Underbelly Page 4

  Both Sam and John were called to give evidence before the Commission and John, with his trademark insouciance, seemed almost to enjoy being grilled by counsel assisting the commission, John Agius, QC, even when the prominent prosecutor dropped this bombshell: ‘Well, you’re the new lifeblood of the drug industry at Kings Cross, aren’t you?’

  With a smirk, Ibrahim replied: ‘So it would seem, but no, I’m not.’ But what he perhaps did not realise then was that Agius had placed on the record the central allegation that has dogged John and his brothers ever since: that they were – and remain – involved in the illicit drug trade.

  A quick scan of newspaper articles reveals Agius’s sentence has been referred to or quoted more than 40 times since, and has become the reflex allegation against the nightclub baron.

  But that sentence wasn’t the only revelation about Ibrahim contained in the pages of the Commission’s transcripts, and his evidence gave an insight into his business life and his falling out with the Bayeh brothers.

  Early in his examination of Ibrahim, Agius asked him whether the Tunnel nightclub had a bank account.

  ‘We had one until four months ago,’ John replied.

  Q. What happened?

  A. We were in the process of renewing the lease and we didn’t know we were going to be there. The chances of renewing the lease weren’t very good at the time, so we’d stopped …

  Q. With which bank was the account?

  A. Kings Cross State Bank.

  Q. What was the name of the account?

  A. Tunnel Cabaret.

  Q. So you closed that account, did you, four or five months ago?

  A. Could be longer.

  Q. Since then you’ve not operated any bank account for the Tunnel Cabaret?

  A. No, sir.

  Q. Or for any business that’s conducted there?

  A. No.

  Q. It’s run as an entirely cash business for those last four, five or more months?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Is there any drug dealing going on there?

  A. No, sir.

  Q. Definitely not?

  A. Never.

  Q. Do you have trouble keeping the drug dealers out of the Tunnel?

  A. Six years ago we had a bit of trouble, but there’s been no drug dealers, there’s been no mention of drugs in the place.

  Q. How are you able to keep them out?

  A. Well, by monitoring who they are and just not allowing them into the club.

  The examination then turned to a tape recording of a telephone conversation between ‘supergrass’ cop Trevor Haken and Bill Bayeh, in which Bayeh was recorded saying he wanted Sam Ibrahim, associate Russell Townsend and a man called ‘John’ out of the Cross.

  Q. What comment do you have to make about what Mr Bayeh was saying in those two pieces of tape? Did you suspect that he was referring to you when he spoke of Sam Abraham and John?

  A. He’s definitely referring to my brother, but I have no idea what Bill was talking about. I’m not sure that Bill has an idea what he’s talking about half the time.

  Q. Well, he seemed to be quite sure that Russell – which we interpret as Russell Townsend – and Sam Abraham and someone called John had lots of people working on the streets in Kings Cross in the context of selling drugs. Have you had any such involvement?

  A. No, sir, I haven’t.

  Q. Definitely not?

  A. Never have.

  Ibrahim treated the entire process derisively, and when asked by Agius what his relationship was like with Bill Bayeh, he was blunt. ‘After hearing that tape conversation, not very good,’ he said. He did not shrink from the persistent questioning, and when asked if he found the recent performance of a police officer forced to discuss corrupt activity ‘amusing’, John said: ‘I find the whole thing very amusing, to be honest with you, sir.’

  Q. What do you find amusing?

  A. That this is all – the way it is unfolding, it is just very amusing to me.

  Q. What aspect of it is amusing to you?

  A. Well, the police are finally sort of seeing how it is for your friends to dob on you, which they’ve been doing for years, managing to get friends to dob on each other and set each other up. Exactly the same thing is happening to them.

  In People of the Cross, John described the effects of the Commission in another way. ‘Four years ago about six or seven people used to organise everything that happened in the Cross. They were always against each other but they were making so much money then that they controlled what opened, what closed, who worked, who sold the drugs. If you didn’t go along with it, these people had the muscle, and the know-how, to make your business life hell. Unless you were one of them, there’d be nothing you could do about it.

  ‘In the last three years, things have changed. The organisation element has gone. You can now actually ring up a policeman, tell him what the problem is and count on him to help you. Before, that policeman would probably know the person you’ve got the problem with and it would cause you even more trouble.’

  JOHN Ibrahim is now one of the most instantly recognisable faces at the Cross.

  On any given Saturday night he can be found standing outside Porky’s with Frank ‘Ashtray’ Amante and the usual muscled strip-club touts. If not there, then on the door at his latest and greatest nightclub, the Piano Room, schmoozing with the A-listers. Or, sometimes, he’ll be deep in conversation in a corner of Dragonfly, where it all began.

  With Tongan Sam, Turkish Mick or Big Fadi in tow, John will walk the Golden Mile like a latter day mafia don, shaking hands, greeting people and checking on his businesses. Most Cross identities are loathe to talk about the sawn-off ‘King of the Cross’ but if pressed will simply say he’s a ‘well-respected businessman’.

  At the time of writing, he was poised to be even better known, following his portrayal in the third of the drama series Underbelly.

  When it was first announced that the show would portray crime and corruption in King’s Cross, John was offered a consultant role but, at least officially, he declined. The ubiquitous lawyer Stephen Alexander was later quoted as saying the third series might present certain difficulties regarding his client’s interests and activities.

  ‘It’s a lot easier to make movies or documentaries with people that have passed on,’ observed Alexander, showing a remarkable grasp of the obvious. ‘It’s a free country and people are entitled to do what they do, but I hope they have their facts right.’

  You may, Stephen. But does John?

  3

  THE KILLING OF DANNY K

  The dead man’s colleagues did not even pretend to cry – in fact, they threw a party at a Darlinghurst night club …

  IT was the underworld’s version of the Last Supper. But instead of one Judas there were four – three of them armed.

  The treachery of those he trusted was about the only Biblical overtone in the short life and brutal death of standover man and would-be drug overlord, Danny Karam.

  Karam, 36, died in a hail of sixteen bullets from three guns fired by his most trusted lieutenants in a street in inner-city Surry Hills on 13 December 1998. It was a calculating and cold-blooded hit, even by gangster standards.

  Minutes before Karam got the bad news, one of the accused men made him a cup of coffee and chatted with him, knowing his colleagues were set to murder him as soon as he went outside. Lucky it wasn’t instant coffee, or they might have missed their chance to give Danny a wake-up shot that would take his head off.

  But they didn’t miss. Four men were linked to the murder but one fled to Lebanon and did not stand trial with the other three. One of those charged had to be brought to court each day from jail where he was already serving life for a double murder.

  Danny Karam’s twisted dreams – and a few vital organs – were blown away by gunmen in his own image, whose callousness he encouraged and exploited. Society might well be a better place with Karam dead – and his killers being locked up for most of their adult li
ves.

  All of Karam’s ‘working’ life in Sydney’s drug scene had been aimed at creating a reputation for toughness and setting him up to move on to bigger and better criminal rackets. Now, at a pivotal moment in his career, he was handed a redundancy package by those who apparently nursed similar ambitions. Another example of the great cycle of criminal life.

  It was not a time for genuine grieving. The deaths of criminals rarely are, apart from the tears of a few close family members. The public is glad that one less dangerous sociopath is off the streets. The dead man’s colleagues did not even pretend to cry – in fact, they threw a party at a Darlinghurst night club called Rogues because Karam’s exit put a new patch of drug-selling turf up for grabs.

  ‘There was a saying at the time,’ recalls self-confessed corrupt cop Trevor Haken, ‘that if people really knew what happened on the streets of Kings Cross, they’d surround the place with barbed wire and flatten it with a nuclear device.’

  Karam was a violent, unpredictable package of potential mayhem and heroin addiction who aligned himself to Kings Cross drug king Billy Bayeh in the expectation of taking over the throne if the opportunity arose. Bayeh used Karam as a human attack dog to savage all the opposition drug sellers on the streets.

  Karam told the Royal Commission that he worked for Bayeh and Sam Ibrahim, brother of John, providing protection, violent if necessary, to enable their drug dealing to continue without disruption. It was lucrative. Karam said he made as much as $10,000 a week in 1995, with a regular $5000 a week from Billie Bayeh to run rival drug dealers out of the area.

  Predictably enough, Karam’s childhood and adolescence had been brutal and dislocated in war-torn Lebanon, where he left school aged eleven. He claimed to have been a commando during Lebanon’s civil war. Most of his adult life had been on a battlefield or in jail.

  In Australia, he began his criminal career in the mid-1980s by bashing heroin pushers and stealing their narcotics to feed his own $1000 a day habit. He told the Commission his raging temper was fuelled by addiction to muscle-building steroids.

  Fiercely ambitious, Karam eventually fell out with both Bayeh and Ibrahim and joined a criminal group of other single-minded, ambitious young men who thought the answer to every problem was violence piled on violence. They were involved in at least four murders and sixteen shootings. Understandably, Karam was feared and hated for the measures he took to quash opposition and there were attempts at retaliation.

  Haken says in his biography Sympathy for the Devil that Karam was typical of the hoodlums who sought success at the Cross. ‘It was important to be tough in the Cross,’ he says. ‘Those with bravado seemed to get away with a lot, but it was a dangerous game. Danny Karam was a typical creature. His first convictions were in 1985 and included heroin use, theft and possessing an unlicensed pistol.

  ‘In jail he built up a strong physique through weight-training and developed the jailhouse attitude that he used to his advantage when he returned to the streets. His record reflects this lifestyle with convictions for serious assault, robbery and the possession of drugs.’

  It was almost inevitable that Karam would die violently and young. In fact, he was lucky not to be killed sooner. In 1993 a gunman arrived at the drug dealer’s suburban house at Lugarno on an assassination mission funded by a cocaine and heroin supplier, a former Karam employer. It all went tragically wrong. The shooter was looking for Karam but murdered an innocent neighbour, Leslie Betcher, by mistake.

  Karam’s endeavours to become a gang leader were not matched by his people skills and his easily-triggered temper.

  His own ‘crew’, known as Danny’s Boys or DK’s Boys, said he was self-centred, mean, abusive, greedy and violent. This was why they killed him, they said.

  The three men charged were Michael Kanaan, 26, Rabeeh Mawas, 25, and Wassim El-Assaad, 25. They all pleaded not guilty to the murder of Karam 13 December 1998. Police said the fourth man in the plot, Charlie Gea Gea, bolted to Lebanon to escape prosecution.

  Karam was shot in his car after leaving the Surry Hills apartment the gang used as a safe house. The impact of sixteen bullets fired from high-powered guns left his body mangled and spread over the front seat.

  The details of what happened came from another of DK’s Boys, Alan Rossini, who was given immunity from prosecution for revealing the events leading up to the hit.

  He said that from 1997 until his murder, Karam’s regular routine was to collect ‘rent’ payments on Sundays from drug distributors for the right to sell cocaine on the streets of Kings Cross. Payments ranged from $4000 to $28,000 a week. The money was collected by Rossini and Kanaan but they saw very little of the cash they were gathering. It all went to Karam, they claimed.

  Frustrated by Karam’s greed and refusal to share the huge profits he was making and angry at what they claimed was the occasional $100 he threw them as wages, his ‘boys’ became murderous.

  ‘Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he’d give it back,’ Rossini alleged, giving an insight into the sophisticated distribution network that put cocaine on the streets.

  ‘Rent’ payments depended on the number of sellers involved. ‘If you wanted to have four (drug) runners on the street it was $4000 a week rent,’ Rossini told the Supreme Court.

  Rossini said he and Kanaan helped put cocaine into capsules and took it to distributors at the Cross who passed it to drug runners. ‘They put it in their mouths and walked around the streets of Kings Cross selling it,’ he explained.

  The cash would be passed back to Rossini and Kanaan to give to Karam.

  ‘We did not get any of that money. Sometimes Danny gave us $100 a week,’ he said.

  There were times when Karam would become violent because the rent was too low. He would threaten to kill anyone who displeased him. And he used the three men as largely unpaid personal servants who grew marijuana and packaged cocaine to be sold to distributors as well as collecting money from drug runners.

  When Karam decided to stay home, his men would also go out to buy his food, get videos, do his laundry and go training with him. At least, this was the picture they painted at trial. As everyone knows, the survivors get to tell the story.

  Rossini told the Supreme Court that Karam had also borrowed $10,000 from Kanaan to set up a computer shop to launder money and had never repaid the loan. Kanaan said he had borrowed the money from his parents and that Karam’s disrespect and failure to pay caused great friction in the group.

  ‘Kanaan was upset about being used. And told me “after all the work we’ve done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it”,’ Rossini said.

  The idea of killing Karam had been discussed by the three accused men and Charlie Gea Gea for around nine months before the actual shooting. ‘It was almost every day,’ Rossini said.

  A failed attempt to give poisoned heroin to Karam, so he might kill himself with a lethal injection while feeding his habit, convinced the trio that shooting him was the only sure way to nail their tyrant.

  ‘I remember them (the shooters) talking about where they would stand when they shot (at him),’ Rossini said.

  One man, he thought it was Kanaan, emphasised that the men should stand at an angle so they would not get caught in cross fire.

  The scenario suggested Kanaan, Mawas and Gea Gea murdered Karam in his four-wheel drive after being tipped off by El Assaad that the standover man had left the apartment.

  Rossini conceded in the Supreme Court that he could have alerted Karam to the murder plot against him and stopped him leaving the unit.

  Barrister (for Kanaan): You never warned him: ‘I think there’s a plot to kill you Danny?’

  Rossini: There’s no way I could have done that. No.

  Barrister: Why didn’t you warn him that he was about to get ambushed?

  Rossini: I was concerned for my own safety. I wasn’t game enough to tell him what was happening.

  Rossini said that although he was not involved wi
th the murder plan he did not disagree with it.

  Judge James Wood, co-incidentally the same man who heard Karam’s original revelations when he chaired the Wood Royal Commission six years earlier, called Karam’s murder cold-blooded and motivated by greed.

  ‘The principal motive (of) Michael Kanaan, I am satisfied, was to acquire an entrenched position for his subgroup in the trade of narcotics and to increase their standing within that section of the criminal milieu,’ he said.

  Judge Wood sentenced Kanaan to life and the other shooter, Mawas, to 25 years with a non-parole period of nineteen years.

  El Assad, who made the crucial telephone call to alert the killers, was given 24 years, with eighteen years non-parole.

  Kanaan was already serving two life sentences for murdering former National Rugby League players, 23-year-old Adam Wright and 24-year-old Michael Hurle, in a drive-by shooting as the two men stood outside a hotel in the inner-city suburb of Five Dock on 17 July 1998.

  When her son’s third life sentence was read out by Judge Wood, Kanaan’s mother made a lengthy outburst from the public gallery, shouting her son’s innocence. ‘I want to be beside you,’ she called as she was led from the court room. ‘God be with you. He will prove you innocent one day.’

  Kanaan called back: ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’ He was more expansive in addressing Judge Wood saying: ‘Your Honour, I didn’t kill those footballers and I didn’t kill Danny Karam.’

  Putting murderers in jail was a triumph but a bonus was the overflow of evidence collected in the Karam killing. The killers and their victim were linked to a renegade crime gang inflicting death and destruction at random to try and muscle in on Sydney’s lucrative drug dealing.

  The gang was suspected of sixteen shootings and four murders, including that of an innocent schoolboy. Ballistic experts linked the sixteen bullets taken from Karam’s body to a gun found at the scene where a policeman, Chris Patrech, had been wounded.

  They were also linked to a notorious drive-by shooting of Lakemba Police Station in November 1988.