Former gang boss Vince Focarelli opens up on his new life in Malaysia after surviving shootings
AFTER surviving five gangland assassination attempts only to be deported, former gang leader Vince Focarelli has built a new life for himself in Malaysia, even contemplating reopening his restaurant La’Fig in his new homeland.
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ALL seemed lost for Vince Focarelli as he lay in a hospital bed only days after his stepson was killed and he was shot four times in a failed gangland hit.
His broken ribs – shattered by one of the assassin’s bullets – prevented him from crying for Giovanni, from screaming with rage and venting his fury over the fifth attempt on his life.
Today, life could scarcely be further from his days as Adelaide’s best-known criminal, but despite having started a new life in Malaysia, the tough guy turned preacher misses home.
“Adelaide was my home and my heart is still there. I miss it,” Focarelli says.
“I am missing two people. I am missing my wife and stepdaughter. When they are here, I will be complete.”
Focarelli – former state leader of the Comancheros bikie gang – looks and sounds like a changed man, now heavily bearded and at home in front of a group of people hanging on his every word.
Speaking to a group of young Malaysian Muslim men and women in a video posted online, Focarelli encourages them to embrace the beauty of life.
Gone is the thousand-mile stare he displayed leaving innumerable court hearings in Adelaide, staring past the cameras and reporters questions to the next move of his criminal syndicate.
Now Focarelli, 42, who converted to Islam in 2012, is all smiles in his new home in Kuala Lumpur, where he plans to reopen his once Carrington St-based restaurant La’Fig Cucina and has also flown his ill mother from Australia to be by his side.
The former gang leader left Adelaide for Italy in March, pre-empting immigration authorities cancelling his visa and taking him into custody pending deportation. He was in Italy only briefly, collecting his passport before making a new life for himself in Malaysia.
In the predominantly Muslim country, Focarelli said he has felt more free than he has for years.
“I have never experienced any culture as beautiful as this,” Focarelli says in the video. “I feel free and I sleep well at night.
“My mother wakes me up a couple of times a night but I feel free because she is here.”
Focarelli’s mother has stage four cancer and is being cared for by her son in Malaysia.
“I never thought that I would see her again, but Allah gave me this blessing,” he says. “It is my turn to take care of her.”
Focarelli, whose father Giuseppe died in 2013, said he misses Adelaide but more than anything he wants his wife and stepdaughter to join him permanently in Malaysia.
Alongside memories of his former life of crime, Focarelli left behind La’Fig, a restaurant run with his wife, which also helped feed the poor and needy.
“My wife was the backbone of La’Fig, I was just the face,” Focarelli says in the video.
“If it wasn’t for her, it would never have got off the ground. When they decided to deport me, my wife said she wanted nothing to do with the place without me. So what we did was pack it up, put it on a container and it is now on Malaysian soil.”
As well as preparing to open a new restaurant and caring for his mother, Focarelli has begun giving talks on his journey to Islam and how he was torn apart by thoughts of vengeance as he lay in hospital after his stepson was killed.
“I desperately wanted to cry,” Focarelli says.
“I couldn’t get angry and scream because my ribs just isolated me from it all.
“I had to shut down. The only thing I was thinking about was that my stepson had been attacked and it was my turn for retribution. I isolated the death because it was too much to bear.”
It was not until he was arrested in connection to drugs and firearms found in the vehicle where his stepson died that Focarelli began embracing Islam, a religion he had been interested in but had not devoted himself to over the previous six years.
“I paid thousands of dollars trying to get out on appeal,” Focarelli says.
“My lawyers told me on a Friday that I would be getting out on the Monday, but then told me authorities were scared for the public safety. They were worried there was going to be a shootout and, in their defence, that is fair enough.”
After his son’s death, Focarelli spent 14 months in prison for drugs and firearms offences. His father died two hours before he was released, compounding his grief .
“While I waited (in prison) I read the Koran,” Focarelli says on the video.
“I was praying 14, 15 times a day. It was my only reassurance. I flooded the cell with tears.
“I felt that it was my fault that my stepson had passed away. I had bought him into the gang world, into the criminal world.
“He was a very loyal young man, very strong and handsome. He didn’t want to leave my side.
“I fell in love with him for that. When you can’t trust the world and then you have someone you can.”
Wrestling with the guilt, Focarelli said he refused anti-depressant medication and, instead, sought solace in particular passages of the Koran which bought him peace.
“If one (passage) can take away so much pain and give me so much peace, how vast is the rest of the Koran?” Focarelli says.
“I’ve never looked back. I’ve never set foot back in that criminal world.
“I got shot four, five times and I am still alive. Allah doesn’t owe me anything. I owe Allah.”
Despite his pledge never to be caught up in South Australia’s underworld crime scene, Focarelli still had his visa cancelled for previous crimes.
“They never gave me a real reason,” he says. “All the crime I did was in the past, my criminal network was in the past, and then they came to deport me.
“I wasn’t the toughest gangster in the world, I don’t claim to be. All I know is that I stood my ground and I wouldn’t take grief from anybody.
“I changed my life but I don’t think that suited them.
“Imagine that – my mother is dying and I just can’t be there for her.
“My father was dying and they wouldn’t let me out of prison. He died two hours before I was released. I couldn’t go to my stepson’s funeral – I had to watch it on TV in prison. Did I turn my back on Allah? No, there was something Allah wanted to change in my life.”
When contacted by the Sunday Mail, Focarelli politely declined to go into the details of his new life in Malaysia.
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