Underbelly (3 page)

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.

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.'

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.'