We just heard a massive bang and we thought it was a backfire of a car.
51-year-old Nick Martin was shot in the back.
The sound of the gun firing muffled by roaring engines.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the blazing lights of a Perth drag strip, a trained sniper lay hidden for 15 long minutes, watching a bikey boss through his scope as he sat beside his wife while 2,000 people cheered the engines and never felt death counting down above their heads.
The man who paid for that bullet was once his brother.
And what he did afterwards is even colder than the shot itself.
Daddy, can we get ice cream?
Nah, buddy.
Daddy’s broke.
Who done this to you?
N man.
Dad just ain’t got no money.
They broke your money and you feel it.
Okay, daddy.
He was also found guilty of two counts of essentially paying the sniper whom he’d promised $150,000 for the execution of Nick Martin.
On Wednesday the 13th of May 2026, a man with a shaved head, a ponytail, and a neck covered in ink sat staring into a camera inside a Western Australian prison.
And he did not move a single muscle in his face while a judge in the Supreme Court in Perth told him that he would probably be an old man in his 70s before he ever breathed free air again.
His name is David James Pi.
He was 43 years old that morning and the court had already found him guilty of hiring a professional sniper to execute his former friend, the rebels bikey boss Nick Martin, in front of a packed grandstand at a drag racing night.
Justice Joseph McGrath handed Pi life in prison with a minimum of 34 years before he can even ask for parole.
And that clock was wound back to the 1st of November 2021, the day Pi was taken into custody.
The sentences for his five other crimes, which included plotting two more murders, will all run alongside it.
So, the walls around him are not going anywhere for a very long time.
What stays with me about that hearing is the way the judge spoke directly to Pi, almost as if he wanted every word to land like a nail.
He told him plainly, “You were the architect of the killing.”
And said the contract murder [music] struck at the very heart of law and order, calling it an unlawful public execution at a sporting event with Nick Martin’s wife and family sitting right beside him when the bullet arrived.
The judge said Pi had placed a price tag on a human life and had shown no remorse whatsoever.
And to this day, Pi denies he had anything to do with it.
His own lawyer, David Hallows, pointed to a single old nightclub brawl in Rockingham and said, “It’s not as though he has a litany of violent offending.”
A line that hung very strangely in a room where his client had just been convicted of paying for a bullet that tore through two people.
By then, Pi had changed colors more than once, starting as a rebel, defecting to the Kacheros.
And now, the court heard, wearing the patch of the Mongols.
Outside the court, his other lawyer, Paul Holmes, told reporters that Pi would appeal against his convictions.
And if you are anything like me, you are already wondering what evidence could be strong enough to bury a man for 34 years.
The answer was sitting in the very same prison system hidden behind a court order.
And only 3 weeks before Pi heard his fate, the whole country was finally allowed to learn the name of the man who had pulled the trigger.
On Friday the 24th of April, 2026, the Supreme Court of Western Australia lifted the suppression orders that had kept the shooter’s identity locked away since his arrest more than 5 years earlier.
For the entire entire trial, he had been known only by three letters, BLJ.
And now the public finally heard the full name behind them.
Benjamin Luke Johnston, a 39-year-old former Army reservist who had once been a specialist marksman.
Pace had good reason to keep him hidden.
Because detectives believe Johnston was sitting inside two sets of crosshairs at once.
One belonging to Nick Martin’s loyal friends who might want revenge and the other belonging to PI supporters who might want the star witness silence before he could open his mouth in court.
In the world we cover on this channel.
That is simply how people end up disappearing.
Paul Holmes fought against the unmasking, arguing that Johnston might need to give evidence again if there was ever a retrial.
But Justice McGrath was not moved, saying the shooter’s identity was already reasonably wellknown inside prison, which tells you how small and dangerous that [music] world really is.
Once the name was out, Johnston’s old internet footprint came crawling back into the light.
Before his arrest, he ran active YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram pages filled with videos of him and his mates leaping off skyscrapers in Hong Kong, a drilling rig, and jagged mountain terrain.
And one of those clips pulled in more than 85,000 views.
He looked like the cheeky Aussie adventurer, which makes everything that came later feel even more twisted.
He had served in the Army reserves from 2004 until 2012 as an artillery gunner and later worked on oil rigs in the states north as an electrical engineer.
And today, he and Pi are both serving their time in Casarina prison under the same roof.
To understand how a base jumping electrician ended up lying in the dirt beside a racetrack with a rifle, we need to go back to a friendship between two bikies that rotted from the inside until only hatred was left.
If you followed the Perth bikey scene back in the early 2010s, you will remember how different it felt with chrome and leather rumbling down the highway, clubous that everybody in the suburb knew about, and the rebels sitting at the top as the biggest gang in Western Australia.
Nick Martin was one of the giants of that era.
A big man in every sense.
A former state president of the rebels whose name carried weight in every bar and backyard where bikes gathered.
Martin had already survived one attempt on his life long before the Motorplex.
In March 2011, during the ugly war between the rebels and the Rock Machine, he pulled up outside his home in Balcata on his Harley-Davidson and was shot through the arm.
A Rock Machine member was jailed for more than 6 years over it, and Martin simply [music] went back to his life.
David Pi was once part of his inner circle.
There is old footage of the two of them walking out of court in Perth together with Pi pointing towards Martin like a mate sharing a joke.
And that image makes what followed feel almost unbearable because these men were friends, not just patch brothers.
Somewhere along the way, that friendship soured and the court later heard it came down to how the rebels were being run.
A fight over recruitment and a deep resentment of Martin’s leadership.
The club itself was starting to turn on Martin, too.
During a separate dirty money trial in 2024, a senior rebel named Carl Labbrook told a Perth court that Martin had been stealing from the club and had been asked to step down as state president only weeks before he was shot with members furious that he alone controlled the club’s cash, right down to the sausage sizzles and raffles.
In those final weeks, Martin [music] was also facing charges over financial misconduct and had been bashed by a Hell’s Angels member, so the walls were closing in from every direction.
But Pi was smart enough to know that if he pulled the trigger himself, every detective in the state would be knocking on his door before the smoke cleared.
He needed someone with no obvious link to him.
Someone with military skills and a cold enough heart.
And that person was about to receive a message on the other side of the world in the middle of a war zone.
When David Pi first reached out to Benjamin Luke Johnston, the former soldier was in Iraq working security for a group called Shadows of Hope, a charity that protects volunteer doctors in war zones.
Johnston said Pi found him through Instagram, knowing that a trained marksman with years in uniform was precisely the tool he needed.
There was no shadowy meeting in a smoky back room, just a social media message landing on a phone in the Middle East, setting in motion a chain that would end with a man dead in front of his family.
Johnston later admitted he had told Pi stories about killing people overseas.
And true or not, Pi believed he had found his man.
When Johnston came back to Australia, he went to Pi’s home in Perth’s southern suburbs.
And by his own account, he went there looking for illegal substances with Pi telling him he could get him a huge amount.
At one of those early meetings, Pi [music] asked him to kill his ex-girlfriend, a woman the court later heard was living in witness protection, and Johnston turned him down flat.
A week later, the two men met again, and this time, Pi named a different target.
According to Johnston, Pi looked at him and said, “I want to kill Nick Martin.”
And then talked through ways he had thought about doing it himself.
He told Johnston the pair were locked in a dispute over recruitment.
That Martin had put a hit out on him and that he just wanted to blow holes in his old friend.
And then came the price, $150,000 for the life of a man he had once called a brother.
Johnston did not walk away this time.
Years later, in the witness box, he described pie in words that were almost darkly funny given what he himself had done, calling him the dodgiest person I knew.
He took the job.
And what happened next was not a rushed act of violence fueled by rage, but something far more patient and far more frightening.
Because Johnston started to hunt Nick Martin the way a soldier studies an enemy position.
The court heard that Pi gave Johnston $10,000 just to carry out reconnaissance.
And the way Johnston spent the following weeks genuinely makes my skin crawl.
He started by following Martin.
In the witness box, he said, “I went to his address multiple times and I tailed Nick Martin, explaining that he was searching for spots where he might stop Martin’s vehicle and learning the rhythm of his daily routine while Martin had no idea that his days were being counted by a stranger.
Then Johnston bought a drone at an ordinary electronic store and flew it over Martin’s home to study the security.
When he worked out that the house was not the right place, he kept digging until he learned that Martin owned a race car.
That single fact changed everything.
Johnston said he zeroed in on the Perth Motorplex, went along to a race meeting as an ordinary spectator, and got within 10 meters of Martin before going back to PI with his report.
I told him there are two possible firing locations in order to kill Nick Martin, and it can be done, he told the court.
And the calmness of that sentence is more frightening than any shouted threat.
On another night, Johnston sneaked into the venue and moved a safety ramp that was blocking the line of sight between Martin’s usual seat and the spot he planned to shoot from.
He also took his rifle out into remote bushland and fired around 200 rounds at a target, testing it over and over until he trusted every single shot.
By the second week of December, the hunter had everything he needed.
A tested rifle, a cleared line of sight, a target with a habit, and a crowd big enough to hide inside, and all that was left was to wait for a Saturday night.
Saturday, the 12th of December, 2020, was the kind of warm early summer evening that Perth racing fans live for.
Around 2,000 people had poured into the Perth Motorlex at Quinana Beach, the air thick with burnt rubber and hot fuel, and families spread across the tiered seating, enjoying what felt like the last carefree night of a strange year of lockdowns.
Nick Martin was sitting in the spectator area with the people he loved most.
His wife, Amanda, was there along with his stepdaughter and her partner, a young patched rebel named Ricky Chapman, and a 5-year-old boy was sitting right behind him.
Out in the darkness, Benjamin Luke Johnston had cut a hole in the fence, dressed himself in camouflage, and crawled on his belly into his firing position.
And for somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes, he lay there watching Nick Martin through the scope of a 308 caliber rifle, calculating the wind speed and making tiny adjustments while Martin sat among his family with no idea that a crosshair was resting [music] on his chest.
15 minutes is a long time to watch a man live while you prepare to end him.
And I genuinely struggle to understand what kind of mind can stay that calm.
At around 20 to9 that night, a single shot cracked across the venue.
From what Johnston later told the court was exactly 365 m.
The bullet struck Martin in the chest, punched through his body, and exited from his lower back, then hit Ricky Chapman, who was seated behind him, leaving a deep wound in his thigh before lodging in his forearm while a fragment grazed the little boy sitting nearby.
Martin turned to the people around him and said the words that witnesses would never forget.
I’ve been shot.
Panic tore through the stands within seconds.
Although many people thought at first that something had gone wrong on the track until they saw the big man go down and people rushing to give him CPR.
Martin died in hospital from that single wound while Chapman survived after surgery.
While the crowd was still trying to understand what they had just witnessed, the shooter slipped away into the night leaving police with no suspect, no weapon, and no name.
Somewhere in Perth, the man who had paid for that bullet was waiting to hear whether his money had bought what he wanted.
And the way he celebrated is something nobody in that courtroom would ever forget.
By the next morning, Western Australia was on edge in a way it had not been for years.
Police Commissioner Chris Dawson stood before the cameras, visibly furious, and said, “This is not the Western Australia we want to live in.”
And within days, a task force called Operation Rell had been launched with more than 100 officers, raiding the clubouses of rival gangs as assistant commissioner Brad Royce declared that police were taking the fight back to the gangs.
While all of that played out on the evening news, Johnston quietly went back to Pi’s house to collect his money.
It was waiting for him in a Woolworth’s shopping bag, but instead of the $150,000 he had been promised, the judge found he was ultimately paid only 100,000.
[music] The way Pi greeted the man who had just killed his former friend says everything about where his heart was.
According to Johnston, [music] Pi said to him, “One dead, one serious.”
Counting the bodies like a score line after a football match.
And when Johnston raised the missing money, Pi shrugged it off with words to the effect that the other person didn’t put in.
Before adding, “It is what it is.”
That little phrase about the other person is the detail I simply cannot let go of.
And I would love to know what you think about it in the comments.
That question of who was supposed to chip in for a murder was never publicly answered in court, and it leaves a very uncomfortable possibility hanging in the air that someone else may have wanted Nick Martin dead badly enough to promise money towards it.
There is also a bitter irony sitting inside that supermarket bag because Pi short changed the one man on earth who could put him in prison for the rest of his life and he did it with a shrug.
If Pi had stopped there, perhaps this would be a very different story.
But the court heard he had other names in mind, and one of them came with a price tag so large it sounds almost unbelievable.
The ex-girlfriend we heard about earlier belongs on this list, [music] too.
Because when Justice McGrath examined that plan, he found it was fueled by exactly the same thing that drove the attack on Martin, which was pure hatred.
It is a frightening thought that a woman already hidden under the protection of the state had been named as a target by a man who could turn a grudge into a funeral.
The second name was even bigger.
Raymond Silly was a senior commanderro bikey living in Thailand and Pi wanted the same sniper to travel there and execute him with the judge describing a promise of up to a million dollars for the assassin which shows how far Pi was willing to go once he had a killer he believed he could rely on.
What strikes me is the strange loyalty map behind it because Pi had joined the Kancheros and yet here he was plotting the murder of a senior figure in that very same club before eventually ending up wearing the patch of the Mongols.
In this world, the colors on a man’s back can change, but the grudges never seem to fade.
While Pi was dreaming of his next execution, he had no idea that the man he trusted with his darkest secrets was already under police surveillance, and that [music] the ghost of the Motorplex was about to be dragged out into the light.
For a few weeks after the shooting, it must have seemed to Johnston that he had pulled off the perfect crime.
But the detectives of Operation Rall were not sitting still.
And about three months after Nick Martin died in early 2021, they arrested him.
His troubles did not end with the murder charge.
In April 2021, the Australian Federal Police interviewed him about suspected involvement in terrorist activity [music] in Iraq.
And suddenly, the cheeky base jumper from social media looked like a man staring down the rest of his life in a cell.
That is when he agreed to give evidence against the man who had paid him.
A choice that instantly made him the most hunted informer in the state.
On the 1st of November 2021, David Pi was taken into custody and charged with the murder of Nick Martin and with inciting the murders of two other people.
He even tried to get a suppression order to protect his own identity, but that application was rejected.
Johnston pleaded guilty to four charges, including murder.
And in December 2021, Justice Steven Hall sentenced [music] him to 20 years in prison.
Martin’s daughter, Tia, Sir, told the court that her father had been her best friend and that without him, she felt vulnerable and afraid for her own safety.
Johnston’s cooperation earned him what Justice McGrath would later call an exceptional discount, slicing his minimum from 30 years down to 20.
And yet, his lawyer, David Mona, confirmed that Johnston had appealed against the length of that sentence.
So, the killer, who had already received a massive reduction, was still fighting for more.
Now, everything rested on one question that would decide whether David Pie walked free or died in prison.
Would a judge believe a self-confessed contract killer, a man who had every reason in the world to point the finger at somebody else?
When the trial of David James Pie opened in the Supreme Court of Western Australia in 2025, it felt less like a court case and more like a high security operation.
Police surrounded the building and inside the courtroom pie was placed behind special glass paneling, an arrangement one Perth commentator compared to Hannibal Lecter.
And having pleaded not guilty to all six charges, he chose to be tried by a judge alone.
The star witness gave his evidence from inside a glass box of his own.
And before the cross-examination began, Johnston asked for and received a certificate of immunity to protect himself from incriminating answers in other investigations.
Pi’s barristister, David Hallows SC, went straight for the throat, arguing that Johnston was a pathological and compulsive liar who had invented Pi’s role to win himself a lighter sentence and pointing out that apart from Johnston’s own story, nothing directly connected Pi to the murder, the defense had plenty of material to work with.
Hallows reminded the court that Johnston had told his girlfriend he killed Martin of his own free will and suggested he had even claimed to be a spook working for the Australian government on a top secret mission.
At one point, Johnston admitted to a story, “I made this up.”
And he agreed he had viewed bikes as terrorists and had seen the killing as community service.
Then Hallows laid out his theory in one brutal question, suggesting that if Johnston wanted a significant discount, he needed to come to the party and put David Pie in.
And you could feel the whole case tilting on the credibility of one strange, contradictory man.
And yet, Johnston kept coming back to the same details.
The Instagram contact, the $10,000 for reconnaissance, the drone, [music] the safety ramp, the two firing positions, the Woolworth’s bag, and that sickening line, one dead, one serious, insisting that the job had come from pie.
A liar can still tell the truth, and a truthful man can still be disbelieved.
So, the question hanging over Perth was whether Justice McGrath would see Johnston as the fabricator the defense described, or as the one man who had seen the murder plot from the inside.
On Friday the 20th of February 2026, the answer finally came and the way it was delivered was almost unsettling in its quietness.
ABC reporter Briana Shepard standing outside court described it as a very, very short hearing with Justice McGrath simply reading out the verdicts.
David James Pi was found guilty on every one of the six charges.
And the heart of the decision was the one thing the defense had attacked hardest because in his written judgment, Justice McGrath said he was satisfied that the shooter was a credible and reliable witness.
For all the lies Johnston had told to his girlfriend and his social media audience, the judge found that when it came to who had paid for the bullet at the Motorplex, he was telling the truth.
And when sentencing came in May, he made it clear that hatred was the motive behind everything.
Today, the man who chose a hired gun so that nothing could ever be traced back to him sits in Casarina prison under the same roof as the sniper whose voice sealed his fate.
The same sniper he once paid with a supermarket bag full of cash.
Do you believe a self-confessed contract killer should ever be trusted to put another man away for life?
And who do you think that mysterious other person behind the money really was?
Tell me what you think in the comments.
And stay with us for the next dark chapter from the Bike underworld.
