The Underworld Podcast - Australia's Brutal Gang Families Waging War in Sydney

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Sydney has long been Australia’s “Sin City”, a pot of gold for crooks with the right connections and friends in the police. But over the past two years an altogether more deadly war has broken out for control of the city’s streets, pitting two Lebanese families and so-called “Postcode Gangs” in a feud that has shocked the nation. And at the top of it all is a fearsome biker-in-exile who has risen beyond even the Italian mob. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric. Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamava Theatre.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Tariq Zahed is not a guide to be messed with. A man mounting, built like a brick outhouse, and on remand for a 2014 murder, Zahed is a massive player in the Comancheiro, Australia's most powerful bike again, and he operates out of Sydney, the nation's most popular city. A slick dresser, the media has taken to calling him the Balenciaga bikey, but he's a violent thug keen to cause mayhem wherever he goes, and despite

being clever enough to keep his fingers off most high-profile crimes, cops are close to charging Tarrick for that 2014 hit. Contract hits to nothing new in Sydney's ruling gang war, controlled from afar by muscle-bound bikies, patrolled on the city's streets by two families of Middle Eastern origin, and below them trigger-happy street gangs separated by their postal codes. It's a strict hierarchy, populated by Islamistellants and drug adult kids, ready to do anything to rise the ranks. Spiratic violence has risen since a fatal 2009 airport brawl. Cops are on notice. Politicians are feeling the heat, but 2022 will be the year that Sydney's criminal vendettors will explode into a full-blown war.

Tarrick and his gangster brother Omar are full to have bounties on their heads. Cops ex-sold Tarik 500 miles south-western Melbourne, but on May 22, both brothers head back to Sydney and on the 10th at 8pm, they're leaving the body fit gym in Open, one of Sydney's western suburbs that's a hotbed of traphouses and street fights when two gunmen screeched to a beside the gym lobby and open fire with modified handguns, spraying bullets into the bodies of both men. 20 of them hit in total. Omar, 39, hits the white towel floor, blood pouring everywhere, fatally wounded.

40-year-old Tarrick takes 10 bullets, one of which crashes directly into his right eye, but somehow he survives. The gunman flee, ditching and torching their car in a nearby district before disappearing into the night. Sources will point the finger at two inexperienced youngsters. Gang hopefuls, who are such bad shots, they almost kill each other in the hail of lead. But this is no ordinary gangland shooting.

It's the opening salvo in a terrifying new era of gang violence. It will cost innocent lives, annihilate an entire family, and lead to one of the biggest crackdowns in Australian police history. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hey guys, happy New Year. Season's greetings to the show that gets down under the skin of global organized crime, digging through more layers than a blooming onion. I'm your host, Sean Williams, a journalist in London.

My puns are going to get no better in 2023. And I'm joined by my colleague Danny Gold in New York City. Feeling hopeful in a new year, mate, got any resolutions? You're doing dry January or Vigannuary or maybe ketamine annuary? I'm not doing any of those things. I've elected this year to not change at all. want, you know, it's everyone else who has to change around me. Well, I continue just doing the same dumb shit.

So that's kind of, that's my feelings right now. Okay. It's like a kneel on that year. So we've actually got merch going up now. So you guys can get a look at that at our website. We're going to put it up on the socials, IG, Twitter, all that kind of stuff, which is pretty exciting. And we've got some other stuff as well, right?

Yeah, I mean, the merch we had taken a break for a couple months. I know a bunch of you guys had asked me where the t-shirts and the hoodies and stuff or, and the hats. But we get to switch all that. So that's coming up. And then as always, patreon.com slash end of world podcast to do bonuses,

other fun stuff. And you can also do it directly through iTunes or the podcast app if that's how you listen to podcasts. Yeah. And first of all,

apologies if I sound a bit gravely. I'm not actually a cool, masculine person. I'm just, I've got a cold. Don't worry. You don't sound like that. We'll try and stumble through this.

I hope it sounds all right. But yeah, this was your shout to look into this subject. and it's been one of the most interesting episodes I've researched in a fair while and a lot of that stuff is down to the fact that Aussie crime journalists are actually

among the best I've come across. I mean, there's so much information out there, some really detailed stuff about the key players that we're going to highlight in the show today. Yeah, you know, I kept seeing a lot of wild stories on it that had been getting out there and hearing about this battle between these families. I think some fans might have messaged me

and then there's that video of the dude getting stabbed in prison that is pretty wild. But yeah, you know, I've actually, I've never been to Australia or done any reporting there. I think you have you? You have, right? Well, I haven't been there, but I'm about to move to New Zealand, so I guess it's just a matter of time at this point.

Yes, but you did do reporting in New Zealand, right? Didn't you meet with some of those bikers and gangsters over there? Oh, yeah, yeah, they were cool guys. Well, cool in some senses. I'll be picking some of that back up in a couple months too, so that'll be pretty cool to do. I hate to go too hard on a Murdoch outlet, but there is this four-part mini-doc series

at the Daily Telegraph. That's the Australian one called The War that I watch for this show. And if you're looking for more info afterwards, I mean, we've got the reading list that all the bonus subscribers get. But I recommend getting on that too. It'll cost you a couple quid for the subscription, but you should pay for journalism anyway, so that's a win-win. A money's no object for me, of course.

Research in this is high-quality content, but the war in question, it's largely between these two families that I mentioned before, right? The Hamzies and the Alamedeens. And like I mentioned in the opening tale, it's just gone insane in the past 18 months or so. So a quick overview, right?

Sydney's gang scene is governed from the top by powerful biker gangs, right? At the top of those sits the Comancheiro. According to most sources, they've even toppled the Andrangetta's procties in the city, which is quite something. Yeah, I mean, that's wild to go after the international sort of mafia. So I know mafia usually means Sicily, but international clans like Andrangetta and take over as a biker gang, right? We don't typically think of those guys as super well organized and super powerful.

But, you know, I knew they were active there. But I thought these groups, these families were like international Lebanese clans like in Berlin that were at the top. I didn't realize the bikers were above them. Yeah, I mean, I definitely want to get more into the bikies as we go into 2023 because they're really interesting. I would imagine it has a lot to do with the shifting sands of like which drugs people are taking. A lot of its stuff going from the Golden Triangle. so a lot of bikies hanging out in Patire and Bangkok and getting stuff from there.

But yeah, I mean, for more stuff on those guys, check out the show from 2020 about the Melbourne gang wars of the 90s. Or maybe we did a show about Melbourne in the 90s ourselves. I don't know, we've done like a million of these now. But yeah, I won't go into too many details on the Comancheiro and the other biker outfits in Australia like the Hells Angels.

We'll do that later on. But they sit above the Hamzies and the Alamedeans who've risen from street slings, and bar brawlers to become multi-millionaire drug empires. And below them is this patchwork of so-called postcode gangs. That's zip codes for your Americans, which are often populated by poor indigenous or ethnic Pacific Island kids who've been frozen out of Sydney Society for decades.

And yeah, that's it. Roll the outro down. Yeah, I mean, basically, when you say postcode gangs, those are like your typical street crews. Yeah, this is stuff that they've been like openly described as blood and crypt kind of street gang. gang adjacent. So yeah, we'll get into that a little bit later on. It's pretty interesting, but I think the kind of vendetta between the two families is what I want to get into most in

this show because it's just crazy. I mean, the characters involved. Well, you're going to find out anyway. So let's go a little bit deeper, right? First off, a quick introduction to the great city of Sydney itself, home to around five and a half million people, capital, and by far the biggest city in Australia's New South Wales State, which, sorry Ozzie, so you're going to get some stuff you already know here. It's in the southeast corner of the country on the coast of the Tasman Sea between Oz and New Zealand. And it's home to Australia's oldest street, George Street, which, I don't know, I'm skeptical about that. And true to all self-respecting Australian locations, it has its own special breed of deadly animal, which is the Sydney Funnel Web spider,

which apparently can kill a human in 15 minutes. Wait, so just in the city, there's a deadly spider like that like in the yeah like I be Jesus I mean fucking Australia man everything there is just trying to kill you

just got to isn't it that scene in like arachnophobia where there was some hideous thing living underneath the toilet seat

that killed someone that movie scarred me for I think it was the shower that movie scared me scarred me for life

like I was scared spiders for a while I saw that movie too young oh yeah it's horrible just kill it all fire Sydney

Sydney has over 100 beaches so that's pretty cool and although those two probably crawling with like poisonous jellyfish or great whites or whatever. One of the beaches is called Woolamulu, which I think kind of, you know, that evens it out. Yeah, definitely.

But the main thing for this show is that Sydney is really rich. Its residents have an average salary around 70,000 US dollars, but it's kept well away from these sprawling suburbs, which are gripped by poverty and drug use, the vast majority of which are located in the western and southwestern districts. Yeah, that's pretty wild. That's 70,000 US dollars numbers. insane, man, especially for a big city. That's, that's, uh, I do remember like when I was backpacking in another life, like pre-instagram

around Southeast Asia, a lot of the kids there were either headed to or coming from Australia because the minimum wage was so high. I think it was even like, I mean, I haven't fact just checked this at all, but I think it was like $25 back then, which is insane. So people would go there for six months, save up money and then go travel or run out of money and go there. But, um, yeah, is there any reasoning for that? You want to get into global economics?

I mean, no, actually, I don't. Keep it going on. Never mind. Keep it. Keep it moving. Yeah, I'll keep it down to the fact. And, yeah, I mean, Osses have always known Sydney as a place of high crime, right?

In fact, its nickname from way back in the 1920s was Sin City. And I'll avoid making any references to an island full of convicts or anything like that from this point on. Yeah, that's just low hanging through. But I think we do need to find a way to work in some, you know, the Simpsons references. because that's just one of the greatest episodes of all time. All right, all right, you win. I see you've played knifie spoonie before. Oh, my God, yeah, that's a classic.

Yeah. So this is Sydney, guys. So now you know everything you need to know about Sydney. You're going to be the coolest guy in the pub. And you know roughly how its gang scene works. So now down to the players. And you'll soon hear how these guys are not your average hoodlums. I've already mentioned Tarik and Armoursarhead, big guys in the Comancheiro,

and they're under the influence of a long time and very dangerous criminal named Mark Buddle. More on him later, but remember the name. He's basically the king of this underworld. But I want to focus first on that deadly feud between the Hamzis and the Alamedeans, and we're going to kick off with the Hamzi family patriarch Bassam Hamzi. Basam is the son of Lebanese immigrants, who moved to Australia during their country's civil war in 1970s, before having him in 1979.

His father Khalil is actually an underworld figure himself and he gets convicted on drug-related charges in the 90s, but his son is just going to outstrip that big time. And very soon too. Bassam becomes a drug addict from an early age and he's just 19 years old when, at a nightclub on one of Sydney's main strips, he shoots dead an 18-year-old boy.

Authority sentenced Bassam to 21 years for murder, but he's only just beginning. inside he converts to radical Islam and founds a gang, Brothers for Life or B4L, that begins running drugs all around Sydney. This is really interesting because it's a drug-dealing street gang that is bonded by radical religious belief, and it rises from the ashes of another gang called the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is largely populated by men of Middle Eastern descent and brazen enough to get stuck into street fights with Sydney's ultraviolet bikers.

That's just the name, right? It's not actually related to the actual Muslim Brotherhood movement. No, no, they're not actually linked to the Qataris. Well, I wouldn't want to make any assumptions there. But no, these are just a bunch of guys, a lot of them from Lebanon, and they get deep into Islamism. It's pretty crazy. So these guys, like, yeah, I've never really heard of a gang like this in this context.

Well, a lot of those guys will do that and then convert, right? That's like the story of like some really prominent jihadis. Yeah. I remember there was this documentary. maybe like 10 or 15 years ago. I think it was about, I don't know if it was Sydney or Melbourne, but it was just the Australian street crew.

I think it was like my brother's keepers or something. They were like surfers, and they weren't sure if they were gang or not, but they were always involved in like shootings and drug dealing. And it kind of, it starts about them, but then it ends up being, there was like these anti,

I think it was anti-Muslim or anti-Arab riots. And I'm not sure, I don't remember exactly if they were in Sydney or in Melbourne or whatever, but that old doc really gets into like this sort of clashing that sounds like it was around this time when these street fights were happening between these, these like communities and all that.

I don't know, it was pretty, uh, I'll have to find, find that somewhere and put it on the social media, but there's some stuff that I've got up there from like old newspaper clippins from, I don't know, like 20 years ago, a bit before that. It's really interesting stuff.

So as you'd expect for these kind of religious sellers, they go around, they beat up random LGBT people during Sydney's Mardi Gras Festival. And they also extort people at public events like auctions, other parties, civil occasions like that. Basam himself, he specifically targets young Aboriginal men suffering with drug addiction and introduces them to Wahhabism, which is this deeply Puritan form of Islam that is unofficially, officially the doctrine of the Saudi Arabian state.

I mean, there's a fair bit of mental gymnastics to go from that to murdering people and shipping drugs, but I guess if it works for the Saudis, it can work for Basam. B4L sets up its first branch in the southwesterns. Sydney suburb of Bankstown, which is just a few miles from Oban, that's the place we mentioned before, where Tarrick and Omar are going to end up getting shot over a decade later. And one of Bassam's cousins, and Bassam's got a few cousins, heads up the operation there. Although Bassam, big guy, long beard, thousand yards there, pretty scary, he is always the brains and the head of that snake.

In response to this flourishing gang and others of similar descent New South Wales cops sets up something called the MEOC which is the Middle Eastern organised crime unit and tough up they go on raids and they just try and bust trap houses and other corner stuff going on in the suburbs

but what do the B4L boys do in response they get MEOC tattooed all over their knuckles their necks they hang out in casinos and they just generally swan about giving not a single shit about the cop or any other authorities. A correctional services leader calls Bassam, quote, very bright and very manipulative.

And he gains notoriety representing himself in legal affairs. As this correction guy, quote, he's somebody who is obviously determined not only to beat the system, but to continue committing a crime or having an influence outside the correction system while he's serving a sentence.

So he does all this from prison, yeah? Yeah, whole thing. It's also for sure. Yeah. that would be an understatement. To be fair, like in 2008, Garz discovered that Hamsey has been using a smuggled cell phone to run operations,

making up to 450 calls a day, which is, that's a call every three minutes, and I'm guessing he doesn't have a hands three set. So, I mean, what the actual shit are the prison staff playing out there? Among the stuff, these calls are quarterbacking. There are two kidnappings, torture, and a drive-by. And apparently, the feds only get win

when they catch Hamsey passing this phone between cells, with dental floss on surveillance cameras. Not the surveyor. The dental floss is not on surveillance cameras. They catch him with them. Anyway, they chuck him into solitary, designating the country's one and only, quote, extreme high-risk inmate,

and they add another 22 years to his sentence with no chance of parole until 2035. And that obviously isn't the end of Batham's story. But on March 23, 2009, another deadly feud splutters into life and it will send shockways through the Hamseys and everybody else in Sydney's underworld. That day, members of the Comancheiro and Hells Angels' biker gangs

spot each other at Sydney's airport, and this gigantic brass knuckle brawl erupts. One of the gangsters even dies, and police arrest whole swathes of the Comancheiro leadership in the aftermath. Anything unlike the origins of these Aussie Biker gangs, or should we save that for another episode? Because I'm always really interested in how these groups start up. Yeah, I'm going to do another show further down the line about this.

because there's some crazy stuff there too. But this fight, this deadly fight, it leaves a power vacuum at the top of Australia's most powerful drug gang, the Cominchero. And into it steps Mark Buddle, this muscle-bound, shaven-headed bikey, who at this point has already been involved in several murders, including that of a bank security guard who'd already surrendered to his men.

He's also accused of beating his girlfriend and her sister and threatening to slit their throats. So he's a nasty prick. And when the heat gets too much after a couple murders, he flees, guess where? Yeah, of course, it's Dubai. And he's currently rumored to be living actually in northern Cyprus, that is, Turkish-controlled Cyprus, sitting on several dozen million bucks of bikey drug cash with a new wife who's pregnant. And if you don't know about Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and how all that relates to Australia,

well, I've left a few links on the reading list for you. It's, yeah, it's touchy. Yeah, I mean, I know about what's going on there. I don't know the Australian, like how Australia plays into the conflict there. Well, like the Australians and New Zealanders have an interesting relationship with Turkey because of Anzac Day, which is kind of like a national day for both countries, which is, which commemorates Gallipoli in the war where like thousands of thousands of men were sent to their deaths. So that's something else laying below it, but also there's a huge Greek community in Australia, one of the biggest kind of immigrant community. So, yeah, you can imagine that a divided nation like Cyprus is going to cause a bit of a ruckus. There's a reason that he went to the northern part.

I think there's no extradition there. So, yeah, at the last I saw, actually, there was a story yesterday saying that his partner was pregnant or something. Like, the Australian press just report on this guy every other day. Anyway. How many discounts does USA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount?

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Call it compliance, or call it, Compliance. Get it? Join the 15, thousand companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANTA.com slash com. Budal has bubbled to the top of the Aussie drug tree, and he is quarterbacking things from abroad, and he begins to forge closer ties to another Sydney crime family, the Alamadines.

And like the Hamzies, these guys are Lebanese in background. Actually, the Alam al-Din family was a prominent Druze for dynasty of warlords in like 17th and 18th century Lebanon. under Ottoman rule. I don't know whether the Sydney Alamedeans are direct descendants, but they're definitely similarly violent in their goals. Until 2015, the family operates quietly and doesn't really make that many headlines. But all that changes in 2015 with a crime that shocks Australia and makes global news. On October 2nd that year at around 4.30pm, a 15-year-old Iraqi, Kurdish, Islamist radical named Farhad Jabbar, strolls, past the plane-clothes officer outside the headquarters of the New South Wales Police

in the inner district of Parramatta. He's carrying a 0.38-Smith and Wesson revolver. And moments later, 58-year-old Curtis Cheng, a police accountant of Hong Kong Chinese descent, heads out of the building's front door on his way home from a shift. Jabar shoots Cheng dead and continues firing the gun into the HQ's lobby, aiming at officers responding to the murder. three-armed cops, then shoot Jabbar himself dead. Investigators had seen increased, quote, chatter before the attack, but it's still blindsides them, and there's a twist in the tale. Far from being the act of some lone wolf lunatic,

the guy who supplied the gun to Jabbar, Talal Alamedin, 25-year-old Sion of the Alamedin crime family, and an avowed Islamist radical with ISIS sympathies. In October 2017, Al-Mahdine, pleads guilty to, this is a weird law, but, quote, possessing a thing connected with a terrorist act and supplying a pistol. It's pretty weird. A year later, he's sentenced to 17 years with 13 and a half before parole, and he refused to stand in a dock or renounce any of his batship beliefs. Yeah, you know, it's actually not that, not that rare when it comes to, I want to

correct what we talked about earlier when it comes to these fundamentalist groups being involved in the drug trade. You know, it's big and like, in, um, In North and West Africa, you know, they're involved with the trafficking cocaine and that that whole route up from West Africa into Europe and all that. And obviously, you know, groups in the Middle East have been involved with drug trafficking before and all sorts of other vices. Yeah, Taliban, I guess, as well. Right. And stuff like that. You know, it's not a new thing or it's not something that's that rare.

You know, these groups always seem to find loopholes for selling crack, but never for, like, letting gay people or other religions live in peace with their head still attached to their bodies. Is that woke? I'm not sure what woke is anymore. Maybe, I don't know. Here's the Guardian anyway. Quote, Justice Johnson said Jabbar and Alu radicalized extremist supporters of Islamic State, while Alamedin had at least some level of sympathy

for the fanatical organization. So yeah, the guy is not good. Yeah, no, he doesn't sound too nice. He's a bad man. But it also remembers, I think I talked about this in one of the early episodes, but when I, in Colbani, I think I mentioned the guy who I was with after I left found like a bag of, he said it was Coke and he like tasted it that had been with ISIS guys in Syria. Like they took it from them and he had this like giant plastic bags.

You know what I'm talking about? I've mentioned this to you before, no? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard the story. Yeah. If you look up like ISIS, Colbani cocaine, you'll see the video. So I was with, um, God, I'm forgetting his name, Swiss reporter.

When you're making that search, by the way. Yeah, make sure you're not being monitored. But yeah, I had left, I left like a couple days before and then he has like the best story of all time. And he has this line in it where he's like, you know, I hate to admit it, but I know what it tastes like and I did a little taste, which is also like incredibly foolish to taste the drug right there. Like, I don't know, man. It's wild. But yeah, so they're not, sorry, I'm rambling all the place. But yes, ISIS does cocaine sometimes.

Anyway, keep it moving. Sorry. I mean, you know, if the Nazis did pervertine and meth, then I guess ISIS is probably. getting high as well. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of disappeared down a bit of a rabbit hole researching this attack and and the killing of Curtis Cheng.

And my God, Australia, you've got some moody clerics kicking around. Pretty much all of its grand mufties have said some insane stuff about everything you might expect a religious cellar to be angry about. The guy that did the job from the early 90s to 2007, he'd been convicted of smuggling goods and claiming the Jews cause all wars

denying the Holocaust, saying women in discurs deserve to be sexually assaulted, eat back down on none of it, and there's way more besides that. So, uh, Aussie National Imam's Council, yeah, boys, you've got to clean your house. Yeah, it might be down time to, uh, to crack down a bit. Yeah, not great stuff. So this killing for most Australians is the introduction to the Alamedein family. Before long, other members of this organisation face trial, or they get sent down for drugs and organised crime-related offences.

Tallah's brother Rafat, 28, and Cousins Bilau, 21, Jihad, 31, Rashad, or sometimes Rishad, 28, and Hamdi, Alamedin, who's 27, have all gone through the legal system since Talao was convicted for Curtis Cheng's slaying. Now, their stronghold is another western suburb called Maryland's, which is about eight miles north of the B4L-H-HQ, which is down in Bankstown, of course.

Before long, the Alamedines have over 300 members, with young aspirants earning stripes by stealing cars, which one police source tells the Daily Mail, they have, quote, down to an art. So here we've got these shifting sands at the very top of Sydney's crime tree. Mark Buddle and the Cominchero, this growing, exploding drug market,

Basam Hamsey's prison exploits, and a rising feud between his B4L or Hamsey gang and the Alamedeans. But before we get down to the brass attacks of that war and its effects on the city streets, I want to take things back just a few steps because it's clear at this point the New South Wales police have been caught

completely off guard by these Middle Eastern families and there was some fascinating history beside that too, which completely shocked me. I'm intrigued. What could shock a worldly man like you these days? Well, just listen up, my friend. Now, Sydney, like I said at the top of the show, right, it's always been this sin city, a place with a thriving underworld.

In the 1970s and 80s, a handful of drug laws get incredibly rich and insinuate themselves into pretty much every aspect of public life. Most had the police in their pockets, and violence was, as one writer put it, sanitised. So as a reporter at ABC, quote, Some experts believe a difference between the underworld of yesterday year and modern gangsters is that they've become much less subtle. Instead of making enemies disappear, crooks are now content with gunning down rivals

in front of their family and random bystanders. Brazen executions have been the calling card of the feud to rocking Sydney over the past two years, claiming more than a dozen lives. Yeah, that brazenness is probably why they're all in prison right now. Yeah, that's a decent shout. Now, the reason for that difference lays as much with the cops as the crooks.

Everything changes in the mid-1990s, with something called the Wood Royal Commission, a massive investigation into police corruption. And this thing is a huge beast. It takes up to 451 hearing days, heard from 902 public witnesses, and it costs an estimated 64 million Australian dollars, which is, I think, like, 5,000 pounds.

And the muck it rates up is incredible. Amid the evidence is cop stealing meth and heroin right out the back of police stations, getting involved in prostitution rings, and even selling child pornography. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Much of the commission focuses on Sydney's Kings Cross District,

which the city's underworld has long turned into this thriving red light district. It's not too dramatic to describe it as a tsunami, one of the investigators tells a news doco team. We were inundated with people rolling over, i.e., turning witness. Let us have no doubt that the corruption so far discovered is not systemic. Give us your new definition. Systemic clearly means, if we take its ordinary definition in the dictionary,

affecting the entire organism. This is not systemic corruption. Doesn't the attitudes of your officers and your management of the force is at stake here, is it not, Commissioner, do you acknowledge that evidence from officers, Duncan DeMoll, Kim Thompson, Neville Scalian, Steve Pentland, John Swan and others who've rolled over indicate that there's been no effective discipline or supervision of police who could get drunk on duty or upset themselves as they saw fit.

Quentin, I don't want to comment. Your primary objective is to restore public confidence in the police service of New South Wales. Shouldn't you at least offer your resignation to the state government? No, Quentin? The answer is no. One cop dies by suicide, 11 other people kill themselves. the back of this commission and so many a cult in the commission's crosshairs that it offers a full amnesty to any officers who come forward with full omissions as to their corrupt activities.

Okay, yeah, that is pretty fucking wild and shocking. It's so huge. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, at the end of all this madness, the Sydney police undergoes a complete overhaul, including changes to education, guidelines, and a corruption investigation team within the false. It also leads to the decriminalization of sex work in a war. Australia and

284 bank cops are swept up in it. Wait, they legalized prostitution because the cops had been running it? Well, so what I've read is that the decriminalization of prostitution was kind of like on its way in and the commission

sort of ramped it up a bit. But yeah, it's pretty wild and I mean almost 300 cops getting involved in in crime. I mean, come on guys. So, this thing does something very important to the underworld. It severs the ties between crime and cops,

meaning that future gangs operate without the consent of the police, and gang rivalries are often settled in much more violent fashion. Quote, everybody knew who was who in the zoo. Dr Michael Kennedy, a lecturer of former detective, says, quote, these people didn't want obvious violence because it cost them money. It's bad for business. Yeah, I mean, it is. Look at the accuser.

Look at everyone in Asian gangs. It's bad. His little Dr. Seuss quote beforehand kind of takes away from the seriousness of it. Yeah, ever so slightly, but I did enjoy it quite a lot. So, yeah, it's good. In case you're a real massacist, I've put a full link to the, like, the full text of the commissions report on the reading list for the show. If you're in law enforcement, you won't want to take a look as well.

Apparently, this thing has been used as a blueprint for countering police corruption around the world since. I don't know how many cops we have listened to the show, but I should like to find out. Now, like I said, I'm not going to go deep into the biker gangs or the war between the Comancheiro and the Hells Angels beside the few points I've made before. But this commission, it's kind of a change into the guard

in both the police and the criminal scene. And it helps the Comancheiro take a far bigger slice of Sydney's drug pie heading into the 2000s. It also leads, by the way, to the rise of a shaggy-haired, former surf champion and starve Australian's very own real life point break. His name is Curley and his story is amazing. And if you want to know more about him,

we've got a bonus show off the back of this one, all about him. So check back in for that. Should be up tomorrow. The bonuses for those who don't subscribe are usually either interviews with people somehow involved, whether police or journalists,

someone in the underworld, right? Or who reports on it. Yeah. Or short stories that are great but just not enough for a full episode like this story here. Yeah, I think Skated Up, we've got one.

I've got an interview with a guy about Chechnine and MMA fighters. There's another one about drug dealers in London. There's some interesting stuff going up now. We're getting back on it. Anyway, back to the Hamsey-Alamedean feud. Bassam Hamsey is, of course, in prison. But he's managed to get himself another cell phone and he's directing more drug deals than ever from his cell.

Tip-for-tack killings between the clans beginning in 2013 and then in 2014, just before Talal Al-Alamdine, the gun that kills Curtis Cheng, a 28-year-old is convicted of attempted murder after shooting Bassam Hamsey's aunt, Maha, in the kneecaps, and spraying her home with bullets from a glock pistol over an unpaid debt. Minutes after that shooting, the car of a rival gang leader to Brothers for Life is shot up, and in December 2014, Hamsey's mother, Lola, is shot in the stomach through the door of her house. So this is getting pretty bad.

soon after B4L is caught up in its own national scandal in July 2016 Hamzi associate Abdul Abu Mahmoud his nephew Adam is killed in a brawl a young man named Joshua Dylan is charged over the fatal stabbing but he's found not guilty Abdul doesn't believe that though

and throughout the trial he makes threats towards Dylan telling his father quote I am going to kill you and put your son no I'm good to kill your whole family Remember this face. My name is Abdul Abu Mahmoud. Wait, so just to refresh my memory, Brothers for Life is Hamzzi,

and the Alamedines are the other, what's the other gang called? Yeah, they're just the Alamedeans, but the Hamzies kind of like evolve out of Brothers for Life just to be the Hamzies, basically. Yeah. Okay.

At first, Abdul struggles to find a hitman who'll kill a child, but with Bassam's help behind bars, he recruits a 29-year-old named Conrad Craig, who spent his whole adult life shifting between facilities, and they hatch a terrible plot to kill the Dylan's teenage son, Braden. Abdul picks Craig up from his release from one charge, and the hitman spends three weeks living in Abdul's home,

until, in the early hours of Good Friday, 2017, Craig burst into the Dylan family house and holds Braden's mum and stepfather at gunpoint. Then he creeps up the stairs, and he shoots Braden dead while he sleeps. Abdall is convicted of Braden's murder alongside Craig, who tries to slit his throat with scissors before confessing everything to cops. The judge doubts that the murder is a brother's for life killing,

but most people believe that Bassam is ultimately responsible. And it looks like this terrible murder, the outcry behind it, and the arrest of several high-ranking B4L members might put paid to the Hamsey-led structure. Particularly eye-opening is the sentence of Bassam Hamsey's chief foot soldier Farhad Kalmi. 60 years with the possibility of parole after 43. And this is not like America where you get, I don't know, like 585 years or whatever. They usually have way, way lower sentences than that.

Kalmi has since been in trouble for stabbing in a fellow inmate. I think that's the video that you said you saw at the top of the show, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like the, I think the prison guards basically. they arrange it so that that guy gets stuck, basically in a cell with him,

and like no one else is there and he's got a knife. It's pretty wild. That's so fucked. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's fair to say that this guy is not trying to curry favor with the state anymore.

And on the back of this, cops then raid Bassam's cell again. I mean, how are they not just doing this every day? And how many cubby holes does an Australian prison cell actually have? Yeah, I mean, they just look really incompetent.

Yeah, I mean, they definitely are. Anyway, This time round, shock horror, they find a USB stick with Islamic State propaganda and the B4L's completely nonsensical motto. I mean, to see if you can pick a few holes in this one. Quote, courage, honor, no mercy, mercy for the weak, family for life. Yeah, just not a little, you know, maybe pick like three or four things and stick to it.

That just seems, I'm losing it. They're losing me, you know? Yeah. I mean, a lot of news people think it's a genius. doing his own legal counsel, but I'm just saying there might be a reason why he's inside this whole time. So,

he's been aside for many, many years, right? But he's definitely no Oscar Wild. Actually, he's probably half Oscar Wilde murdered, so maybe it's funny if he is Oscar Wilde for the purpose of this show, whatever. Either way, the cops are now thinking that Bassam has got a guy on the inside. I mean, no shit.

He's got this Foxcon Factory's worth of phones and a bunch of flash drives just laying around his cell, what the fuck? and they arrest his lawyer, a sort of pound-shop James Gandalfini-looking guy called Martin Churchill for, quote,

cooperating with a criminal and, quote, aiding in the supply of a commercial quantity of methamphetamine. Oh yeah, that's surprising. Oh, and actually Churchill was never a lawyer at all,

just a legal secretary posing this one. Another massive win for the Australian Prison Service. In 2019, the Hamsey-Alamede war really kicks into gear. Wait, this was just the buildup so far? Yeah, it's hard to believe, but it's really just like getting there at this point.

So leaked prison CCTV footage shows none other than Talal Alamedin and Bassam Hamsey tearing into each other in the yard of their Supermax facility. Why are they in the same prison? Video shows the two going toe to toe before Talal gets the upper hand, leaving Hamzi battered and bruised. But this obviously inflames the already federal state on the streets of Sydney's western suburbs. And by the fall of 2020, bodies really start dropping fast. That actually might be the video that I was thinking of, to be honest with you.

Because that one is also mad. Yeah, all of it leaked on YouTube. Prison service is shit, isn't it? It's pretty bad. Around this time, Mark Buddle, remember him, the Comenchero living out in Turkish Cyprus. he declares himself the organisation's commander and demands commission on every shipment of drugs coming through the ports of Sydney. And that's quite a lot.

New South Wales has a huge addiction crisis with meth and opioids flooding into the state from the Golden Triangle and other production hotspots. Last August, COPS seized the biggest ever shipment of fentanyl, which should put plenty of fear into authorities. Buddle, meanwhile, text his contacts, quote, to all main players in Oz and abroad who land work in Sydney slash New South Wales.

As of 2021, there'll be a Sydney commission that will be formed. Every time a stamp lands in Sydney, you reach out to the commission and tell them what stamp it is. Pay a small fee to the commission. Make sure your drivers never get napped by street thugs, and if they do, we back you all the way. You think he made like a PowerPoint presentation for this too, like a pitch or like a deck?

I'll send you a picture and then you can make your mind up. I'm going to guess no. Also, I found that one that I was talking about, that stabbing video. It was actually, I guess there have been a lot of stabbing videos in Australian prisons. We probably should have looked at up, but it's one of the Brothers for Life bosses, our ex-bosses, a guy, that guy, I think Farhad Kaomi, you mentioned him, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He takes a razor blade out and starts stabbing a handicapped, uh,

Handcuffed, not handicapped, a handcuffed triple murderer named Abu Zar Sultani. And the prison guards just don't do anything because they're scared. Okay. Yeah, what do we think about that? That's a weird one. Yeah, it's pretty... But he's not handicapped. It's definitely not handicapped.

Yeah, apparently, later that same year, so this is why he was locked up. He had a Black Ops killing squad dubbed the Afghanis, who, even though it should be the Afghans, right? Who shot dead a Calabrian crime family gangster, who had been an associate of. B4L. So there's a lot going on there. Yeah. I mean, there's so much that I've put up on the notes that is on the bonus material. There is like an Afghan faction of both of these gangs actually, which is some people are saying that they're now forming their own street gang and there's a family called the Ahmed's that 's apparently doing that. I mean, there's loads of stuff guys. I've got it all up in the

notes on the bonus. So I do check that out when you can. But yeah, these factions are just splitting and splitting and splitting and splitting. And obviously they go all the way down to the street gangs I'm going to mention later on. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story.

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Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Anyway, after this, after Mark Buddle issues his kind of declaration of intent with every shipment of drugs coming through the port, Sydney, this leading Hamsey soldier called Medjid Hamsey, he tries to offload a shipment of 400 kilos of coke through Sydney without Buddle's approval. I mean, that's a fair bit of cocaine. There's already been bad blood, right?

Hamsey has issued a hit on Buddle unsuccessfully. I mean, if you're going to come at Buddle, you'd pretty much better not miss. So on October 19, 2020 at 7.30am, Mejid Hamsey is leaving his home when two gunmen, two gunmen again, shoot him dead in the street. And now we are really off to the races.

Buddle believes he's being screwed by the Hamzies and he sides with the Alamedeens in their feud. Anybody associated with either family is a target, even if they're completely innocent. Teenagers, pensioners, aunts, uncles, grandparents, dozens of shot dead, usually by young kids stolen cars with modified glocks or other rapid fire pistols. On June 17, 2021, Bill Al Hamsey, one of the leading Hamsey associates, is executed at 10.30pm after leaving a fancy Japanese restaurant called Kit Kyoto, right in the middle of Sydney's downtown, right next to the Harbour Bridge. You've all seen that place.

Days later, cops foil a plot to murder Ibrahim Hamsey on Sydney's North Shore, so this war is no longer confined to the west and southwest of the city. On October 19, 2021, a black Toyota Camry parks outside the home of teenage gangster Salim Hamsey and his elderly father, Tufik. A 25-year-old man leaps out of the car and shows, shoots both men dead. And it continues. January 6th last year, Bassam Hamsey's 35-year-old brother,

Gassan Amun, is shot dead outside a Sydney beauty salon, shot twice in the head execution style by a gunman driving had stolen Mini Cooper before they set the car alight. What could you do, one resident tells a TV station, adding, quote, it's everyday life now. So at the bottom of all of this crazy violence

are the street gangs acting out so-called post-code wars, many of which are under the tutelage of the Hamzies or the Alamedines. Local authorities have likened it to the Bloods and Crips' Territorial Wars of the 1990s. Primary-schooled kids are being recruited into what is quickly becoming the worst era of organised crime in Sydney's history. Now, these guys aren't Middle Eastern, they're not Islamists, many are disaffected youth from Sydney's long sideline Pacific and indigenous communities. They're fighting for turf and corners and tiny scraps of the big players' riches. There's the usual collection of mostly shit drill tunes, a bunch of rap crews rhyming about

shanking and beating the crap out of each other. And one of these guys, I-Huncho, is a key member of the Alamedin family. And from what I've researched, he seems to be like this, the go-between, between the family and the street gangs who were fiercely patriotic about their neighborhoods. And this is a feared gang leader called Franny Loco from a district way out west, way, way beyond Bankstown, open, or Maryland's called Mount Druitt. Quote, you fight for your area, you know? And as dumb as that sounds to most people, for us out here, it's something to die for.

For me personally, I've never felt Australian and I was born here, but I've always felt like Mount Druitt, like this is my home. And this conveyor belt of young soldiers is great. for the crime syndicates, but it's created a whole cycle of horror in Sydney's porous quarters. Here's a South West Sydney GP and community leader, quote, a lot of people who've witnessed the violence are definitely suffering from acute post-traumatic stress, and unfortunately, it's progressing to a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Unfortunately, they perceive that they are in a war zone.

How easy is it to get guns? Like, how easy are they available in Australia? Because I thought they had super strict gun laws. Yeah, I thought so too, no comment. I have no idea where the guns are coming from, but they always get there in the end. I mean, maybe they're circulating them around, but I've seen some raids where police have got a whole bunch of equipment,

so clearly something's gone wrong there. The cops have got a heavy-handed in response to all of this violence. I mean, you can kind of understand, but they're now using controversial new laws that allow the search of, quote, serious drug convicts on the streets or in their homes without warrants at all. says New South Wales Police Minister Paul Toll at a recent media briefing quote

These are not ordinary people They are scumbags and they are a scourge on our society We're going to get on top of this and wipe out this insidious behaviour It's pretty tough words Opposition police spokesperson Walt Second says cops allowed organised crime to flourish in the state Over the past two years As they were too preoccupied with COVID-19 responses

that saw thousands of regular citizens targeted, fined or detained for breaching public health orders. He also accuses the government of accepting that shootings are part of life in Sydney's working class West. He says, quote, if there have been homicides in Sydney's affluent east or the city's North Shore, the government would have had a much more prompt response.

So, firstly, I mean, that's a fair point to make. And secondly, shout out for having an opposition police spokesperson. That's a really cool and democratic thing, I guess. Yeah, I've never heard of that before, but it's kind of, it's pretty wild to have it as an official thing. I kind of like it. Yeah, it's good. So now we are up to last spring. The Alamedeans might be in legal trouble, but they've got Mark Buddles Comoncherro backing them. And they've all but routed the Hamsey family. Over a dozen leading members of Bassam Hamsey's gang are they dead or behind bars. In fact, so much of the Hamsey's been decimated that in my mind, March 22, it's reported that Bassam has been dethroned in favour of his younger cousin, Ibrahim. 27.

Says an insider to the telegraph, quote, they look at Bass like he's a weirdo. They all deal with his shit and make out like they care, but there's a groan whenever he calls. They aren't that close with him. And the guy adds, quote, he was the boss, but now Ibi, that's Abraham, is running the ship. But even he is in prison. He's been charged for drugs, racketeering, and attempted me. murder last November. So it's fair to say that the Hamzies are at this point pretty spent false. Quote, the Hamzies just don't have the means to keep up at the moment, as a senior

police source. We don't want to write them off, but it's almost like they're fighting something unwinnable. The Alamedeans keep coming out on top. May's attempted double assassination of Tarrick and Omar Zahead could therefore be seen as a rubber stamp on the power of Mark Buddle and the Alamedeans, but Buddle will go for whoever gets him the most cash. And in recent months, police have really stepped up their attempts to break the Alamedean family. Operation Hulk has arrested 82 members since March 22, with cops claiming they're breaking up the entire organisation. Several months ago, 450 police carried out 29 separate raids across Western Sydney,

arresting 18 people. I'm confident we've cut the head off the snake, says one commissioner. Cops claim the syndicate is running 36 phone numbers, offering a quote, smorgas board of drugs, and making up a quarter of a mill profit each week per phone in US, that is. One of the numbers has over 700 customers, and these phones claim police are the very prized possessions that have sparked the majority of the murders

between the Hamzies and Alamedeans. Damn, bro, sounds like the St. Louis, though. we talked about. Yeah, man. And it's, I mean, it's not a lot better for the amount of murders either, like, considering the sides of these, like, suburbs that is, because still so much of this isn't hitting those affluent areas, although the CBD killing of one of the Hamzies, that really did put people's noses out.

Anyway, with cops smashing one clan and the other clan, either dead or out of action, 2023, you would hope could see a lull in the violence on Sydney streets. but the Comancheiro is still strong as ever with Buddle in his Cypriot layer, the drugs are keep coming and there is no shortage of streettops ready to step up and take control of a thriving drugs market.

So I reckon this is a story that we'll be coming back to, no doubt. Yeah, it's a good one man, and you did a good job with it. I'm glad that we got it out there. So as always, bonus episode, it's patreon.com, such as to know what a podcast or iTunes.

And yeah, anything else, man, or until next week. yeah just look out for that bonus show as well if you want to know more about the the surf dude that got himself in a bit of bother but um yeah until next week right