He’s one of Australia’s most wanted criminals. This is why he’s untouchable

It should have been a warning sign. The “deportation” of drug trafficker Kazem Hamad to Iraq was a comfortable affair for someone law enforcement had designated as a major organised crime threat.

After spending eight years in a maximum security prison, Hamad was picked up in a van and driven to Melbourne Airport, catching a Qatar Airways flight on which he and his security escort of Serco guards took up an entire row of seats.

A private charter plane, paid for by Hamad, was considered too risky, given his official classification by immigration authorities as a “dangerous person”.

It was the 39-year-old’s first taste of freedom in nearly a decade, and the deal he struck to pay for his own expulsion let him leave the country on something of his own terms. Hamad was even allowed to stop to change from prison garb into high-end streetwear.

In July 2023, the gangland boss was being exiled from Australia, but the move would have no effect on his growing power in Melbourne’s underworld, a rise that police and corrections authorities had been unable to stem even while he was locked up inside one of the most secure prison units in Victoria.

It has been 16 months since Hamad was booted to his native Iraq – a period marked by more than 120 firebombings and numerous shootings linked by police and underworld sources to his rise to power.

Now the Iraqi citizen seems out of reach to Australian law enforcement as prosecutors are reluctant to share information with Iraqi counterparts and seek his extradition for fear local authorities might execute him.

Police suspect he is the kingpin in Melbourne’s tobacco war – in which rivals set fire to each other’s shops and other venues in a battle for control of the illegal tobacco trade – and also involved in drug trafficking and other violent crimes.

Hamad pictured in about 2015.

This story is based on information provided by seven police and underworld sources, court proceedings, and law enforcement intelligence documents obtained by The Age.

The first sign of trouble

On the morning of the same day Hamad was escorted out of the country in 2023, masked men were breaking into a mausoleum in Preston to steal and defile the body of Meshilin Marrogi, sister of one of his greatest enemies, gang boss George Marrogi.

Six days later, long-time enemy and underworld heavyweight Mohammed Akbar Keshtiar, known as “Afghan Ali”, was gunned down on a South Yarra street. Hamad is the prime suspect for ordering the hit, police and underworld sources say.

This was just the start of what they suspect were Hamad’s revenge acts, which he would wage in the midst of a turf war for control of the city’s illicit tobacco industry that police believe he had ignited months before.

If it had happened 20 years ago – before smartphones, encrypted messaging apps and cryptocurrency – Hamad’s deportation might have put an end to his rise in Melbourne’s underworld.

It’s now clear authorities were unprepared for how rapidly and violently he could make his mark from 13,000 kilometres away.

Hamad was arriving in a country he hadn’t seen since his early teens, but he had laid the groundwork for expanding his reach in Australia.

He was already the boss of a major Melbourne underworld crew that had been building its power and wealth while he spent eight years in jail for heroin trafficking. When he was in prison, police suspect his cousin, Ahmed Al Hamza, and other figures controlled the syndicate.

Police intelligence obtained by The Age shows Al Hamza had forged a powerful street crew that would be linked to more than a dozen violent incidents as it fought rivals in the drug trade.

Some of the future gang members were just 11 years old when Hamad went to prison in 2015. But during the tobacco war in 2023-24, they would be willing to shoot at perceived rivals and their property on behalf of a boss they had never met.

Al Hamza would be forced to flee Australia in 2022 for the Middle East in the wake of investigations linking him to huge drug importations.

Hamad spent months living in Sunrise Bay Tower in Dubai.

Now 27, he moved to Dubai, setting up an operational base for a new Melbourne underworld force run almost exclusively from overseas.

The emirate has a reputation as the go-to destination for Australian crime figures on the run or seeking sanctuary, partly due to the apparent disinterest of local authorities in the extensive criminal histories of those setting up a base there or the source of the wealth they flagrantly display.

Hamad, who spent only days in Baghdad after being deported to Iraq, also shifted to Dubai.

He moved into a luxury apartment in the Sunrise Bay Tower, a 34-storey waterfront development with a private beach.

The property belonged to an Australian bikie boss, Mark Buddle, who lived there before meeting Hamad behind bars in Australia. Hamad got the apartment keys, along with control of a multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking network.

Hamad was soon enjoying his freedom racing along Dubai’s highways in a Ferrari and partying with associates and underlings who had flown in, first-class, to confer with the new “boss”.

The firebombing of a Moonee Ponds tobacco shop in June 2023 was linked to the Hamad syndicate.Credit: Nine News

In Australia, his name began coming up in investigations into Melbourne’s tobacco war. Police suspect he ordered extortions, firebombings, bashings and shootings.

While Hamad was in prison and Al Hamza in the Middle East, the duo used intermediaries to concoct a plan to take over the illicit tobacco trade in Melbourne, which had turned into a black market worth hundreds of millions of dollars due to steeply rising taxes.

Within months of Hamad’s release from jail and deportation, Australian law enforcement realised they had a big problem on their hands.

The university of advanced criminality

How Hamad went from a mid-tier drug dealer when jailed in 2015 to a gangland boss by 2023 is a story that goes to the heart of the way Australia’s prison system fails to manage organised crime figures.

Bikies, gang members, mafia and Middle Eastern organised crime figures pose a particular problem for the corrections system, which is primarily focused on keeping order over a population of highly dangerous offenders.

Members of one bikie club, for example, are housed together in units to prevent conflict with members of other clubs.

Mark Buddle inside a prison van leaving Melbourne Magistrates’ Court in August 2022.Credit: Jason South

But prison provides a perfect environment for new connections to be made, alliances to be formed and plots to be hatched.

“It’s a constant problem for us,” a police source said. “Corrections isn’t there to stop these guys from plotting; they’re only interested in the most efficient and safe way to hold them. It’s like a criminal convention in there.”

This is precisely what happened between Buddle and Hamad, according to police and underworld sources.

In 2022, Buddle was arrested and extradited to Australia from Turkey, where he was sent to Barwon Prison to await trial on drug trafficking charges.

His jail neighbour? Kazem Hamad.

An exercise yard in Barwon Prison’s highest-security Olearia unit.Credit: Jason South

Despite near-constant isolation, CCTV surveillance and monitoring, these two high-profile and high-risk prisoners managed to plan a vast new criminal enterprise. They did it in one-hour “run-outs” – exercise time in a prison yard filled with individual cages.

“The guards don’t really give a shit who does run-outs together, and it’s a place for people to talk when they’re not going to be overheard,” a former inmate said.

In a bail hearing for a Hamad lieutenant in May, Detective Leading Senior Constable Matthew Lindsay testified that police intelligence showed numerous indications that Hamad and Buddle had become allies.

This included a relative of Hamad’s visiting Buddle in prison after Hamad’s expulsion from the country.

“When Kaz was over in the United Arab Emirates, he was staying in Mark Buddle’s apartment. So they’re pretty connected,” Lindsay testified.

Hamad and Al Hamza could not be contacted for comment.

The Iraqi conundrum

Hamad was only in Dubai for about two months before UAE authorities scooped him off the street and deported him to Iraq.

The move was apparently sparked by information about Hamad’s activities handed over by Australian law enforcement.

As the firebombings were hitting a fever pitch in Melbourne and Hamad was being linked to increasingly violent crimes, Victoria Police called a press conference in December 2023 to announce Hamad – without naming him – had become a major law enforcement target.

“This particular person had resided for a short period of time in a country that he felt comfortable, and in relative luxury, in Dubai,” Detective Inspector Graham Banks said.

“He no longer lives there. And that is no small part to the joint approach of Victoria Police and [the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission].”

Whatever was in the intelligence dossier handed to their counterparts in the UAE, the information wasn’t enough to warrant Hamad being arrested locally or extradited to Australia.

It could be described as a serious error.

In Dubai, at least, there were some eyes on Hamad and his activities, much as there had been on a host of other organised crime figures who had found refuge there.

Iraq, on the other hand, is practically an information black hole.

“How dumb is the government? If Kaz was such a threat – he could have been in their hands in Dubai – why did they get him kicked out?” an underworld source said.

Police and underworld sources say Hamad is living in a fortified community for the wealthy in a suburb of Baghdad. He is surrounded by heavily armed personal security.

Unlike Buddle and other alleged criminals who have been returned to Australia, Hamad never became an Australian citizen. Al Hamza renounced his Australian citizenship in favour of his Iraqi nationality.

Evening shoppers in downtown Baghdad.Credit: AP

“Why would the Iraqis ever give him up? Kaz’s not Australian, he’s an Iraqi citizen. Australia invaded that country, turned it into a war zone,” the underworld source said. “Iraq never handed its citizens to any f---ing Western country. Never.”

“They’re [Hamad’s gang] not even committing crimes in Iraq. It’s just a base.”

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton and detectives tackling organised crime have conceded they are presented with difficulties while Hamad is based in Iraq.

“That’s the complexity about a global world and serious organised crime,” Patton said during an interview in August.

It’s a big problem.

Good bilateral relationships are key to successful extraditions, said Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University. But Australia doesn’t have an extradition agreement with Iraq, and co-operation between the two nations is close to non-existent.

The only avenues to extradite Hamad are through a 1930s extradition treaty between Iraq and the United Kingdom that Australia inherited, or under a 1988 United Nations convention against drug trafficking that allows signatories to petition other signing states for the extradition of suspected drug offenders.

But even then, the request relies on the goodwill of Iraqi authorities to honour the international arrest warrant and hand over one of their citizens.

The Victorian Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP) is reluctant to send prosecution briefs overseas for fear offenders could be executed by local authorities, police and legal sources speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters told The Age.

Drug trafficking is punishable by death or life imprisonment in Iraq, meaning Hamad’s life could be placed in jeopardy by the sharing of Australian-sourced intelligence or evidence implicating him in the drug business.

The Victorian OPP has blocked previous attempts by Victoria Police to have the federal Attorney-General’s Department seek Hamad’s extradition, amid worries an execution could become a diplomatic headache for Australia.

Federal authorities have come under significant criticism in the past for providing information that has led to Australians being arrested, jailed and even executed overseas for drug offending, such as in the case of the Bali Nine.

“I think that given the political sensitivity around any extradition related to this matter and the sensitivity in terms of sharing certain material with the Iraqi authorities, Victoria Police will be somewhat constrained in terms of providing a very wide-ranging prosecution brief,” Rothwell said.

State and federal prosecutors referred questions about extradition policy to the Attorney-General’s office.

“Death penalty risks associated with Australian extradition requests to other countries are carefully considered by the attorney-general prior to a request being made,” a spokesperson told The Age.

“There is a long-standing policy of successive Australian governments to not share information that could contribute to the application of the death penalty.”

Streets of fire

October 2024 marked two significant occasions. The number of tobacco war-related fires hit 100 in Victoria and the Lunar taskforce, a special police unit formed when Hamad erupted on the scene, was one year old.

While Hamad’s enemies – former tobacco kingpin Fadi Haddara, bikie-turned-boxer Suleiman “Sam the Punisher” Abdulrahim and others – have been subjected to attempted hits and other violence, Hamad has remained protected by distance and his layers of security in Iraq.

Hamad’s crew has also allegedly intimidated and threatened its enemies and witnesses into silence. Three prosecution cases have collapsed in the past year after people withdrew statements or refused to co-operate with police.

The syndicate has also been able to tap into what appears to be a bottomless supply of “contract” arsonists, car thieves and gunmen willing to be hired anonymously to do attacks for a few thousand dollars.

The syndicate controls shops in South Australia and Western Australia and has staked a claim over a chunk of Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

Police have publicly described Hamad’s brother, Maytham, as the tobacco war “puppeteer”. He is in home detention in Perth, charged with laundering $270,000 cash and intends to plead not guilty. He is not accused of involvement in other more serious crimes that Hamad is suspected of committing, including drug trafficking.

“My view is that the major player [Hamad] is not going to settle for a particular [territory],” Inspector Banks told The Age.

“This is why I’ve never thought the friction is going to be over. He might consolidate a position, and then he’ll start moving into somewhere else. It’s not one geographical area. While the market is what it is, I can’t see it stopping.”

Police have arrested more than 90 people over the tobacco war, but the kingpins and those accused of the most serious crimes remain out of reach.

“For [offenders] who are not citizens, it’s very, very challenging for police,” Banks said.

John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.