[music] Good evening.
Tonight, we can show you the terrifying moment two gunmen opened fire inside a busy Orbin kebab shop during the lunchtime rush yesterday.
We begin this hour in Western Sydney though.
Police are hunting a man who escaped their clutches after officers intercepted a suspected underworld kill car.
February 2nd, 2025.
8:41 p.m.
A black Audi rolled slowly through the streets of Greenacre in Sydney’s Southwest.
Its windows darkened, its headlights off.
On a quiet residential road, a group of men stood outside a townhouse, smoking and laughing.
They never saw the car until it was already beside them.
The back window dropped.
A burst of automatic gunfire ripped through the night.
Bullets tore into brick walls, parked cars, and bodies.
One man collapsed instantly.
Two more fell screaming.
The Audi accelerated away, disappearing before neighbors could even process what had happened.
By the time police arrived, Greenacre had become another crime scene in a war that had been building for years.
That shooting was not random.
It was part of a long, brutal feud between some of the most dangerous criminal groups in Australia.
And at the center of it all was a name most Australians had never heard before.
2024 KVT [music] KVT was not a traditional gang.
It did not begin with a leader, a clubhouse, or a clear hierarchy.
It began as a loose network of young men from Sydney Southwest who had grown up surrounded by drugs, violence, and prison culture.
Many of them had family members who had already done time.
Others had been involved in petty crime before graduating to something far more organized.
Over time, those men began moving together.
They pulled money.
They shared weapons.
They shared enemies.
And slowly, they became something far more powerful than any one of them could have been alone.
Police intelligence would later describe KVT as a fluid criminal alliance.
That was bureaucratic language [music] for something far more dangerous.
A gang that could not be easily dismantled because it didn’t rely on one boss.
When someone was arrested, someone else stepped in.
When someone was killed, the network absorbed the loss and kept moving.
By 2023, KVT had begun pushing into Sydney’s drug trade in a serious way.
They controlled street level dealers, mid-tier distributors, and stash houses that allowed them to move heroin, meth, and cocaine across the city.
They also began taxing other criminals for protection.
If you wanted to sell drugs in certain suburbs, you paid KVT or you became a target.
That expansion put them on a collision course with two powerful forces.
The Alamodine Crime Family and a collection of Afghan- linked gangs who had been dominating parts of Sydney’s underworld for years.
The Alamadines were old school.
Their power came from blood ties, loyalty, and a reputation built over decades.
The Afghan crews, on the other hand, were newer, faster, and deeply involved in the city’s drug import roots.
Both saw KVT as an upstart that had grown too quickly and too loudly.
At first, the conflict was quiet.
Dealers were robbed.
Drug shipments vanished.
Threats were passed through intermediaries.
But in criminal ecosystems, quiet conflicts never stay quiet.
[music] They either resolve or explode.
In late 2024, they exploded.
One of KVT’s key figures was shot outside a cafe in Bankstown.
He survived, but the message was clear.
Someone was trying to cut the head off the snake.
KVT responded within days.
A suspected Alamadine associate was gunned down in broad daylight near a shopping strip.
Witnesses saw two masked men fire repeatedly before escaping in a stolen vehicle.
No one [music] was arrested.
From that point on, Sydney Southwest became a battlefield.
Drive-by shootings, arson attacks, and attempted assassinations began happening weekly.
Police struggled to keep up.
Task Force Falcon, a special NSW police unit, was formed to deal with the violence.
Their intelligence reports showed that KVT was at the center of most of it.
They were not just defending themselves, they were striking first.
What made KVT especially dangerous was how young and reckless many of its members were.
These were not seasoned mobsters who understood restraint.
These were men in their early 20s with access to militarygrade weapons and a willingness to use them in public.
Every dispute unpredictable.
Behind the scenes, KVT was also evolving.
They were no longer just street dealers.
They had begun laundering money through small businesses, using encrypted phones to coordinate shipments, and building connections with overseas suppliers.
Some of their drugs were coming through the Middle East, others through Southeast Asia.
Sydney had become a hub and KVT was positioning itself to control it.
The Afghan gangs and the Alamodines saw this for what it was, an attempt to rewrite the city’s criminal map, and they were not going to let that happen without a fight.
The violence reached a new level when a young Afghan linked associate was killed in a targeted hit outside a mosque.
That was a line that could not be uncrossed.
Retaliation was guaranteed.
Within days, KVT members were ambushed at a service station.
One was killed, another barely survived.
By early 2025, the war had spilled into neighborhoods that had never seen this kind of bloodshed before.
Families were being woken by gunfire.
Schools went into lockdown.
Sydney, a city known for its beaches and nightife, was suddenly dealing with a level of organized violence more commonly associated with Mexico or Europe.
And still, no one seemed able to stop it.
Police arrested low-level gunmen, but the shootings continued.
Weapons were flowing in faster than they could be seized.
Every arrest seemed to create two new enemies.
Task Force Falcon was intercepting encrypted messages that showed just how organized KVT had become.
They were coordinating attacks, moving safe houses, and planning retaliation with chilling efficiency.
What had started as a loose group of friends had become a criminal machine.
And February 2nd, 2025 was just one chapter in a story that was far from over.
By the time Sydney reached the middle of 2025, the war was no longer just a series of shootings.
It had become a system.
Everyone involved knew which streets were controlled by which crews, which houses were safe, and which cars meant danger.
Taxi drivers refused certain routes.
Store owners closed early.
Parents kept children indoors after dark.
The violence had become part of the city’s background noise, and the name KVT was being whispered in places where people used to talk about football and rent prices.
What made KVT so hard to fight was that no one could point to a single boss.
Unlike the Alamadines, who had a clear family hierarchy, or the Afghan crews, [music] who followed traditional clan and loyalty structures, KVT operated like a decentralized network.
There were key figures, of course, but no obvious kingpin.
When police arrested one member, another filled the gap.
When one safe house was raided, another was already prepared.
This made Task Force Falcon’s job almost impossible.
They could see the violence.
They could see the weapons.
They could see the encrypted phone traffic exploding every time a shooting happened, but they couldn’t easily identify who was actually making the decisions.
Behind the scenes, however, KVT was not as chaotic as it appeared.
Police intelligence suggested that a small inner circle coordinated the most serious operations.
These men had grown up together in Sydney’s southwest.
Bonded by family ties, shared prison stints, and years of surviving the same streets.
They trusted each other more than anyone else in the world.
And that trust allowed them to operate without written rules.
Money was the glue that held them together.
KVT’s real power did not come from gunmen.
It came from drugs.
Heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and synthetic opioids were [music] pouring into Sydney through ports and airports that were already overwhelmed.
Some shipments came [music] from Southeast Asia.
Others were linked to Middle Eastern networks.
KVT controlled the mid-level distribution, moving product from importers to street crews who sold it across Western and southwestern Sydney.
Every gram sold meant more money for weapons, more safe houses, more bribes, and more leverage.
The more violence they used, the more territory they gained.
The more territory they gained, the more drugs they sold.
It was a self-feeding machine.
The Alamodine family had once dominated much of this territory.
They were respected, feared, and deeply embedded in Sydney’s organized crime scene, but their structure also made them vulnerable.
When key figures were arrested or targeted, entire branches of their operation weakened, KVT took advantage of that.
They didn’t challenge the Alamodines directly at first.
They chipped away at their dealers, undercut their prices, and stole their customers.
The Afghan gangs were different.
They were faster, more aggressive, and heavily involved in international supply chains.
Many of them had connections to overseas networks that could move drugs across borders with frightening efficiency.
They saw KVT not just as a rival, but as a threat to their entire business model.
When one of their associates was killed outside a mosque, the war took on a new level of personal and cultural intensity.
That wasn’t just a business dispute anymore.
That was an insult that demanded blood in return.
What followed was a cycle that Sydney had never seen before.
One shooting triggered another.
One funeral became the setup for the next attack.
Encrypted phones buzzed constantly with plans, warnings, and revenge plots.
Young men who had grown up together were now hunting each other across suburbs they all called home.
Task Force Falcon intercepted messages that showed how carefully some of these hits were planned.
Cars were stolen weeks in advance.
Stolen plates were swapped out hours before an attack.
Guns were hidden in drains, walls, and ceiling cavities.
After a shooting, the weapons were dumped in waterways or passed to other crews so they could not [music] be traced.
Even when police caught suspects, witnesses were too afraid to testify.
In neighborhoods where KVT and its rivals operated, everyone knew what happened to people who talked.
One of the most alarming developments was how brazen [music] the attacks became.
Shootings were no longer happening in back alleys.
They were happening outside cafes, at service stations, and in quiet residential streets.
One attack took place just meters from a school.
Another occurred near a shopping center filled with families.
Each time the message was the same.
No place was truly safe.
Behind all of this, the money kept flowing.
KVT’s drug profits allowed them to outspend their rivals.
They paid more for weapons.
They paid more for loyalty.
They paid more for silence.
Young men from struggling neighborhoods were offered quick cash, protection, and a sense of belonging.
Many of them joined without fully understanding what they were stepping into.
The war also created new alliances.
Smaller crews, seeing the writing on the wall, aligned themselves with KVT for protection.
Others sided with the Alamadines or the Afghan groups.
Sydney’s underworld fractured into competing camps.
Each one waiting for the next strike.
Police raids increased.
Dozens of arrests [music] were made.
Guns and drugs were seized.
But the violence continued.
Every time one cell was disrupted, another took its place.
Task Force Falcon realized they were not fighting a gang.
They were fighting a network.
And at the center of that network was KVT.
By the time February 2nd, 2025 arrived, the war had already claimed multiple lives.
That Greenacre shooting was just one more escalation in a conflict that no one seemed able to contain.
The people pulling the triggers were often barely out of their teens.
The people giving the orders remained invisible.
Sydney was changing.
And as long as KVT and its rivals continued to fight for control, the city’s streets would keep paying the price.
By the time the Greenacre shooting shocked Sydney in February 2025, Task Force Falcon already knew the war was no longer something they could control with routine policing.
It had become something far larger than a few rival crews settling grudges.
It was now a full-scale criminal conflict driven by money, reputation, and a generation of young men who had grown up surrounded by violence and had nothing to lose.
KVT was no longer just a gang.
It was a brand, a reputation that traveled through Sydney’s western suburbs like [music] a warning.
People didn’t need to know who the leaders were.
They only needed to know that if you crossed KVT, retaliation was guaranteed.
That certainty was what made them powerful.
Good afternoon.
Sydney nightclub [music] identity John Ibraham has been revealed as the target of an alleged botched assassination attempt.
Our chief court reporter Tiffany Jenders has [music] the story.
In the world of organized crime, there are two kinds of dangerous men.
There’s obviously some sort of a confrontation and argument whereby there was a number of shots discharged at that time.
There are the ones who want you to know their name.
And then there is the other kind.
The ones who never needed to say a word.
The ones whose reputation arrived before they did and lingered long after they were gone.
This is the story of one of those men.
A man who never gave interviews, never sought headlines, never wanted to be famous, and yet his legend grew until it was impossible to ignore.
To understand Tong and Sam, you first have to understand King’s Cross.
For most of Australia’s history, the cross was unlike anywhere else in the country.
Part red light district, part tourist strip, part criminal empire.
It was a place where the rules of ordinary life simply did not apply.
Where money moved in cash, where power was exercised in back rooms, and where the wrong look at the wrong man could end your night or your life.
By the late 1980s and through the 1990s, one family was consolidating power over this world like no one before them.
The Ibraims, led by the charismatic and ruthless John Ibraim, a Lebanese Australian who had grown up hard and built himself into a nightclub empire.
The family controlled some of the most lucrative venues in Sydney.
The strip clubs, the late night venues where the real money was made.
The doors that separated the ordinary world was drunk at the time and later abandoned his car on a nearby from everything happening behind them.
But power in King’s Cross was never given.
It was taken.
And once taken, it had to be protected.
That protection required someone extraordinary.
Someone whose presence alone could prevent violence before it happened.
Someone whose reputation was so fearsome that rivals would think twice, three times before making a move.
John Ibrahim found that someone.
His name was Semi Angida.
But the streets would come to know him by another name entirely.
Very little about Tong and Sam exists in the public record.
No interviews, no press conferences, no social media, no tell all profiles.
At a time when the underworld increasingly courted celebrity, Tongan Sam moved in the opposite direction, deeper into the shadows, further from scrutiny.
What we do know is this.
Semi Angada was of Tongan descent, which gave him his street name.
Two members of the Ibrahim family have been wounded in an overnight shooting in Sydney’s West.
Three men were shot, and a task force [music] has now been set up to investigate the crime.
The officer in charge says he’s sick and tired of such senseless violence and is urging the victims to reveal everything they [music] know.
And he was by every available account an almost physically impossible human being.
Standing close to 2 m tall and weighing approximately 120 kg, not of fat, but of dense hardened muscle.
He was described by those who knew him as the equivalent of five regular bodyguards combined into one man.
Think about what that means for a moment.
Not twice as capable, not three times, five.
His sheer physical presence was a weapon in itself.
In a world where reputation was everything, where fear was the currency that kept order, Tong and Sam didn’t need to threaten anyone.
He didn’t need to raise his voice.
He didn’t need to touch a single person.
He simply had to walk into a room.
And the room changed.
Conversations [music] lowered.
Eyes moved to the floor.
Men who had been arguing a moment before suddenly found the matter resolved.
The instinct to survive, the same one wired into every human being since the beginning of our species.
It spoke to them clearly.
Do not make this man your problem.
How does a man become what Tong and Sam became?
The honest answer is that we don’t fully know.
There are no records of his early life that have been made public.
No boyhood stories, no training history, no account of how he first came into John Ibrahim’s orbit.
What we do know is that by the time he arrived at Ibrahim’s side, he was already fully formed, already complete.
A man who had not just learned how to fight, but had mastered it, had understood it at a level that separated him from the ordinary ranks of hard men and bouncers that populated the cross.
John Ibrahim would later describe Tong and Sam as brutal in a fight.
But what set him apart was not the brutality.
Brutal men were common in King’s Cross.
What was rare, genuinely rare, was the control.
Ibrahim described watching Tong and Sam take men down with such precision, such technical mastery.
Peeling for information following a shooting in Sydney’s West last year.
The bodyguard of prominent nightclub boss John Ibrahim, known as Tonga Sam, was gunned down in Maryland in November.
His attacker fled the safe.
That he could choose exactly where his opponent would land when they fell.
Not just whether the man went down, where he [music] went down, a meter to the left, 2 m back, against the wall, or away from it.
That is not street fighting.
That is something else entirely.
That is a man who has spent years understanding the mechanics of human violence at a level that most people never approach.
Witnesses who saw him in action described encounters that left them shaken long afterward.
Shots and then there was a bit of a break and then another four or five shots.
Men who came looking for trouble, who had worked themselves up to it, who had convinced themselves they were ready, discovering in the space of seconds that they had made a catastrophic mistake.
His fights were swift, one-sided, decisive.
There was no struggle, no protracted brawl, no back and forth.
There was simply a man standing and then a man on the ground.
There was simply a man standing and then a man on the ground.
And usually a crowd standing in stunned silence trying to process what they had just witnessed.
The period of the late 1980s through the 1990s was both the golden age and the most dangerous era for the Ibrahim family’s empire.
The money was enormous, the power was real, and the threats were constant.
King’s Cross was not a stable environment.
It was a pressure cooker.
Rival operators, criminal factions, police corruption, standover men, drug networks.
Everyone wanted a piece of what the Ibrahims had built, and some were willing to take it by force.
The attacks came.
Shootings, confrontations, violence targeting the family and those closest to them.
Two members of the Ibrahim family were wounded in an overnight shooting in Sydney’s West.
Police investigated whether the incident was connected to [music] a pattern of attacks on the family.
Witnesses described hearing seven gunshots, a pause, and then another four or five.
His brother Louie would soon face his own downfall.
[music] In 1997, he was jailed for perverting the course of justice, bringing an abrupt end to the family’s reign.
For a moment, the cross seemed leaderless.
The old king was gone.
The system that ruled the streets was breaking apart.
And in the chaos left behind, new players were already moving into position.
Because while one empire was collapsing, another one was quietly beginning to rise.
As the Bayer Empire tightened its grip on King’s Cross, another family was quietly learning the rules of the same unforgiving world.
The Ibrahim brothers didn’t grow up surrounded by luxury or influence.
Their story began far from Sydney’s neon lights in Tripoli, Lebanon.
In 1975, their mother, Wahiba, fled the country with her children during the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war.
Boarding a ferry and leaving almost everything behind, Australia became their new home.
Life in Sydney wasn’t easy.
Wahiba raised six children largely on her own, while their father spent long periods away.
Money was tight, [music] and survival meant adapting quickly.
The eldest The shooting followed a confrontation between two groups of men.
A confrontation that escalated into something far more serious.
In the aftermath of this period of sustained violence and threats, John Ibrahim’s older brother made a decision that would define the next chapter of Tong and Sam’s life.
Semi Angada was assigned to John Ibrahim personally, not to the venues, not to the business in general, to John.
Learning how the streets worked and more importantly who held real influence.
In those days, King’s Cross was a classroom, and the Ibrahim brothers were paying very close attention.
Because while the old guard still controlled the streets, two ambitious brothers were already studying how to take their place.
King’s Cross in the late 1980s had its own [music] brutal way of testing newcomers.
Respect wasn’t given, it was earned, and sometimes [music] it came at a heavy price.
For John Ibrahim, that moment came when he was still a teenager.
At 16 years old, he witnessed two men attacking the brother of Bill Bay.
The cross had its own unwritten rule.
If you stepped into someone else’s fight, you accepted whatever came next.
John stepped in.
The confrontation escalated instantly.
In the chaos, a kitchen knife was driven into his torso, cutting deep into his lungs, liver, and intestines.
The injuries were so severe that he was rushed to St.
Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, where doctors fought to keep him alive.
For 3 weeks, John lay in a coma.
When he finally woke up, from that point on, Tong and Sam became a permanent presence.
Where John Ibrahim went, he went.
Events, nightclubs, family gatherings, funerals, he was there.
Not behind glass, not at a distance, not checking in periodically.
He was there, constant, watchful, immovable, and his loyalty was absolute.
In a world built on shifting allegiances where men switch sides for money or survival, Tong and Sam never wavered.
Not once.
Not in the good years, not in the violent years, not through all of it.
John Ibrahim would later reflect on what Tong and Sam represented to the family in terms that said everything.
He said simply, “The family eventually inherited a brother.”
In any world, that is a profound statement.
In the world they occupied where trust was a liability and loyalty was routinely bought and sold, it was almost unimaginable.
Not an employee, not a weapon, a brother.
For years, Tong and Sam operated in the shadows.
Hundreds resigned, and the scandal left deep scars across the state’s law enforcement system.
The underworld figures who had operated comfortably in the shadows suddenly found themselves dragged into the spotlight.
One of the biggest names to fall was Bill Bayer.
The man once dubbed the king of King’s Cross has walked free from Sydney’s Silver Water Jail.
In 1996, after years dominating King’s Cross drug networks, Bayier was arrested and later sentenced to 15 years in prison for cocaine and heroin trafficking.
The man once described as one of the most powerful figures in the cross was suddenly gone.
But the investigation didn’t stop there.
The Royal Commission hearings also brought attention to a young nightclub operator who had been quietly building his reputation on the strip.
John Ibrahim.
[music] During questioning in 1995, council assisting the inquiry, John Agus, suggested that Ibrahim and his associates had stepped into the power vacuum left behind as BA’s influence faded.
The implication was clear.
A new generation protected by his anonymity as much as by his physical power.
He was known in the underworld.
He was known to police.
But to the general public, he remained invisible.
Then came the shooting that changed that.
Tong and Sam, identified in police statements as the personal bodyguard of John Ibrahim, was shot in Mrylands in Sydney’s western suburbs in November.
He survived, but the attack shattered the illusion of invulnerability that had protected him for so long.
Police investigations revealed the shooter had not acted alone.
Investigators believed at least five other people had been involved in coordinating the ambush.
A significant planned operation against a man who was himself no ordinary target.
The shooter fled the scene in a stolen car that was later set on fire.
A professional disposal eliminating forensic evidence.
Obviously some sort of a confrontation and argument whereby there was a number of shots discharged at that time.
Police released security footage of four vehicles believed to be connected to the incident.
Appealing for information from the public.
The message the attack sent was clear.
Even Tong and Sam could be reached.
But it also demonstrated something else entirely.
The fact that it required five people.
Detailed coordination, stolen vehicles, a professional getaway.
All of that said more about the target than the attackers.
To get to Tong and Sam, you couldn’t just send a man.
You had to see an operation.
For most of his career, Tong and Sam’s legend lived only on the streets, passed around in whispers, understood by those who moved in the relevant circles.
Invisible to everyone else.
That changed with television.
The hit Australian series Underbelly.
The Golden Mile brought the world of King’s Cross into Australian living rooms, dramatizing the violence, the power struggles, the personalities that had defined the district for decades.
Tong and Sam was there depicted as the imposing silent force at Ibrahim’s side.
His character captured public imagination almost immediately.
Here was a man who had operated for years without a single press interview.
Members of the Ibrahim family have been wounded in an overnight shooting in Sydney’s West.
Police will investigate whether the shooting is related to other without any public profile whatsoever.
And suddenly, millions of Australians were watching a version of him on their screens, trying to reconcile the quiet giant in the drama with the myth they were only now hearing about.
Years later, The Last King of the Cross, the Paramount series dramatizing John Ibrahim’s rise through King’s Cross, brought his legend to an international audience.
A new generation encountered the story for the first time.
But for those who had lived through the era, who had been there, the television versions were only echoes of something they had witnessed with their own eyes.
The real man was always bigger, always quieter, always more frightening.
While the 59year-old was being rushed to Westme Hospital, the gunman dumped the car at nearby Maze Hill.
They set it on fire before making a desperate getaway.
Sydney’s underworld has produced many hard men over the decades.
Men who built reputations through violence, who moved through the criminal landscape, leaving fear in their wake.
What separated Tong and Sam from almost all of them?
First, the combination of scale and skill.
Physically, he was an outlier, a man whose size alone made him formidable.
But size without ability is manageable.
Size with the kind of technical fighting mastery that John Ibrahim described.
That combination is nearly impossible to prepare for and nearly impossible to overcome.
Second, the discipline.
Most men in his position with his capabilities eventually let ego take over.
They start fights they didn’t need to start.
They make noise.
They draw attention to themselves and to the people they’re supposed to protect.
Tongen Sam was the opposite.
Was drunk at the time and later abandoned his car on a nearby street.
Are you denying that you’d had a few drinks before you smashed into several parked cars?
No comment.
Thank you.
He fought when it was necessary and only then he sought no recognition.
He pursued no fame.
In a world where status was everything, he had no interest in the performance of it.
Third, and perhaps [music] most importantly, the loyalty.
In organized crime, loyalty is always transactional at some level.
[music] Men are loyal while the arrangement benefits them and they recalculate when it doesn’t.
That is the reality beneath the mythology.
Tong and Sam appeared to operate on a different principle entirely.
His commitment to the Ibrahim family went beyond calculation.
When John Ibrahim’s brother assigned him to John’s protection, he didn’t treat it as a job.
He treated it as a purpose, a calling even in whatever sense that word can apply to this world.
He traveled with the family.
He attended their funerals.
He was present not just in the moments of danger, but in the quieter moments, too.
The ones that mark real belonging, real family.
And that is what Ibrahim meant when he said the family had inherited a brother.
King’s Cross has changed almost beyond recognition.
The lockout laws introduced in the 2000s effectively ended the district’s reign as Sydney’s nightlife capital.
The venues closed or relocated.
The crowds dispersed to other parts of the city.
The money found other streets, other postcodes, other arrangements.
The world that Tong and Sam patrolled, that neon lit, danger soaked corridor of power and controlled chaos.
It doesn’t really exist anymore.
Not in the form it once did.
Walk through the cross today and you will find cafes and apartment buildings where nightclubs used to be.
Quiet where there was once noise, ordinary life where there was once something far more volatile.
But the legacy of the men who shaped that world remains.
John Ibraham built an empire and survived it.
Emerging as a kind of celebrity figure, a man who crossed from the underworld into mainstream Australian culture without ever quite leaving his origins behind.
Books, television series, public [music] profiles.
His story became part of the national conversation.
And Tong and Sam, he remained what he always was, private, absent from the public record.
No memoir, no interviews, no carefully managed image rehabilitation, no podcast appearances or documentary cooperations or curated social media presence.
Just silence.
The same silence he always chose.
There is something almost philosophical about what Tong and Sam represents in the story of Sydney’s underworld.
In a culture obsessed with fame, where everyone wants to be seen, recognized, validated, remembered, he chose the opposite.
He built one of the most fearsome reputations in Australian criminal history [music] without ever asking for it.
Without ever stepping in front of a camera voluntarily, without ever telling his own story.
His legend was built the old way, through presence, through action, through the unspoken understanding of everyone who encountered him.
That this was not a man to be tested, not a reputation that could be dismantled by a smarter argument or a better lawyer or a more powerful connection.
You couldn’t outthink Tong and Sam.
You couldn’t outmaneuver him.
You couldn’t wait for him to make a mistake because he didn’t make mistakes.
The only option was to avoid him entirely.
And most people upon reflection found that to be the wisest course of action available.
He didn’t need to tell anyone who he was.
They already knew.
In the end, the most feared men are rarely the loudest.
They are the ones who stand in the background, silent and certain, while the world moves carefully around them.
In Sydney’s criminal history, there has been no one quite like Semi Anga.
A Tongan giant in a world of ordinary men.
A ghost made of muscle and loyalty and controlled, precise violence.
A brother to a family that needed one.
In a time and place where that kind of loyalty was the rarest thing of all.
The cross had many legends, but only one Tong and Sam.
The family eventually inherited a brother, John Ibraim.
On the 27th of June 1981, a heroin dealer named Warren Lan Franchi was shot dead in a laneway in Chippendale by a Sydney detective.
The man who brought him to that meeting was a criminal called Netti Smith.
For the next 40 years, the two stories would raise one question.
Where did Sydney’s police end and its underworld begin?
This video follows two men who answered that question in very different ways.
Roger Roger was a decorated detective who ended his life in prison.
Netti Smith was a violent criminal who said police gave him a green light.
We will separate what courts and inquiries established from what was only alleged because in this story that line matters.
Start with a common mistake.
Many people believe Roger was convicted of killing Lan Franchi or of the murder of Salanne Hustep, the woman who accused him.
He was not.
He was never charged over either death.
What he was convicted of is a different list and it is long.
Roger Roger was born in Sydney on the 3rd of January 1941 and grew up in Bankstown.
A newspaper profile says he was a talented child pianist.
In 1958 at 18, he joined the New South Wales police.
He rose to become a prominent member of the armed holdup squad.
In 1980, he received the Peter Mitchell Award for arresting an escaped armed robber.
On paper, he was a star.
Outside the force, his name was already attached to serious allegations, and the same Wikipedia profile that records the award also records claims that evidence was fabricated in earlier cases.
Those claims were disputed.
Arthur Stanley Smith was born in Sydney on the 27th of November 1944 and raised in Redund.
He was first convicted of theft around the age of 11.
He spent much of his young adult life in prison with sentences from 1963 to 1965.
From 1968 to 1975 and from 1978 to 1980.
The Sydney Crime Museum says that in the mid 1970s he worked as a standover man for a criminal named Murray Riley, then distributed heroin for Riley’s syndicate before setting up his own operation.
The two men were closely linked.
Smith later claimed that Roger and other detectives gave him a green light to commit crimes in return for favors.
Police deny it.
That claim comes from Smith himself, and it has never been proven in a court.
But what happened in Chippendale in 1981 tied their names together permanently.
Warren Lanie was a 22-year-old heroin dealer and standover man linked to Smith.
According to the Sydney Crime Museum, Smith brought him to a meeting with Roger on the 27th of June, 1981.
At that meeting, Roger shot Lanranchi dead.
Roger said he acted in self-defense.
LanFranchi was said to have been involved in a robbery and the shooting of a young policeman earlier that month.
According to the museum, 18 police officers in the area supported Roger’s account.
The coronial inquest did not accept it.
The jury declined to find that the shooting was self-defense, but no charges followed and Roger was not stripped of his standing.
Smith later said Roger had killed Lani in retribution.
Roger denied that.
There is also a disputed theory about motive.
Some accounts say Lan Franchi was carrying money to bribe his way out of trouble.
Police deny it and the Sydney Crime Museum notes that the motive remains debated.
What is not debated is who held the gun.
Lan Franchie had a girlfriend.
Sally Anne Hustep was born in 1954 into a middle-class Jewish family in Sydney and left school at 15.
She worked as a sex worker and developed a heroin habit.
In 1981, she began a relationship with Lan Franchi.
After he was killed, she did something almost no one in her world did.
She went public.
She appeared on the television program 60 Minutes and accused Roger of being a killer.
She also gave police internal affairs a statement describing payments to vice squad officers and her belief that parts of the force were corrupt.
Her statement is described in her biography as helping to lead to the later inquiries.
She also alleged that Roger had killed Lani and taken money from him.
Roger denied it and the claim has never been tested in court.
On the night of the 6th of February 1986, Hustep took a phone call at a flat in Sydney, told her flatmate she would be back in about 10 minutes and left.
She was never seen alive again.
The next morning, a man walking his dog found her body in Busby Pond in Centennial Park.
She was 31.
Her death was treated as a homicide.
An inquest ran across several years and found that she was murdered by a person or persons unknown.
No one was charged at that stage.
The question of who killed her would hang over both Smith and Roger for the rest of their lives.
Years later, police bugged Smith’s cell and had a cellmate talk with him.
On that recording, Smith allegedly claimed to have killed seven people, including Hustep.
He later said he made it up because he knew he was being recorded.
He stood trial for her murder in 1999 and was found not guilty.
In a 2005 interview, he said he was at home that night and that Roger wanted her dead.
Those statements are unverified and Roger has always denied involvement.
The murder of Sallyanne Hustep has never been solved.
Was it a case of a jury doubting a recording made in a prison cell or a case of a witness the underworld wanted silenced?
Tell me what you think in the comments and subscribe if you want the rest of [music] the story.
Why does this matter?
Because the case of Roger and Smith is often told as a story of two monsters.
The record shows something more uncomfortable.
It shows a system that failed to stop either of them for years.
And the failure is the real story here.
Consider how it looked from the street in 1981.
A young police officer had been shot.
A detective with a medal and a reputation had killed the man said to be responsible.
18 officers backed his account.
For ordinary people, there was little reason to doubt it, and that is exactly why the early years of this story went the way they did.
The jury at the inquest saw it differently.
But an inquest cannot send anyone to prison.
It can only say what it finds.
That gap between what people suspected and what could be proved is the thread that runs through every part of this story.
From Lanie to Hustep to the Drury shooting.
Meanwhile, Roger’s career was unraveling.
On the 6th of June 1984, Detective Michael Drury was shot through his kitchen window.
He survived.
Drury later accused Roger of orchestrating the attack after he refused a bribe in a drug case.
[music] Roger was charged with conspiracy over the Drury shooting.
In 1989, he was found not guilty.
Drury never withdrew his accusation, and the acquitt did not end the questions about the man at the center of it.
Smith, meanwhile, was heading for his own collapse.
By the mid1 1980s, he had returned to armed robbery, focusing on payrolls.
Then came the killing of a truck driver, Ronald Flavl, in a road rage incident in the late 1980s.
Sources differ on the exact year, so I will not put a date on it.
In 1989, he was arrested trying to rob a council payroll and his bail was revoked because of the Flavl charge.
That was the start of the prison term he never left.
He was convicted of Flavl’s murder and sentenced to life.
In 1998, he was also convicted of murdering Harvey Jones, a brothel owner last seen in 1983, leaving a hotel in Alexandria.
Jones’s body was found about 12 years later, buried off Botney’s Foreshore Road.
Smith was convicted of two murders.
For a man who claimed he had once been protected, he had become a prisoner who would die inside.
In 1992, Smith appeared as a star witness before the Independent Commission Against Corruption and told it that armed holdup squad detectives had passed on information that helped criminals plan robberies.
Commissioner Ian TMBI delivered his report in 1994.
He found Roger corrupt and wrote that his dealings with Smith brought discredit on the police service and must be described as scandalous.
Notably, one account says Smith refused to name Roger at that hearing.
The Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service, known as the Wood Royal Commission, ran from 1994 to 1997 under Justice James Wood.
Its task was to find out whether corruption in the police was systemic and entrenched.
By then, Roger was out of the force, so the commission was about far more than one man.
Its first big break came in 1994 when Detective Sergeant Trevor Haken was summoned by the New South Wales Crime Commission.
He agreed to work covertly.
For about 6 months, his car was bugged and his phones were tapped.
By 1995, the commission had uncovered hundreds of instances of bribery, money laundering, drug trafficking, fabricated evidence, and serious assaults in the King’s Cross Detective Division alone.
Detectives were confronted with recordings of cash handovers.
One practice was known as the laugh.
King’s Cross detectives took weekly payments from drug figures and other criminals.
After the hearings, officers flooded the commission with requests to make deals.
Police Commissioner Tony Lowour had told the commission that corruption was not systemic and his map of the force showed King’s Cross as corruptionfree.
He resigned shortly after the commission’s first report.
The commission’s interim report in November 1996 said the problems could not be fixed by what it called [music] a mere patching up of the old system.
It warned that failing to reform could bring back the same culture and conduct that had prompted the inquiry.
It recommended that the commissioner be given control over appointments and dismissals, that officers be required to make integrity declarations, and that targeted integrity testing and random drug testing be allowed.
Hundreds of officers resigned or were dismissed.
Justice Wood also declared a conditional amnesty for serving officers who disclosed corruption.
Peter Ryan, recruited from the United Kingdom, became commissioner and put many of the recommendations into practice.
The commission’s staff and equipment formed the core of the Police Integrity Commission, which was later replaced by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission.
Think about what that meant for Roger.
In 1989, he walked free in the Drury case.
By 1992, he had a prison sentence and no police career.
By 1994, an anti-corruption commissioner had put his name on the public record.
The man who once wore a medal had lost everything the badge gave him, one step at a time.
And none of it came from a single dramatic moment.
And Smith, he became the rare criminal who talked, at least in part.
But his words carry a warning.
A man convicted of murder speaking about police he says protected him has every reason to shape the story.
That does not mean he lied.
It means his claims need support and the commissions treated them that way.
What happened to Roger afterwards matters most.
In 1992, he was sentenced to 3 years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice after depositing $110,000 into bank accounts under false names.
That conviction cost him his place in the police force.
In 2005, he was jailed for 12 months for lying to the Police Integrity Commission during a hearing into possible corruption at Liverpool City Council.
He was released in February 2006.
By the time he was an old man, he had never been convicted of a killing.
Then came May 2014.
Jaime Ga was a 20-year-old Sydney student described by police as a drug dealer.
He was killed in a storage unit in Padto and his [music] body was dumped in the sea off Krenella.
Roger, then 73, was arrested and charged with his murder along with former detective Glenn McNamera.
The prosecution said the two men planned to take Gow’s supply of 2.78 kg of ice worth about $19 million and that the killing was done for financial gain.
McNamera said his meetings with Gao were for a book about Asian crime gangs.
Prosecutors rejected that.
Both men denied pulling the trigger and blamed each other.
A first trial in July 2015 was aborted on its second day.
A retrial began in February 2016.
And on the 15th of June 2016, a jury found both men guilty of murder after about 6 and 1/2 days of deliberations.
On the 2nd of September 2016, Justice Jeffrey Bellow sentenced [music] both to life in prison.
He said the killing was brutal in its execution and callous in its aftermath.
He could not say beyond reasonable doubt which man fired, but he was satisfied one of them did and that Gao was executed in cold blood.
There is one more detail from the Gao case worth stating carefully.
Prosecutors said the plan was a robbery of drugs, not an arrest.
McNamera’s defense was that he was working on a book.
The jury heard both versions and it rejected the second.
That is a finding of a court, not an opinion from me.
The sentencing judge also noted what could not be proved.
He could not say which man pulled the trigger.
Under the law, that did not matter because both were found to have taken part in the killing.
Both received the same sentence, which in New South Wales means life.
Roger kept claiming innocence.
His lawyers argued he could not properly cross-examine McNamera.
The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal described his case as completely lacking in credibility.
In March 2023, the High Court refused him leave to appeal.
Roger died on the 21st of January 2024, aged 83 at the Prince of Wales Hospital after being transferred from prison.
He had been serving life.
Netty Smith had died more than 2 years earlier on the 8th of September, 2021 in the Long Bay Jail Hospital, aged 76.
Step back and look at the numbers the commission itself reported.
Hundreds of instances of bribery, money laundering, drug trafficking, fabricated evidence, and serious assaults surfaced from one detective division alone.
That figure comes from the commission’s work, and it explains why the report rejected the bad apple theory.
The theory was comfortable.
It said corruption was the work of a few individuals and that removing them would fix the problem.
The commission’s evidence pointed the other way.
It described a culture in which corruption had become entrenched.
That is why the recommendations went beyond sacking people.
They changed how the force was run, how officers were tested, and who answered [music] for what.
Whether those reforms fully worked is a debate for historians.
But the commission itself is the reason Sydney’s police look different today.
Now, bring it back to the two men.
Roger and Smith were not the whole of the problem.
They were the faces of it, which is why their names are the ones people still know long after most of the evidence has faded from memory.
Spare a thought for the people at the edge of this story.
Warren Lan Franchie was a criminal, but he was also a young man whose death was never answered by a conviction.
Salanne Hustep was a 31-year-old woman who spoke up when almost no one in her position would, and her case remains open.
Ronald Fll was a truck driver killed in a road rage incident.
Harvey Jones was a brothel owner whose body lay buried for around 12 years.
Jaime Ga was 20.
Behind every name in this video is a family who waited for answers.
And some of them are still waiting.
Let me pull the threads together because this story is easy to blur.
What a court established.
Roger was convicted in 1992 of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, convicted in 2005 of lying to the police integrity commission, and convicted in 2016 of murdering Jaime Ga.
Smith was convicted of the murders of Ronald Fll and Harvey Jones.
What was alleged but never proved in court.
That Roger ordered or carried out an attack on Detective Drury.
That Smith killed Sallyanne Hustep.
That Roger had a hand in her death.
And that police gave Smith a green light.
Each of those has been denied.
And Smith was acquitted at trial over Hustep’s death.
That distinction is not a technicality.
It is the difference between history and rumor.
And it is the reason this video keeps returning to the words convicted, acquitted, and alleged.
If a version of this story you have seen skips those words, treat it with caution.
The two men’s stories end in prison hospitals.
One was a detective who had stood in court many times as a witness.
The other was a criminal who once said he was protected.
Neither was ever convicted of killing Lan Franchie or Hustep.
That is the part that should stay with you.
The courts did what they could do.
They convicted Roger of corruption and of the murder of Jaime Gao.
And they sentenced Smith for two murders.
But the two deaths that began everything, Lanie and Hustep, were never answered with a conviction of the man most people suspected.
The Wood Royal Commission reached a harder conclusion than any single trial.
It found a culture that had to be rebuilt, not a few bad apples to be removed.
A culture that let men like Roger stay in uniform and let men like Smith think they had permission did not disappear when the two men went to jail.
Do you think the green light was real?
Tell me what you think in the comments.
The morning Majid Hamsy died, Sydney was just waking [music] up.
Neighbors were leaving for work.
School buses were beginning their roots.
And Condell Park looked like any other quiet suburban pocket of western Sydney.
But at 7:25 a.m., two men stepped out of a stolen Toyota with pistols in their hands.
And within seconds, a street that had never made the news, became the epicenter of one of Australia’s most violent underworld wars.
Majid Hamzy, one of the most feared and powerful figures in Sydney’s criminal landscape, was running for his life.
He didn’t make it.
His murder wasn’t random.
It wasn’t emotional.
It wasn’t sloppy.
It was the result of years of betrayals, millions of dollars and stolen drugs, encrypted messages sent [music] across the world, and a criminal family whose enemies had finally decided that Majid Hamzy had become too dangerous to live.
This is the story of [music] how a gangster became a target.
How an underworld feud exploded into open warfare.
And how even after multiple arrests, trials, and international investigations, no one has ever been held legally responsible for pulling the trigger.
Majid Hamzy was born in 1976 into one of Sydney’s most feared criminal dynasties.
The Hamsy family name carried weight across western Sydney, particularly in Bankstown, Greenacre, and Condell Park.
His older brother, Bassam Hamzy, would go on to found the notorious Brothers for Life gang, an organized crime network involved in drug trafficking, extortion, [music] and contract killings.
Even after being sentenced to life at Goldburn Supermax Prison for murder, Bassam continued to influence operations from behind bars through trusted lieutenants [music] and family members, turning his prison cell into a command center for a criminal empire.
Majid, unlike his brother, kept a lower public profile.
To outsiders, he ran a gourmet [music] chocolate and dessert business.
To police and rivals, he was something else entirely.
Behind closed doors, Magid was deeply embedded in the Hamzi family’s criminal operations, acting as a strategist, [music] fixer, and enforcer.
He was known for his connections, his access to drugs and weapons, and his willingness to authorize violence when necessary.
In the underworld, he wasn’t just another gangster.
He was a man people feared crossing.
That fear was earned.
In 2013, Majid’s aunt, Maha Hamzi, was shot in both legs outside her home in what police believed was a targeted warning.
The attack sent shock waves through the family and signaled that enemies were closing in.
3 years later, in 2016, a hitman named Hammed Assad was murdered.
Investigators believed Majid was involved in arranging the killing as retaliation [music] for the earlier attack on his aunt.
This wasn’t just family loyalty.
It was a declaration that anyone [music] who touched the hamsies would pay for it.
Despite this reputation, Majid managed to [music] avoid long-term imprisonment.
In 2019, he faced serious charges related to a massive methamphetamine importation dating back almost a decade.
The case collapsed.
He walked free.
During time spent on remand, he even studied business courses, further reinforcing the image of a man who could move between legitimate and criminal worlds with ease.
But police never stopped watching him.
They knew who he was.
They knew what he did.
They just couldn’t yet prove it.
By early 2020, Majid was also involved in the illegal steroid trade.
Detectives from the New South Wales State Crime Command recovered anabolic steroids from his Condell Park home.
He was charged and a court date was set for November.
But Majid Hamsy was never going to make it to that courtroom.
What most people didn’t know at the time was that Magid wasn’t just being hunted.
He was hunting, too.
Behind the scenes, Magid had become deeply entangled in a [music] global criminal network connected to one of Australia’s most infamous outlaw Bicki bosses, Mark Buddle.
But Buddle, the former national president of the Comancho Motorcycle Club, had reinvented himself as an international drug kingpin.
From overseas, he controlled shipments of cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
His power came not just from money but from fear.
People who crossed him tended to disappear.
According to encrypted anom messages later intercepted by police, Maji believed Buddle had become his enemy.
He suspected Buddle and his associates of trying to undermine him, steal from him, or even have him killed.
In response, Majid did what underworld figures always do when they feel [music] threatened.
He went on the offensive.
He began trying to organize hits of his own, using overseas contacts and offering massive sums of money to have rivals assassinated.
One of his targets was another major Sydney crime figure, Bal Benji Hamza, an associate of Battlele and a man with [music] his own longunning feud with the Hamsy family.
Majid was not bluffing.
Messages sent through A0M showed him negotiating prices, requesting proof of death, and even demanding that one victim have the word Hamzy carved [music] into his chest as a warning to others.
These weren’t idle threats.
This was a man actively trying to arrange multiple murders, but the underworld moves faster than most people realize.
If Majid was plotting to kill Battle and his allies, Buddle was already plotting to kill him.
Police would later allege that Majid had crossed a final line by stealing a massive shipment of cocaine, roughly 400 kg worth tens of millions of dollars from Ble’s organization.
[music] In the drug world, theft on that scale is a death sentence.
There are no negotiations.
There is no forgiveness.
Once that line is crossed, the only currency left is blood.
By October 2020, Majid Hamsy was a marked man.
The hit that killed him would not be rushed.
It would not be sloppy.
It would be professional.
On the morning of October [music] 19th, two gunmen waited inside a stolen gray Toyota Rav 4.
Nearby, a m black MercedesBenz and a white BMW were positioned as part of a convoy designed to move the shooters in and out without being traced.
Fake number [music] plates had been fitted.
Phones were placed on airplane mode to avoid tracking.
The plan was precise.
When Majid stepped outside his townhouse on Simmit Avenue in Condell Park, he had no idea death was already parked across the street.
At 7:25 a.m., the two masked men stepped out of the Rav 4 and opened fire.
14 shots were fired.
Four hit Majid.
He tried to run, sprinting down the street and turning onto Curtain Place.
Blood was already pouring from [music] his arm, chest, and leg.
He collapsed about 200 m from his front door.
By the time paramedics [music] arrived, he was dead.
Bullet holes were left in nearby houses and cars.
Parents were dropping their kids at school.
Neighbors were screaming, but the shooters were already gone.
They vanished into Sydney’s suburban maze, leaving behind only [music] shell casings and one of the most explosive gangland murders the city had seen in decades.
Majid Hamsy’s death would ignite a war that would leave multiple bodies in its wake.
But before that war [music] began, police would launch one of the most ambitious investigations in Australian crime history.
And what they would uncover would expose an underworld where murder was just another business transaction.
The gunshots that killed Majid Hamzy lasted only seconds.
But the operation behind them had been months in the making.
What unfolded on the streets of Condell Park that October morning [music] was not a spontaneous act of violence.
It was the final step in a carefully engineered assassination built on surveillance, logistics, stolen vehicles, [music] and a criminal intelligence network designed to leave no fingerprints behind.
Within hours of the shooting, [music] the New South Wales State Crime Command activated Strike Force Courier, a task force [music] created specifically to hunt down the people responsible.
Detectives knew immediately that this [music] was not the work of amateurs.
The way the shooters had arrived, the speed of the attack, and the clean getaway all pointed to a professional hit team.
The first real break came from CCTV and dash cam footage.
Sydney is blanketed [music] with cameras, and on that morning, the killers had unknowingly passed dozens of them.
Investigators began piecing together the movements of multiple vehicles that had traveled from the suburb of Morbank to Condell Park just before the shooting.
The footage revealed a small convoy moving in coordination.
A gray Toyota RAW 4, a matt black MercedesBenz, and a white BMW.
This wasn’t coincidence.
It was a tactical formation.
One car was used for the shooters.
The others were positioned to act as support [music] decoys and backup escape vehicles in case something went wrong.
Every route had been planned in advance.
Additional footage showed a silver Toyota Corolla [music] driving north on Simmit Avenue shortly before the shooting.
Moments later, a white Toyota High van was seen leaving the area.
[music] Police believe these vehicles were also part of the operation, either carrying lookouts or serving as mobile safe zones for the gunman after the hit.
The RAV 4, the primary getaway car, was later found burned out in Yaguna.
Fire destroys DNA, fingerprints, and [music] any traceable evidence.
The BMW and Mercedes were discovered hidden at a property in Lutinham.
This wasn’t panic.
This was procedure.
The people who planned this knew exactly how to erase themselves.
One piece of footage, however, changed everything.
As one of the shooters ran back toward the getaway vehicle, his hood briefly slipped, exposing part of his face.
He was a blonde Caucasian male.
It was a fleeting moment, but it was enough [music] for investigators to realize something important.
This wasn’t just a Middle Eastern gang feud.
This was a mixed race hit team, likely involving professional contract killers rather than local street level enforcers.
[music] That detail became even more disturbing when police connected the footage to another murder.
Just 3 weeks earlier, former command sher Vicky Ferris Gibron Abu Nada had been gunned down [music] outside his home in Pania.
The execution style was almost identical.
Multiple shooters, stolen cars, precise timing, [music] rapid escape.
The same blonde gunman was believed to have been involved in both killings.
[music] This wasn’t revenge.
This was a campaign.
The conclusion was unavoidable.
Someone was systematically removing high-level figures in Sydney’s criminal underworld.
And Majid Hamsy was only one of the targets.
As Strikeforce Courier dug deeper, they uncovered just how sophisticated the planning had been.
Phone records showed that all devices [music] used by the suspects had been placed in airplane mode during the operation, preventing live tracking.
Pre-arranged meeting [music] points had been set up.
Vehicles had been swapped multiple times to confuse surveillance.
The shooters had likely waited in position for hours, watching Majid’s movements [music] until the perfect moment presented itself.
And then there were the guns.
The firearms [music] used to kill Majid Hamzy were never recovered.
Police believe they were melted down shortly after the murder, destroying ballistic evidence that could have linked the weapons to other crimes.
This level of cleanup requires resources, connections, and experience.
It suggested that the people behind the hit [music] had done this before and would do it again.
For 9 months, Strikeforce Courier quietly tracked suspects, analyzed footage, and followed money trails.
Then, in July 2021, the first arrests were made.
Ezen Omar and his brother Muhammad Omar were charged in connection with the assassination.
Prosecutors alleged that Ezen had acted as a fixer, [music] sourcing stolen vehicles and setting up staging locations, while Muhammad had helped hide one of the getaway cars.
Neither man was accused of pulling the trigger, but both were charged with murder under the theory that anyone who [music] facilitates a killing is just as guilty as the person who fires the gun.
Raids were conducted across multiple suburbs.
Stolen cars, jewelry, and other evidence were seized.
It looked like [music] police were closing in, but they were only scratching the surface.
In March 2022, two more names entered the case.
Bryce Williams and Christopher O’Brien were arrested and charged with murder.
Williams was believed to be the blonde man [music] captured on CCTV.
O’Brien was alleged to be the second shooter.
According to police, these two men were the ones who had actually pulled the triggers.
Yet even then, investigators knew the truth was bigger than two gunmen.
Behind every contract killing is someone who orders it, someone who pays for it, someone who decides who lives and who dies.
And in the Hamsy case, all roads were beginning to lead back to one man living far beyond the reach of Australian law, Markle.
By the time Bryce Williams and Christopher O’Brien were charged with murder, police already knew that the truth behind Majid Hamsy’s death went far deeper than two [music] men with guns.
The shooting was just the final act in a long and brutal underworld [music] chess game, one that had been unfolding quietly through encrypted phones and [music] offshore criminal networks for years.
The key to unlocking that hidden world came from an unlikely source.
A secret FBI backed operation known [music] as AN0M.
A N0M was an encrypted messaging app that criminals around the world believed was completely secure.
What they didn’t know was that law enforcement agencies had secretly built it, monitored it, and used it to read millions of supposedly private messages in real time.
For drug traffickers, contract killers, and gang bosses, it became a digital trap.
Majid Hamzy walked straight into it.
Through [music] Magid had been communicating with overseas operatives, arranging murders, negotiating prices, and plotting to eliminate his enemies.
The messages showed a man who was not just a target of violence but an active architect of it.
One of the most shocking revelations was that Majid had been trying to [music] have Mark Buddle himself assassinated.
Butle the former national president of the Kancherero motorcycle [music] club had reinvented himself as a global drug kingpin.
From overseas he controlled massive cocaine shipments and had built an empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to police intelligence, Majid believed Buddle was planning to kill him, so he decided to strike first.
A N0 messages revealed Majid contacting an overseas-based hit broker known only as JD.
He offered up to $100,000 per target, demanding video proof of the killings.
In one chilling exchange, Majid even instructed that one victim should have the word [music] Hamzy carved into his chest as a message to anyone thinking of crossing him.
This wasn’t paranoia, it was strategy.
Magid believed that by removing Butle’s allies, he could weaken the entire [music] network.
But Ble was already ahead of him.
Police alleged that Majid had stolen a [music] massive shipment of cocaine from Butle’s organization.
Around 400 kg worth tens of millions of dollars.
In the underworld, stealing drugs is worse than murder.
It is an act that demands immediate and absolute retaliation.
From that moment, Majid’s fate was sealed.
Intercepted messages [music] suggested that Battlele, who was believed to be living in Cyprus at the time, authorized a contract killing.
He allegedly used his immense wealth to hire professional gunmen and logistics teams to eliminate Majid before Majid could eliminate him.
The operation wasn’t just revenge, it was preeemption.
There was also another name in the messages, Bal Benji Hamza, a powerful Sydney crime figure and an associate of Ble.
Majid [music] had targeted him as well, believing him to be part of a conspiracy against the Hamsy family.
The feud between their families went back [music] more than a decade, fueled by violent attacks and deep grudges.
In this world, [music] no one trusted anyone.
The AOM data revealed something else, too.
Majid was not the victim of a sudden betrayal.
He was deeply embedded in the same violent system that eventually consumed him.
He was ordering hits, offering money, demanding brutality, and planning assassinations with the same cold efficiency as [music] the people who ordered his own death.
The murder of Majid Hamzy was not random.
It was not impulsive.
It was the inevitable outcome of a war that had been quietly raging behind the scenes.
While police believed Butle had orchestrated the hit, they faced a massive problem.
Butle was overseas, protected by corrupt networks and the complexity of international law.
He couldn’t be extradited easily, [music] and even if he could, proving that he gave the order would be incredibly difficult.
That left the alleged gunman.
Bryce Williams and Christopher O’Brien were accused of carrying out the execution.
CCTV placed them near the scene.
Phone data linked [music] them to the convoy.
But in the court, suspicion is not enough.
The prosecution needed proof.
And that’s where [music] everything began to unravel.
When the trials finally began, many in Sydney believed justice [music] was close.
Police had spent years tracking suspects, analyzing footage, and decoding encrypted messages.
The story of Majid Hamsy’s murder seemed clear.
A powerful crime boss had been targeted.
Professional gunman had carried out the hit, and an international drug kingpin had allegedly ordered it.
But courtrooms do not operate on what seems obvious.
They operate on what can be proven.
Asen Omar, one of the first men charged, became a test case.
Prosecutors initially accused him of being deeply involved in the murder, acting as a fixer who provided stolen vehicles and helped manage the aftermath.
But as the case moved forward, [music] cracks began to form.
Evidence that looked powerful on paper became fragile under cross-examination.
In April 2023, the prosecution conceded they could not prove Omar had participated in the killing itself.
Instead, he pleaded guilty to being an [music] accessory after the fact, admitting he had helped conceal evidence.
In 2024, he was sentenced [music] to 3 and 1/2 years in prison.
For the murder of Majid Hamsy, that [music] was the only punishment anyone would receive.
The real focus was always on Bryce Williams [music] and Christopher O’Brien.
They were accused of being the men who pulled the triggers.
Williams was allegedly the blonde gunman caught on CCTV.
O’Brien was said to be his accomplice.
The state built a massive case against them, relying on surveillance footage, phone records, and inferences drawn from their movements before and after the shooting.
But the defense teams went on the offensive.
They argued that none of the evidence proved that either man was at the scene when the shots were fired.
CCTV was grainy.
Faces were obscured.
No DNA, no fingerprints, no weapons, [music] and no eyewitnesses placed them directly at Majid’s side when he was killed.
The AN0M messages, while damning toward Majid himself, did not directly link Williams or O’Brien [music] to Ble’s alleged order.
The trial dragged on for 13 weeks, much of it held behind closed doors under strict suppression orders.
Jurors heard about encrypted phones, underworld hierarchies, and international drug empires.
But when it came time to decide, the legal standard was simple.
Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
[music] In December 2025, Bryce Williams was found not guilty.
Christopher O’Brien had already been quietly acquitted earlier in the year, though the public was not allowed to know until Williams case was resolved.
The result was shocking, but legally sound.
No one had been convicted of [music] murder.
Majid Hamzy, one of the most powerful criminals in Sydney, had been executed in broad daylight.
Police believed they knew who ordered it.
They believed they knew who carried it out.
But they could not [music] prove it in court.
The case was officially unsolved.
Majid’s death had already achieved what his killers wanted.
It shattered the Hamsy [music] family’s power and ignited a brutal gang war that claimed multiple lives, including members of [music] his own family.
His enemies were eliminated.
His empire collapsed and the streets of western Sydney were forever changed.
[music] In the end, Majid Hamsy became what so many underworld figures eventually become, a cautionary tale.
He lived by violence.
He plotted murders.
He trusted criminals and encrypted phones.
And he died the way he lived, caught in the same deadly web he had helped create.
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