In February 2025, more than two decades after his original murder conviction, a man already serving time inside Australia’s most secure prison, was sentenced again.
This time it was for directing the supply of methamphetamine from inside his own cell.
He won’t be eligible for parole until 2035.
By then, he’ll have spent close to 37 years behind bars.
For a significant portion of that time, he never actually stopped running a criminal organization.
He’s one of three men at the center of this video.
The other two never spent that long in custody at all.
One is currently serving a sentence in New Zealand.
The other hasn’t set foot in Australia in years and by every indication available has no intention of returning.
What connects them is that all three have been credited by police, by court findings, or by their own organization’s continued activity with directing serious criminal enterprise.
Each did so from a position most people would assume made that kind of direction impossible.
A prison cell with cameras and a guard rotation.
A maximum security facility specifically redesigned to prevent exactly this.
A country with no meaningful extradition relationship pulling someone back to face charges waiting for them at home.
None of it stopped any of them.
One built something close to a written constitution for his own organization.
It was a formal set of rules sent through encrypted messages from custody establishing a levy system, welfare payments for members families, education funding, even a Christmas party.
That same directive over the following two years produced something genuinely unusual, a purpose-built combat unit.
It was trained by a former United States Marine flown in specifically for a month to deliver instruction most people would associate with a foreign military, not an outlaw motorcycle club.
A second left Australia entirely relocating to a country his family’s heritage traces back to.
He did it while police were still building the case against him rather than actively closing in.
He’s been named a suspect in one of the most devastating killings connected to a war that’s already claimed at least 11 lives.
A father and his 18-year-old son shot together in their own driveway.
He’s never faced a court over it.
He may never have to, provided the country currently sheltering him keeps declining to send him back.
The third built something considerably harder to pin down than either a written policy or a change of address.
A reputation cultivated across more than two decades inside the same prison system.
It was strong enough that people who’d never met him would join an organization carrying his name and follow instructions relayed through channels investigators have spent years trying to fully map.
As recently as last year, people inspired by that reputation attempted to rebuild the organization’s presence in an entirely different state.
An effort that ended in a killing more than 20 years after the man was first convicted.
Put those three side by side and strip away everything except the actual mechanics of how each one kept directing an organization despite a restriction specifically built to prevent it.
A genuinely uncomfortable question emerges.
Which of the three actually proved hardest to stop?
The answer isn’t the one you’d probably guess going in.
Physical freedom, it turns out, isn’t the same thing as durable power.
The man with the least room to move has, by one genuine measure, held on to his own influence longer than either of the other two.
The reasons why say something worth sitting with about what a prison sentence or a border can actually accomplish against someone determined enough to work around either one.
Some of what connects these three men to specific current allegations remains exactly that allegation, not proven fact.
And we’ll be direct about which is which as each case comes up.
Ranked from least durable to most, starting with the man whose power depends entirely on a country deciding day after day that it still won’t send him home.
Rafid Alamadine left Australia in late 2022.
He didn’t flee in the sense of disappearing overnight, boarding a fishing boat, or evading a specific arrest warrant already in his name.
Reporting on his departure describes something closer to a calculated relocation, moving to Lebanon, the country his family’s heritage traces back to, while investigators were still building the broader case against his network, rather than actively closing in on him personally.
That distinction matters for understanding how his specific model of remote leadership actually differs from the other two figures in this comparison.
Ruffett wasn’t captured and then forced to direct operations from behind bars, the way this channel has documented happening to figures serving active sentences.
He chose his own exile on his own timeline before any formal legal process had cornered him into it.
New South Wales police have since named him as a suspect in the October 2021 killing of Tufik Hamzy and his 18-year-old son.
One of the most devastating single incidents in the broader war this channel has traced in detail elsewhere.
Arrest warrants connected to those killings were issued in May 2024.
By that point, Ruffett was already comfortably beyond Australia’s reach in a country with no meaningful extradition arrangement forcing his return.
What makes his case genuinely instructive for this comparison isn’t the fact of his exile itself.
Plenty of Australian organized crime figures have relocated overseas once the legal pressure at home became untenable.
What’s worth examining is whether his network’s own continued operation genuinely depends on his ongoing direct instruction or whether it’s simply running on infrastructure he built years earlier largely independent of whatever he’s actually doing in Beirut on any given day.
The evidence points toward genuine continued involvement rather than passive absence.
Investigators alleged the network’s prison-based drug smuggling operation, Bupernorphine Strips, moved into correctional facilities, generating roughly a quarter of a million dollars over several months, funneled its profits specifically toward Ruffett’s own brother-in-law.
He managed that revenue and kept it flowing back toward leadership.
That’s not the financial architecture of an organization drifting along on autopilot.
It’s a structure still actively directing money toward a specific person for a specific purpose consistent with genuine ongoing command rather than a founders’s name simply being invoked out of habit by subordinates running things on their own.
Police assessment of the network’s broader operations backs this up.
One senior detective describing the specific challenge posed by organized crime figures directing Australian operations from overseas called it among the most significant obstacles facing investigators in the country.
That’s a genuinely different kind of admission than police simply conceding a fugitive remains at large.
It’s an acknowledgment that the fugitive in question retains functional operational control, that catching associates on Australian soil doesn’t meaningfully disrupt whatever is actually being decided from Lebanon.
Compare this to how the network’s own alliance structure has held up in his absence.
The common cherro partnership was set up to seize joint control of Sydney’s drug trade, and it stayed intact and operational well into 2024 and 2025.
It was a sustained coalition, not something that fell apart the moment its architect left the country.
By contrast, the KVT tie eventually split and spawned the separate Coconut Cartel conflict, which this channel has covered in detail.
We can’t say for sure if the split came because Ruffett’s direct oversight had weakened at a distance or because the payment dispute would have blown up no matter where he was.
This comparison doesn’t resolve that question with confidence.
What we can say is Ruffett’s model rests on something the other two lack real freedom to move, meet and communicate, unbound by prison walls or external monitoring.
He can meet people in person.
He can travel within whatever countries will still have him.
He can conduct business through ordinary channels, phone calls, meetings, banking relationships rather than smuggled devices and coded messages passed through visitors.
That’s a considerably easier environment to run a criminal enterprise from than a prison cell.
It shows in the operational range.
This account has traced front companies, property portfolios, crossber financial flows, and a reach stretching from Marylands to Turkey and Lebanon.
The cost of that freedom is permanence.
Rafett can’t simply serve out a sentence and walk back into Australian life once his legal exposure has run its course, the way a prison-based leader theoretically can.
Every year he stays in Lebanon pushes him further from any realistic return, widening a split that began as a strategy and could over time harden into near total separation.
Basam Hamzi, whatever the genuine severity of his own confinement, remains inside the same country, subject to the same legal system with an actual release date attached to at least some of his sentencing, however distant.
Rafett has no comparable horizon.
His power is genuinely greater in its day-to-day flexibility than either of the other two figures in this comparison and genuinely more fragile in the sense that it depends entirely on countries with limited appetite for cooperating with Australian authorities continuing to tolerate his presence indefinitely.
There’s a further wrinkle worth including here because it complicates any simple ranking of most powerful based purely on operational freedom.
Massud Zakaria, a senior figure within this same broader network, described in earlier coverage as its alleged number two, attempted something considerably closer to Rafett’s own model, fleeing first to Malaysia by fishing boat before eventually surfacing in Turkey.
He was caught.
Turkish special forces arrested him in Bodram in January 2023 after just over a year on the run.
That was considerably shorter than the multi-year evasions other Australian fugitives have managed in Turkey.
That capture matters directly for assessing Ruffett’s own position because it demonstrates the model isn’t automatically safe simply by virtue of distance.
Years later, Zacharia filed a subpoena against Australian police, arguing his 2023 deportation from Turkey was unlawful.
If that argument wins, it could make Australian authorities less confident in fully relying on Turkish cooperation against other fleeing network figures in future.
Rafett’s choice of Lebanon over Turkey or the UAE may reflect that calculation.
Lebanon offers weaker practical extradition cooperation with Australia than Turkey has sometimes provided, and it also gives him direct family and ancestral ties in a way Zachary’s opportunistic move to Turkey did not.
Ranked against the other two figures in this comparison, Ruffett’s power looks on balance, like the least structurally secure of the three, genuinely wide-ranging in its day-to-day operational freedom, but built on a foundation that depends entirely on political and diplomatic circumstances, neither he nor his network actually control.
A change in Lebanese government cooperation, a shift in how seriously Australia’s own diplomatic relationship with Beirut treats extradition requests, or simply enough accumulated international pressure could, in principle end his specific model of remote leadership considerably faster than either of the other two men’s confinement is likely to end theirs.
He sits third in this ranking, not because his network is smaller or less violent.
This channel has already documented it as arguably the most lethal of the three.
But because his own personal position within it is the most exposed to forces genuinely outside his control, Pascilica Nauahoo never left New Zealand, he didn’t need to.
What he built instead from inside custody resembles something closer to formal government than the informal personalitydriven command structures this channel has documented across most other organized crime figures in its research.
A genuinely written, explicitly stated set of governing rules transmitted through encrypted communication to the man responsible for implementing them on the outside.
That message sent in February 2021 laid out something Naufu himself called the commission.
His own stated purpose was direct.
Maintain the organization’s position as the country’s dominant criminal force and protect the club and its members.
War within the underworld, he wrote, was in his own assessment inevitable.
A framing that positioned everything that followed as preparation rather than aggression.
Regardless of whether that characterization genuinely reflected his own thinking or simply provided convenient justification for what he wanted built.
Regardless, what the commission actually established goes considerably further than most prison-directed criminal enterprises this channel has traced elsewhere.
A formal levy, $5,000 for every kilogram of drugs sold, funded a centralized pool directed towards specific itemized purposes.
Financial support for the families of imprisoned members, legal representation costs, polytechnic study fees for anyone wanting further education, formal patching ceremony expenses, and an annual Christmas party.
That’s not simply extraction dressed up as organizational structure.
It’s a genuine internal welfare system paid for with criminal proceeds, but administered with careful bureaucratic detail.
That structure looks much more like a legitimate membership organization’s governance than the predatory models this channel has tracked elsewhere.
The man responsible for actually implementing Nfahu’s written directives was Lehi Vimahi.
Court proceedings described him as national commander and in less formal terms as Nahu’s own man on the outside.
We should be precise about what this division of labor means because it’s plainly different from how remote leadership operated in the other two cases.
Rafett Alamadin, still physically free, can act on his own instructions directly.
Basam Hamzi, this account will trace in detail shortly, has relied on considerably more informal, personal networks of loyalty built over decades.
Now, Fahu built something closer to a formal executive relationship.
He set out a written policy and named a subordinate whose job was to translate that policy into action with enough clarity that prosecutors later described Vimahi in his own sentencing as a genuine lead offender rather than merely a subordinate carrying out someone else’s orders.
The commission’s financial infrastructure extended into genuinely sophisticated laundering.
An accountant working with the organization incorporated a company in March 2023 under an associate’s name, laundering millions over 6 months.
The proceeds were then used to buy two legitimate hospitality businesses in a small town north of Auckland, which were later sold, completing a full cycle from criminal drug proceeds to clean capital.
That’s a much more elaborate financial operation than most prison-directed criminal networks.
This channel has documented suggesting Nahu’s written instructions went well beyond internal discipline into deliberate economic strategy.
None of this on its own would necessarily distinguish Nafahu’s model from a competent criminal organization simply continuing to function despite its leader incarceration.
What actually sets his case apart and what earns him the middle position in this ranking rather than the bottom is what the commission’s resources were eventually directed toward building a dedicated combat unit trained specifically to give the organization genuine tactical capability it hadn’t previously possessed.
What’s worth establishing here before moving to it is the underlying logic connecting Nahu’s imprisonment directly to his organization’s escalating sophistication rather than treating the two as coincidental.
A man with no physical freedom and no ability to meet international contacts or conduct face-to-face negotiations nonetheless managed to identify or have identified on his behalf the need for professional-grade combat training.
He then oversaw through nothing more than written instruction and a trusted subordinate the recruitment of a foreign specialist capable of delivering it.
That’s a genuinely different order of remote command than simply keeping an existing operation running while its leader waits out a sentence.
It’s active, deliberate organizational development, initiated and directed entirely through the same restricted channels, encrypted messages, prison visits, a single trusted intermediary that correctional authorities specifically designed custodial sentences to limit.
Whatever security measures New Zealand’s prison system applied to Nauf Fahu during this period, they evidently permitted a genuinely significant expansion of his organization’s capabilities rather than simply allowing its existing operations to limp along unchanged.
It’s worth holding this achievement alongside its eventual cost because Nahu’s own position in this ranking reflects both.
His formal governance structure and the paramilitary unit it eventually produced represent a genuinely more ambitious use of remote authority than this channel has documented.
Rafett Alamadin achieving from considerably greater physical freedom.
But that same ambition generated the specific evidence that would ultimately produce Nahu’s further conviction.
The written commission directive itself, the financial trail through the Hava registered company, and the training records eventually recovered by police formed that evidentary chain layered on top of whatever sentence he was already serving when he first sent that encrypted message in 2021.
Contrast this with Rafett’s own considerably more diffuse operational style, informal alliances, family-based loyalty, wealth concealed through front companies rather than formally written policy.
Now, Fahu’s approach generated more capability faster from a considerably more restricted position.
It also generated a clearer, more prosecutable paper trail.
Building institutional structure from inside a prison cell requires writing things down, sending messages through channels that can be intercepted and coordinating with subordinates whose conduct can be traced back to the original directive.
That trade-off, greater achieved capability purchased at the cost of greater evidentiary exposure is what places Nahu in the middle of this ranking rather than at either extreme.
He built more from less freedom than Rafett Alamadine managed with considerably more room to operate.
He also left considerably more behind for investigators to eventually use against him than either Rafett has so far or Basam Hamzy managed across a genuinely much longer run of sustained prison-directed leadership this account turns to next.
Somewhere between establishing the commission’s financial infrastructure and its eventual exposure, Nafahu’s organization crossed a threshold, this channel hasn’t documented any other imprisoned Australian or New Zealand crime figure reaching genuine professional paramilitary capability.
Built specifically to project violence on the organization’s behalf, the mechanism was simple in outline, extraordinary in execution.
A former United States Marine Corps sergeant, genuine combat experience from Afghanistan, a further professional background in law enforcement, arrived in New Zealand on 12 November 2023.
He hadn’t come as a tourist, and he wasn’t approached through any conventional criminal recruitment channel this channel has documented elsewhere.
Court records describe him as having come specifically to deliver training to patched commoner members at the direction of an organization whose actual president remained throughout this entire arrangement in custody.
Lehi Bimahi handled the practical logistics, arranging accommodation, securing gym access, managing the month-long stay this specialized training required.
The curriculum itself extended well beyond basic weapons familiarity into genuinely military territory, formal selection testing, physical conditioning benchmarks, instruction in AR-15 rifles, and a broader syllabus covering squad tactics, coordinated raids, and close combat technique.
This channel isn’t going to describe in further specific detail.
16 candidates began the program.
Six finished it.
That 62% attrition rate pointed to something far more rigorous than an informal exercise, and it matched, according to court documents, the organization’s stated goal of forming two operational squads organized with genuine military logic rather than simply maximizing numbers.
The resulting unit became known in the court proceedings that eventually followed as the Ghost Squad.
Its stated purpose, agreed to directly by at least one of its own convicted members, was carrying out violence on behalf of the organization, specifically to maintain its dominant position within the broader criminal landscape.
It’s worth pausing on what this specific achievement actually represents set directly against the other two models in this comparison.
Rafett almadin had genuine freedom to operate in Lebanon.
He built alliances with the commoner and earlier with KVT before that relationship fractured, which gave him access to violent capability his partners already possessed.
He hasn’t, as far as this account has been able to establish, personally overseen the creation of an entirely new purpose-built combat unit from scratch.
Now, Fahu did exactly that from inside custody.
He used only his written authority and a trusted subordinate to handle the practical arrangements a foreign specialist’s month-long stay required.
That’s genuinely remarkable as a demonstration of remote command.
It’s also this account has to note directly the specific achievement that ultimately proved hardest to keep hidden.
Video evidence recovered by police showed Vimei himself directly participating in the combat training.
He did not simply arrange it from a comfortable administrative distance.
He personally underwent the same physical and tactical instruction he’d organized for the patched members beneath him.
That kind of direct hands-on involvement generates exactly the kind of evidence a more cautious, more purely administrative leader might have avoided by keeping his own participation strictly logistical.
The eventual reckoning came through New Zealand Police Commissioner Andrew Costa’s public framing of the case.
He treated the Kancherto not as a collection of individually prosecutable offenders, but as a formal criminal group, which let investigators draw legal lines between Nafahu’s 2021 commission directive, the financial infrastructure that followed, and the ghost squad training that emerged.
Nafahu and Vimahi were ultimately jailed together in the Auckland District Court over charges spanning moneyaundering, drug dealing, and the training program itself.
Prosecutors described Vimahi as a genuine lead offender whose conduct went well beyond merely following distant instructions.
There’s a specific irony worth sitting with here because it connects directly to why this account places Nafahu above Rafett Alamadine in this ranking.
Despite Nafahu’s own eventual, more comprehensive legal reckoning, Rafett remains free.
Nafahu has been additionally convicted on top of whatever sentence he was already serving when he first sent that 2021 directive.
And yet the sheer scale of what Nafahu achieved, a written constitution for his organization, a functioning internal welfare economy, sophisticated money laundering through legitimate hospitality businesses, and a purpose-built paramilitary unit trained by an actual foreign combat specialist represents a genuinely more ambitious exercise of remote authority.
That scale exceeds anything this account has been able to establish.
Ruffett achieved despite his considerably greater physical freedom to work with.
Power, in other words, isn’t simply a function of how free someone is to move around.
Now, Fahu’s case suggests something close to the opposite.
Genuine physical restriction paired with patience.
A trusted intermediary and a willingness to put instructions in writing despite the evidentiary risk can produce organizational achievements a nominally free leader operating via looser alliance structures simply hasn’t matched.
What ultimately limits this specific model isn’t the underlying restriction of imprisonment itself.
Nafahu’s own case proves that restriction alone doesn’t prevent genuine institutional development.
It’s the specific unavoidable trade-off between building something formal enough to actually function at scale and building something informal enough to stay genuinely hidden from investigators with the time and resources to eventually piece together an encrypted directive, a laundering trail, and a foreign trainer’s own recovered training notes into a single prosecutable case.
Nafahu chose formality and got scale in return.
He also got eventually exactly the kind of comprehensive conviction that Model’s own paper trail made close to inevitable once investigators finally connected all three threads together.
That specific trade-off, genuine achieved capability purchased at the cost of eventual comprehensive exposure, sets up the comparison this account turns to next, with a figure whose own remote leadership has, by contrast, sustained itself for considerably longer through a model built on almost the opposite set of choices.
Basam Hamzi was convicted of murder in 2002 at 19 years old.
What makes his story genuinely distinct from either Rafid Alamadin’s exile or Pasilica Nalahu’s written commission isn’t the fact of his imprisonment.
Plenty of organized crime figures have directed operations from custody for a period.
It’s the sheer duration.
Hamzy has been running criminal enterprise from behind bars for close to a quarter of a century, spanning multiple decades, multiple correctional facilities, and this account will establish across its full coverage a model of remote command that has proven considerably harder to definitively dismantle than either of the other two figures in this comparison.
His actual sentence traces back to the 1998 shooting of Chris Tumazis outside Mr.
A Goodb Bar nightclub in Darlinghurst when Hamsy was 18 years old.
He was sentenced to 21 years in 2002.
In the following years at Lithco Correctional Center, investigators uncovered the pattern that defined his documented career.
A smuggled mobile phone discovered only after investigators traced an extraordinary volume of calls.
Reporting from the period places the figure at up to 450 separate calls in a single day, was connected to a drug supply operation worth an estimated quarter of a million dollars weekly.
All directed from inside a prison cell he was never supposed to have unsupervised communication access to.
That discovery, investigators eventually locating the phone through dental floss, an almost absurd detail that captures how resourceful prison concealment becomes when someone has years to refine it, led to Ham’s transfer to Goldman’s Supermax facility.
Supermax is Australia’s most secure correctional environment, specifically designed to prevent the kind of continued criminal direction he’d already shown at Lithco.
It’s worth being direct about what Supermax Transfer was meant to accomplish because it frames what follows as a genuine test of whether Australia’s most restrictive custodial environment could contain someone determined and connected enough to keep operating regardless.
Supermax isn’t simply a higher security version of ordinary custody.
It’s built around minimizing exactly the kind of informal contact, movement, and communication that had allowed Hamsy’s Lithgo operation to function in the first place.
Restricted visits, heavily monitored correspondence, limited association, even with other inmates.
Hamsy’s response over the following years was to build something far more durable than a string of ad hoc drug deals run through a smuggled phone.
He founded Brothers for Life, not just a criminal enterprise he directed from custody.
It was a proper organization with its own recruitment logic, internal structure, and the capacity to recruit people who’d never served alongside Hamzy on the outside.
This channel’s earlier dedicated research traced a prison-to- street recruitment model.
Men entered custody with no prior connection to Hamsy, encountered his reputation inside, and emerged as committed members, carrying his instructions back into the world he could no longer access.
That recruitment mechanism deserves direct comparison with both Nofahu’s written commission and Rafett’s pre-existing alliance structures.
It offers a different solution to the same problem the three men faced.
How to build and sustain loyalty and operational capacity among people you can’t meet, vouch for, or reward and punish like a leader at Liberty can.
Nofahu solved this through formal written policy, genuine institutional structure, explicit rules, itemized benefits, all committed to writing and transmitted through a trusted intermediary.
Ruffett has relied, this account’s earlier coverage established, on considerably more conventional criminal alliance building, family ties, existing relationships, negotiated partnerships between already established organizations.
Hamsy’s model in those formative years looked different from both.
He built institutional identity and reputation from inside custody, strong enough that strangers who encountered his organization in prison would carry his authority back out on his behalf.
That’s a harder trick than the other models because it depends on reputation and mystique to do the job written rules or old relationships would normally handle.
A prospective Brothers for Life recruit joining because Ham’s name carries weight inside the correctional system is extending trust and loyalty based almost entirely on story and reputation.
They’re not joining because of a direct personal relationship built over years of shared criminal activity on the outside.
It’s worth noting what this model cost Hamsy legally in those early years because the patent differs meaningfully from what this account traced with Nfahu.
Nahu’s own written commission directive became eventually direct evidence prosecutors could use against him, a specific dated document connecting him personally to everything that followed from it.
Hamsy’s more informal, reputation-based model produced less of that immediate paper trail early on because it relied less on explicit written instruction and more on the harder to prosecute currency of reputation, mystique, and informal prison network loyalty.
That difference in method, formal written governance against something closer to cultivated legend sets up the considerably longer, considerably more consequential story this account traces across Hamsy’s subsequent decades in custody, including the specific family losses, legal battles, and eventual further convictions that would test whether even this model, apparently more resistant to straightforward prosecution than Nafahu’s own written commission, could ultimately survive a quarter century of sustained dedicated investigative attention.
Reputation built strongly enough to command loyalty from strangers carries a specific cost.
Most conventional criminal alliance structures don’t.
It makes an entire extended family into targets, whether or not any individual relative ever chose to be part of the organization their surname had become attached to.
This channel’s earlier dedicated research into the broader Alamadine Hamsy war already traced what that cost actually looked like in practice.
Majid Hamzy, Basam’s own younger brother, was shot dead outside a home in Condell Park in October 2020.
A targeted daylight execution investigators connected directly to the wider conflict.
Basam’s own reputation and organization had helped sustain.
Whether or not he’d personally directed the specific circumstances that led investigators to his brother’s own doorstep.
Bilal Hamsy, a cousin, was killed in Sydney’s CBD in June 2021.
Topic Hamsy, 64, and his 18-year-old son were shot dead together in Guilford that October.
A father and teenage son killed in their own driveway.
Connected by family name to an organization Basam Hamsy had built from a prison cell he’d occupied since before either of them was old enough to remember him as anything other than an absence.
There’s a specific detail worth returning to from this account’s own earlier coverage of Raf Alamaden because it lands differently once placed directly alongside Hamzy’s own family loss.
His Rafett himself was later named as a suspect in the Tophic and Salem Hamzi killings specifically.
That means two of the three figures in this comparison connect directly to the same specific act of violence.
One as the man whose family absorbed the loss, the other as the man police believe may have ordered it.
Power in this particular underworld doesn’t simply mean directing your own organization’s activity.
It means your own family becomes leverage, currency, and target simultaneously in ways entirely outside your control, regardless of how securely you’re held or how far away the person threatening them happens to be.
Maha Hamzi, Basam’s aunt, survived being shot eight times through her own front door in March 2013.
An attack this channel has documented in exhaustive detail through its separate coverage of Reynold Glover’s conviction and Hammed Assad’s own alleged unresolved involvement.
That specific attack traces back to a debt dispute connected to Basam’s cousin Bilal.
Meaning the violence reaching Hamzy’s family wasn’t confined to the later, more publicly documented 2020 2022 war at all.
It stretched back close to a decade earlier into territory this account has already traced, connecting directly to Hammed Assad’s own eventual killing, allegedly at the hands of Medid Hamzi himself in apparent retaliation.
Basam Hamzy’s own response to at least some of this accumulated family loss took a form worth including directly because it demonstrates something about how he’s chosen to engage with the formal legal system even while continuing to operate outside it.
He took New South Wales police to civil court alleging officers had known of a specific threat to his family for more than a week before Majid’s killing and failed to act.
That’s a genuinely unusual move for a man this channel has otherwise documented running a criminal enterprise from custody using the same court system prosecuting him to separately pursue accountability from police in a case entirely distinct from his own ongoing criminal matters.
A separate legal action connected to conditions inside his own custody rather than his family’s safety adds a further dimension worth noting.
Hamsy has filed formal complaints about access to Arabic language materials and to laptops in corrective services facilities.
They look like everyday administrative grievances, but he clearly judged them worth taking through the courts instead of just accepting whatever supermax rules imposed on him.
Both legal threads matter here because they reveal how Hamsy approaches power.
And that approach sets him apart from the two other figures we have already followed.
Rafett Alamadin operates largely outside any formal legal engagement with Australian institutions.
At all, his power exists in the gap left by his own physical absence from the jurisdiction that wants him.
Now, Fahu’s own engagement with formal process has been almost entirely reactive, contesting charges and appealing convictions as they’re brought against him.
Hamsy’s pattern suggests active ongoing engagement on multiple fronts.
He ran a criminal enterprise while also using the courts in parallel to pursue his own grievances against the very system holding him.
It’s worth connecting this specific pattern to the man who was eventually convicted of directing violence against members of the Alamadine family in apparent retaliation for what happened to his own relatives.
This account has already traced Meid Hamzy’s suspected role in Hammad Assad’s 2016 killing itself.
Apparently retaliation for Assad’s alleged involvement in the earlier attack on Maha Hamzi.
That means the same family that absorbed devastating losses for more than a decade was also at times allegedly enacting comparable violence in return.
This channel has traced a brutal reciprocal cycle across separate accounts, all tying back to the same extended family network Basam Hamz’s imprisonment never truly separated him from.
What emerges from tracing this specific dimension of Hamzy’s story is a picture considerably more complicated than simple uninterrupted criminal command from behind bars.
His reputation and organizational structure generated genuine sustained loyalty and operational capacity.
This account has already established that much.
That same reputation and the family network sustaining it generated a genuinely devastating cycle of loss that no amount of confinement, whether his own or anyone else’s, actually managed to prevent or contain.
Power exercised from Supermax didn’t simply mean directing drug distribution from a cell.
It meant watching from that cell as an extended family absorbed the consequences of conflicts he could influence but never fully control.
The war began before some of its eventual victims were even born.
By February 2025, more than two decades after his original murder conviction, Basam Hamzi was sentenced again.
This time it was for directing the supply of more than 450 g of methamphetamine from inside Gold Supermax covering 2017 to 2018.
That conviction matters because it proves something the other two figures haven’t shown to the same extent.
Sustained active criminal direction from custody.
It spans not just the years after his original conviction, but decades into a sentence that has already outlasted most organized crime figures entire careers.
His own parole eligibility for this conviction doesn’t arrive until June 2035.
Put that date against everything else this account has traced because it shows Hamsy’s model of remote leadership isn’t simply a historical footnote from earlier in his sentence.
It’s continuing actively well into a period when most observers might reasonably have assumed decades of supermax confinement would have finally comprehensively severed his connection to any operational criminal activity at all.
Hamsy’s own lawyer has stated publicly that Brothers for Life is in current terms no longer operative, a claim worth treating with the same careful scrutiny this account has applied throughout its broader coverage of contested claims from legal representatives.
It’s genuinely difficult to reconcile that specific characterization with the 2025 conviction for directing drug supply from the same prison this account has just traced across more than two decades of continued criminal activity.
Either the organization itself has genuinely wound down while Ham’s own individual criminal conduct continued independently of any formal Brothers for Life structure or the claim reflects legal strategy considerably more than operational reality.
This account can’t resolve that specific tension with confidence and it’s worth naming the genuine uncertainty directly rather than picking whichever version makes for a tidier narrative.
There’s a further genuinely significant data point worth including here because it connects Hamsy’s own continued influence directly to a separate organization this channel has documented in extensive detail.
Sam Abdul Raheem, known within his own circles as the Punisher, was shot dead in Melbourne in January 2025 during what this channel’s earlier research established was a specific attempt to revive Brothers for Life’s own presence in Victoria.
Whether that revival attempt happened with Hamsy’s own direct knowledge and authorization or simply invoked his name and reputation without any genuine current instruction from him isn’t something this account can establish with certainty.
What can be said is that more than two decades after his original conviction and even while his lawyer claimed the organization had ceased operating, someone judged the Brothers for Life name still carried enough weight to try rebuilding a Victorian presence.
That revival attempt ended in a killing tied back to the same broader web this account has traced through Kazim Hammad’s suspected involvement.
That connection matters directly for this comparison because it illustrates something distinct about how Ham’s specific model of power actually operates compared to either Nafahu’s written commission or Ruffett’s more conventional alliance structures.
A name and a reputation cultivated across more than two decades of continued demonstrated criminal capacity apparently retains genuine value and genuine pull even independent of whatever formal instruction Hamsy himself is actually issuing at any given moment.
That’s a considerably more durable form of influence than either written policy, which requires active ongoing direction to remain relevant, or conventional alliance building, which depends on the specific relationships involved staying intact.
It’s worth being precise about what this durability actually costs Hamzy personally, because the trade-off here differs meaningfully from either of the other two figures already traced.
Nahu’s written commission generated direct prosecutable evidence connecting him personally to specific criminal decisions.
Rafett’s continued freedom depends entirely on diplomatic and political circumstances he doesn’t control.
Hamzy’s model reputation and mystique doing the work that written instruction or physical presence would otherwise handle has proven much harder for prosecutors to pin down in full.
Individual pieces do surface, though like the 2025 methamphetamine conviction, which still produced genuine legal consequences.
That partial resistance to prosecution doesn’t mean total immunity.
Across more than two decades, Hamzi has faced multiple separate convictions tied to criminal activity from custody.
They include the original Lithgo phone discovery, his transfer to SuperMax, and a 2025 methamphetamine conviction that pushed his release date out by more than a decade.
Every piece of evidence prosecutors have linked to him has carried real serious consequences.
What’s proved far harder is any comprehensive disruption of the broader reputation and organizational identity behind it.
That reputation appears to have made Sam Abdul Raheem’s attempted Brothers for Life revival more than two decades after Hamsy’s conviction look like a genuinely viable criminal venture.
Line the three models up and a clear pattern emerges, one worth carrying into this account’s closing comparison.
Rafett Alamodine’s power is wide but shallow in legal exposure.
He has extensive operational freedom, but it rests on diplomatic circumstances that could shift faster than he can control.
Now, Fahu’s power was narrow, but deep in evidentiary exposure.
His ambitious institutional building came at the cost of a paper trail that made his eventual comprehensive conviction nearly inevitable once investigators connected the pieces.
Hamsy’s power looks like neither of those specific trade-offs.
It is built on something much harder to prosecute less on any single decision, document, or relationship and more on more than two decades of reputation that keeps producing criminal activity.
Sometimes directly traceable to him, sometimes merely invoking his name.
Regardless of how many individual acts investigators can prove, line the three models up and the differences matter more than the surface resemblance of criminal leaders directing operations despite physical restriction first suggests.
Rafett Alamadine’s power depends on physical freedom combined with geographic distance.
He can move, meet, negotiate, and direct through largely conventional channels provided he stays within countries unwilling to extradite him.
That freedom generates genuine operational range.
It includes front companies, crossber financial movement, and alliances built and rebuilt as circumstances shift.
It also means his entire model rests on a foundation he doesn’t fully control.
Diplomatic relationships between Australia and Lebanon.
Political shifts in either country, or simply enough accumulated international pressure could unwind his specific arrangement considerably faster than either of the other two men’s confinement is likely to end.
His network’s own alliance with the commoner has held.
Its alliance with KVT fractured into an entirely separate war.
That’s the genuine instability built into a model dependent on maintaining multiple separately negotiated relationships rather than a single formal internal structure.
Pasilica Naufu’s power depends on formal written governance transmitted through a single trusted intermediary willing to translate policy into action.
That model produced genuinely more ambitious institutional achievement than Ruffett has managed with considerably greater freedom, a functioning internal welfare economy, sophisticated laundering through legitimate businesses, and ultimately a purpose-built paramilitary unit trained by an actual foreign combat specialist.
It also generated the clearest, most directly prosecutable paper trail of any model in this comparison.
Building institutional structure from a prison cell required putting things in writing and sending them through channels that could eventually be intercepted, traced, and used as direct evidence against the person who authorized them.
Basam Hamzy’s power depends on neither formal writing nor physical freedom, but on more than two decades of accumulated reputation, strong enough to generate genuine loyalty and continued criminal activity from people who’ve never personally met him, operating with or without his own direct current instruction.
That model has proven the hardest of the three to comprehensively dismantle precisely because it doesn’t depend on any single relationship, document, or geographic arrangement that investigators can specifically target and unwind.
It also hasn’t proven immune to prosecution entirely.
The 2025 methamphetamine conviction demonstrates individual pieces of his continued activity can still be traced and proven, even if the broader reputation sustaining Brothers for Life’s name has resisted any single comprehensive legal reckoning.
Ranking these three by pure operational range would favor Rafett, whose genuine freedom of movement still exceeds anything either of the other two men can access.
Ranking by sheer institutional ambition would favor Nafahu, whose commission and ghost squad represent a more sophisticated single achievement than anything this account has documented from either of the other two.
Ranking by sheer durability, length of time, actively directing criminal enterprise despite restriction, resistance to comprehensive prosecution, and continued relevance even amid direct claims that his organization had ceased operating favors Hamzy decisively.
That’s the specific basis for this account’s own final ranking.
Placing Hamsy first, now Fahu second, and Ruff at third.
It’s worth being direct about what this ranking is and isn’t measuring.
It isn’t ranking these three men by the total scale of harm their respective organizations have caused.
This channel’s own earlier coverage of the Alamodine Network’s role in at least 11 deaths connected to the Hamsy War specifically suggests Ruffett’s network may well have produced the single largest body count of the three.
It isn’t measuring current wealth or organizational size or even the specific severity of any individual conviction.
It’s measuring something narrower.
And this account would argue genuinely more revealing how effectively each man has managed to keep directing criminal activity despite a restriction of imprisonment or exile specifically designed to prevent exactly that.
By that specific measure, distance turns out to matter less than durability.
Rafat’s freedom is real, but it’s borrowed from political circumstances outside his control, and it comes with an increasingly permanent cost attached the longer it continues.
Now, Fahu’s institutional achievement is real, but it generated its own downfall through the very documentation required to build something that ambitious from inside a cell.
Hamsy’s reputation-based model, by contrast, has now survived more than two decades, multiple correctional facilities, Australia’s most secure prison environment specifically designed to prevent it, and at least one further major conviction directly connected to continued criminal direction from custody, while apparently still carrying enough genuine weight in 2025 to inspire an attempted revival of his organization in an entirely different state.
More than two decades after his name first entered Australian court records.
None of these three men has been definitively comprehensively stopped.
That’s arguably the most important shared finding across all three cases, more significant than any specific ranking between them.
Australia and New Zealand’s respective correctional and legal systems have each in their own way been genuinely tested by a leader determined enough, connected enough, and patient enough to keep directing criminal activity regardless of the specific restriction placed on them.
And in each case, that system has managed only partial incremental disruption rather than anything resembling total containment.
Step back from the specific ranking this account has just established and a genuinely uncomfortable pattern emerges across all three cases simultaneously.
One that says less about any individual figure’s own particular cleverness and considerably more about the structural limits of how Australia and New Zealand actually attempt to disrupt organized crime leadership once a specific individual has been identified as a genuine threat.
Prison, as these two very different correctional systems demonstrate, does not deliver the clean, total severance from criminal activity its design intends.
It restricts considerably, but restriction and elimination aren’t the same thing.
Now, Fahu directed the creation of an entire paramilitary unit while behind bars.
Hamsy continued to direct drug distribution across separate periods spanning more than two decades, even from inside facilities built to prevent exactly that.
Both cases confirm what this channel has documented across many other figures.
A determined, well-connected leader can still function inside almost any correctional environment today.
It usually requires patience, at least one trusted outside contact, and access to even minimally reliable communication.
Exile presents a different, sometimes more counterintuitive problem.
Rafat Alamadin’s own position demonstrates that removing someone from the immediate jurisdiction pursuing them doesn’t remove their operational relevance either.
It simply changes the specific mechanism through which they continue exercising it.
Trading physical restriction for geographic distance and trading the risk of prison-based detection for the risk of diplomatic and political circumstances eventually shifting against them instead.
Taken together, this suggests the two primary tools for physically separating a criminal leader from their organization, incarceration and forced or voluntary exile address different symptoms of the same problem.
Neither genuinely resolves it.
Both restrict movement.
Neither reliably restricts influence provided the underlying organization retains enough independent structure, loyalty or reputation to keep functioning around whatever specific limitation has been placed on its nominal leader.
It’s worth asking what would need to change to close this gap.
None of the three cases here suggests an obvious straightforward answer.
Now, Fahu’s case might suggest tighter controls on written and encrypted communication in correctional facilities.
His case also shows how hard that is to enforce completely given the volume of messages a determined inmate and a willing outside contact can eventually establish through whatever channels remain minimally available.
Hamsy’s case might suggest more aggressive earlier disruption of the underlying reputation and organizational identity itself rather than simply prosecuting individual pieces of continued criminal activity as they surface except reputation.
Unlike a specific document or a specific transaction isn’t the kind of thing a formal legal system is generally well equipped to directly target and dismantle.
Rafett’s case might suggest stronger, more consistently enforced international extradition cooperation, except that depends on diplomatic relationships and political will, considerably beyond what any single police force or prosecutorial strategy can unilaterally produce.
There’s a broader reflection worth closing on here, connecting this specific three-way comparison back to the wider body of work this channel has built across its extensive coverage of Australian and New Zealand organized crime more generally.
Almost every major organization this channel has documented, the Kancherero, Brothers for Life, the Alamadine Network, and many others has proved across dozens of cases more durable than any single leader’s tenure directing it.
Individual leaders get arrested, get shot, get exiled, get convicted.
The underlying organizations in case after case this channel has traced, tend to persist regardless, cycling through whoever happens to be capable of stepping into whatever vacancy the previous leader’s own removal actually created.
This comparison adds an important refinement to that pattern.
Sometimes the leader doesn’t even need replacing because the original leader never actually stopped leading in any meaningful sense at all.
Nafahu’s commission functioned as genuine active governance, not simply a historical artifact from before his imprisonment.
Hamsy’s continued 2025 conviction confirms activity, not merely lingering reputation from decades earlier.
Even Rafett, despite his own physical absence, appears to remain genuinely actively connected to ongoing financial flows.
This account has already traced directly to his own brother-in-law’s management.
That’s worth sitting with directly as this comparison closes because it complicates any simple narrative suggesting Australian and New Zealand law enforcement simply need to catch the right person to meaningfully disrupt organized crime at its source.
In each of these three cases, authorities did catch or at least formally restrict the specific individual identified as the organization’s leader.
In each case, that restriction produced genuine, measurable disruption, arrests of subordinates, seized assets, additional convictions, dismantled specific operations.
In none of the three cases has that restriction produced anything resembling total comprehensive severance between the leader and the organization still operating in some form in his name.
Whether that gap between restriction and genuine disruption is something Australia and New Zealand’s respective justice systems can eventually close through some combination this comparison hasn’t been able to fully specify or whether it represents a more permanent structural limitation of what incarceration and exile can actually achieve against sufficiently determined, sufficiently connected organized crime leadership is a question this channel’s own broader body of work continues returning to across case after case without ever quite arriving at a fully satisfying answer.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting rather than speculation.
Where this comparison has relied on allegation rather than formal conviction, Rafat Alamodine’s suspected involvement in specific killings, chief among them, that distinction has been flagged directly throughout rather than treated as settled fact simply because it fits a compelling narrative.
What happens next for all three men and for the organizations that have so far outlasted every attempt to genuinely separate them from their leadership remains, as this comparison was being put together, still very much unresolved.
