeen-year-old Sam started working as a bouncer at a Parramatta strip club.

  ‘He thought it was magic,’ John wrote. ‘I just followed in his footsteps, learning martial arts from the age of nine until I was fifteen. My brother and I aren’t exactly bouncer material – we’re not tall – so learning how to defend myself was definitely a plus.

  ‘ … When I was fourteen I used to have my own little group I moved with and we’d always end up in the Cross, even though we lived out west near Parramatta. We’d come up here at least five nights a week for the bright lights and night life. We liked to think that we were Sam’s back-up. He used to think of us as little pains in the arse.’

  But John and Sam were hugely different people, even back then. Sam was a heavy puncher rather than a heavy thinker and would hit first and ask questions later, if ever. But John had the intelligence to realise that at least a bit of learning would go a long way.

  ‘Most days I’d go to school. I used to avoid it as much as possible – roll up late all the time. School wasn’t for me. It’s just buying time ’til you’re mature enough to get out and work. All I needed was to learn how to read and write and multiply. I’d come to the Cross and they’d teach me something completely different. I had a few teachers that hated me with a passion. They’d constantly throw me out of the classroom because I couldn’t agree with anything they said. The principal made the best sort of prediction. He said I had three options – I’d be a very wealthy man, or I’d be in gaol, or dead.’

  John left school the moment he got his School Certificate at the age of fifteen. He took a job as a bricklayer but chucked it in within six months.

  While he still lived at home, his life seemed to be revolving around Kings Cross more and more. That was undoubtedly because, while John was still at school, Sam had begun to work for the Bayeh brothers, Bill and Louie.

  In the 1980 and 1990s the Bayehs, Bill in particular, were big players in the Cross. During the Wood Royal Commission, Bill Bayeh was exposed as a major heroin and cocaine dealer. He was charged in 1996 and later sentenced to a long prison sentence.

  But in the late 1980s, Bayeh was at the top of his game, and when Sam started working for him, the Ibrahim brothers were drawn into the heart of Sydney’s organised drug distribution scene.

  Sam was later to describe his role in the Cross at the time as an enforcer for drug dealers like Bayeh. He said he had known the Bayehs since he was a child.

  ‘My job was if there was any trouble in there, someone was causing trouble, the boys were to call me. I would have to come in and stop the trouble,’ Sam told the Royal Commission. He did not specify what ‘trouble; was but it was unlikely to be helping old ladies cross the street.

  It was through the Bayeh association that John became involved in the illicit networks at the Cross. In his book, he described how if he and his friends were ever short of money, they would go there.

  ‘My brother’s boss (Bayeh) would slip me a fifty or a hundred, give me a pat on the head and tell me to go and do whatever I wanted.’ While Bayeh’s ‘charity’ might seem generous, it paid off a year later, when John’s loyalty saw him almost killed while protecting the older man.

  Bayeh was on the Darlinghurst Road strip, on his own, and was being harassed by two men. John, then a month shy of his sixteenth birthday, came to his rescue and received life-threatening stab wounds as a result. It was this near-death experience that set John on a path that today sees him hailed as the latest King of the Cross.

  Ibrahim recalls the incident like this: ‘Two men were harassing him (Bill Bayeh) and I sort of came to his rescue. I hit one man so he couldn’t do any more damage, then broke up the other two who were still fighting. The guy that I was helping ran off. I had this other guy pinned up against the wall. I didn’t want to hit him because it would have been too easy, and I think he just acted out of reflex. He had a kitchen knife wrapped up in newspaper behind his back, and suddenly he just stuck me with the knife.’

  Though it left him with a punctured lung and hundreds of stitches, the stabbing was the making of John Ibrahim. He spent six months in hospital, but when he came out he was suddenly a player.

  ‘Getting stabbed certainly changed things … the person I’d helped (Bayeh) gave me opportunities. People liked having me around, they knew I’d always be there for them. They figured I had brains.’

  Describing himself as a ‘kept man’, he said he and his friends were soon reaping the benefits of being ‘in’ with the Kings Cross criminal underworld.

  ‘Wherever we went – in the coffee shops, the clubs, the discos – we’d get everything we wanted because of our association with certain people. At sixteen that was a big thrill.’

  But over the next three years John began to see that being a gofer for the Cross crooks wasn’t what he wanted for himself.

  ‘If someone said, “Look, we’ll be there for you – you can count us,” that was good enough for me. But I came to know that it was all make-believe; that if the time and politics didn’t suit them, they wouldn’t be there, no matter what favours you’d done for them. I was getting burnt by all the conniving and lies and it started chipping away at me, a little bit at a time. I be
gan to think, “This is ridiculous. These people aren’t so magic. They’re thugs and they’re using me as their bat, that’s all”.’

  True to John’s reputation for foresight, he began to realise that life as Bill Bayeh’s bodyguard wasn’t going to bring him the success he yearned for. Bayeh was an illiterate, violent man who, despite being the head of a large drug syndicate, was eventually caught ‘bagging’ his own drug deals. John knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and started eyeing off his own piece of the pie.

  He got his security licence, created a company and made nice with a Surfer’s Paradise nightclub owner. ‘I liked him because he was his own man, a person I could learn from. On a holiday up at Surfers we looked him up and, after sorting out a blue outside his club, we got to talking. I suggested opening a nightclub in the Cross. He’d always wanted to but he was cautious because he didn’t know the right people. I did, so we decided to go into partnership.’

  At the age of nineteen, John borrowed $70,000 from a friend and bought a stake in a nightclub on Earl Place, in one of the seedy side alleys off the ‘Darlo’ strip. It was called Tunnel Cabaret. John signed onto the books in mid-1990, a month before his twentieth birthday, and is unofficially recognised as the joint’s owner even today, despite removing himself from the club’s books in 2001.

  That club, which has since changed name three times – to Silva, EP1 and finally Dragonfly – remains the headquarters of the John Ibrahim clique, and on any given Saturday you can find John on the door or inside, mixing with his current crop of bad boys.

  Some of the ‘boys’ have been by his side since the early days. Semi Pouvalu Ngata – better known as Tongan Sam, Uncle Sam or Sam the Taxman – has been the Ibrahim family’s minder-in-chief for the better part of two decades. One of the most feared men in the Cross, Tongan Sam is known for his gangster look. He’s not hard to pick – although only a fool would pick him. Men like Tongan Sam pre-date metric measure: he’s a ‘six-foot four’ islander with a long black mullet and wears a black trench coat that makes people nervous. The close relationship between Tongan Sam and the Ibrahims is such that his son, Nimilote ‘Nim’ Ngata, has even begun to work for the family, as an apprentice standover man and bodyguard. Job security in a security job – all in the family.

  Other well-known Ibrahim family hangers-on include Mehmet ‘Turkish Mick’ Gulasi; ‘Big Fadi’ Khalifeh; the current licensee and part-owner of Dragonfly, David Auld; David ‘Samoan Dave’ Lima; Alen Sarkis. And, of course, the photogenic sons of the deceased colourful Sydney identity George Freeman, David and Adam.

  All can be seen at Dragonfly. Anyone wanting to speak to Ibrahim has to walk past at least one of these men. The club has been shut down on occasion since he became boss, and some new plaster and paint has disguised the night in 1999 when the club was sprayed with bullets.

  In 2001, following a series of well-publicised raids, police applied to have the club shut down, alleging it was part of a well-organised drug trade in the Cross.

  The people on the club’s books at the time challenged the action and the closure application was thrown out of court, the drug dealing allegations never proven.

  TWO men who haunt the back corners of Dragonfly, ‘Samoan Dave’ Lima and Alen Sarkis, have been key players in a new group linked to the Ibrahim brothers. This is the crime gang Notorious, which became a notorious crime gang after being just a little infamous.

  Formed by the youngest Ibrahim brother Mick in 2007, the gang was originally a street gang known as the Notorious Scorpions. When Michael was jailed over the manslaughter of the brother of an Australian comedian and actor, George (Fat Pizza) Nassour, the group morphed into a well-organised band of crooks resembling a bikie gang with an image consultant.

  With Sarkis, a former drag racer and chicken shop owner, as the putative ‘President’ and Lima as the sergeant-at-arms, the group began to push and shove to justify its name. It finally hit the police radar in mid-2008 during raids on city nightclubs linked with the Ibrahims.

  Then, in mid-2008, residents of a quiet, affluent estate on Sydney’s North Shore were woken by a bomb going off. The bomb exploded under a late model black Jeep Cherokee owned by Sarkis, who had been living at the Lane Cove North Estate.

  While the bomb didn’t do much damage, it threw the spotlight on the gang, and marked the beginning of a six-month period of drive-by shootings and violence. Houses were shot at, young men were gunned down in dark places. It had taken time and effort but Notorious was now truly notorious, a name muttered among crooks and cops alike. Of course, the gang members immediately said they didn’t like it.

  In March 2009 Sarkis spoke to the Sydney newspapers to correct what he said were a series of misapprehensions.

  ‘We don’t want to be portrayed to the public as we’ve been. We want to be acknowledged and respected as a motorcycle club, not as gangsters. We’re a group of likeminded friends that formed as a motorcycle club not to be dictated to by the other clubs – that’s all we are,’ he said.

  He said the frustrations of police and other motorcycle clubs about Notorious were simply because the club represented the ‘new age’ of bikies.

  ‘Australia has been used to the clubs that have been around for a while and the appearance of a new club has maybe been taken as a threat to them.’ The only threat Notorious posed, Sarkis said, was to the fashion sense of the traditional bikie clubs.

  ‘We ride bikes but we dress well, we shave and we train. If that’s a problem, I apologise. If you want us all to be overweight and bearded – sorry, it’s not going to happen.’

  Since that meeting, and perhaps as a result of the New South Wales police’s crackdown on the outlaw clubs, Notorious has evaporated, with not a single sighting of their ‘colours’, even on a Vespa in Paddington. Samoan Dave is still an important part of the Ibrahim family inner circle of guards but Sarkis has all but vanished.

  Well before Notorious, the Ibrahim clan had a much bigger and meaner gang on their side – the Nomads Motorcycle Club. The second biggest outlaw club in New South Wales, with more than 200 members across nine chapters, the Nomads were for a long time a powerful force in the Cross, and it was only a matter of time before they either clashed with the Ibrahims or brought them into the fold. History shows it was the latter.

  In mid-1997 a secret police operation pounced on Sam Ibrahim and three members of the Nomads – the national president Greg Craig, his brother, and Scott Orrock, national sergeant-at-arms.

  Only days before, on Wednesday 9 July, Greg Craig handed control of the Nomads’ Parramatta chapter to Ibrahim.

  It was a key moment in the evolution of both the Ibrahim crew and the outlaw clubs. For the Ibrahims, it meant they could tap into a powerful national biker organisation; for the clubs, it was the beginning of an ethnic influx of Lebanese, Turkish, Egyptian, Iraqi and Islander men. An experiment in multiculturalism that many of the ‘establishment’ bikies would later say they regretted. It is the same with many Gentlemen’s Clubs.

  Sam took over the chapter and the Granville clubhouse soon became not only an ethnic melting pot, but a rogue’s gallery of men who have since become some of the most dangerous in Sydney.

  A Sydney Morning Herald article by literary figure Malcolm Knox and Dylan Welch quoted a person who was part of the Auburn scene in the late 1990s and had been involved with the Parramatta Nomads:

  ‘The way Sam ran it was: “Here are your colours, I’m your power base now, you’ve got the whole club behind you. Do what you want – you’ve got no one to answer to.” Everyone joined. To our boys, the bikies were so up high in the crime world that if you were one of them, it’s like you were so powerful that you were untouchable.’

  The chapter quickly grew to become one of the most feared outfits in Sydney, and ‘Sam’ Ibrahim was the unquestioned chief of what police repeatedly alleged in court was an organised crime outfit.

  Here, in the real world outside the social pages, ‘Sam’ was not playing the media-frie
ndly game. He was, in fact, proving a headache for smooth-talking John because of his long involvement with the outlaw motorcycle club and his reputation as a violent standover man with a hair-trigger temper. If not a hair-trigger, full stop. Bikers were always big on guns.

  The Nomads went to war with the Rebels – Sam even went so far as to challenge Rebels national president Alessio ‘Alex’ Vella to a ‘fight to the death’ – and feuded constantly with Mahmoud ‘Mick’ Hawi’s Comanchero City Crew.

  But in the end it was an internal feud, between members of the Newcastle and Parramatta chapters, which crippled the club.

  In September 2004 a group of Sydney Nomads travelled to Newcastle and attacked a group of senior Newcastle members, believing their colleagues were ‘not properly catering for the financial needs’ of a jailed member and his family.

  Two men, Newcastle sergeant-at-arms Dale Campton and member Mark Chrystie, were bashed and shot in both kneecaps. This seemed unnecessarily robust, even by western suburbs standards. Sam Ibrahim, Orrock and Sydney West chapter boss Paul Griffin were charged over the double shooting two years later, when Campton agreed to give evidence. All three were eventually found not guilty by a jury in late 2008, but it meant that Sam, placed on remand in December 2006, was off the streets for almost two years.

  In April 2007, only a few months after Sam’s departure to jail, a van was driven through a roller door of the Parramatta chapter’s clubhouse and torched. The fire destroyed several motorcycles and caused extensive damage to the building. The Nomads hierarchy, perhaps tired of the continual warring, disbanded the chapter and its members dispersed, filling the ranks of the Bandidos, the Rebels, other Nomad chapters … and, for a small group of hardcore Ibrahim supporters, the newly formed gang, soon to be Notorious.

  SOME dirt sticks even to Teflon. One of the reasons John Ibrahim has not been able to whitewash his past the way he would have liked is the voluminous contents of the Wood Royal Commission in the mid-1990s.

  More specifically, a single sentence has haunted Ibrahim since his two days in the witness box at the age of 25.