Passion for power yet destined to die, the life and times of Mick Hawi
Killing Mick Hawi was a brave move. The man was a legend among Sydney bikies as he transformed the Comancheros from a bunch of petty crooks and fat overweight bike riders into a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise.
NSW
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Killing Mick Hawi was a brave move. The man was a legend among Sydney bikies as he transformed the Comancheros from a bunch of petty crooks and fat overweight bike riders into a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise.
Even his enemies admired what he had done with a club whose sole claim to fame was its involvement in the Milperra Father’s Day Massacre decades before.
Hawi was 18 when he joined the gang as a patched member in 1998 and within four years wanted to be the boss. So he rode out to Windsor in north-west Sydney with a few other Comancheros and told Jock Ross, who called himself the Commander of the gang, that they were retiring him.
Ross, the founder of the club and survivor of the 1984 Milperra massacre in which seven people died in a pub carpark shootout, was given the ultimatum to go quietly as a respected legend of the club or they would bash him and take his bike and colours. He wisely stepped aside.
Hawi was just 22 when he took over and began to recruit his Lebanese and Turkish associates to join the club, displacing the older members. They were the new breed of muscle bound fighters and drug dealers.
Hawi was not your ordinary thug - he was smart and made sure he surrounded himself with similar types.
His lieutenants were Hakan “Big Hux’’ Ayik and Duax “Dax’’ Ngakura who were major money earners for the club, especially Ayik who organised massive drug importations and was said to be a genius at money laundering.
At the same time, Hawi had ruthless and extremely violent young men to enforce his presidency. Former Australian Army sniper and Afghan war veteran Joshua Falkhead was hired as a body guard.
The ever ambitious Hawi moved the clubhouse from its drab western suburbs premises at Granville to inner city Marrickville, encroaching on the traditional Hells Angels who had their headquarters in nearby Petersham,.
It was typical Hawi bravado and sent a statement to the rival gangs that the Comancheros were back and not taking a backward step.
The son of Lebanese immigrants, Hawi arrived in Australia as a five-year-old in 1985 and went to James Cook High in Kogarah before leaving school at 16 to join his father’s spray painting business. As a teenager he was said to love motorbikes, a passion which led him to the bikies.
There were two sides to Hawi. One was the flashy dresser adorned with bling who ordered beatings and bombings of rival clubhouses, while the other was the family man who married his childhood sweetheart, Carolina Gonzalez and had two children.
Having dragged the Comancheros out of the ‘80s into the modern bikie world, Hawi was smart enough to know that with power and publicity he also made himself a target inside and outside the club.
After the Cronulla riots of 2015 as tension between the young men of Middle Eastern background and the Bra Boys at Maroubra was threatening to boil over again, he went to the beachside suburb to calm down the “Aussies’’ threatening to retaliate.
He had to convince his fellow Comanchero and eventual nemesis, Mark Buddle, that further violence was bad for business.
Buddle himself was already a powerful figure in the club and one of the few people who could calm the Bra boys down.
While on the surface it may have looked like Buddle and Hawi were a team, nothing could be further from the truth. The two hated each other and their relationship would deteriorate in the following years.
While Hawi was growing in confidence and the club was making huge profits from drug deals the Comancheros and Hawi were making enemies.
The Hells Angels were fuming when Hawi started shifting their operations into their inner city territory and tensions flared.
In 2007 after a leisurely lunch at the Grappa Ristorante with members of the Finks bikie gang, his Audi was shot at, with a bullet later found in the headrest. He quickly started driving bullet proof cars and having more bodyguards around him.
Most thought the Hells Angels were behind the shooting. But even an attempt on his life didn’t stop Hawi from wanting bigger and better.
Around the same time the Comancheros bought the old Dancers strip club in Bayswater Road at Kings Cross.
They called the new premises the Lincoln Club and declared they were taking over the Cross.
It put them in direct conflict with the Ibrahim family who ran most of the clubs in the area and rival bikie gangs, Notorious and the Nomads.
It didn’t end well. While he was trying to make a move on the Cross he was still antagonising the Hells Angels.
The Comancheros were now engaged in fights on two fronts.
On March 22, 2009, Hawi was on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney with four other Comanchero members when he saw the Hells Angels emblem on the T-shirt of Derek Wainohu, president of the Hells Angels Sydney chapter.
They couldn’t help themselves and both made calls to marshal their gang members to be at the airport when the plane arrived in the afternoon.
By the time the two gangs brawled in front of hundreds of passengers including children at the domestic terminal, Hells Angel associate Anthony Zervas, 29, was dead, beaten with a 17kg metal bollard and stabbed repeatedly with a pair of scissors.
Wainohu was not charged, but Hawi gave himself up to police and was sentenced to 21 years jail but despite this he still believed he could run the Comanchero Club, much the same way Bassam Hamzy controlled the Brothers for Life from Supermax prison.
But Hawi’s power base was gone. Hakan Ayik fled the country in 2010 when he realised he was going to be arrested over a $230 million heroin shipment he had organised. Daux Ngakuru, Hawi’s mate and bodyguard took over as a kind of caretaker president in a blaze of glory with a wild harbour cruise for 350 Comanchero members. But he too, could see the walls closing in and took off overseas and is believed to be in Turkey with Hux.
Despite his desire to keep leading the club, Mark Buddle, known to be one of the most ruthless and violent Commos in the country, declared himself National President. With Hawi in jail, his allies on the run and Buddle’s fearsome reputation, no-one dared dispute the self anointing of the Maroubra hard man.
No sooner had he taken over, Buddle himself took off overseas after he learned the NSW police were keen to talk to him about the fatal shooting of security guard Gary Alibon during a payroll truck robbery in the middle of the Sydney CBD in 2010. Police still want to question Buddle over the shooting.
But Buddle, through the force of his personality, huge wealth he has accumulated and the band of very loyal soldiers, he has kept control of the bikie club despite not being in the country.
Everyone had seemingly forgotten Hawi, expecting him to spend the best part of the next two decades in jail when he won an appeal against the murder conviction for the airport brawl, struck a deal with the Director of Public Prosecutions and was released from jail in 2015.
It took everyone by surprise, particularly Buddle who was now entrenched overseas but running the club by proxy through trusted allies.
Overtures from Hawi to get back into the club were repeatedly knocked back and although Buddle was overseas there was known to be tension between the two.
Hawi then began to move into standing over people in the construction industry, traditionally an area where the Comancheros had made money.
A number of sources said in the lead up to his death he was told by the Comanchero hierarchy in Sydney to get out of the standover business but he ignored them — it was not a wise move.
Soon after, he was killed in a hail of bullets outside the Fitness First gym at Rockdale.
“Hawi was becoming a threat to more than just one group. he was starting to get big money, wasn’t sharing and there was a fear he would grow in power and start getting a bigger crime syndicate together under his own banner, or join an other bikie gang,’’ ’ said a NSW law officer.
“Its quite possible a couple of high ranking crooks thought Sydney would be a more profitable place without Mick Hawi and joined forces to get rid of him..’’