John Ibrahim book extract: ‘I would’ve torn Sydney’s underworld apart looking for who tried to kill my brother’
JOHN Ibrahim recently said he 'would’ve torn Sydney’s underworld apart looking for who shot brother Fadi'. He must be feeling the same way about those behind the shooting of close friend and enforcer Semi ‘Tongan Sam’ Ngata.
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JOHN Ibrahim recently said he 'would’ve torn Sydney’s underworld apart looking for who shot brother Fadi'. He must be feeling the same way about those behind the shooting of close friend and enforcer Semi ‘Tongan Sam’ Ngata.
In an exclusive extract from his book published recently , Ibrahim described in his own words his rage, regret, disbelief and everything in between as he stands in a hospital, willing his little brother, Fadi, to survive a shooting which put five bullets in him.
EVER WONDERED WHAT HELL feels like? Let me try and explain. I’ve been stabbed, shot, bashed and threatened with every weapon and ‘death scenario’ hundreds of times. I’ve been imprisoned here and overseas. I’ve been left for dead and put in a coma. I’ve been locked up and betrayed. So what I am saying is, I know pain.
But nothing I’ve been through in my life hurts as much as the hopelessness I feel on this night in June 2009. I’m alone in the Emergency waiting room at Royal North Shore Hospital’s intensive care unit doing something all too familiar to our family. I’m on a death watch – this time waiting to hear if my second-youngest brother, Fadi, will survive the five bullets pumped into him by a would-be assassin. I’ve been where Fadi is now, kicking in heaven’s door. So has my oldest brother, Sam. For my poor mum, this will be her third time waiting to find out if one of her sons will live or die.
All I know so far is a gunman hid on a golf course across the road from Fadi’s house, and when Fadi pulled up in his Lamborghini some time before midnight the shooter walked over and shot him through the driver’s window with a silenced 9mm. He put five shots into his stomach, chest and arm, with only one bullet actually exiting. The one bullet that did leave his body went on to hit his girlfriend (now wife) in the leg as she sat in the passenger seat.
At this point in my story we Ibrahim brothers have had the dubious and unwanted honour of watching our lives get played out on the front pages of the newspapers and as the lead story on TV news bulletins for the past few months. As I sit here in Emergency, the muted television in the corner is showing promos for Underbelly:The Golden Mile, an upcoming crime series about the underworld – unfortunately, heavily featuring me.
But I’m thinking only of my little brother, who lies dying just a few feet away.
Fadi is the ‘dancer’ of our family – the only one of us Ibrahim boys who dances in public. In honour of this fact I had a podium named after him at DCM, a club I once owned. He would use it to hype up and challenge fellow customers to a dance-off on opposing podiums.
I haven’t spoken to Fadi for months before the shooting, and one of our last conversations is a fight overthings brothers fight about, including his ‘fucken look at me’ lifestyle – Fadi’s flamboyant car has the licence plate ‘034’, his age. Or, as I would’ve translated it, ‘WANKER’ – he was never on the path the rest of us brothers seemed to be on.
That’s why Fadi’s shooting comes right out of the blue, and was the last thing I was expecting. Fadi is a builder by trade, the non-violent one in the family, the sweet one, as far from
being a gangster or biker as an Ibrahim can be. He is known for loving his life.
Sam Ibrahim, my uglier, more heavy-set brother, is the oldest of the four Ibrahim boys. Sam is an alleged standover man who has already presided over, and destroyed, two different outlaw bikie gangs and has the tattoos along with the bad attitude (and haircut) to match. Sam is what you might call a handful, but he’d sure be handy to have by my side right now. Unfortunately he won’t be joining me in this particular death watch because he’s in Long Bay supermax on remand for allegedly kneecapping two guys in Newcastle.
The youngest is Michael Ibrahim, or ‘Mick’. With his fleshy face and cheeky grin, he’s arguably my favourite brother. But at twenty-eight, he’s holed up in a cell at Broken Hill jail following a conviction for manslaughter.
And me? I’m Mr Legit by now, but I’m definitely no saint. Since 1988 to 2014, I’ve owned or controlled over forty licensed venues in Sydney, and I’m always on the street working them. That’s a long time to have your balls on the line. I’ve been shot, stabbed and a broken bag of bones. And I’ve buried so many friends and enemies alike. In my occupation I inevitably cross paths with drug dealers, straight cops, crooked cops, crime syndicates, standover guys, kids targeting me with drive-by shootings, and plastic gangsters who want what I’ve got, only without working for it.
Everyone makes or has enemies. In your workplace you might have them too. But where you might get a nasty email or cop some attitude from a colleague, my enemies are gun-carrying wankers who just hate me for being me. For some of them the reasons are as simple as not showing them enough respect when refusing them entry to one of my venues. For others I’m in the way of them moving up the food chain.
But most of their resentment is to do with the family and our ongoing battles – with three brothers, we do tend to inherit each other’s dramas. For the majority of these haters, they have no downside to acting on their threats to put me six feet under. That’s what makes them so dangerous. Most are kids born into the wrong families with few opportunities to make a decent fist of life. I can understand that. I’ve been there too. I was one of them.
So I get it that they want to take a shot at the big time by knocking over the man that the media tells them is at the top of the food chain. The problem is I’m not at the top of the food chain. The people that are, you’d never know their names, or realise they even exist.
If you’re shaking your head in disbelief at my family now, I don’t blame you. One brother on the operating table, two in prison, and me having a price on my head 24/7 for more than twenty-five years? So much for the House of Ibrahim!
*
JUST AN HOUR OR so before, on the day it happened, I was at work in the centre of Kings Cross under the iconic Coca-Cola sign. That fucking Coke sign – it’s been one of the few constants in my life from the age of thirteen. I’m strutting around, doing my usual ‘I’m all that’ walk through Piano Room, at the time the place to be in Sydney. That’s when a guy comes up to me and says, ‘John, your brother has just been shot.’
Not hearing him right, because I’m deaf in one ear from all the loud music in nightclubs, I think he’s just threatened Fadi – so I naturally respond, ‘What did you say to me, cock?’ Luckily a girl steps in and calmly explains that the two of them were at dinner with Fadi and his partner Shayda earlier that night and Shayda’s just called in hysterics. It’s a fluke that, after calling for an ambulance, the first girl Shayda calls from the scene to try and get my phone number is standing just metres away from me at the Piano Room. I grab Shayda’s number from this girl and bolt to my car with an offsider in tow. As I hit the Harbour Bridge at speed, dodging in and out of slower moving traffic, I get hold of Shayda on the phone. They’re just pulling her out of the ambulance and she’s conscious but she tells me Fadi is in a very critical condition and might not make it.
‘It’s bad, John,’ she says. ‘It’s bad.’
I’m nearly punching a hole in the floor with my foot as I jam the accelerator pedal down. A police car heading the other way spots my well-known Range Rover on the bridge, and in the rear-view mirror I see them swing their car around across the empty lanes. But they have no chance; I’m going too fast. By the time I arrive at Royal North Shore, I’m only fifteen minutes behind the ambulance. I jump out and head for the Emergency ward entrance. I glance over my shoulder only to see my companion getting slammed onto the bonnet by several cops and handcuffed. I walk on. A uniform cop is at the door that leads to the operating theatre but he thoughtfully steps out of my way. The look on his face says I’m going to be saying goodbye to my brother. My heart skips a beat: Fadi is lying there conscious and in agony in an operating theatre, surrounded by intensive care doctors. It’s chaos.
While the doctors and nurses swap urgent medical chatter, I look beyond them to the X-rays illuminated on a viewing panel nearby. They show clearly where the bullets entered Fadi’s body and the path they took through his flesh. At the end of four dark trails through his torso lie the slugs that hadn’t left his body. The one that did pass through him and hit Shayda is keeping her next to him, only now she’s in her own operating theatre. Shayda is the hero of the night. By applying pressure to Fadi’s wounds and calling an ambulance – even while struggling with her own bullet wound – she’s given him a chance at life.
Standing alone in that waiting room, I’m surprisingly calm, maybe even a little numb. Whatever I have achieved, the fact is that right now I’m all alone. I’ve always wanted a life less ordinary and this is where it’s led me. Be careful what you wish for.
I’ve rolled with dramas and scrapes with death in the past, but this will be different. I haven’t yet told my mother or sisters the news of Fadi’s shooting. I don’t want to upset them, sure, but I also need this time to walk and think. I need to work out who did this to my family so I don’t have to rely on the cops or anyone playing any head games with me later on.
For now the cops have left me to stand beside my brother until he is wheeled off to his emergency surgeries. But detectives from the various crime squads will be here to interview me as soon as the sun rises. So I pace and I think; I’m in a quiet rage but still cold and calculating.
Whether Fadi will live or die is just one of the questions I ask myself right now. Who benefits from shooting an Ibrahim? Who would want to kill my brother and why? Who the fuck has he gotten himself involved with? Is it someone he has pissed off all on his own? Or is this a family thing? Could it be possible they mistook Fadi for me? How did they think they would get away with it? How the hell will I tell my mother and my sisters if Fadi doesn’t pull through?
The answers aren’t immediately clear but I’ll figure it out soon, and once I’m certain I’ll act. Call me what you will, but nobody has ever questioned my intelligence and my preference for planning and strategy.
As doctors operate on Fadi, I pace and think and brood all night. I’m going to have to ring Mum soon. Details of the attack on Fadi are leaking out on TV and I can’t keep this from her much longer. I read the words rolling across the screen, ‘IBRAHIM SHOT’, but feel nothing. All it means to me is that the shooters themselves are now on notice; they know Fadi is still alive and that he probably knows who wanted him dead or saw who shot him, so they’ll do everything possible to conceal their tracks. If Fadi survives and can shed light on the triggermen or whoever planned the hit, that information represents a major threat, and a grave mistake, for someone.
The attempt on my brother’s life will have to be dealt with one way or another. If Fadi doesn’t make it, I won’t make it. I won’t have the luxury of time to plan so there’s a good chance I will either end up in the ground or in a jail cell myself. Right now I’m ready to tear the Sydney underworld apart if I have to, and when I do I’ll do it well. All it takes is the experience, the money and the will, and by now I have all three. The experience part is only important if you care about getting away with it – which at this point I didn’t. My main concern was how many I could get before I get stopped.
Fadi’s shooting is just the tip of the iceberg for me and my brothers – any one of us could have been on that operating table at any time.
Night turns into day, and the uniform cops drift away and the Gangs Squad and Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad come visiting. They’re of little help to me or Fadi, and I’m even less of a help to them. As I see it the cops have two problems to deal with – who shot Fadi and what do I plan to do about it? Do I represent a threat or an opportunity? An opportunity they have been waiting for is the more likely. Are these the first shots in a gang war? How many more shootings will there be and who will get caught in the crossfire? Public safety and the perception of law and order is their primary concern, which is fair enough. But really, all eyes are on me. I’ve got two brothers locked up and two high-ranking bikie cousins also in jail. The question all the cops are asking is, ‘What will John do next?’
You’re probably thinking a normal person in this situation would leave it to the police. But I know better. When it comes to my family, I trust almost nobody. And the one or two people I do trust, I do not want to involve out of fear of them becoming collateral damage.
There was a time before the Royal Commission into corruption in the New South Wales Police when the cops would have been useful. But now information is the new currency, not cash, so the Ibrahims are f***ed and have been ever since. Sydney is now being run by dogs and informants. Even if the cops did stumble across the person responsible for Fadi’s shooting, there’d be no charges laid; they would just use that information to flip them.
Think about this for a minute.
At the time of writing this book, all three of my brothers have been shot, all outside their houses. Sam was shot outside Mum’s and there were even cheap shots fired at my mum’s house while she was recovering from cancer surgery. That to me is unforgivable. There have been three different contracts put out on my life and two botched attempts. (And that’s just what the police know about. I haven’t told them about the botched attempts that have backfired on all those would-be hit men. By this point, we’re seasoned and well-trained against this crap. Any attempt on me then would be a suicide mission.) Yet can you recall anyone having been arrested over a crime against an Ibrahim?
Look it up. The answer is no, never.
It is amazing what you can become desensitised to. When I’m told someone has been shot, I automatically ask where. I get the shits when they reply with the suburb instead of the location of the bullet wound on the body, so I can gauge the seriousness of the situation.
By the time the squad detectives have come to see me, they’ve already called in all their dogs and informers, anyone with any connection to my family. An informer is a criminal who wants to stay out of jail; a dog is a criminal in prison who wants his sentence reduced. Both of them give information to the police to improve their lives. New South Wales Police have dogs on leashes all over the country waiting to earn their keep, which means they gain their freedom by being out on the streets reporting back to the police. In my opinion this is another form of police corruption. When hearing of an Ibrahim in trouble, the dogs and informers with a connection to us contact their handler and offer their services.
Now, with Fadi in a critical condition, the police choose three informers who can get close to me, out of ten dogs available to them. Ten! What I wouldn’t give to know who the other f***ing seven are...
The hysteria over Fadi’s shooting has been amplified by the pending release of Underbelly. Perfect timing, right? Looking down from the hospital window, I can see the media scrums forming outside the lobby. In among them I can see forty friends and blow-arses gathered too. If experience has taught me anything, it is that at least one or two of these ‘friends’ are somehow involved in this sorry mess and I’ll be looking for them later.
At first the police won’t let any of them through, but by mid-morning of that first day they make an exception for one. Into my sanctuary, on my brother’s death watch, comes the first dog sent to see me by the cops, and it’s someone very close to our family.
He’s been turned into a police informant in a sentencing deal the year before and now he’s sent in to see what he can get out of me on the pretext of offering to help. He’s talking and I can see his lips moving, but I’m not listening to what he’s saying and me thinking this prick is just a blue-collar worker – how can he help? I don’t know at this stage he’s flipped. I’m thinking of my family members he’s close to, not wanting to get this guy into trouble, when I tell him, ‘I got this. Stay out of it – it’s not your business.’
Later I’ll see him in the witness box giving evidence against my brothers and realise he was trying to incriminate me while pretending to sympathise with me over Fadi. Would you believe this low f***? Having given up on me, he then moved on to my younger, less experienced brothers, and entrapped them both on tape. Years later, on tapes subpoenaed for another case, you can hear him walking away from me at the hospital and talking through his concealed microphone to his handlers, saying, ‘I told you, he doesn’t like me or trust me.’
Side note – this guy got two years reduced off his drug conviction, even though the judge and jury found him to be an unreliable and dishonest witness. This is another example of why I think no reduced sentences should be given for convicted criminals that give false statements just to reduce their own. There should be at least a rule that if the evidence doesn’t lead to a conviction then you do all of your own time.
I’m thirty-eight and my ego is acting up again. I thought I had sorted it out a long time ago, but keeping it in check is going to be a challenge this time. I treat my ego as though it’s a separate entity – an enemy sometimes and a friend at others. One day I suspect it will be the cause or at least part of my downfall. Fadi is now in a coma, after three emergency surgeries. They’ll keep an eye on his internal workings over the next days and weeks and decide if he has to go under the knife again. As I keep watch for him, I am afraid of what I am going to have to do. I have worked hard and gone through a lot to get to where I am, and my biggest fear is not only losing my brother but also losing the page I am on.
For the past twenty years or so I’ve been rebuilding and reinventing myself. I’ve gone from almost nothing to almost something. It’s been a hard road to walk. But now everything is on hold – and on show. I put my ‘inner thug’ behind me a long time ago, not thinking I’d need to go back to him ever again. But sometimes your worst self is your best self for what is needed.
I walked away from all this crap more than twenty years ago, but the bonds of brotherhood have me in neck deep again. There are some things you just can’t let pass . . .
f*** it! My life was becoming too good to be true.
********
AFTER TWO DAYS AT the hospital all the stories started coming in. There are so many different theories that I have to pursue them all. One is that Fadi is loan-sharking and pretending to be something he’s not. He is all juiced and muscled up, but that still doesn’t change what’s inside you, and that isn’t him. Fadi playing gangster is the last thing I saw coming. If it’s true, he’s been caught bluffing in the worst way you can, and that is bluffing in life. Even at his best he wasn’t cut out for this; you can’t be a late starter – not to this life.
The theory goes that one of Fadi’s customers decided it’d be cheaper to kill the lender than to repay. If that’s true, Fadi has probably not taken the advice I gave him years earlier: never lend anyone more than it costs to have you knocked – which I jokingly tell him means he should stick to lending $10K at a time, because everyone in this world is walking around with a price above their head and he shouldn’t be mixing with this shit.
The shooter has supposedly flown overseas shortly after the hit on Fadi. The big question is who paid for it? In Sydney hit men are a dime a dozen. It comes down to a few names so I’ll have to wait for Fadi to wake up. Everything I’m finding out is the opposite of what the police are telling the media. The police and the newspapers seem to be more interested in trying to spark something between me and the bikies. One of their stories is that an outlaw motorcycle club ordered the hit on Fadi and that I’m going after those hitters. This emanates from a strike force the police set up earlier in the year called Bellwood, whose target is my family. Maybe it is what they really believe at the time, but they are wrong and it isn’t helping. They’re selling an Ibrahim–Bikie feud while Fadi fights for his life because of an unrelated incident of a personal nature.
I’m feeling guilty for the spotlight on my family, but trust me it was not my doing. It was goddamn unforeseeable circumstances and bad timing, especially for me. I’ve always been mindful of what Mum has had to put up with. Shielding her from my crap used to be easy. There was one time when I’m in hospital on a drip, with two drainage tubes hanging out of me from the internal bleeding, and Mum calls to ask if I’m okay. She’s heard something about me getting hurt, and I immediately go into character: ‘No, no, Mum. All good.’ Then, to put her off the scent, I whisper, ‘I’m at home on the couch with two women. They’re trying to talk me into doing things, Mum, disgusting things, Mum.’
‘You are disgusting, John,’ she replies, laughing.
Mum thinks I own a restaurant, right up until the Underbelly series comes out. And after watching it every Monday night, having enlisted my little niece who at the time is studying to be an intensive care nurse as her translator, she puts it all together. Before that she could never understand how the restaurant industry became so volatile and violent. How does John get so many fat lips and black eyes from serving meals? Remember, when I started, The Tunnel had a restaurant licence with a cabaret extension, so the restaurant aspect was a crucial part of the business.
Now I don’t have enough words to say sorry to Mum for the life we have brought to her doorstep. For days we don’t even know if Fadi will wake up. So I do what sons do and I just stay with her.
After years of police surveillance I’ve been trained not to use my phone, so I’m talking with my trusted people and getting them to make the inquiries on secure phone lines or in person, just to be safe.
Out of all this the police create yet another strike force, Proudfoot (again with the f***ing names). It’s supposed to investigate Fadi’s shooting, but they’re the same detectives who arrested Sam on a kidnapping charge two months earlier. The main game for the cops is not necessarily solving the crime but linking all the shootings into one investigation for the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad and Gangs Squad.
My guys are telling me the cops have dusted off every informer, and all the conversations with the informants are about Sam and Michael, not Fadi. That is, ‘How’s Michael taking the news? What’s Sam got planned?’
But even with all my experience of the cops, I’m not prepared for what happens a month or so later. Having given up on me, they move on to the less experienced younger brothers. Fadi, who is now awake and out of the coma, is on so much medication that I can’t shut him up without duct-taping his mouth. You can hear me on those police intercepts: ‘You know this bed is bugged by now ... you know this whole room is bugged, right?’ But does this stop him? No. He just keeps blabbing on.
Say what you want about us, but you can’t deny us Ibrahims are resilient f***s. Nobody wins all the time, but not everyone keeps getting back up like we do.
And within days of him coming out of surgery, the police insist on around-the-clock protection, placing two uniform police at the entrance of his recovery room. All unnecessary, because I already have my own people for the same purpose, but really they are more interested in the people coming and going having to show their ID – more intel. They also leak to the papers that it is costing the police force a fortune for the 24/7 protection. So I get my lawyer to ring up New South Wales Police and ask how much did it cost taxpayers to guard Fadi for the duration of his stay in hospital. Instead of reimbursing police I write a personal cheque for $69,000 to the intensive care unit for Royal North Shore Hospital, with a note saying, ‘Thank you for all your kindness and patience, especially towards my mum. Love, John Ibrahim.’
*********
It becomes clear Michael is so wound up about who has shot Fadi that the police listen to conversations between these two brothers – after Fadi came out of his coma – through July, August and September 2009. It is during this time that, in a visit from Buckwheat, Mick supposedly talks about rounding up ten suspects and knocking ’em all, with comments like, ‘Even if nine are innocent, we’d still be doing Sydney a favour.’
Buckwheat passes this conversation on to police. Okay, if Fadi had died there might be a part of me that is thinking the same thing, but I would never share that information with anyone. By the time Michael and Fadi are arrested, they’ve involved Rodney Atkinson, a no-nonsense stand over man nicknamed Goldie because his top teeth are covered in gold. The charges are serious: conspiracy to commit murder. Fadi and Michael claim that Goldie wasn’t brought in to kill. His job is to collect outstanding debts, and to get them any way he can.
Back near the start, while Fadi’s still in a coma, the word hits the street from Broken Hill that five people on Michael’s so-called hit list are going to be visited, and most of them have bikie ties. Now various people who assume they are on this list go looking for protection from a high-profile motorcycle club, by paying in either drugs or cash. A potential bikie war looks even more on the cards, because a lot of people in Sydney start hiring muscle and threatening one another.
And I’m in the middle of it. Michael and Samare in prison, and Fadi is in hospital. So the only Ibrahim looking for the supposed vengeance would be me. These ‘hit list’ targets were just getting robbed; buying the illusion of protection.
********
Now I’ve been shot and shot at plenty of times, and so have my brothers at various times, but let’s just say we’ve squared the ledger on this account over the years. But when a carload of f***heads spray my mum’s house with bullets while she is recovering from having her breast removed from cancer, they overstep the line. To make matters worse, this attack was just a decoy while they then also shoot up my house, which was the real target. These dumb and immoral desperadoes also sprayed my house three times over a couple of weeks in the hopes I’d call the police. I never did.
The thing is these guys were being paid not to kill me or my mum but on the condition they caused enough damage that it would make the news – no coverage, no payment. I didn’t know this just yet, so I took my security up a notch. My house was sprayed so many times I started collecting spent cartridges and bullets stuck in my walls, keeping the collection in my key bowl by the door.
The next time they come, they come correct, sending three guys with machine guns and thirty rounds. I collect all the spent cartridges I can find, but I must have missed a few which end up on a walking track next to my place. When a neighbour steps on a spent cartridge, he assumes it’s related to me, as when he looks up at my house I’m having my ocean-view windows overlooking the walkway repaired. So he does what civilians do: he calls the cops.
The police arrive just as my window repair crew is pulling up and walking in. As they follow the repair crew in, I’m trying to walk them backwards before they notice the holes in the walls and the remaining windows, but it’s too late. One of the cops is straight to the point: ‘John, if you tell us any more lies from this point on, we’re gonna be charging you.’
I call my lawyer but not before they confiscate my hard drive for the cameras, which show me arguing with a girlfriend at the front door, trying to get rid of her. It’s at the exact time that another camera shows the idiots taking shots at the house. The video makes it look like I’m trying to get rid of her, as if I was waiting to ambush them without having her there and worrying about her safety. The police also do a search of the neighbouring cameras and catch the two vehicles involved. One is stolen and one is registered to a junior member of an ambitious bikie gang. They are able to track them driving through the Harbour Tunnel in a convoy. The really sad thing is I know the president, the vice- president and the sergeant-at-arms of the gang shooting at me and my mum. They are the same age as my brother Mick, and I watched them grow up together as kids and they have been to Mum’s house a hundred times. Some were even part of Sam’s Parramatta chapter at one time or another.
So the police charge the youngest of the five involved, because it was his car with his number plate. Also caught on camera was a coconut who was due to be deported. They catch up with him and he tells them the whole story. He gets charged and it is in the newspapers . . . so there is nowhere for them to go; it’s out. But you know what? During the confession to the cops, they somehow ‘forgot’ to get him to sign, and the youngest guy charged, well the charges they brought him in for were mysteriously dropped. I wouldn’t believe it but it’s an old trick from the police informant protection book that I’ve seen a hundred times. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy turned out to be a registered informant for the police ever since.
So these guys who have been caught stone cold reach out to a mutual friend, Pauly, to see if we can have a meeting. I think yeah, sure, but bring all three to the meeting. Pauly asks can I guarantee their safety? He sees the look on my face and says, ‘I know what you’re going to do. I don’t wanna be involved.’
A week later the sergeant-at-arms gets kicked out of the club and is rightfully now feeling ‘vulnerable’. In other words he is the one that was paid. He reaches out to a more senior and closer friend that I respect and have known almost all my life. He asks my friend to arrange a meeting, knowing I wouldn’t do anything at his establishment. So I meet the sergeant-at-arms in the restaurant’s kitchen on a closed night, and this tough bikie doesn’t stop crying, sobbing with regrets and apologies. Then he tells me he has been at my mum’s house that week with his wife and kids, where he gave her flowers and respectfully apologised, and she accepted his apology.
I stare at him, f***ing shocked for a moment. I say, ‘That’s really nice of you but flowers and sorry aren’t gonna do it for me, so I don’t accept your apology and this is not over.’
Suddenly he pulls out a gun and hands it to me, saying, ‘Shoot me. If you can’t forgive me, then just shoot me now.’
I’m even more pissed that he brought a gun to the meeting. I do take it off him, though, but long story short I go straight to my mum’s after that meeting and ask her about his visit. She is confused and says, ‘I thought he was apologising for not coming to see me sooner when I was recovering from the surgery. I even cooked for his wife and kids – that son of a bitch.’ Yep, my beautiful and naive Mum was a bit narky. He did bring some nice flowers and some Lebanese sweets, though. Five months later at my father’s wake (which I’ll come back to later), us boys are sitting in a line at the back of Mum’s house greeting well-wishers while the women are sitting inside, as is the custom. Michael is out of prison then but Sam is not. The funny thing about this tradition is that even all your enemies have to come and pay their respects, friends and enemies alike. You have to shake hands and kiss them on either side of the cheek. So here we are in the backyard of my mum’s house with half the men in Sydney that we want to
shoot or who want to shoot us.
My brother Michael nudges me and says, ‘Here comes your mate, limpy.’ I laugh and he adds, ‘I heard he got shot with his own gun.’
I can’t help but laugh back and say, ‘Yeah, I heard much the same thing.’
‘You know we could get rid of all of our problems right here, right now in Mum’s backyard,’ says Michael.
‘Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. Every f***wit we want is right here.’
Last King of the X by John Ibrahim is published by Pan Macmillan Australia and is on sale from July 25.