Bassam Hamzy on the run but still knows where his bullets are kept
Publishing previously unseen photographs of Bassam Hamzy and court transcripts of intercepted phone calls, The Sunday Telegraph today reveals how he began his two-decade reign of terror spanning several continents and leaving behind a trail of bloodshed. EXCLUSIVE MULTIMEDIA SPECIAL REPORT.
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Publishing previously unseen photographs of Bassam Hamzy and court transcripts of intercepted phone calls, The Sunday Telegraph today reveals how he began his two decade reign of terror spanning several continents and leaving behind a trail of bloodshed.
Holed up on his uncle’s property as a fugitive in Lebanon, Bassam Hamzy was a world away from home.
But distance was no barrier.
He was still the man of his western Sydney house and he wanted to know where his bullets were, down to every last one.
“No one is to touch them, lock them in a room and no one is to touch them,” he firmly told his mother, Lola Hamzy.
“I know where every bullet is, all the bullets. I want the guns, the bullets, the car and the boat. When they come and take them, no one has to say anything to them.
“That’s what I want.”
It was September, 1998, and a 19-year-old Hamzy knew homicide detectives were closing in on him.
Unpublished phone taps which were tendered in court provide a chilling insight into the mind of a ego-driven man and his secret life on the run from western Sydney to Lebanon, Belize and Miami, where he organised the bashings of associates he believed were gossiping about him back home, and orchestrated the smuggling of at least two importations of pure cocaine between the Central American nation and Australia.
READ THE FULL COURT TRANSCRIPTS
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Detectives would be back on his family’s door stop before long, looking for evidence to prove he’d shot and killed 18-year-old Kris Toumazis after a petty dance floor spat inside a Oxford St nightclub four months earlier.
Hamzy, the son of a Lebanese Army soldier and grade 11 drop out, managed to get out of the country and travelled to Lebanon before police caught up with him.
He kept tabs on their movements through daily phone calls to the landline at his family’s Auburn home, where his mother and younger siblings lived.
But detectives were also keeping tabs on Hamzy, who seemed to move between the Middle East and North and Central America with ease
During one intercepted phone call with his mother Lola, she asks if life in Belize is better than in Lebanon and whether he has found work.
“Much better,” Hamzy replies.
“There’s a farm. I go often to the farm. and they have everything here.”
His mother replies: “Yeah, but is there any work so you can start working there?”.
“There is if I want to,” Hamzy replies.
“So work son,” she urges him.
Hamzy: “I’m returning, I’m returning. Do you think I’m going to spend the rest of my life here?”
In another call, Hamzy is in Miami — something a relative finds hard to believe.
“Where are you?,” the relative asks.
“Um … I’m in Miami,” Hamzy replies. “I swear on the Koran that I am”.
“Look at this bludger,” the relative says. “He’s making movies”.
But the phone calls were more than just small talk. They were a way of his family letting him know that police are closing in.
His family told him detectives had turned up at the front door asking questions.
Hamzy trusted that they’d keep their mouths shut but he didn’t have the same faith in his so-called friends.
A sketch artist impression of the key suspects in the shooting was published on page 9 of The Daily Telegraph on August 26, 1998.
One of four faces on the page was strikingly similar to Hamzy.
Not that he minded; the first question he asked when his sister told him about the press attention was: “is it a good picture?” and then “Does it look good?”.
On the 20th anniversary of Mr Toumazis’s murder, The Sunday Telegraph has revisited the crime that first put NSW’s most notorious inmate behind bars. On the night of Friday May 29, 1998, Hamzy and his friends, including Nedhal Hammoud and Kader Chakaik went out to dinner in Double Bay.
They all lived in the western suburbs but loved to cruise the nightclubs and bars of the east on the weekend.
The group moved to the Cauldron club in Kings Cross and then on to Mr Goodbar on the northern end of Oxford St in Paddington.
On the other side of town, Mr Toumazis, who loved karate and was raised by an adoring family, was at the Coogee Bay Hotel with his friends, Nick Lambos and Arthur Kazas, before they moved on to Mr Goodbar.
Just before closing time on the dancefloor, Hammoud approached Mr Kazas and wrongly accused him of harassing his girlfriend. Mr Kazas wanted no part of the escalating conflict but it reignited on the footpath outside the club.
Attempting to diffuse the situation, Mr Kazas, Mr Toumazis and Mr Lambos jumped into a white Capri parked outside the club. In a childish one-up, Chakaik kicked the rear wheel of the Capri before he joined Hamzy and Hammoud across Oxford St.
After assessing the damage to his car, Mr Kazas gave chase with Mr Toumazis and Mr Lambos in tow.
Hamzy was waiting on the corner of West Street, his handgun at the ready.
He fired off a number of shots across Oxford St and one bullet hit Mr Lambos near the collarbone.
Mr Lambos fled down Paddington’s twisting laneways, unaware he had been shot until he ran into another police car.
Mr Toumazis, with his arms outstretched, was within a metre of Hamzy when he was hit, falling to the ground.
In a final act of cowardice, Hamzy steadied himself with one foot on a low brick wall, before unloading another bullet into Mr Toumazis.
As police swarmed the area, Hamzy, Chakaik and Hammoud made their exit.
Hamzy and Hammoud went to Parramatta to a motel and discussed their getaway; there was talk of passports, money transfers and Lebanon.
The next day the pair visited Hammoud’s brother, Khaled Hammoud, in Sydney’s southwest and evidence presented in court years later suggested a gun passed hands.
Hamzy and Nedahl Hammoud then travelled to Yass, hiding out at a property owned by Hammoud’s uncle
Years later, Hamzy would claim a spur of the moment decision was made at that property to push on to Melbourne and eventually flee to Lebanon.
“We decided to leave my dogs at Yass and I asked the owner of the farm to take my dogs back down to Sydney for me if he got the chance,” Hamzy told a court in 2001.
“Then we headed to Melbourne.”
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Hammoud booked a room, under the alias Samuel Toby, at the four star Swanston Hotel in Melbourne’s CBD.
Hamzy and Hammoud laid low, waiting for their brothers to bring them cash and their passports from Sydney before boarding a flight to Lebanon.
Hamzy moved into his uncle’s house and tried — but eventually failed — to adjust to simple living.
He may have been on the run for murder but he seemed more preoccupied with making sure his mother sent his favourite underwear to him and that his younger relatives were on track to becoming boxing champions.
“Are you still going to kickboxing?” Hamzy asked one of his young relatives, aged 12, during a phone call on July 15, 2008.
“The first one that enters the fight and wins his I’ll give ‘em a thousand dollars.”
A month later, the obsession Hamzy had with his young relatives becoming fighters intensified. “Are youse losing weight?” he asks one of them.
The relative: “I’ve lost four kilos now.”
Hamzy: “When do you think he’s gunna make youse fight?”
The relative: “He told me he wants me to train harder to next year the beginning of next year he said.”
Hamzy: “I will tell you from now on you start catching the train there and you catch a train back alright. I want you every f**kin’ day you can go there. Every single day.
“Are you being good at school? If you do one little thing wrong and I find out you know what I’m gunna do to youse? I’m going to break your f**kin’ head.
“Don’t go and be a f**kin’ hero alright?”
They needed to study Sugar Ray Leonard boxing fights, Hamzy urged.
By this point, his relationship with Hammoud had soured and Hamzy was growing increasingly paranoid that he was about to turn against him.
Police were turning up at his house looking for guns
Coincidentally, they’d found a .22 calibre rifle and a 12-gauge pump action shotgun in the roof of Hamzy’s house in Auburn two months before Mr Toumazis’s murder.
Police had also found a poster of Osama Bin Laden before he became the world’s most wanted man post-September 11, 2001.
It was an indication of Hamzy’s religious leanings, ironic given the opulent gangster-lifestyle he led. Hammoud’s brother, Khaled Hammoud, had travelled to Lebanon at the urging of police to convince his brother to return home.
Hamzy got wind of the treachery and was fuming.
“I know what he’s done, he’s told the police everything,” he told his mother Lola in one fiery telephone call.
“What more do you want to know? He gave them my name, he told them what had happened. He told them he knew I had the pistol …
“Both of them will die okay.”
Lola attempted to calm her son down: “Hey, listen, listen, wait, wait.’ “We don’t want to have more catastrophes, one is enough for us.”
But Hamzy was on a roll.
He was already annoyed at his brother Mejid for driving his car around Sydney and disobeying his instructions to pass it on to an uncle.
“Yes I want catastrophes, I like catastrophes,” Hamzy said.
“You know, once I have these three if I then go to prison I would be happy. “
My life will then have been completed because these three are my life.”
Lola pleaded with her son to take it easy before revealing that Mejid — “the hole in my prick” as Hamzy described him — had driven Hamzy’s car to work. “
I hope he’ll die while in his work,” Hamzy spat.
“I hope a projectile can be launched from here and hit him on the head there. “Where’s all my pistols? He’s sold them hasn’t he?”
Eventually, Hammoud relented and returned to Australia, where he provided homicide detectives with a self-serving account of what happened on May 30, 1998.
According to Lola, he paid her a visit in Auburn and the pair got into a screaming match about who was to blame.
“I said to him it was you to blame for everything, why are you blaming Bassam?” she said in a phone conversation.
“He said ‘well I’m not blaming him. I said ‘it wasn’t my son who went and told them, it was your brother who went and told them when they bribed you brother with money.
“He said ‘don’t shout’. I said ‘you can’t tell me that, I can shout and talk. I said to him ‘you are to blame for everything and it was you who put him in trouble’.”
Hammoud claimed Hamzy simply stopped talking to him when they fled to Lebanon.
But Lola, a mother attempting to defend her son, accused Hammoud of being “mean” to Hamzy.
“No, no, no I didn’t speak with them because I knew they were dogs,” Hamzy snapped. “You don’t worry about me, I can survive even on Mars. “Nobody can say anything to me and nobody can lay a hand on me.”
Hamzy was convicted of Mr Toumazis’s murder in March 2002 and sentenced to 21 years jail.
Nedhal Hammoud was sentenced to at least six years jail for being an accessory after the fact to murder and a string of unrelated drug offences.
Khaled Hammoud was charged with being an accessory after the fact to murder. He was sentenced to one year jail served as intensive corrections order in the community.
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