Annette Sharp: Roxy Jacenko lets guard down in close car wash encounter

A WEEK after Roxy Jacenko was photographed kissing an ex-boyfriend she has been snapped in the arms of a known crime gang associate: her long-time friend Alex Macris.

Roxy Jacenko and Alex Macris at the cafe. Picture: Backgrid Australia

A WEEK after Roxy Jacenko was photographed kissing an ex-boyfriend, who for the past eight months has been her rock during her husband’s long year in jail for insider trading, she has been snapped in the arms of a known crime gang associate: her long-time friend Alex Macris.

For reasons best known to his tightly knit family, Macris usually keeps his head down when out and about in his home town of Sydney.

It could be because a decade ago the “money collector” became a target for the Notorious and Comanchero bikie gangs while on remand over drugs and guns charges, prompting prison guards to repeatedly isolate him during his stay at Silverwater jail.

Or perhaps it’s because of his family’s bitter rivalry with former associates the Ibrahim family.

Court testimony heard Macris’s brother John had erroneously been linked to the 2009 drive-by shooting of Fadi Ibrahim.

Fadi was shot five times while sitting in his Lamborghini outside his Castle Cove home.

The long-time friends share a smile and embrace. Picture: Backgrid Australia

According to the testimony of a former Ibrahim associate addressing a committal hearing in 2011, the shooting of Fadi allegedly occurred after Alex Macris “ripped (older brother Michael Ibrahim) off $1.4 million”.

This is alleged to have prompted Michael’s older brother John Ibrahim to withhold $400,000 owed to Alex’s brother John, a nightclub owner.

When Fadi was ultimately shot, Michael Ibrahim mistakenly formed the view that John Macris was involved.

Or so claimed the Ibrahim associate known as “W1” at a committal hearing into Fadi and Michael Ibrahim’s alleged involvement in a revenge hit on John Macris.

Charges against Fadi were dropped, while Michael and a third man were acquitted in 2012. No one was ever charged over the shooting of Fadi.

When you’ve done the kind of work Alex Macris has confessed to — he told a court in 2014 he used his own 75-year-old father as an unsuspecting drug mule for the transportation of 26 kilos of meth oil in the back of a Ford Falcon station wagon in 2011 — it generally serves you best to keep your head down.

Roxy Jacenko supported her husband Oliver Curtis throughout his trial and incarceration. Picture: Renee Nowytarger/The Australian

So what could Macris want with a woman who courts the spotlight as much as Jacenko?

The pair were photographed meeting and embracing at a Crystal Car Wash in Rose Bay on May 6 while Jacenko’s black Bentley — one very like the black Bentley owned by Macris and raided by police in 2009 leading to the discovery of two semi-automatic pistols, $8350 cash and amphetamine capsules, 178 ecstasy pills and the steroids nandrolone and testosterone — was cleaned.

Jacenko has been close to the Macris family for more than a decade. She was once romantically involved with Macris’s older brother John, who now lives in Greece.

She has also befriended Alex’s wife Jessica.

A week after her rendezvous with Alex, Jacenko boarded a private jet for Tokyo for some fashion therapy without her children — perhaps giving herself some “me” time before her husband’s release from jail next month.

The polarising PR woman usually can spot a paparazzo a mile off but of late she seems to have lost her instinct for detection.

The photographer who captured her exchanging kisses with Nabil Gazal a week earlier had worked unfettered for hours shooting the doughnut queen and multi-millionaire property developer, who has told his sceptical and privacy-loving family he should never have dumped Jacenko in 2010 — the year she met and fell pregnant to Oliver Curtis.

Gazal, who has a young child by a former partner, a son Rocco, is now telling family and friends he plans to make Mrs Curtis his wife should she ever divorce Curtis in the future.

“He has told us he should never have let her get away from him in the first place,” said one intimate.

“He is smitten with Roxy. She excites him.”

With friends and ex-lovers like the Macris brothers, the excitement for Gazal, should Jacenko divorce Curtis upon his release from jail in three weeks time, will, he can rest assured, be for life.