[music] [music] [music] In November 2011, a man walked into a gym car park in Brunswick, Melbourne, and opened fire.
Toby Mitchell, then the Bandido’s National Sergeant-at-Arms, was hit six times.
He survived, but it took around 30 operations, and he lost a kidney, his gallbladder, and most of his liver in the process.
Whoever pulled the trigger has never been identified.
The case remains unsolved.
CCTV footage from the gym next door reportedly went missing in the aftermath.
Most people who survive an attack like that step back from the life that led to it.
Mitchell didn’t.
He returned to his role inside the Bandidos.
Was shot at again less than 2 years later.
Eventually left that club and by 2020 had become president of a different one entirely, the Mongols Melbourne chapter.
For a while, he was one of the most visible and best connected figures in Victoria’s underworld.
Then in April 2022, his own club voted him out.
Not police, not a rival gang, his own members in what one insider described as a near unanimous vote over accusations he’d been associating with someone connected to a police witness in another member’s manslaughter case.
Before we go further, a note on how this video is put together.
Everything here is drawn from court reporting, police statements, and journalism already published elsewhere.
Where a matter was alleged rather than proven, including who was behind the 2011 and 2013 shootings, we’ll say so directly.
What makes Mitchell’s story different from most people covered in this kind of format is what happened after the gang life.
He didn’t disappear and he wasn’t killed.
He reinvented himself as a fitness and lifestyle figure on social media.
Building an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers while also racking up a string of assault charges, including one incident where he was knocked unconscious in the street after starting a fight himself.
So, this is a story with an unusual shape.
Not a rise and a fall ending in prison or a funeral, but something messier.
Repeated attempts on his life that were never solved, a leadership position he built and then lost to his own club, and a public reinvention that’s still unfolding.
In this video, we’ll go through Mitchell’s record in order, his rise inside the Bandidos, the shootings that nearly killed him twice, his move to the Mongols, and his time as their Melbourne president, the vote that ended it, and where he stands today.
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We’ll start with how a man from Melbourne’s northern suburbs ended up as one of the Bandido’s most senior enforcers in the country.
Public reporting on Toby Mitchell’s life before he became a name associated with the Bandidos is notably thin.
He was born in 1974, and available coverage picks up his story once he was already inside the club, working his way toward its most senior enforcement roles.
There’s little detailed reporting available on his upbringing, family background, or exactly how or when he first joined.
That gap is worth acknowledging directly rather than filling in with assumption.
Unlike some of the gang figures covered elsewhere in this series, Mitchell’s early life doesn’t appear to have drawn the same level of media attention his later, more violent chapter would.
What is documented is the physical world Mitchell operated in once he’d risen through the Bandido’s ranks.
He was closely associated with Dohert’s gym in Brunswick, a short walk from the club’s Melbourne clubhouse.
A detail that reflects a broader pattern common among outlaw motorcycle club enforcers, where a serious commitment to bodybuilding and physical training, often runs alongside a formal role, enforcing club discipline and protecting its interests.
Mitchell’s build and reputation for physical intimidation became a defining feature of how he was described in reporting throughout his time in the club, and it’s a thread that runs consistently through his record for the next decade.
By the late 2000s, Mitchell held the role of sergeant-at-arms within the Bandidos, a position responsible for enforcing internal discipline and in practice, often serving as the club’s most visible enforcer in disputes with rival organizations.
In September 2011, he was elevated further, becoming the Bandido’s National Sergeant-at-Arms, a role covering enforcement matters across the club’s chapters throughout the country.
He stepped into that position after his predecessor Lee Undi was arrested on weapons charges.
A leadership transition that in outlaw motorcycle clubs often follows directly from a predecessor’s arrest or incapacitation since these organizations tend to lack the kind of institutional succession planning found in more conventional structures.
It’s worth being precise about what the National Sergeant-at-Arms role represented for Mitchell at this stage of his life.
It placed him at the center of the Bandido’s response to conflict with rival clubs, a position of genuine influence within one of Australia’s largest outlaw motorcycle organizations, but also one that put him squarely in the middle of the kind of interclub tension that in Melbourne specifically had already produced a documented history of drive-by shootings, firebombings, and targeted violence between rival gangs throughout the 2000s.
Taking on that role wasn’t simply a matter of internal prestige.
It meant becoming functionally one of the most exposed figures in an organization that was at the time engaged in active and sometimes lethal rivalries with several other clubs operating in the same territory.
Media coverage from this period offers a strikingly mixed picture of how Mitchell was perceived.
Some reporting characterized him in starkly menacing terms, consistent with his formal enforcement role.
Other coverage describing him in the aftermath of the violence that would soon follow referred to him in far softer language as someone personally known outside the club context for being polite and fond of animals.
That contrast isn’t unusual for senior figures in organized crime, where a formal role built around intimidation and enforcement can coexist with a personal reputation among people who know someone socially that looks nothing like the public image built around their gang affiliation.
Neither characterization cancels the other out, and both appear consistently enough across independent reporting to be worth including here.
Rather than simplifying Mitchell into a single one-dimensional figure before the events that would define the rest of his public life.
By late November 2011, Mitchell had held the position of National Sergeant-at-Arms for barely 2 months.
Whatever the internal politics or specific tensions that may have contributed to what happened next, the public record doesn’t establish a clear singular explanation.
What is established is what took place on the afternoon of 28th November.
An ambush that very nearly ended Mitchell’s life.
And that would define the next phase of his career inside and eventually outside the Bandidos.
At around 4:30 p.m.
On 28th November 2011, Toby Mitchell was at Doert’s gym on Weston Street in Brunswick, a gym he trained at regularly, located a short distance from the Bandido’s Melbourne clubhouse.
According to reporting from the time, a gunman approached and opened fire.
Mitchell was hit as many as six times, several of the wounds to his back as he attempted to flee the attack.
He was rushed to Royal Melbourne Hospital in critical condition.
What followed was an extended period of medical treatment that, according to later reporting, involved around 30 separate surgical procedures.
Mitchell lost a kidney, his gallbladder, and the majority of his liver as a direct result of the injuries.
For a man whose reputation within the Bandidos had been built substantially on physical presence and enforcement capability, the physical toll of the attack was severe and by most accounts permanent.
Reporting on his later legal matters would continue to reference lingering health complications from this shooting more than a decade afterward.
Victoria Police’s response to the shooting reflected the level of public concern it generated.
Investigators publicly stated their determination to identify and prosecute whoever was responsible, and the case was treated as a significant escalation in what police already understood to be an active and volatile period of tension between rival outlaw motorcycle clubs operating in Melbourne.
It’s worth being precise about what actually happened with that investigation in the years since.
Despite the scale of police resourcing directed at the case in its immediate aftermath, no one has ever been charged in connection with the shooting, it remains in the formal sense unsolved.
Several details from the investigation and subsequent reporting are worth setting out clearly while being careful to distinguish confirmed fact from suspicion.
CCTV footage from DHY’s gym, footage that might reasonably have been expected to assist investigators in identifying the shooter, reportedly went missing in the aftermath of the attack.
Public reporting has connected the shooting, at least as a line of police inquiry, to Prisoners of War, a prison-based gang that has separately been linked in reporting to the murder of Melbourne gangland figure Carl Williams.
It’s important to state plainly what that connection does and doesn’t establish.
A reported line of police inquiry connecting an unsolved shooting to a particular group is not the same as a confirmed finding of responsibility and no individual or organization has ever been formally identified, charged or convicted in relation to the attack on Mitchell.
The public record leaves the central question, who ordered or carried out the shooting and why genuinely unanswered.
Despite the severity of his injuries, Mitchell’s response to the attack followed a pattern that would come to define much of his subsequent public profile.
Rather than stepping back from his role within the Bandidos, he returned to it once he’d recovered sufficiently to do so.
Reporting from the period after his recovery, describes him resuming his position as sergeant-at-arms, continuing to be seen publicly in his bandido’s colors, and traveling regularly to Southeast Asia.
His first significant public appearance after the shooting came at a Danny Green boxing event, where he was reportedly seen speaking with J Malcoun, president of a rival gang.
A detail that illustrates something notable about Melbourne’s underworld social scene during this period.
Even amid serious, unresolved violence between rival organizations.
Individual relationships between senior figures in competing clubs could apparently continue in more informal social settings.
Separate from whatever tensions existed at an organizational level.
Mitchell’s survival and continued visibility after the 2011 shooting contributed significantly to the reputation that would follow him for the rest of his public life.
That of someone who had been targeted for assassination and lived.
A distinction that within the specific subculture of outlaw motorcycle clubs tends to carry its own form of standing regardless of the unresolved questions surrounding who was responsible.
That reputation would be tested again a little over a year later.
On the night of one March 2013, Mitchell and another Bandidos member were at a workshop on Norton Drive in Melton, an industrial area in Melbourne’s outer west near the clubhouse of the Diablo, a club with reported links to the Bandidos.
According to contemporaneous reporting, the pair were confronted by a large group, reportedly more than 20 people connected to at least two motorcycle gangs.
Multiple shots were fired during the confrontation.
Mitchell was hit in the arm.
The second man present, a 28-year-old, was also injured, though not critically.
Several vehicles at the scene were damaged by gunfire.
Victoria Police’s armed crime task force was assigned to investigate what officers publicly described as a firearm incident.
As with the 2011 shooting, police expressed concern that the attack could represent an escalation toward broader, more sustained conflict between rival outlaw motorcycle clubs, given Victoria’s already established history of gang violence throughout the preceding decade.
Also consistent with the earlier case, no arrests were made in connection with the Melton shooting in its immediate aftermath.
Based on available reporting.
A second serious attempt on Mitchell’s life that like the first has not resulted in a publicly reported conviction.
Taken together, these two shootings occurring within roughly 16 months of each other, both targeting Mitchell specifically, both resulting in significant physical injury, and both remaining formally unresolved, represent an unusually sustained pattern of targeted violence against a single individual, even by the standards of Melbourne’s outlaw motorcycle club scene during this period.
It’s worth pausing on what that pattern does and doesn’t tell us.
It’s not possible based on the public record to say definitively who was behind either attack or whether the two incidents were connected to each other to internal tension within the Bandidos to conflict with a specific rival club or to some other dispute entirely.
What can be said is that Mitchell by early 2013 had survived two serious targeted attempts on his life in a relatively short period.
And that this fact alone, independent of any specific unresolved motive, cemented his reputation as one of the more consequential and closely watched figures in Victoria’s underworld.
It was in the aftermath of the second shooting that Mitchell’s formal association with the Bandidos came to an end.
Public reporting describes him leaving the club in 2013, though the specific circumstances and timing of that departure.
Whether it was a decision he made independently in the wake of the shooting, a mutual parting, or something more contested aren’t laid out in detail in available reporting.
What is clear is that for a period of roughly 6 years afterward, Mitchell doesn’t appear to have held a formal leadership position within any outlaw motorcycle club, even as his broader profile within Melbourne’s underworld remained prominent.
This gap in Mitchell’s gang affiliation is worth noting because it complicates a simple narrative of continuous rise through organized crime.
Unlike some of the figures covered elsewhere in this series, whose criminal careers show a relatively steady trajectory from lower ranking member to senior leadership, Mitchell’s path included this extended interruption, years in which he was neither actively climbing within a club hierarchy, nor entirely removed from the broader social and criminal networks that had defined his earlier career.
During this period, reporting continued to describe him as one of Melbourne’s best connected underworld figures.
Someone maintaining relationships across multiple organizations, even without holding formal rank in any of them.
What eventually drew Mitchell back into a formal leadership role wasn’t a return to the Bandidos, but a move to an entirely different club, one that had a documented history of rivalry with the organization he’d spent over a decade serving.
That shift in April 2019 marked the beginning of the next major phase of his public record.
Not as an enforcer working beneath senior leadership, but as a president in his own right.
Toby Mitchell’s move away from formal gang leadership didn’t last.
In April 2019, roughly 6 years after leaving the Bandidos, he joined the Mongols, an outlaw motorcycle club with an established rivalry with the organization he’d spent the previous decade serving.
The move was reported at the time as a significant shift in Melbourne’s underworld landscape, and police reportedly expressed concern that it could reignite tensions between the two clubs, given the pattern of retaliatory violence that had characterized bikey conflict in Victoria throughout the preceding years.
It’s worth pausing on what this decision represented for Mitchell specifically.
He wasn’t a young prospect starting from the bottom of a new organization’s hierarchy.
He was by 2019 one of the more recognizable and well-connected figures in Melbourne’s underworld.
Someone who had survived two targeted shooting attempts, served at the most senior enforcement level within a rival club, and maintained relationships across multiple organizations during his years without formal gang affiliation.
Joining the Mongols in that context wasn’t simply a matter of finding a new club.
It brought an experienced high-profile figure with an established reputation directly into a rival organization at a time when the underlying tensions between the two clubs hadn’t disappeared.
Mitchell’s rise within the Mongols was rapid by comparison to his earlier career.
By September 2020, roughly a year and a half after joining, he had become the club’s Melbourne president, placing him at the head of what reporting described as one of the more powerful chapters within Victoria’s outlaw motorcycle club scene at the time.
Under Mitchell’s leadership, the Melbourne Mongols pursued an aggressive expansion strategy.
According to contemporaneous reporting, the chapter recruited members away from rival clubs, including a significant defection from within Mitchell’s own former club.
Jason Addison, a former national president of the Bandidos, patched over to the Mongols, reportedly bringing his own associates with him.
According to police estimates cited in reporting from the period, the Mongols patched over roughly 10 former Bandidos members within the space of a couple of months during this expansion.
Some of that recruitment reportedly conducted even while individuals were in custody.
By the time this growth phase had taken hold, the Melbourne chapter’s membership had reportedly grown to more than 100 people, a substantial figure for a single city chapter of an outlaw motorcycle club in Australia.
This expansion occurred against the backdrop of Victoria’s anti-bikey legislative framework which had been progressively strengthened over the preceding decade specifically to disrupt organized motorcycle club activity that the Mongols were able to grow so substantially in Melbourne during this period despite that legislative environment points to something structural about how outlaw motorcycle clubs in Australia have continued to operate and recruit even under sustained legal pressure.
Legislation targeting visible markers of gang membership and organized gatherings doesn’t necessarily prevent the underlying recruitment and expansion of a club’s membership base.
Mitchell’s presidency wasn’t limited to organizational growth.
During the same period, he was also personally involved in a series of legal matters that would come to define much of the public reporting on his tenure as Mongol’s boss.
In October 2020, he was charged over an alleged serious assault outside a cafe on Domain Road in South Yara with police alleging he struck a man to the head three times.
As a condition of bail on that charge, Mitchell was ordered not to associate with any members of the Mongols, a condition that notably placed direct legal restrictions on his ability to function in his own leadership role.
While the charge remained before the courts, barely a month later in mid- November 2020, Mitchell was involved in a second widely reported incident.
This time at Queensbridge Square in South Bank.
CCTV footage examined in later court reporting showed Mitchell out with a group of friends after an evening at a nearby bar engaging in a verbal altercation with a man seated on the ground.
According to the footage, Mitchell punched the man twice in the face before being pulled away by people in his group.
He then approached the man again, at which point the man struck Mitchell, knocking him unconscious.
The entire sequence reportedly lasted around 40 seconds.
Mitchell was subsequently charged with a fray and with committing an indictable offense while already on bail from the South Yara matter.
These two incidents occurring within weeks of each other during Mitchell’s tenure as a sitting club president illustrate a pattern that continued to recur throughout the following years.
Rather than violence connected to organized gang conflict or rival club disputes.
Much of Mitchell’s most serious legal exposure during this period stemmed from personal altercations in social settings, several of which were captured on CCTV and in at least the South Bank case appeared to begin with Mitchell as the instigator rather than the target.
Reporting from around this period, drawing on court proceedings connected to these charges, described Mitchell in starkly different terms depending on which specific incident was being discussed.
Characterized in one matter as having acted like an enforcer, and in the other as having been, in the words used in court reporting, out for blood when he struck the second man.
As part of the legal process connected to these charges, Mitchell was reportedly ordered to undergo intensive anger management treatment and to abstain from alcohol ahead of sentencing.
Separately from these personal legal matters, Mitchell was also involved during this period in a formal legal challenge connected to Victoria’s firearms restrictions, specifically targeting people associated with outlaw motorcycle clubs, legislation that imposes additional barriers on gang members obtaining firearms licenses, reflecting the state’s broader anti-bikey legislative approach.
According to reporting, Mitchell ultimately abandoned this legal challenge rather than pursuing it to a conclusion.
Though available reporting doesn’t specify in detail the particular grounds on which the challenge was originally brought or exactly why it was dropped.
Taken together, this period of Mitchell’s life, roughly 2019 through 2022, presents an unusual profile for a sitting outlaw motorcycle club president.
He was on one hand overseeing a genuinely successful organizational expansion, recruiting senior figures away from a rival club and substantially growing his chapter’s membership base during a period of active legislative pressure on gangs generally.
On the other hand, he was simultaneously accumulating a string of personal assault charges connected to social altercations that had no apparent direct connection to gang business or interclub rivalry.
Behavior that if anything created ongoing legal exposure and instability for a leader whose position depended on maintaining his club’s standing and cohesion.
That tension between organizational success and personal instability would ultimately prove significant to how Mitchell’s time as Mongols president came to an end.
Unlike the earlier chapters of his career, where the greatest threats to his position came from rival gangs, bullets fired by unidentified asalants in 2011 and 2013.
The eventual end of his presidency would come from within his own organization.
It wouldn’t be a rival club or police or a court sentence that removed Mitchell from his leadership role.
It would be a vote taken by his own members over conduct that had nothing to do with the expansion and recruitment success that had defined the earlier part of his presidency.
By early 2022, Toby Mitchell had spent close to two years as Mongols Melbourne president, presiding over a chapter that had grown substantially through recruitment and defections from rival clubs.
That period came to an abrupt end in early April 2022.
Though the exact framing of what happened depends on which source is doing the framing.
A detail worth sitting with directly rather than smoothing over.
Some contemporaneous reporting described the event as Mitchell announcing he would step down from the presidency and leave the outlaw motorcycle club lifestyle behind entirely attributing the decision to pressure from senior Mongols figures including Nick the knife Forbes and Philip Maine.
Other reporting drawing on insider sources within the club described a more direct process, a formal near unanimous vote by Mongols members to expel Mitchell outright.
According to that account, the vote took place on a Friday night following a meeting between Mitchell and club leadership and Mitchell subsequently declined to comment when contacted, refusing to take calls in the days afterward.
These two framings aren’t necessarily as contradictory as they might first appear.
It’s entirely possible for an outcome to be presented publicly, including by the person directly affected, as a voluntary departure.
While insiders closer to the internal politics describe the same event as involving pressure and a formal vote that left little real choice, what’s consistent across both versions of the story is the underlying cause.
Accusations that Mitchell had been associating with people connected to a police witness, specifically a witness in the manslaughter case against fellow Mongols member Lachlan Floyd.
It’s worth setting out the Floyd case in enough detail to understand why this association mattered so much within the club.
Floyd, a former soldier and Finins member who had patched over to the Mongols, shot and killed a man named Stuart Townsend in February 2016 following a dispute that began after Townsend started dating Floyd’s ex-girlfriend.
According to court evidence, the confrontation escalated at a public reserve in Melbourne Southeast, where Floyd, armed with a banned semi-automatic shotgun, fired at least five rounds toward Townsend, and an associate after reportedly being shot at first.
Towns and died from a stray pellet wound.
Floyd pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment with a non-parole period of 6 and a half years with the court taking into account a PTSD diagnosis connected to his military service within a club culture built substantially around internal loyalty and a code of silence toward police.
Association with a witness who had assisted the prosecution in a fellow member’s case represents a serious breach of trust, arguably a more fundamental violation within that specific subculture than most of the personal legal troubles Mitchell had accumulated during his own presidency.
According to the senior Mongols source cited in reporting, Mitchell had been repeatedly warned about this specific association before the club ultimately moved to expel him, describing the final vote as effectively unanimous, including from members who had previously been loyal to him personally.
The same source offered a blunt characterization of the club’s reasoning that Mitchell had come to believe he was bigger than the organization and that the club did not tolerate what it considered bad behavior.
It’s worth pausing on the health context surrounding Mitchell at this point in his life because it adds a dimension to the expulsion that’s easy to overlook amid the internal politics.
By 2022, reporting connected to his various court appearances had established that Mitchell was managing significant ongoing health complications stemming from the 2011 and 2013 shootings, including, according to evidence heard in court, needing as many as 27 medications a day, some administered twice daily.
A man in that condition, still managing the physical aftermath of two targeted assassination attempts a decade earlier, was simultaneously navigating the internal politics of a club prepared to remove him over a perceived breach of trust.
Neither fact cancels out the other, and it’s worth holding both in view when considering how Mitchell’s final period as a gang leader actually played out.
The immediate practical consequences of Mitchell’s departure were significant for the Melbourne Mongols specifically.
Reporting from the weeks following the expulsion described as many as 40 members leaving the chapter alongside him in what was characterized as a broader loss of loyalty and cohesion within the Victorian branch of the club.
Two other prominent figures were expelled around the same time.
Mark Bali, the club’s former national sergeant-at-arms, who was separately facing cocaine trafficking charges and had previously had a $500,000 Lamborghini seized by police as alleged proceeds of crime.
And Sam, the Punisher, Abdul Rahim, a professional boxer and former partner of a reality television personality who had earlier served time over a high-speed car crash that killed an elderly woman.
According to underworld sources cited in reporting, both men were expelled specifically for what was described as treachery to the club, connected to their close association with Mitchell.
Mitchell’s own public response to the expulsion suggested he had no intention of quietly stepping away from Melbourne’s underworld social scene, whatever his formal status within the Mongols.
Days after the vote, he posted an image to Instagram showing himself alongside more than a dozen other men, including Bali and Abdul Rahheeim with a caption that read in effect, a pointed rhetorical question about what the club had expected to happen.
The post was widely read as a direct message to his former organization, a signal that Mitchell retained significant personal influence and connections regardless of his formal expulsion, including, according to reporting, a wide network extending into organized crime circles beyond the outlaw motorcycle club scene.
Specifically, the Mongols response to that message came within days in the form of a coordinated public ride.
A large contingent of remaining members departing the club’s Port Melbourne headquarters for Seymour in what was reported as the gang’s first public show of force since the change in national leadership.
Anti-bikey police, including officers from the dedicated task force that had monitored outlaw motorcycle clubs in Victoria for years, closely tracked the ride.
Underworld sources cited in reporting from this period suggested the broader Mongols organization in Victoria was struggling in the aftermath of Mitchell’s departure with membership numbers substantially reduced across multiple chapters not only in Melbourne but reportedly extending to a decline in the club’s north side and Akoa chapters and even affecting loyalty within international Mongols chapters in Russia, Ukraine and Indonesia which had reportedly maintained strong ties eyes specifically to Bali rather than to the incoming national leadership.
Whether Mitchell would go on to join a different outlaw motorcycle club or remain independent of formal gang affiliation as he’d done for roughly 6 years after leaving the Bandidos wasn’t clear in reporting from this period with journalists covering the story noting they intended to keep close watch on Mitchell’s own social media activity for any signal of his next move.
What actually followed wasn’t a move to another club.
It was something that, for a man whose adult life had been defined almost entirely by formal roles inside outlaw motorcycle organizations, represented a genuinely new chapter.
One built not around a clubhouse or a patch, but around an Instagram account, a personal training brand, and an audience of several hundred,000 followers drawn in no small part to the very reputation his decades inside gang culture had built.
In the years since his expulsion from the Mongols, Toby Mitchell’s public life has taken a shape that sets him apart from most of the figures covered in this kind of series.
He wasn’t killed.
He wasn’t sent to prison for an extended term.
Connected to organized crime.
He didn’t fade from public view.
Instead, he built something that looks on the surface like an entirely conventional modern career, a fitness and lifestyle brand on Instagram, now numbering close to half a million followers built around gym content, personal training, and a public narrative of transformation and resilience.
It’s worth being direct about how unusual that trajectory is within the broader landscape of organized crime figures.
Most people who spend two decades inside outlaw motorcycle clubs survive multiple assassination attempts and eventually lead a chapter of one of Australia’s most scrutinized gangs, don’t end up as social media personal trainers with a substantial public following.
Mitchell’s post Mongols reinvention represents something closer to a rebranding than a rehabilitation in the conventional sense.
He hasn’t publicly disavowed his gang history so much as folded it into his current public identity with his survival of the 2011 shooting specifically becoming a recurring reference point in how his content and his story are framed publicly.
That framing deserves scrutiny rather than simple acceptance.
A narrative built around surviving multiple shootings and rebuilding physical strength afterward is in one sense a genuinely compelling story of resilience.
It’s also in another sense a story that keeps Mitchell’s underworld history central to his current public brand rather than something he’s moved past entirely.
His notoriety in a very direct commercial sense appears to be part of what sustains the audience he’s built since leaving the Mongols.
Whether that represents someone using an unavoidable public history productively or someone continuing to profit from a reputation built through decades of gang affiliation and violence isn’t a question this account can answer definitively.
Both readings are available in the same set of facts and reasonable observers could land in different places on it.
Mitchell’s life since 2022 hasn’t been entirely free of the kind of incidents that defined his time as Mongols president either.
In September 2024, he hosted a rooftop party at a Melbourne hotel to celebrate a former associate’s birthday, an event attended by around 50 guests that was ultimately shut down by Victoria Police following noise complaints from the venue.
It’s a minor incident by comparison to the assault charges and shootings that dominate the earlier parts of his record, but it’s a reminder that Mitchell, even in his current public role as a fitness influencer, has continued to maintain visible social connections to his former underworld circle rather than cutting ties entirely.
There’s a broader question worth sitting with here, one that applies to Mitchell’s case specifically, but also resonates with several other figures covered across this series.
What does it actually mean for someone to leave organized crime behind?
And how do we assess whether that’s genuinely happened?
For Daniel Eelu, covered earlier in this series, the answer was tragically foreclosed.
His attempt to build something different was cut short by violence connected to his past.
Whatever the precise motive turned out to be, Mitchell’s case offers a different, arguably more ambiguous test of the same question.
He’s not actively serving as a gang leader.
He’s not, based on available reporting, currently facing charges connected to organized drug trafficking or gang violence, but his public identity remains deeply tied to that history.
His social circle appears to still include figures from his time in outlaw motorcycle clubs, and the specific incidents that have generated media attention since his expulsion, including the shutdown hotel party, suggest continuity with his old world rather than a clean break from it.
It’s also worth returning before closing to the two unresolved shootings that opened this account.
More than 14 years after the attack outside Doh’s gym and more than a decade after the second attempt on his life in Melton, neither case has produced an arrest, a charge, or a conviction.
Whoever ordered or carried out those attacks has never been formally identified in the public record.
That’s a genuinely unusual outcome for two such high-profile, extensively investigated shootings.
And it says something about the broader challenges Victoria Police has faced in solving targeted violence connected to outlaw motorcycle clubs during this period.
A pattern that isn’t unique to Mitchell’s case, and one that recurs across other unresolved shootings connected to Melbourne’s underworld throughout the 2000s and 2010s.
What can be said with confidence?
Drawing together everything covered in this account is that Toby Mitchell’s story doesn’t fit neatly into the two most common narrative shapes this kind of case usually takes.
The gang figure who is eventually killed by the violence connected to their own world or the gang figure who is eventually convicted and imprisoned for the organized criminal activity they were involved in.
Mitchell has experienced neither outcome.
He survived two attempts to kill him that remain officially unsolved.
He rose to formal leadership of a major outlaw motorcycle club, not through organized criminal enterprise being prosecuted, but through internal club politics playing out in reverse.
Recruitment and expansion followed by an internal vote that removed him over an alleged breach of trust rather than any external law enforcement action.
And rather than disappearing afterward, he built a public career that keeps his underworld history central to his current identity for an audience that appears drawn, at least in part, to exactly that history.
Whether that makes Mitchell’s story a genuine account of survival and reinvention, a case study in how notoriety itself can become a marketable asset regardless of its origins, or simply an unusually well doumented example of how difficult it is to draw a clean line between someone’s past and their present.
That’s a judgment this account leaves open because the available evidence doesn’t settle it one way or the other.
What the record does establish clearly is a life shaped by an extraordinary amount of targeted violence that has never been formally accounted for, a leadership position built and lost through internal politics rather than legal consequence, and a current public existence that neither fully escapes nor fully embraces the decades that preceded it.
Toby Mitchell’s career intersects with a much broader decadesl long debate in Australia about how governments should try to disrupt outlaw motorcycle clubs.
And his own case offers a useful, if unintentional, test of how well that legislative approach has actually worked in practice.
In 2015, Victoria introduced new anti-consorting legislation specifically targeting outlaw motorcycle gangs, creating an offense of unlawful association that prohibited convicted criminals from repeatedly associating with each other in ways police believed maintained or expanded criminal networks.
Then Attorney General Martin Pakula described the reforms as necessary tools to disrupt and dismantle criminal gangs, framing the legislation specifically around concerns that groups like the Mongols and Bandidos were increasingly sophisticated in how they recruited and expanded, including through social media.
A concern that, in Mitchell’s specific case, turned out to be precient given how central his own social media following would later become to his postgang public life.
It’s worth stepping back to consider how this kind of legislation has actually performed both in Victoria and across other Australian states that have introduced similar laws.
Consorting laws of this kind have a long history in Australian policing dating back to the 1920s and have been applied against outlaw motorcycle clubs, specifically since state governments began treating bikey gangs as a serious organized crime threat in the 2000s.
The results have been genuinely mixed and not straightforwardly positive.
Academic and legal analysis of these laws across multiple states has repeatedly found that consorting legislation has been largely ineffective at actually breaking up motorcycle clubs.
In South Australia specifically, some bikies themselves have credited early consorting laws with helping consolidate and strengthen the state’s outlaw scene rather than dismantling it.
Reviews of similar laws in New South Wales found the legislation was frequently used against people with no connection to organized crime at all, including people with intellectual disabilities and members of already marginalized communities, prompting recommendations that the laws be restricted specifically to serious organized crime rather than applied broadly.
In Queensland, a state task force reviewing similarly aggressive anti-bikey legislation found that outlaw motorcycle gang members were responsible for well under 1% of all reported crime in the state despite the intense political and media focus placed on bikey gangs specifically leading the task force to conclude that media coverage had arguably distorted public perception of the actual scale of the threat relative to organized crime more broadly.
This broader context matters for understanding Mitchell’s case specifically because of an irony worth naming directly.
The event that actually ended his position as a gang leader wasn’t a policeled disruption operation, a consorting charge, or any of the legislative tools Victoria and other states had spent the better part of a decade building specifically to break up clubs like the Mongols.
It was an internal disciplinary process conducted entirely within the club itself.
Applying the Mongols own version of an anti-association principle.
Expelling Mitchell not because police had disrupted his network, but because his own organization judged that his associations had violated the club’s internal code around cooperating, even indirectly, with law enforcement.
There’s something genuinely instructive in that contrast.
Governments across Australia have spent enormous political and financial capital over the past two decades building legal frameworks specifically designed to prevent people like Mitchell from maintaining criminal networks and gang leadership positions.
In his particular case, none of that legislative apparatus was what actually removed him from his role.
The mechanism that worked was considerably older and less formal.
A gang’s own internal culture of loyalty and its intolerance for anything resembling cooperation with police enforced through the club’s own governance structure rather than the states.
This doesn’t mean external anti-bikey legislation has no effect at all.
Victoria’s laws and task forces have produced genuine seizures, arrests, and disruptions across many other cases, including some covered elsewhere in this series.
But Mitchell’s specific downfall is a reminder that these organizations often police themselves more effectively, at least in specific individual cases, than external legal frameworks manage to.
The other broader pattern worth placing Mitchell’s case within, is Melbourne’s long, largely unresolved history of targeted shootings connected to organized crime and outlaw motorcycle clubs.
The 2011 attack on Mitchell occurred against the backdrop of Melbourne’s gangland wars of the 2000s.
The same period and broadly the same underworld ecosystem that produced the killing of Carl Williams, one of the most notorious organized crime figures in the city’s recent history, along with dozens of other unsolved or partially solved murders connected to competing criminal networks throughout that decade.
The specific line of inquiry connecting Mitchell’s 2011 shooting to the prisoners of war prison gang itself linked in reporting to the Williams case situates Mitchell’s attempted killing within this broader ecosystem of Melbourne organized crime violence rather than treating it as an isolated incident specific only to bikey club rivalry.
What’s striking looking at this pattern as a whole is how consistently these targeted shootings have gone unsolved.
Even in cases involving high-profile, extensively covered victims and significant police resourcing.
Mitchell survived two separate assassination attempts, each generating substantial media coverage and stated police determination to find those responsible, and neither has produced a conviction.
This isn’t a criticism specific to the individual investigations into Mitchell’s shootings.
It reflects a broader well doumented challenge in prosecuting organized crime violence generally where codes of silence within criminal networks the destruction or disappearance of evidence like the missing CTV footage from Dohert’s gym and the difficulty of securing witness cooperation from within tightly bonded criminal organizations all work against successful prosecution regardless of how much investigative effort is directed at a case.
There’s a final dimension worth considering.
What happened to the Mongols organization in Victoria after Mitchell’s departure illustrates something about the fragility of these club structures more broadly beyond just Mitchell’s individual case.
Reporting describing as many as 40 members leaving the Melbourne chapter alongside him and international chapters reportedly weakening in the aftermath due to loyalty ties to other expelled figures rather than incoming leadership.
Suggests that Mitchell’s personal standing within the club had by 2022 become inseparable from a significant portion of the chapter’s actual membership and operational strength.
His removal wasn’t simply the loss of one leader who could presumably be replaced through normal succession.
It appears to have triggered something closer to a genuine organizational crisis for the Victorian Mongols specifically, at least in the short term.
Whether the chapter has since rebuilt under Forbes and Maine’s leadership or continued to operate in a diminished state isn’t something available reporting from this account’s research addresses in detail.
But the scale of the initial exodus points to how much of the chapter’s cohesion had by that point been built around Mitchell personally rather than around the Mongols as an institution independent of him.
Taken together, these threads, a decade of expensive, contested antibi legislation that ultimately wasn’t what ended Mitchell’s leadership.
A pattern of unsolved targeted violence stretching back to Melbourne’s gangland wars and a club structure that appears to have been more dependent on one man’s personal standing than on any durable institutional foundation.
Paint a picture of Victoria’s Outlaw Motorcycle Club seen as considerably less stable and considerably less effectively governed by either police or the club’s own leadership than either side’s public rhetoric during this period tended to suggest.
Toby Mitchell’s story doesn’t end the way most stories in this series do.
There’s no funeral, no life sentence, no final court date bringing a decadesl long saga to formal legal closure.
He’s alive, active, and as far as available reporting indicates, not currently facing any organized crime charges connected to his gang history.
That alone makes his case worth sitting with differently than most of the figures this channel has covered.
It’s worth going back through the shape of his record one more time, because the pattern that emerges is genuinely unusual.
Mitchell rose through the Bandidos to become National Sergeant-at-Arms, one of the most senior enforcement roles in one of Australia’s largest outlaw motorcycle clubs, only to be shot six times within 2 months of reaching that position.
An attack that nearly killed him and has never been solved.
He recovered, returned to the club, and was shot again 18 months later in a second attack that also remains unresolved.
He left the Bandidos afterward, spent roughly 6 years without formal gang affiliation while remaining a recognizable figure in Melbourne’s underworld, then joined a rival club entirely and rose to lead its Melbourne chapter within 18 months.
That leadership ended not through police action or a rival club’s violence, but through his own organization’s internal vote, expelled over an alleged association connected to a police witness.
In a decision some described as him stepping away and others described as him being pushed out.
None of the major turning points in Mitchell’s adult life came through the criminal justice system holding him accountable for organized crime activity specifically his most serious personal legal consequences.
The 2016 drug and weapons conviction.
Various assault charges from 2020 and 2021 were significant, but they were prosecutions for individual criminal conduct, not organized crime charges connected to his roles within either the Bandidos or the Mongols.
The two events that actually shaped the trajectory of his gang career.
The shootings and the expulsion both occurred largely outside the formal justice systems reach.
The shootings remain unsolved.
The expulsion was a private internal club matter that police had no direct role in.
This is worth stating plainly because it cuts against a common assumption in how organized crime cases tend to get told that gang leaders eventually meet their end through prison or through violence connected to law enforcement pressure.
Mitchell’s career suggests a third possibility, one that may actually be more common than the two dramatic endings most true crime coverage focuses on.
A gang leader whose position simply becomes untenable due to internal politics, personal notoriety, and a body of individually prosecuted but non-organized crimespecific legal trouble rather than any single decisive law enforcement or rival gang intervention.
What Mitchell chose to do afterward is in its own way just as unusual as how he got there.
Rather than fading from public life or attempting a quiet private departure from his underworld reputation, he built a public brand explicitly organized around his own survival story, turning the two unsolved assassination attempts and the physical toll they took on his body into central material for an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers.
It’s a genuinely novel approach to life after organized crime leadership, and it raises questions this account can describe, but can’t fully resolve.
Is Mitchell’s current public persona a legitimate example of someone building something new out of an undeniably difficult personal history?
Or is it a continuation in a different commercial form of the same underlying dynamic that made him valuable to two different outlaw motorcycle clubs in the first place?
His physical presence, his notoriety, and his ability to draw attention.
There’s no need to force a single answer to that question.
And doing so would likely oversimplify something that’s genuinely ambiguous.
What can be said is that Mitchell’s story illustrates more clearly than most how difficult it actually is to draw a clean boundary around when someone’s involvement in organized crime has truly ended.
He’s not currently a patched member of any outlaw motorcycle club based on available reporting.
He’s also someone whose current public identity remains deeply organized around that history, whose social circle continues to include former associates from his gang years and whose most recent newsworthy incident, the shutdown hotel party in 2024, involved exactly the kind of social gathering with former underworld figures that has recurred throughout his adult life.
It’s also worth reflecting on what Mitchell’s case adds to the broader picture.
This series has built up across other Australian and New Zealand organized crime figures.
Where Daniel Lu’s story ended with violence catching up to someone in the middle of what looked like a genuine attempt at change.
And where several of the Bikey and gang leaders covered elsewhere in this series ended their stories through conviction or through death at the hands of rivals.
Mitchell’s case sits in a genuinely different category.
Someone who survived the violence that typically ends these stories lost his formal position through his own club’s internal governance rather than external pressure and is still as of the most recent reporting available writing the next chapter of his own public life in real time.
That’s an important thing to be honest about both for viewers and for how this channel approaches ongoing cases generally.
Unlike Daniel Elu, whose story reached a formal legal conclusion through Thomas Tahitahi’s conviction and sentencing, or McMurray, whose murder charge remained before the courts at the time that account was recorded.
Mitchell’s story doesn’t have a comparable endpoint to report toward.
There’s no pending trial, no unresolved charge working its way through the justice system, no clear next chapter this account can point to and say that’s where this concludes.
What exists instead is an open-ended present.
A man in his early 50s, managing the physical aftermath of two attempts on his life that were never solved.
Running a fitness brand built partly on that survival story, still connected socially to a world he’s formerly left with no indication from available reporting of what comes next.
If there’s a single thread that ties Mitchell’s case to the broader questions this series keeps returning to, it’s this.
Organized crime figures don’t always get the endings.
Dramatic, final, legally conclusive.
That true crime coverage often implies they should.
Sometimes a career built inside these organizations simply trails off into something else entirely, leaving behind unresolved violence, an ambiguous public reinvention, and a set of questions about accountability and change that the public record, as it currently stands, isn’t in a position to answer definitively.
This channel covers organized crime and gang history across Australia and New Zealand using court records and verified public reporting rather than speculation.
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