He was Adelaide’s most notorious gangster, a street hood who rose to head a feared bikie gang, survived six attempts on his life and watched his son die in an ambush. Now, for the first time since being expelled from Australia in 2017, Vince Focarelli tells the incredible story of his life and crimes. Read Part 1 here.
SOME are born into the gangster life, others are born to be gangsters.
In the case of Vince Focarelli, a deep infatuation with the criminal lifestyle set him on a path that led to the pinnacle of South Australia’s underworld.
The 45-year-old rose to become the state’s most notorious gang and bikie leader, surviving six attempts on his life before he was forced into exile by a government order to have him banned from the country.
Speaking publicly for the first time since leaving SA in 2017, the convicted drug dealer has detailed his past in an exclusive interview.
He has paid tribute to his stepson, Giovanni, who was shot dead by a Descendants bikie at Dry Creek in 2012, and revealed how his plan to assassinate the gunman was thwarted when he rediscovered Islam, forcing forgiveness and a change of heart.
He has also explained why, still to this day, he will not tell police who killed his stepson.
By his own account, he is “not an evil man” but one who has “done evil stuff because the life required it”.
Now living in Malaysia, Focarelli cares for his sick mother and is a youth mentor, using his bullet wounds as a story in an attempt to correct the sins of his past.
HOW A BIKIE WAR BEGAN
In 2006, after a 6½-year stint in prison for drug offences, Focarelli re-assumed his position as bodyguard to a prominent SA crime figure, who had recently become a Hells Angel.
He hung around the outlaw club for a couple of months and then became a prospect under the tutelage of its sergeant-at-arms. It lasted just a few months.
According to Focarelli, what happened next forced him to break away and form SA’s most powerful street gang – the New Boys – and triggered a violent spate of shootings and attacks across Adelaide.
“My wife and I went to his house, we were happy and we were laughing. We really hit it off, I thought he was a nice guy,” he said.
“But then everything changed from then on. I couldn’t understand why, I couldn’t work it out. “Then he set me up with a dodgy deal and took off to England.
“He left me here in Adelaide to be set up with one of the members so I would be kicked out.”
It was a move that ignited one of the state’s most violent turf wars.
Focarelli said two other Hells Angels, who were prospects of the club, were wronged in a drug deal and left them $180,000 out of pocket.
“(A senior member) didn’t realise when they (the wronged prospects) departed (the Hells Angels) they had a lot of support and following from the northern suburbs,” Focarelli said.
“I was the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle for having a crew again. That’s when the New Boys were formed.”
OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW BOYS
Afghans, Iraqis, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Africans, Muslims, Buddhists, Greeks, Italians and Aboriginals – more than 100 people from different backgrounds joined the New Boys in 2007.
“The theme was, out with the old (which was the Hells Angels), and in with the new, which was us. They were old news,” Focarelli said.
“The only guys that were organised were the top guys, we were organised. But the other ones, we let them run free like wolves and that’s what was scary. It’s what was hard for the cops as well.
“They didn’t know what to do, how to do surveillance and everyone wanted to be a part of the New Boys.”
The gang operated out of Focarelli’s Hindley St tattoo studio, Ink Central, and became embroiled in violent and bloody clashes with rival Hells Angels members over a five-year period.
The first shooting against Hells Angels members was never sanctioned by New Boys leaders, Focarelli claims.
“I was at the tattoo shop working. I think whoever did it was on the end of a controversial phone call from the Hells Angels and they went and did what they did,” he said.
“It was never planned, it was never spoken about. I had no idea until the next day.”
During this time, Focarelli banned Hells Angels members and associates from the CBD.
“North Terrace, East Terrace, South Terrace and West Terrace were off limits for them,” he said.
“If they stepped into the city they would be attacked. They even had scouts to try and find out where we were. One time I noticed one walking near the shop. We grabbed him and he was wearing a supporter T-shirt underneath.”
As the violence escalated, a senior Hells Angels member from the South Crew chapter invited Focarelli to a meeting on South Road.
Members of the southern chapter, who are predominantly older, were trying to avoid being caught in the crossfire.
Focarelli met one longstanding member at Harley Davidson alone. The man was granted reassurances he and other older members would not be targeted.
BIKIE GANGS COME KNOCKING
As the Hells Angels v New Boys battle waged on, a bidding war broke out between the Mongols and Comancheros for Focarelli’s services.
The two clubs were looking to expand and needed an SA president.
Feeling ready to keep climbing the gangster ladder, Focarelli initially liked the idea of wearing a Mongols patch.
“Because when the New Boys and Hells Angels were doing all those shootings, I was (leaning towards) the Mongols,” Focarelli said.
“They contacted me and said we’re going international, we want you.
“They said: ‘We’ll give you money, patches. Anything you want it’s yours’.
“But the Comancheros heard this, they were following my story. They were the ones I was really drawn too. The colours, the patch. Mick Hawi (the ex-Comanchero boss who was assassinated in 2018) was a friend of mine.”
Some New Boys gang members followed Focarelli and joined the first-ever SA chapter of the Comancheros, which was formed in December, 2010.
But just a year later, Focarelli was stripped of his club presidency after internal disputes.
“I told them, don’t come down here and try to tell me how to run my state. I’m the president, let me handle things. This is my family, my state, let me handle it,” he said.
“I’m not a child and didn’t want to get treated like a child. Most importantly, I didn’t want to get treated like a puppet. I wouldn’t take orders and they didn’t like it.
“I didn’t give my patch back, I threw it away. You’re supposed to give it back but I didn’t want to.”
OPERATION KILL VINCE
Ten years on after a failed bomb plot, the word “explosion” is more than enough to make Focarelli’s blood boil.
In February, 2010, the Hells Angels decided a dead version of the New Boys leader was the best kind. Two club associates went to kill him with a bomb at Enfield.
But the men, Vahe Hacopian, 31, and Barzan Palani, 23, died instantly when their Holden sedan exploded. The homemade bomb is believed to have been sitting in the car’s centre console.
The driver’s body was blown into the gutter outside an elderly woman’s home while debris was scattered over a 35m radius.
“There was a bombing at my house and I was dirty with that bombing,” Focarelli said.
“I was so dirty. Back in that life you do things properly, my family was there.
“I heard they were going to put the bomb next to my window where I slept with my wife. That was not on. Those dogs got what was coming to them.”
But the explosion, which came a year after an earlier brush with death when he took himself to hospital with an unexplained gunshot wound, was the just the beginning.
In September, 2010, Focarelli was confronted inside a Sefton Park supermarket by a man who levelled a gun at the gang leader but didn’t shoot.
“The guy is a coward and went there for show. I know that for certain. First of all, you don’t go with a shotgun to kill someone, not a rundown shotgun, that’s number one.
“Number two, if you know that I’m there, you wait for me to get to my car and then go bang. “You don’t go into a public place with cameras and lights and start tap dancing, pretending you’re on Australian Idol.
“Then you come with a run down shotgun and pellets that spray. Come on man.
“At the end he failed and he failed because he’s a coward.”
Focarelli survived a third attempt on his life at Munno Para in late 2011.
He had driven to a home for a meeting with an unknown man. Witnesses heard shouting before at least four shots were fired. They saw men running down the street as the gunman and another man fled on a Japanese sports bike.
Focarelli, with a gunshot wound to his leg, smashed a window on a nearby home and escaped through a back door.
In 2012, he escaped unharmed when shots were fired in the carpark of the Findon Hotel on Grange Road.
“I feel that God loves me for sure. I feel blessed,” he said.
“That life, I’ve lived it since I was 12 years old. I’ve lived it in every aspect and every angle in which that life should be lived.”
In the final attempt on his life, and despite multiple gunshot wounds, Focarelli would escape again. But his loyal follower and bodyguard, stepson Giovanni, would not survive.
‘THE BULLET WAS FOR ME’: THE KILLING OF GIOVANNI FOCARELLI
Focarelli would take 1000 bullets over a few broken ribs any day.
The pain of those bone breaks is insufferable. But that agony doesn’t even register when compared to losing a child.
It was at Dry Creek in January, 2012, that Giovanni Focarelli took his final breath.
“Getting shot from point blank range, man, I must’ve ducked when I pulled Johnny in. ‘Papa’ was his last word after getting shot,” Focarelli said.
“When I pulled him in the gunman took shots at me and I ducked down towards the steering wheel and twisted. By doing that twist, I must’ve moved at the right time for the bullet to not go through my skull.”
The shooter – a member of the Descendants bikie club – ambushed the pair during a drug deal gone wrong.
Giovanni, also known as Johnny, was shot and killed as he sat in the front passenger seat of a car driven by his father after it stopped on Flame Avenue.
“The bullet was for me,” Focarelli said.
“Johnny told me: ‘I’ll protect you, if anything happens to you it happens to me too.’
“He didn’t know that snake came to shoot. He lured me in.
“I should’ve picked up on it. I didn’t at the start but (the gunman) was acting weird.
“For me, when I got shot, all I could think about was Johnny getting shot.
“The only thing I was thinking of, because I know he died. I could tell that he died. I was thinking: ‘How am I going to explain this?’
Speaking about Giovanni’s death publicly for the first time, Focarelli said his stepson was on “another level on beauty”.
“Not once did he ever disrespect his mum, raise his voice or stamp his feet,” Focarelli said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. He was fearless and in the tattoo shop I was meant to be the popular one, but the girls came in for him, girls love the gangster stuff.
“Johnny would just smile, he had lips like sponge pillows, bright, white teeth that were straight, he had these crystal green eyes and infectious smile.”
Giovanni loved the gangster lifestyle and vowed to protect his dad until the end.
“He got a bullet for me. He tried to protect me and got a bullet. He’s the real deal,” Focarelli said.
Laying in hospital, revenge was the only thing on Focarelli’s mind. But the Crimes Gang Task Force had other ideas.
“One bullet hit my two ribs, broke them, and came out of my chest area. One bullet was lodged in my skull. One went around on my back and just missed my nervous system. I would’ve been paralysed for life and one in my arm at the back,” he said.
“Four days later, I pulled the cords out, blood was everywhere. I tried to patch myself up as much as I could. I just left.”
But Focarelli was met at the elevators by police who arrested him on drugs charges.
In the end it was a blessing Focarelli wouldn’t realise for three months, and one that he guarantees spared SA a “murder spree”.
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