Australia's Brutal Gang Families Waging War in Sydney
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Tarek Zahid is not a guy to be messed with. A man-mountain, built like a brick outhouse, and on remand for a 2014 murder, Zahid is a massive player in the Comanchero, Australia's most powerful biker gang. And he operates out of Sydney, the nation's most populous 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 Tarek for that 2014 hit. Contract hits are nothing new in Sydney's roiling gang war. Controlled from afar by muscle-bound bikies, patrolled on the city 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 Islamist zealots and drug adult kids ready to do anything to rise the ranks. Sporadic 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 vendettas will explode into a full-blown war.

Tarek and his gangster brother Omar are thought to have bounties on their heads.

Cops exiled Tarek 500 miles south-west to Melbourne, but on May 2022, both brothers head back to Sydney, and on the 10th, at 8pm, they're leaving the body-fit gym in Oban, one of Sydney's western suburbs that's a hotbed of trap houses and street fights, when two gunmen screech to a halt 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 tile floor, blood pouring everywhere, fatally wounded. 40-year-old Tarek takes 10 bullets, one of which crashes directly into his right eye. But somehow, he survives.

The gunmen 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 were such bad shots they almost kill each other in the hail of lead.

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.

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Yeah, and first of all, apologies if I sound a bit gravelly. I'm not actually a cool masculine person. I've just 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. And what 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 in some senses uh i'll be picking some of that back up in a couple months too so that'd be pretty cool to do i hate to go too hard on a murdoch outlet but there is this four-part mini doco series at the daily telegraph that's the australian one called the war that i watched 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 know you

you should pay for journalism anyway so that's a win-win and money's no object for me of course researching this is high quality content but the war in question it's it's largely between these two families that i mentioned before right the hamsies and the alameddines 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

at the top of those sits the Comanchero. According to most sources, they've even toppled the Andrangheta's proxies 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, you know, international clans like Andrangheta 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, 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 that it has a lot to do with the shifting sands of like, which drugs people are taking. A lot of this stuff going from the golden triangle. So yeah,

A lot of bikies hanging out in Pattaya 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 nineties. Or maybe we did a show about Melbourne in the nineties ourselves. I don't know. We've done like a million of these now, but yeah,

Yeah, I won't go into too many details on the Comanchero and the other biker outfits in Australia like the Hells Angels. We'll do that later on. But they sit above the Hamseys and the Alameddins, who've risen from street slingers 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 you 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, Dale.

Yeah, I mean, basically, when you say postcode gangs, those are like your typical street crews. Yeah, this is stuff that they've been openly described as blood and crip kind of street 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. First off, a quick introduction to the great city of Sydney itself. Home to around 5.5 million people, capital and by far the biggest city in Australia's New South Wales state, which, sorry Aussies, 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

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-respect in 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? Yeah. Jesus. I mean, fucking Australia, man. Everything there is just trying to kill you.

Wasn'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. I was scared of spiders for a while. I saw that movie too young. Yeah, it's horrible. Just kill it all fire. It was Sydney...

Sydney has over 100 beaches, so that's pretty cool. And although those two are probably crawling with poisonous jellyfish or great whites or whatever, one of the beaches is called Woolamooloo, 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 70,000 US dollars number is insane, man. Especially for a big city. I do remember 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-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 yeah, is there any reasoning for that?

You want me to get into global economics? No, actually, I don't. Keep it going. Keep it moving. Yeah, I'll keep it down to the fact. And yeah, I mean, Aussies 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 Sydney.

this point on. Yeah, that's just low-hanging fruit, 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. Alright, alright, you win. I see you've played Knifey Spoonie before. Oh my god, yeah, that's a classic. So, this

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 Tarek and Arma Azarhead, big guys in the Comanchero. 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 Hamseys and the Alameddines. And we're going to kick off with the Hamsey family patriarch, Bassam Hamsey.

Bassam is the son of Lebanese immigrants who moved to Australia during their country's civil war in the 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

Authorities sentenced Bassam to 21 years for murder, but he is 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 like linked to the Qatari. So, 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 like 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. 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 communities and all that. I don't know, it was pretty... I'll have to find that somewhere and put it on the social media. But there's some stuff that I've got up there from old newspaper clippings 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 zealots, 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.

Bassam 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 Bassam.

B4L sets up its first branch in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Bankstown, which is just a few miles from Oban. That's the place we mentioned before where Tarek 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 Organized 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 cops or any other authorities. A correctional services leader calls Bassam, quote, "...very bright and very manipulative."

and he gains notoriety for 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 all Sway. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, that would be an understatement. To be fair, like, in 2008, guards discover that Hamzy 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-free set, so, I mean, what the actual shit are the prison staff playing out there? Yeah.

Among the stuff these calls are quarterbacking, there are two kidnappings, torture and a drive-by. And apparently the feds only get wind when they catch Hamzy passing this phone between cells with dental floss on surveillance cameras.

Not the surveillance. 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 Bassam's story. But on March 23rd, 2009, another deadly feud splutters into life and it will send shockwaves through the Hamseys and everybody else in Sydney's underworld.

That day, members of the Comanchero 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 swaths of the Comanchero leadership in the aftermath. Anything on like 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 Comanchero. 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

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 rumoured 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 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 and 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 communities. 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. The Australian press just report on this guy every other day. Anyway, Buddle has bubbled to the top of the Aussie drug tree and

and he is quarterbacking things from abroad. And he begins to forge closer ties to another Sydney crime family, the Alam-Madeens. And like the Hamzis, these guys are Lebanese in background. Actually, the Alam-Al-Din family was a prominent Druze dynasty of warlords in like 17th and 18th century Lebanon under Ottoman rule. I don't know whether the Sydney Alam-Madeens 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 a plainclothes officer outside the headquarters of the New South Wales Police in the inner district of Parramatta.

He's carrying a .38 Smith & 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. Jabbar shoots Cheng dead, then 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 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 Al-Madin, 25-year-old scion of the Al-Madin crime family and an avowed Islamist radical with ISIS sympathies. In October 2017, Al-Madin pleads guilty to, this is a weird law, but, quote, "...possessing a thing connected with a terrorist act and supplying a pistol." That'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 batshit 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 people.

fundamentalist groups being involved in the drug trade. You know, it's big in like in North and West Africa, you know, they're involved with the trafficking cocaine and 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 heads 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 would radicalize extremist supporters of Islamic State, while Al-Madin 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 Kobani, 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 bag. You know what I'm talking about? I've mentioned this to you before, no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard this story, yeah. If you look up like ISIS Kobani cocaine, you'll see the video. So I was with, God, I'm forgetting his name, Just be careful 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 disgusting

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 over the place. But yes, ISIS does cocaine sometimes. Anyway, keep it moving. Sorry. I mean, you know, if the Nazis did Pervitin and meth, then I guess ISIS is probably getting high as well. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. And I kind of disappeared like that a bit of a rabbit hole research in this attack and the killing of Curtis Cheng. And my God, Australia, you've got some moody clerics kicking around. Pretty much all of its grand muftis have said some insane stuff about everything you might expect a religious cellist 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 caused all wars, denying the Holocaust, saying women in skirts deserve to be sexually assaulted. He backed down on none of it. And there's way more besides that. So Aussie National Imam's Council. Yeah, boys, you've got to clean your house. Yeah, might be down time to crack down a bit. Yeah, not great stuff.

So this killing for most Australians is the introduction to the Al-Madin family. Before long, other members of this organisation face trial or they get sent down for drugs and organised crime-related offences. Talal's brother Rafat, 28, and cousins Bilal, 21, Jihad, 31, Rashad, or

or sometimes Rishad, 28, and Hamdi Alamuddin, who's 27, have all gone through the legal system since Talal 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 slash Hamsey HQ, which is down in Bankstown, of course. Before long, the Alameddines 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 Comanchero, this growing, exploding drug market, Bassam Hamzi's prison exploits, and a rising feud between his B4L or Hamzi gang and the Alameddines.

But before we get down to the brass tacks 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 is 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 lords 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 yesteryear 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 feuds 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. Now, this thing is a huge beast. It takes up to 451 hearing days, heard from 902 public witnesses, and

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 cops 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 King's 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 DeMolle, Kim Thompson, Neville Scullion, 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 absent themselves as they saw fit?

Quinton, 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, Quinton. Why not?

The answer is no. One cop dies by suicide, 11 other people kill themselves at the back of this commission, and so many are caught 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. 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 force. It also leads to the decriminalization of sex work in 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 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 and former detective, says, quote, these people didn't want obvious violence because it cost them money. It's bad for business. And yeah, I mean, it is. Look at the Yakuza. 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 masochist, I've put a full link to the full text of the commission's report on the reading list for the show. If you're in law enforcement, you might 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 listening to the show, but I'd like to find out.

Now, like I said, I'm not going to go deep into the biker gangs or the war between the Comanchero and the Hells Angels beside the few points I 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 Comanchero 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 star of Australian's very own Real Life Point Break. His name is Curly, 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 Scat It Up, we've got one. I've got an interview with a guy about Chechnyan 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 Hamzy-Alamadine feud. Bassam Hamzy 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 begin in 2013 and then in 2014, just before Talal Al-Madin provides the gun that kills Curtis Cheng, a 28-year-old is convicted of attempted murder after shooting Bassam Hamzi'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, Hamzi'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 Mahmood's nephew Adam is killed in a brawl.

A young man named Joshua Dillon 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 Dillon, telling his father, quote, I am going to kill you and put your son. No, I'm going 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 Hamzi, and the Ahmadine's are...

are the other what's the other gang called yeah they're just the Alameddines but the Hamseys kind of like evolve out of Brothers for Life just to be the Hamseys 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 Dillon'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's

Craig bursts into the Dillon 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. Abdul 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 Brothers 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 Hamzi-led structure. Particularly eye-opening is the sentence of Bassam Hamzi'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 for

This is, they usually have way, way lower sentences than that. Cal me 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, uh, I think the prison guards basically like 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 favour 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 cubbyholes 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, 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 papers think he's a genius for 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 inside for many, many years, right? Yeah.

But he's definitely no Oscar Wilde. Actually, he's probably had 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 Foxconn 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 Gandolfini 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 as one. Another massive win for the Australian Prison Service.

In 2019, the Hamzi-Alamuddin war really kicks into gear. Wait, this was just the build-up 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 Alamuddin and Bassam Hamzi 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 Hamzy battered and bruised. But this obviously inflames the already febrile 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. Yeah, that one is also mad. Yeah, all of it leaked on YouTube. Prison services is shit, isn't it? It's pretty bad.

Around this time, Mark Buddle, remember him, the common chair-o 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, Kopp seized the biggest ever shipment of fentanyl, which should put plenty of fear into authorities. Buddle, meanwhile, texts 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. Mavis,

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 wind 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 that up, but it's one of the Brothers for Life bosses.

our ex-bosses, a guy, that guy I think Farhad Qaumi, you mentioned him, right? Qaumi, yeah. He takes a razor blade out and starts stabbing a handicapped, 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. He'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, yeah, 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 Ahmeds that's apparently doing that. I mean, yeah.

There's loads of stuff, guys. I've got it all up in the notes on the bonus, so do check that out when you can. But yeah, these factions are just splitting and splitting and splitting, and obviously they go all the way down to the street gangs I'm going to mention later on. Anyway, after this, after Mark Buddle issues his kind of declaration of intent with every shipment of drugs coming through the port of Sydney...

This leading Hamzi soldier called Majid Hamzi, 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? Hamzy has issued a hit on Buddle unsuccessfully. I mean, if you're going to come at Buddle, you pretty much better not miss. So on October 19, 2020 at 7.30am, Medjid Hamzy 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 Hamzy's and he sides with the Alameddines in their feud.

Anybody associated with either family is a target, even if they're completely innocent. Teenagers, pensioners, aunts, uncles, grandparents, dozens are shot dead, usually by young kids, stolen cars with modified Glocks or other rapid-fire pistols.

On June 17, 2021, Bilal Hamzi, one of the leading Hamzi associates, is executed at 10.30pm after leaving a fancy Japanese restaurant called Kid 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 Hamzi 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 Hamzi and his elderly father Tufik. A 25-year-old man leaps out of the car and shoots both men dead.

And it continues. January 6th last year, Bassam Hamzi's 35-year-old brother, Ghassan Amun, is shot dead outside a Sydney beauty salon. Shot twice in the head execution style by a gunman driving a 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 postcode wars, many of which are under the tutelage of the Hamseys or the Alameddines.

Local authorities have likened it to the Bloods and Crips territorial wars of the 1990s. Primary school 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, iHuncho, is a key member of the Alameddine family.

And from what I've researched, he seems to be like this, the go-between between the family and the street gangs who are fiercely patriotic about their neighborhoods. And this is a feared gang leader called Franny Loco from a district way out west, way, way, way beyond Bankstown, Oban, 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 poorest 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 tool 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 behavior. It's pretty tough words. Oh,

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 had 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 like, that's a really cool and democratic thing, I guess. Yeah. I've never heard of that before, but it's kind of, uh, it's pretty wild to have it as an official thing. I kind of like it.

Yes, good. So now we are up to last spring.

The Alameddines might be in legal trouble, but they've got Mark Buddle's Comanchero backing them, and they've all but routed the Hamsey family. Over a dozen leading members of Bassam Hamsey's gang are either dead or behind bars. In fact, so much of the Hamsey's been decimated that in March 2022, 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 Ibrahim, is running the ship.

But even he is in prison. He's been charged with drugs, racketeering and attempted murder last November. So it's fair to say that the Hamseys are at this point pretty spent fools. Quote, the Hamseys just don't have the means to keep up at the moment. That's a senior police source. We don't want to write them off, but it's almost like they're fighting something unwinnable. The Alameddines keep coming out on top.

May's attempted double assassination of Tarek and Omar Zahed could therefore be seen as a rubber stamp on the power of Mark Buddle and the Al-Madin's. 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 Al-Madin family. Operation Hawk has arrested 82 members since March 2022, 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 smorgasbord of drugs and making up a quarter of a mil profit each week per phone in US days.

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 Hamseys and Alameddines. Damn, bro, sounds like the St. Louis stuff we talked about.

Yeah, man. And I mean, it's not a lot better for the amount of murders either, like considering the size 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 Hamseys 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's streets. But the Comanchero is still strong as ever with Buddle in his Cypriot lair. The drugs keep coming and there is no shortage of street toughs 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, slash the normal 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 surf dude that got himself in a bit of bother. But yeah, until next week. All right. Bye.