The 15th of January, 2022, just after 10:30 in the morning at the Lake Heights soccer fields on the NSW South Coast, a man called a woman he knew and told her to come and pick him up.
She did bringing a friend along for the ride.
Neither of them had any idea what the next 3 hours would actually involve.
That man was Troy Albert Fornishari, former president of the Phoenix Motorcycle Club’s South Coast chapter, a figure well known across the Ilawir region, partly for his criminal history, and partly for something considerably more visible, facial tattoos reading tough luck across his eyelids and not guilty across his cheek.
Once inside the car, Fornes began issuing threats from the back seat.
By 1:00 in the afternoon, the group had arrived at a home in Kyama Downs, and what had started as an unsettling car ride turned into something far more serious.
Inside that house, Foriari discharged a firearm inside the lounge room, close enough to one of the women that the moment would go on to define years of her life afterward.
He forced the weapon toward her face.
He aimed it at the second woman as well.
At one point, he stood on one of the women’s hands, causing an injury serious enough to require hospital treatment.
The two women were held there for 90 minutes before it was over.
Police wouldn’t build a case around this incident until months later, investigators eventually recovering physical evidence directly from that Kyama’s property that corroborated exactly what the two women had described happening inside it.
It would take years for the matter to actually reach a courtroom.
In the meantime, Fornisher’s name kept appearing in NSW court reporting for entirely separate reasons.
In 2023, he pleaded guilty to intimidating and seriously hurting a fellow alleged drug dealer over an unpaid debt alongside commercial drug supply charges.
A man already well known to South Coast detectives, already serving time, already building the kind of criminal record that made headlines describe him as one of the region’s most recognizable offenders.
The kidnapping case eventually caught up with everything else.
Just weeks ago, a Wongong court found for guilty over what happened to those two women back in January 2022.
The judge overseeing sentencing didn’t hesitate on the outcome describing a custodial sentence as clearly warranted given everything the court had heard.
For Nashiari was handed 8 years with a non-p parole period of just under five, meaning he won’t be eligible for release until April 2029.
One detail from the sentencing remarks says more than almost anything else about what those 90 minutes actually cost the people who lived through them.
One of the two women, the court was told, has been left with the kind of trauma that has permanently altered how she sees the world around her.
So, how does a man who once led a Beaky chapter end up in a lounge room in Kiamad Downs, holding two women captive for 90 minutes over what still isn’t entirely clear?
What does a case like this reveal about the gap between a criminal reputation built on tattoos and headlines and the actual lasting harm done to two ordinary people who simply agreed to give someone a lift?
And what happens to a man like Fornesari now sitting in custody until at least 2029.
That’s what we’re getting into today.
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Troy Albert Fornashari’s path toward becoming one of the Ilawara’s most recognizable criminals didn’t begin with the began, according to his own sentencing hearing years later with something that happened when he was 7 years old.
Judge Andrew Hastler laying out what he described as Fornashari’s tragic family history during a 2024 sentencing told the court that Fornishari’s deep distrust of authority traced back to watching his own father experience a fatal heart attack as a child and calling trip0ero for help only for emergency services to treat his call as a hoax.
The court heard he went on to experience further trauma throughout the rest of his childhood.
Details that weren’t laid out in full, but that the judge clearly considered relevant to understanding how Fornishari’s adult life had unfolded.
What came next followed a pattern familiar to anyone who studied how young men end up inside outlaw motorcycle culture.
Forari went through basic army training.
At some point in his younger years, a structured environment, discipline, chain of command, the kind of external framework that can genuinely help someone who’s never had reliable structure at home.
It didn’t become the path he ultimately settled into.
The did.
According to what was raised in court, Fornashari found something inside the club that the army hadn’t fully provided him genuine positive reinforcement from other members.
Along with the structure and direction he’d apparently been missing since childhood.
For a man whose formative experience of authority, had been a triple0ero operator, refusing to believe his own father was dying, an organization built on absolute internal loyalty and its own self-contained hierarchy, may well have offered exactly the kind of belonging conventional institutions had already failed to give him.
He didn’t stay a rank and file member for long.
Forari worked his way up through the fin south coast chapter based in the Ilawir region south of Sydney eventually becoming its president a position of genuine standing inside one of Australia’s recognized outlaw motorcycle clubs responsible for representing the chapter’s interests and maintaining its structure across the region.
By the time most people in NSW court reporting circles came to know his name, Foriari had built a public identity that went well beyond his club title.
His face told its own story before he ever said a word a fully inked face, including the words tough luck tattooed across his eyelids and later not guilty across his cheek along with knuckle duster designs on his chin.
It’s the kind of physical presentation that guarantees instant recognition.
The sort of choice that signals a complete rejection of any attempt to move quietly through the world.
Local journalists covering the Ilawara courts routinely described him simply as colorful, a word doing a lot of work to capture a man who’d made himself quite deliberately impossible to ignore.
That combination, genuine early trauma, a search for structure that eventually settled on one of Australia’s outlaw motorcycle clubs, and a public image built around visibles.
Permanent defiance set the stage for everything that followed.
By his mid30s, Troy Fornasiari wasn’t simply a former Beaky chapter president.
He’d become one of the most recognizable names in South Coast NSW crime reportings for reasons that were about to get considerably more serious than anything his tattoos alone could capture.
By 2023, Troy Fornes’s pattern of resolving disputes had become disturbingly consistent.
And one specific incident involving a man he’d called a friend for six years showed exactly how far that pattern could escalate when money was involved.
Paul Moscan and Fornashiari had known each other for the better part of 6 years.
By the time Forniari turned up at Moscan’s Kunawara home in May, the visit started ordinarily enough two men who knew each other well, talking the way they normally would.
It soured the moment the conversation turned to money.
For Nashari, the court would later hear, had found himself carrying more than $60,000 in drug debt to his own upline suppliers.
And Muskieran became the person he decided to take that pressure out on.
What followed inside that home left Muskieran with a serious head injury requiring hospital treatment.
He returned home the next day, only to find Fornishari waiting for him there again.
This time offering something closer to an apology, telling him he was sorry and promising it wouldn’t happen again.
That promise didn’t hold.
Threats followed by text message afterward, specific enough that prosecutors later read parts of them directly into evidence.
Mccieran being told he was coming for a drive and a warning that he’d end up with something put into both of his knees if he didn’t cooperate.
That specific phrase, coming for a drive, deserves attention on its own.
It’s the exact same method for would later be accused of using against two entirely different women less than a year earlier in January 2022.
Calling someone, arranging to be picked up, using a car as the setting where control could be established and threats could be delivered without anyone else around to intervene.
Whether that was a genuine pattern for Nashari had refined over time or simply the most obvious tool available to someone looking to isolate a person and apply pressure.
The repetition across two entirely separate cases says something about how consistently he seemed to rely on exactly that setup.
The investigation that eventually caught up with the Muskan assault didn’t start with Muskieran at all.
NSW strike force detectives had already been watching a separate woman connected to methamphetamine distribution across the Ilawa and it was through that surveillance that Fornashari’s own role surfaced not as a witness but as her upline supplier.
Court documents later detailed the full scale of it.
238 g of methamphetamines worth roughly $56,000 sold to her over just 3 weeks.
Police listened in as she complained to a friend about product she considered unreliable and poor quality.
Weighing whether to find a different supplier entirely, an unglamorous, almost mundane window into the actual mechanics of a drug supply relationship, most true crime coverage never bothers to show.
For Nashari initially denied everything connected to the Makernan incident.
It wasn’t until the day his trial was set to begin in August 2023 that he changed course entirely pleading guilty to intimidation, reckless wounding, and commercial drug supply, sparing the court a contested hearing, but leaving the underlying pattern fully on the public record regardless.
A man in serious debt, willing to threaten and hurt someone he’d called a friend for years, using exactly the kind of coercive setup that would come to define the far more serious case, still waiting to be resolved against him.
Saturday the 15th of January, 2022, around midday at the Lake Heights soccer fields, Fornosari phoned a woman he knew and told her to come and get him.
She wasn’t alone when she arrived.
A friend had come along for the ride.
An ordinary favor between two people who had no reason to think the day would turn into anything else.
Forari climbed into the back seat.
From there, according to what the court would later accept as facts, he began delivering a set of threats directed specifically at the two women, now driving him the kind of language designed less to communicate anything specific than to establish.
Immediately exactly who was in control of what happened next.
By 1:00, they’d arrived at a house on Cameron Crescent in Kiamad Downs.
What had started as a car ride became something the two women wouldn’t be able to leave for the next 90 minutes.
In size, Fornosari used a handgun to terrorize both women.
A level of intimidation so severe it would go on to shape years of one woman’s life afterward.
Nothing about it was connected to any actual robbery, dispute, or transaction either woman was part of.
It was by every account later accepted in court deliberate and sustained cruelty for its own sake.
At another point during the orals, Fornesari brought his full weight down on one of the women’s hands.
An injury serious enough that she required hospital treatment once it was finally over.
90 minutes.
That’s how long two women who’d simply agreed to give someone a lift spent unable to leave a house in Kyama Downs, held there by a man they’d known to varying degrees before that day, never anticipating what accepting a phone call from the soccer fields would actually cost them.
When the case eventually reached Wongong District Court years later, Forari didn’t accept responsibility the way he had with the Mccieran matter.
He pleaded not guilty across the board, and his defense made clear exactly what kind of trial the court could expect.
Asked directly what facts were actually in dispute.
His own barristister told the judge plainly that the defense intended to contest whether any of it had happened at all a total denial despite everything the two women had already told police despite physical evidence that would later be recovered from the property itself.
That defense meant the two women had to give evidence in open court describing what they’d experienced in that Kiad’s house, cross-examined by lawyers working to convince a jury that none of it was true.
For anyone who studied how serious violent crime cases actually work their way through Australian courts, that’s often the most difficult part of the entire process for victims.
Not simply surviving what happened, but having to relive it publicly under scrutiny years later because the person responsible refuses to accept any version of events beyond his own.
The jury ultimately didn’t accept that denial.
What the court found had happened inside that house matched in every material respect what the two women had described from the very beginning.
What’s notable about the case against Troy Fornosiari over what happened in Kiamad Downs isn’t just what investigators eventually found, it’s how long it took to get there.
The incident itself took place in January 2022.
But it wasn’t until March 2024 that Fornashiari was hit with a dozen fresh charges specifically connected to it kidnapping, taking a person with intent to commit a serious offense, possessing a pistol and multiple counts of using a weapon to commit an indictable offense.
By that point, he was already behind bars anyway, serving time for the separate mccieran assault and drug supply matters.
Sitting inside the Midn North Coast Correctional Center, awaiting sentencing on charges that had nothing directly to do with what the two women in Kyama Downs had reported more than 2 years earlier.
That gap raises an obvious question.
What actually took so long?
Part of the answer appears to lie in physical evidence that didn’t surface until much later in the investigation.
Detectives eventually recovered a bullet lodged inside the floorboards of the Kyama Downs property found in December 2023, nearly two full years after the incident itself, with entry and exit points through the lounge room matching exactly what the two women had already told police had happened there.
Corroborating physical evidence like that doesn’t always emerge quickly, particularly in a case built initially around two witnesses accounts of an incident with no independent recording of what happened inside a private home.
Once that evidence was in hand, the case against Fornosari solidified considerably.
Of the 12 charges originally laid in March 2024, seven were ultimately withdrawn before the matter reached trial.
A common pattern in serious criminal prosecutions where the strongest, most provable charges are pursued while weaker or overlapping ones are dropped rather than risk eluding the core case in front of a jury.
What remained were the charges that mattered most.
Kidnapping, the firearm offenses, and the specific counts connected to how that weapon had been used against both women.
The trial itself didn’t actually begin until early 2026, a oneweek proceeding at Wllingong District Court.
Presided over by Judge William Fitz Simmons, for Nashari, 42 years old by that point, wasn’t even present in court when his trial date was confirmed.
The matter proceeded with only his legal representation there to formally acknowledge what was coming.
His barristister, Ben Hart, made clear well in advance exactly what kind of trial the court and the two women would be facing a defense built entirely around, denying that any of it had happened at all 4 years after the fact.
Despite the physical evidence investigators had spent those same four years working to recover and confirm for the two women at the center of the case.
That timeline meant living with what had happened to them for years before ever seeing any resolution.
First waiting for charges to be laid at all, then waiting through a defense built on outright denials, then finally testifying in a courtroom about an incident from half a decade earlier.
When the jury’s verdict finally came in early 2026, it closed a case that had taken longer to reach trial than the entire 90 minutes inside that Kyama’s house had originally lasted to unfold.
To understand what it actually meant for Troy Fornachiari to lead the Fin South Coast chapter, it helps to understand that the club he was representing had only a few years earlier come close to disappearing entirely.
The Fins were founded in Adelaide in 1969.
The name borrowed almost jokingly from a Wizard of ID comic stripline about towns people shouting defiance at their king.
What started as a social writing club evolved over the following decades into what Australian law enforcement classifies as a genuine 1enter organization, developing chapters across South Australia, Queensland, Western Australia, and eventually New South Wales.
Then in October 2013, the club effectively collapsed from within.
The overwhelming majority of Finins members nationally made the decision to switch allegiance entirely, patching over to the American-based Mongols motorcycle club as it expanded its presence into Australia, leaving what remained of the original brand a shadow of what it had been.
A faction eventually reformed under the original name in the years that followed, rebuilding with redesigned patches and a fresh recruitment drive.
But by every account, it represented something considerably smaller and less established than the organization that had existed before the mass defection that history explains a detail that’s easy to miss otherwise.
Journalists covering Fornashari consistently described his position as leading the fledgling fin south coast chapter not a typo or careless word choice but an accurate reflection of what he was actually building.
He wasn’t inheriting decades of entrenched regional standing the way a president of an older more established chapter might have been.
He was helping construct something genuinely new in the years after the club’s near collapse in a region of NSW that hadn’t previously had a significant Fin presence at all.
Building that kind of chapter from close to nothing happens against a legal backdrop specifically designed to make it difficult.
Anti-consorting laws introduced across multiple Australian states through the 2010s made it a formal offense for known offenders to continue associating with each other after police issued a warning legislation built explicitly to disrupt exactly the kind of organizational rebuilding forari and others were attempting.
In practice though, those laws have produced a strikingly small number of actual convictions relative to the warnings issued.
In Queensland, for example, hundreds of official consorting warnings were handed out in a single reporting year.
While only a handful of people were ever actually charged and fewer still convicted, a pattern that’s drawn criticism from independent reviewers who’ve questioned how effectively the laws are actually being applied daytoday.
That gap between legislative intent and practical enforcement matters for understanding how someone like Fornesari could rise to lead a chapter at all during exactly the period these laws were meant to prevent it.
The framework existed.
The warnings were issued.
But building an organization, even a small one, in a regional pocket of NSW, largely outside the major metropolitan task force’s primary focus still proved achievable right up until Fornosari’s own individual offending rather than any coordinated anti-consorting enforcement became the thing that actually ended his time leading it.
Wongong District Court 3 weeks before this video was made.
Troy Fornashari appeared on a video link from prison dark hair, sllicked back, a beard, sipping occasionally from a water bottle as Judge Ahmad Abdul Karim worked through the details of a kidnapping that had happened more than 4 years earlier, back when Forashari’s own charges were still being denied outright.
The jury had already delivered its verdict in February.
Guilty on kidnapping.
Guilty on taking a person with intent to commit a serious indictable offense.
Guilty on two separate counts of using an unauthorized pistol.
What remained was the sentencing itself, the court’s final word on exactly how much time this would cost him.
Judge Abdul Karim didn’t hesitate on the central question.
A custodial sentence, he said, was clearly warranted for what forari had done.
8 years backdated with a non-p parole period of 4 years and 10 months meaning forari won’t be eligible for release until the 16th of April 2029.
What’s genuinely worth sitting with is how the judge weighed Fornishari’s own history within that sentence.
He found that Fornosari’s moral culpability was slightly reduced, specifically pointing to a connection between the childhood trauma raised in earlier proceedings and the way violence had become normalized inside the outlaw lifestyle fornicari had built his adult identity around.
It’s a careful, deliberately narrow finding, not an excuse, not a suggestion that what happened to those two women mattered any less because of what had happened to Foresari decades earlier, just an acknowledgment built into Australian sentencing law itself.
That circumstances shaping a person’s path through life are relevant to punishment even when they don’t come close to justifying what that person eventually did to someone else.
The court also heard something about what fornosari hopes comes next once April 2029 eventually arrives.
He wants to distance himself from the associations that have defined so much of his adult life.
He wants to reconnect with family.
He’s expressed interest in finding work in the transport industry.
The kind of ordinary practical goal that sits almost jaringly next to everything the court had just spent the hearing detailing.
There’s a genuine irony sitting inside his current custody arrangement.
Two, since this latest stretch began, for Nashari has been held under the highest level of security available, specifically for his own safety, a classification serious enough that it’s actually prevented him from accessing the rehabilitation and reintegration programs that might otherwise help him work toward exactly the future he says he wants.
The same reputation that once helped him rise to lead a beaky chapter now in a strange way stands between him and the programs designed to help him leave that world behind for good.
None of that changes what the judge made clear was the sentence’s real foundation.
A woman left with trauma serious enough, the court was told, to permanently alter how she now sees the world around her.
Whatever Forari’s own path toward that Kyama’s lounge room looked like, whatever reduced culpability, the court was willing to formally recognize.
The outcome for the two women who simply agreed to give him a lift that January morning remains exactly what it always was theirs to carry long after his own sentence eventually runs its course.
There’s something worth sitting with in the fact that Troy Forniari had the words not guilty tattooed permanently across his own cheek years before a jury would spend a week in Wongong District Court determining definitively that he was.
Facial tattoos like that aren’t accidental.
They’re a declaration chosen deliberately meant to be read by everyone who ever looks at him for the rest of his life.
Tough luck across his eyelids, knuckle duster ink on his chin, not guilty on his cheek.
Taken together, it’s less a random collection of ink than a kind of permanent public identity statement.
A man actively choosing to present himself as untouchables, unbothered, someone the system could throw whatever it wanted at without ever actually landing a hit.
The jury’s verdict in February made that particular declaration into something considerably more complicated than Fornosari likely intended when he first sat down for the tattoo.
It’s difficult to imagine he chose those specific words without at least some awareness of how they might eventually read against the reality of an actual conviction, whether as defiance, dark humor, or simply a man who never seriously entertained the idea that a jury would someday prove him wrong about the very words permanently written across his own face.
What sits underneath that curated toughness?
According to nearly everything raised across his various court appearances is someone who spent his entire adult life trying to outrun a childhood that left him with, in a judge’s own words, a deep distrust of the systems meant to protect him.
The 7-year-old who watched his father have a heart attack and couldn’t get anyone to believe his call for help never really disappeared.
He just got buried under layers of ink, muscle, and a reputation deliberately built to make sure nobody ever saw that boy again.
He hasn’t been entirely alone through any of it either.
Reporting from his earlier court appearances, noted family members present in the galleries, with one friend telling local media that Fornashiari had all the support he needed and that those closest to him were staying positive throughout the process.
That kind of loyalty doesn’t require anyone to excuse what he’s done.
It simply reflects something true about how family and community connection often works.
Regardless of what a person has actually been convicted of, people who’ve known him for years, who perhaps remember him before the tattoos and the colors and the multiple prison stints, aren’t necessarily choosing to ignore the harm he’s caused.
They’re choosing to stay connected to someone they knew before any of it started.
That’s the tension running underneath this entire case.
And it’s not one this channel can resolve for you.
A man badly failed by the systems meant to protect him as a child grew into someone who went on to fail two women completely unconnected to any of that original harm women who did nothing more than agree to give him a lift on an ordinary Saturday.
Both things happened.
Both things are true.
And somewhere underneath eight years, a security classification that blocks rehabilitation and a face permanently inked with words a jury has now formally contradicted is simply a man who by his own account hopes he gets the chance to be someone else entirely once April 2029 finally arrives.
8 years for 90 minutes.
That’s the arithmetic of this case.
Reduced to its simplest form.
Though anyone who’s actually followed what happened inside that Kyama’s house knows the real cost was never going to fit neatly into a number like that.
Troy Fornosari will be 49 years old when he’s next eligible for release in April 2029.
He says he wants a job in transport by then.
Wants his family back.
Wants in some genuine sense to become someone other than the man who once had not guilty tattooed onto his own face.
A declaration a jury has now formally permanently contradicted.
Whether he actually gets there is something nobody watching this video can answer, including us.
What we can say is that the two women who agreed to pick him up from a soccer field on an ordinary Saturday in January 2022 don’t get the same kind of clean release date.
One of them, the court was told, now carries trauma serious enough to have permanently altered how she sees the world.
There’s no parole board reviewing that.
No fixed date when it’s simply over.
That’s really the imbalance sitting at the center of this entire story.
A man shaped by genuine documented childhood trauma built an adult identity around toughness, tattoos, [snorts] and a Beaky chapter he helped rebuild from almost nothing.
And somewhere along the way, that identity curdled into exactly the kind of harm nobody who actually knew him.
As a 7-year-old boy watching his father die could have wanted for him.
Understanding where that harm came from doesn’t erase what it did to two people who had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
So here’s what’s actually worth asking.
Does knowing Fornishari’s own history change how you see this case at all?
Or does the severity of what those two women went through simply outweigh whatever explanation sits underneath it?
There’s no clean answer here.
And we’re genuinely not sure there’s supposed to be one.
If we got anything wrong in this one, or if there’s context about this case you think deserves more attention, tell us in the comments we mean that seriously, not just as a line to end the video on.
Cases like this deserve to be told accurately, and we’d rather hear it from you than get it wrong.
Thanks for watching this one all the way through.
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