It is the triangle of Melbourne suburbs where those with guns rule the streets and sleeping children are no longer safe from the bullets. Read part two of The Age’s investigation into how Melbourne became a gun city.



Rachad Adra was lying in bed with his four-year-old son when bullets ripped through the front of his Thomastown house.

Fired from the street, they travelled through a window, a front room and through an inside wall before tearing into Adra’s flesh, killing him. Neighbours heard the screams of his young son, who was seriously injured.

Ten months on, the rental house in Melbourne’s north-west is vacant, and while the bullet-riddled glass has been replaced, the blinds haven’t. Small round burn marks, as if someone had butted out a cigar, show where the metal that took Adra’s life first entered his house.

Rachad Adra was killed and his young son injured in a shooting in Thomastown.

As a wave of gun crime washes through Melbourne’s streets - with at least 100 shootings in the past 20 months - the number of bullets being fired has inevitably led to unintended victims. Victims like Adra and his son, who were not the target. His family has not responded to requests for comment.

Police are still appealing for witnesses, but would not release any more information on the killing which, along with more than half of Victoria’s gun crimes in the past two years, remains unsolved.

Adra’s murder last October bore the hallmarks of Victoria’s gun problem: a willingness to shoot indiscriminately, the spread of high-powered weapons, the killing or maiming of innocent people and a concentration of shootings in the city’s north-west.

It is here where a new breed of criminals are taking up arms with deadly consequences. And they’re starting young.

Climbing the criminal chain

Before Amad* was suspected of shooting two men dead, and attempting to murder another, he was a 14-year-old who ram-raided shops to steal cigarettes.

It was crude but lucrative: take a stolen car, smash through a shop front in the early hours, steal as much as $60,000 worth of cigarettes in minutes, vanish into the black.

Ram-raids are so common they are almost a rite of passage for young men such as Amad who grew up in Broadmeadows and surrounding suburbs, around closed and closing factories, wide streets branded with burn-outs, front yards claimed by junk or weeds, or both.

Only a small percentage of profits from these raids end up in their pockets; the people who recruited them, and moved the cigarettes, take the lion’s share.

And so, eventually, Amad moved up the chain.

Soon he was organising the raids.

Then he started moving drugs that were harder and more lucrative than tobacco. Soon after he recruited offsiders to do the same. With this, came the shootings.

Amad is not the kingpin of a burgeoning criminal empire. Nor is he a gun for hire, of the type which became prominent during the gangland war.

Instead he embodies the reckless young gunslingers who have made the north-western suburbs the state’s worst region for shootings.

A Fairfax Media analysis of known shootings in Victoria in the past two years shows about one-in-five happened within a suburban triangle with points roughly in Coolaroo, Campbellfield and Glenroy. At the middle of this catchment of crime lies Broadmeadows.

Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Steve Fontana says that in this region, shooting people as retribution or over a minor debt has become “commonplace”.

Police have mapped criminal networks operating here, similar to that which Amad belonged to, which have up to 1000 members.

Police Minister Lisa Neville is midway through answering a question about shootings in the north-west during an interview earlier this month when she receives a text message from her press secretary: a 16-year-old has been shot in Broadmeadows.

Gun map

Click on the map to view shooting incidents


Shooters in the shadows

It is alleged Amad was not long out of his teens when he shot a man dead in Campbellfield. It is also suspected he gunned down another man, who survived, in Glenroy.

He was charged over those incidents, but not another shooting: the murder of a man, again in the north-west, only a few months after the Campbellfield death.

Fairfax Media can reveal he is the prime suspect, but Amad, and his alleged victims, cannot be named.

A former detective, who worked for two decades in the region, says of Amad: “He’s got a heart like a split pea, unless he’s got a gun in his hand or 10 other blokes with him”.

A detective who investigates organised crime says: “He was always known as a kid who caused a lot of trouble, and was involved in stealing cars and other things.

“He was one of those ones who you knew was going to go on to bigger and better things. Even then, he was trying to be a big gangster.”

There is no shortage of other young men with the potential to reach his level of violence. For some of them, the progression seems as if it’s written in the stars.

“They come from shit,” the former detective says.

Fontana believes the north-west networks are entrenched, but it’s not as straightforward as blaming their upbringing, or home suburbs.

“The concern about some of those groups is their sphere of influence ...[some] individuals have the ability to mobilise a large number of young people to commit crime.

“I’m not just talking about firearms-related crime, I’m talking about series of ram raids on shopping centres, for example. We’ve had a look at some of those groups, and we’ve charged up to 80 sometimes, but they might have a network of up to 1000.

“A lot of these young people, some have come from good families, they’ve got no prior convictions, so it’s really interesting in terms of looking at the changing dynamics of some of this offending that’s taking place, and the networks.”

The two detectives, who were speaking to Fairfax Media independently and on condition of anonymity, believe police did not do all they could in the region.

Firstly, the force was too slow to act, the former detective believes.

And the organised crime detective says that when police did act, they probably focused too much on shootings between two warring families - the Haddaras and the Chaouks.

This meant others, like Amad, who were shooting people for even pettier reasons than a family spat, ascended in the shadows.

Amad (right) was always 'trying to be a gangster'.

Uncontrollable violence

Late in the afternoon of April 9, 2008, Mahmoud Kheir was standing in the driveway of his two-storey home in Broadmeadows’ neighbouring suburb Gladstone Park. He was about to be shot in both legs.

This was somewhat unremarkable; Kheir would be shot at least twice more in the next eight years.

And he knew that shooting people, and being shot, was part of business if you were from a crime family based in Melbourne’s north-west.

Kheir was 29, a father-of-three, on bail, a regular drug user, intellectually disabled and illiterate in English and Arabic. A few months later, he would be charged with gun and drug offences for running an ecstasy and amphetamine trafficking syndicate with his father and brother.

As Kheir lay bleeding in his driveway, and two gunmen ran from his cul-de-sac, the detectives about to be called to the scene were already seething.

Their patch was becoming uncontrollable.

The shooting was the latest bloody example that they were failing to stop young men intent on violence.

It prompted another forceful approach from local police to head office demanding more resources to tackle gun crime. This time, they listened.

The Santiago taskforce was formed; an acknowledgement that the gunmen of the north-west were a problem of statewide importance.

It found that 25 families of mostly Lebanese, Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi and Afghani origin were linked to almost all of the shootings and other crime in the north-west.

Some of the offenders were toddlers when their parents left the Middle East in the 1980s or 1990s. Others were the first generation of their family born in Australia.

Either way, they had fallen through the cracks, like many others - regardless of cultural background - who were raised in the north-west.

Police discover a ballistics vest and explosives during a raid in Dallas, in Melbourne’s north-west.

Photo: Penny Stephens



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Melbourne’s badlands

In winter, there are days when the sky seems to envelop the city’s buildings, creating a seemingly endless grey canvas.

The effect is somewhat different in the north-western suburbs. Instead, the stainless steel of industrial sheds seem to stretch upwards, clawing at the bleakness, trying to avoid being smothered by a pillow of cloud.

You could be forgiven for thinking the region had pockets that were no-go zones; where it was not safe to look someone in the eye, and residents had boarded up their windows in fear of a stray bullet.

This is far from Compton, Los Angeles, but the social media pages of many local young men reveal there is a shared reverence for that city’s gangster culture.

These neighbourhoods are littered with reminders of violence: there is the business owned by a man who lost one brother at the end of a firearm, another to a drug overdose; the street in Dallas where a 19-year-old was found dying from a gunshot wound in July; the Broadmeadows house, with the carcasses of three cars in the front yard, which was struck in a recent drive-by shooting.

Those with Middle Eastern heritage are not the first group of young men born into troubled houses north of the Metropolitan Ring Road that ended up in organised crime: Carl Williams, among others, was raised here, dropping out of Broadmeadows West Technical School in year 11 during the 1980s.

One former officer from the region said he first noticed problems with shootings linked to Middle Eastern families in 2005.

What separated these criminals from those who had come before was the frequency of their offending, and their disregard for human safety.

“There were shootings every day, armed robberies, kidnappings and torture,” he says.

“We were just getting absolutely smashed with armed robberies on soft targets or drug ripoffs where people were getting shot.

“They didn’t have a care in the world about the consequences.”

No chance

The Santiago taskforce set up in the wake of Kheir’s shooting, and since disbanded, did not stop the violence.

Those who were locked up or killed were replaced by their sons, younger brothers, or relatives from interstate, mostly Sydney.

The former officer does not know why this new breed he first started seeing more than a decade ago became so hooked on guns.

It was, he says, probably a combination of several factors: their early induction into criminality, easy access to guns, cowardice, bravado, and recklessness.

Most were poorly educated and serious drug users, like Kheir.

A prominent Broadmeadows local, who did not wish to be named to protect her reformed drug addict son, said the dearth of community services in the north-west set a lot of young men up to fail.

She added that her son did not have this excuse; he came from a loving and supportive family, but was easily influenced by those who weren’t.

The drug problem in the north-west is, in her view, similar to the gun problem: both behaviours - using drugs, and using a gun - have become normalised.

In some cases, the link is even more defined.

Kids experiment with drugs, become hooked, commit crime to fund the habit, wind up dealing, buy a gun because almost everyone else in the game has one.

“A lot of them just have no chance,” she says.

These difficulties are both illustrated and compounded by other factors, such as the chronic rate of unemployment in Broadmeadows.

According to federal government figures for the March quarter, the suburb had a jobless rate of 22.6 per cent - the highest in the state, and almost four times the state average.


$20,000 for an AK-47

Broader failures of the justice system have also contributed to the gun problem, a former detective says.

The delay in cracking down on the crime families that were emerging in the area was a factor, he says, but more disastrous was the punishment handed to those who were charged as teenagers.

The young troublemakers largely ignored any chance for rehabilitation handed to them in the Children’s Court, and were not sufficiently punished for doing so, he says.

There was no reason for them not to pick up where they left off, or, worse, escalate their offending.

Another policing failure, he says, was that the force developed little understanding of how crime families were getting their firearms.

Typically, guns fall into the hands of criminals in three ways: stolen from registered owners, mostly from farms or other regional properties; illegally imported; or from the “grey market” of illicit firearms created after a wider range of guns were made illegal as part of sweeping reforms introduced in 1996.

These areas can overlap, and include other factors, such as the manufacture of firearms, which could rely on a gun part being illegally imported, for example.

Whether any of these methods were relied upon more than others to arm those in the north-west is unclear.

“We didn’t identify where a lot of the guns came from, which we knew at the time was a problem,” the officer says.

“There were longarms cut down, there were revolvers, semi-automatic handguns.

“We knew they were getting some stolen from farms, but that didn’t explain the handguns.”

When Kheir was arrested in September 2008, a .30-30 rifle, a loaded .357 Magnum revolver and a loaded .25 Browning semi-automatic handgun were found inside his house.

While all guns are inherently dangerous, these are fairly standard weapons that have been found on crooks for decades.

What concerns police is the increased access to high-powered, military-grade weapons.

This includes weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles, which can fetch as much as $20,000 on the black market.

Browning 9mm Hi-Power Pistol Used in an alleged burglary of a hydroponic marijuana "grow house" in 2016. The weapon, which was stolen two years earlier, was used to threaten a police officer before the suspect was arrested.

‘They’re prepared to use them’

Assistant Commissioner Fontana is almost philosophical when he discusses the increase in gun crime, particularly non-fatal shootings, which he says are representative of a broader community problem where people seem to have less concern than ever before for the well-being of others.

“You can't just look at firearms-related crime, you've got to look at violence generally because we are seeing different trends in the community with violence,” he says.

Assistant Commissioner (Crime) Stephen Fontana

“It comes back to this lack of respect and lack of concern about consequences for those people using weapons and violence.

“Hardened criminals used to carry firearms and use them. Now we're seeing a lot of people with guns that are involved in minor, petty crimes, and they're prepared to use them. That's a concerning trend.”

He is less abstract about the inherent dangers caused by the spread of military-grade weapons. Police are seeing them more often than ever before.

He says these guns are more likely to result in an innocent member of society being killed or maimed in a shooting gone wrong.

Police Minister Lisa Neville says reducing the shootings in the north-west is possible, but will take time.

The area may have the highest rate of shootings, but is also overrepresented in family violence, children in protective services, and general crime statistics.

She says the solution to all these issues must involve community development, intervention, and job creation.

“If you can get intervention right early enough, you would hope you can start to see some really significant difference in terms of the figures.

“But no doubt there’s a sense of hopelessness sometimes amongst some of those communities.”

Leila Alloush, the chief executive of Victorian Arabic Social Services, which is based in Broadmeadows, says that any program designed to assist the Middle Eastern community has to be collaborative.

“That is the way that people from Arabic countries solve any problem: by getting together to work it out. It won’t be done by one person.”

Gunning for attention

Amad is sitting in the dock in a courtroom at the Melbourne Magistrates Court. He is accused, along with another man, of providing the security and distribution network for a large drug syndicate.

He talks throughout the hearing to his co-accused, gesturing to those in the court he knows, including a younger brother. This brother is going a similar way to Amad, the organised crime detective says.

Another man, a friend who Amad has referred to as a “brother”, is also there.

Amad and his co-accused stare aimlessly around the court, their attentions eventually turning to those who are not their supporters, police, or lawyers.

Eventually, their gaze fixes on this Fairfax journalist, the only reporter in their case.

The co-accused, not sure about our business, holds three fingers on his right shoulder, to indicate police epaulettes; he wants to know whether or not I’m in the force.

Amad is watching, smiling, as the case goes on to his left.

When the gesture is met with a shake of the head, the co-accused looks puzzled, before excitedly making a pad with his left hand, and a pen with his right, to ask if I’m a journalist.

He, and Amad, are pleased with the answer.

The case goes on. At one stage, a nickname for Amad is mentioned while a witness reads telephone intercept logs, and he looks towards us and smiles, raising his eyebrows and nodding slightly, as if to say, “that’s me”.

Flesh is being added to the bones: the level of organisation involved in the syndicate, the part Amad and the co-accused played in it, the evidence that shows they were not mere foot soldiers.

The pair look in our direction from the dock again, and while Amad smirks, leaning forward slightly in his seat, the co-accused raises his right index finger.

He wants the story to go page one.

* Not his real name.

Amad (middle) is suspected of shooting two men dead.



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