Sydney is the biggest generator of dirty money and ancillary shooting, stabbing and kneecapping. In the past decade there has been an average of about eight murders a year that can be seen to have organised crime and Sydney connections. If the marksmen were more efficient the number would as much as double.
Violent episodes of drive-by shootings, bashings and woundings stain police intelligence reports like blood spatter.Brown's character in Two Hands seemed to step from the shadow of Lennie McPherson. For a time, as is the convention, he appeared to be untouchable.The first explanation for his longevity is he was like so many of them, a fizgig or informant.Ron Woodham, the veteran NSW Commissioner for Corrective Services, confirms McPherson's assistance, recalling his 1981 give up of the most famous stick up man and escape artist of his day, Darcy Dugan.Over time if you are, like McPherson, an able crook, you can cross into a world of quasi legitimacy.Such is the aura of power, other criminals pay a routine tax for operating in your territory.Without lifting a finger fees are paid to open entertainment venues such as nightclubs, and collect operating taxes.In the old days there was a quid in loan sharking, standover, sly grog, girls, gambling, shoplifting, gear nicked from the docks, nobbling of briefs and organising armed holdups.
Kings Cross was and remains a visible epicentre, with business and market share reaching well into the suburbs. McPherson, who had come from Balmain and won his degree in thuggery at Grafton jail, went home to a fortress in middle-class Gladesville.
Crims have long liked to kid themselves they operated to their owns rules and moral code, respecting rivals' territory and keeping a kind of peace.According to another veteran, former assistant commissioner Clive Small, McPherson was the style of gangster who saw violence as bad for business, taking care to keep conspicuous bloodshed off the front page. Crooks and cops would even take the initiative and eliminate mad-dog criminals who trespassed beyond an understood order.They were good at kidding themselves how civilised they were and how, for example, the likes of Neddy Smith would never deal drugs.But by the 80s they were tripping over themselves to sell and snort their own product, because drugs meant money and money meant power.
When a newer Mr Big, Bill Bayeh of Hunters Hill, assumed the throne at Kings Cross, according to a partner in crime corrupt detective Trevor Haken, Bayeh was the biggest heroin and cocaine supplier along the golden mile. There was a percentage everywhere with the nightclubs proving an ideal market to move drugs.It works like this. Beneficial ownership becomes very difficult to trace but that does stop a huge whack of door payments funnelling back, along with commissions from dealers.Policing the scene becomes next to impossible as the dealers blend indivisibly into the crowd.
There was a time when having a high profile could help the entrepreneurial crook.
As was the case with Lennie McPherson, a widespread belief that he ran things and could get you killed meant that copious cash flowed his way from all manner of business, without there being any direct and conspicuous connection to criminality.
A force field ripples outward from the question "don't you know who runs this place?", keeping competition at bay.There is a cost, too. The cycle does have a way of turning.Both McPherson and Bayeh ultimately fell. As we saw, the higher the profile the harder it was for crooked police to ensure protection and the easier it became for honest police to secure arrests.The Wood Royal Commission was meant to end the era of police franchising selected criminals. Frank Mennilli rejects the proposition that in the modern era any figure may be considered untouchable.
Police Minister Michael Daley said there is no doubt there is less crime and corruption following the Wood Royal Commission. The most recent figures from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows that crime is falling or stable in all 17 crime categories across the Kings Cross local area command.But the dangers of becoming a bigger target at the Cross don't all come from the police.
The Golden Mile is still prized territory. The Comancheros and Bandidos certainly think so.
the Ibrahim family.The signs are everywhere. The King is under siege.Succession planning is under way.A veteran of the scene, NSW Police State Crime Command director Ken McKay, said: "There is a push by other groups for more power."The Ibrahim empire is seen to be in decline as a rival family with obligatory bikie links has moved to challenge the current order.Recently, the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang has made its presence felt in the Cross.The major suspect in the Fadi shooting comes from the Comanchero camp. There is fear of further bloodshed.When police asked John Ibrahim about the challenges to his hold on power, he is said to have dismissed his rivals as "just gronks who won't last three months".When a senior Comanchero was asked why the challenge to the King, he replied: "It is just his turn."Crooked police once described the streets of the Cross as paved with gold. Go there on any midnight and you will see why.Business legitimate and otherwise thrives, driven by hordes of wide-eyed pleasure seekers.Police Assistant Commissioner Frank Mennilli said: "Unfortunately, there are some elements of criminals who prey on areas where there are high volumes of people."One among those high volumes is long-term Kings Cross resident and founding head of the National Crime Authority Justice Donald Stewart.He has cause every day to lament his own and others' failure to morally renovate the Cross.Over time he came to the view that it was handy for both criminals and police to concentrate their endeavours. Having served a kind of apprenticeship with the old generation of crims like Bill Bayeh and George Freeman, John Ibrahim, 39, of Dover Heights, has the status of The King.Although once described in the Wood Royal Commission as the lifeblood of the drug trade in the Cross, he has no criminal convictions.He can - and does - claim with credibility that his enterprise is legitimate. Where incredulity settles is around those massive bodyguards who shadow him.Legitimate businessmen don't normally need that kind of protection. Ibrahim did not want to comment for this piece but he has consistently denied the charges of connection to any form of criminality.According to senior police sources, the black suit and sunglasses, the Lamborghini and nightclub accoutrements, have given rise to a perception in recent years that the Ibrahims were soft, which in John's case does not seem to be true.Although, as one police insider who has watched the lifecycle of the Cross said, a major difference of those involved is they are more likely to hire muscle than exercise their own.
Managing the profile of those who rule Sydney after dark would be a challenge to the best of the city's public relations firms.John Ibrahim has expressed a desire to retreat from the dazzle of publicity. It does not seem to be working that well.An aura of power generates money that assists protection. But as competition erodes sources of revenue, that shrinks too.Curiously, it was ever thus, the Cross seeming to need its figureheads. Before John and Bill and George there was Lennie. The best-known Mr Big, the late Lennie McPherson ruled the Cross for most of the 1960s and 1970s.His era is already ancient history as organised crime continues to evolve. The new networks now operate in a marketplace that stretches well beyond Kings Cross, and for that matter Australia.The Mr Big or Godfather model has been superseded by a flat corporate structure.Now, a chief executive figure uses agents to broker supply mostly from Asia. Business is compartmentalised, with bikie gangs tasked for enforcement and distribution and money managers contracted to shift and hide profits.
In the McPherson era the net worth of a crime boss was estimated at about $10 million at any one time.Now criminals with no known profile can generate more than double that profit with a single importation of drugs.No one has an exact figure.
The Australian Crime Commission estimates between $3 billion and $6 billion of dirty money is washed away each year, with most of the laundering going through Sydney.
So the law enforcement battleground has also come to share a larger stage. Just as the criminals are becoming more corporate, so are the cops. New co-operative strategies - largely pioneered by the ACC - have begun to produce important arrests.
In more than a quarter of a century reporting crime I have long thought that Bryan Brown's portrait of a Sydney hoodlum, Pando, in the movie Two Hands was the most accurate so far.Brown's gangster wore Yakka shorts and drove a Falcon. He carried wads of cash and thumped people. He was born of the streets, paying no heed to fashion.Like the city that bred him he did not need to be known as big and bad - because he just was.Despite Brisbane's takeover of the cops back in the 1980s, and the faux Sopranos push in Melbourne of the 1990s, Sydney has no trouble hanging on to the dubious crown of being Australia's crime capital.It is the largest centre for incoming container traffic, estimated to account for 70 per cent of bulk drug caches that enter the country.It is also the biggest distribution point, a hub of other criminal economies, notably Adelaide and Perth. Last month, arrests in Perth that as much as took out a nascent chapter of the Comancheros, can be traced to two seizures of 7kg of methamphetamine dispatched from the crime capital.
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