How Bassam Hamzy continues to wield influence from behind bars
Bassam Hamzy has still managed to pull the strings in the underworld during his two decades behind bars. The man responsible for moving Hamzy to Supermax described him as “dangerous” and a “menace in jail”. EXCLUSIVE MULTIMEDIA SPECIAL REPORT
- Part 1: The night Bassam Hamzy’s reign of terror began
- Part 2: From murderer to cocaine kingpin
- Part 3: Plotting murder from prison cell 214
Life behind bars as the state’s most high-risk inmate is spent under the microscope.
Every phone call Bassam Hamzy, 39, makes is listened to in real-time and must be conducted in English.
His incoming and outgoing letters are scanned and the recipients noted.
The only exceptions to the rule are Hamzy’s conversations — via mail, on the phone or during non-contact visits — with lawyers.
He rotates cells inside Goulburn’s Supermax prison every 28 days.
Every time he walks into a day room, he is pat down and scanned with a metal detector.
The people who visit him are vetted and subject to criminal history checks every 12 months.
Even when he moves within the High Risk Management Correctional Centre, he is fitted with hand and ankle cuffs.
Yet somehow, Hamzy, who has the highest security risk classification available, has still managed to pull the strings in the underworld during his two decades behind bars.
There is little regard for the years he adds to his sentence when he is caught and prison sources suggest he is devoted to a life of crime, even if that means being locked up forever.
Former Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham was responsible for moving Hamzy to Supermax and described him as a “dangerous man and a menace in jail”.
“He will never get out of jail the way he is going, he just keeps getting more and more time,” Mr Woodham said.
While he suggests his network has diminished, with most of his supporters in jail themselves, Mr Woodham says Hamzy is more cunning and knows how to use the law against law enforcement.
Every time Hamzy emerges on the periphery of a criminal investigation, the question is raised; how does Australia’s most high-risk prisoner in the country’s most secure prison manage to wield influence outside jail?
A long line of smuggled mobile phones has helped.
“Every time he came to Sydney for court he would put word out,” Mr Woodham said.
“He would pay anything to get a mobile phone. He tried to get it back with him when he goes back to Goulburn. He is a dangerous man because when he gets a phone he rings people all over the place.”
He had two hidden inside a silver tin in Silverwater after he was jailed in 1999, another concealed in the spine of a book at the Supermax library in 2016 was linked to Hamzy and he used another phone inside his Lithgow jail cell to run a multi-million crime ring in 2008.
An ICAC investigation in 2004 exposed a prison officer accepting money to sneak mobile phones into prison for two Supermax inmates, including Hamzy.
His behaviour landed him with a long list of conditions restricting his movements but that just encouraged him to sue prison bosses Mr Woodham and current Commissioner Peter Severin over an abuse of power and putting him in isolation.
Hamzy spent many nights in his cell poring over legal textbooks and learning the rule of law, which aided him in his battles against the system.
Sometimes it worked.
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In June this year he represented himself in Goulburn Local Court after being charged over having a smuggled mobile phone inside a day room attached to his cell.
He beat the charge and walked away with an ego boost after the magistrate acknowledged his “articulate” knowledge of the law.
The idea behind shipping Hamzy off to Supermax was to clip his wings after he was caught running a lucrative crime syndicate from Lithgow’s maximum security prison in 2008.
He used a tiny mobile phone, which he slid between cells using dental floss, and made more than 450 phone calls a day.
Detectives intercepted the calls and listened as Hamzy ordered a kidnapping, a drive-by shooting and oversaw a multi-million drug network between Sydney and Melbourne without so much as writing a sum down on paper.
Privately, investigators were impressed by his ability to juggle numbers and several tasks at once — it set him apart from other criminals.
But there was no denying his evil and his ruthless ability to manipulate people to do whatever he wanted.
This extended to his track record of luring inmates to follow his beliefs of Islamic extremism.
He received another 15.5 years jail on top of his 21 years jail for Kris Toumazis’s murder in May, 1998.
In 2011, the street gang formed in his honour — Brothers for Life — emerged on the street’s of southwest Sydney.
Mohammed “little crazy” Hamzy, was the chapter boss but everyone knew his cousin — Bassam Hamzy — called the shots from inside jail.
The gang self-destructed when Hamzy parachuted underworld figure and fellow inmate Farhad Qaumi into the group to pull it’s members, drunk on power, drugs and money, into order.
Mr Woodham, who recently finished writing a book about his time as NSW’s prison boss, said prison officers found the hand-sketched BFL logo — two AK47 guns crossed over — in Hamzy’s cell in Silverwater.
It was a shock for police then in late 2017, when they began to hear BFL whispered around the streets of Wollongong.
But these wannabe gangsters were not young Lebanese men from around the southwest — they were petty criminals or drug addicts from Anglo Saxon or indigenous backgrounds who converted to Islam in jail.
The Brothers for Life Illawarra Chapter leader was Damien Featherstone, who had shared a jail yard with Hamzy before encouraging other inmates to form a resurrected version of the group once they were released on parole.
The new-look BFL was dangerous but a shadow of its former self; it couldn’t find the money to buy the guns they needed for gang business and their drug trade was flailing.
A number of people have been charged over alleged links to the BFL Illawarra chapter.
Hamzy has been moved around prisons or inmates moved away from him in a Corrective Services bid to limit his influence.
Several police officers told The Sunday Telegraph they encouraged colleagues to take Hamzy’s offers of information, in return for more favourable sentences, with a grain of salt.
He has claimed knowledge of Sydney’s missing rocket launchers — stolen from a defence force base between 2001 and 2003 and suspected of being buried in bushland.
When one detective decided his claims were unbelievable, he tried his luck with another.
Senior police officers told the Court of Criminal Appeal in 2013 that Hamzy did not have any “useful information to provide concerning either the theft of rocket launchers”.
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More recently, police believe Hamzy helped mastermind the cover-up of teenager Brayden Dillon’s murder in April, 2017.
Hamzy had never met or had anything to do with Dillon, police allege, but a close friend of his had a grievance.
Remember that illegal mobile phone charge he beat in June this year?
The Sunday Telegraph understands calls from the phone — found in a day room used by Hamzy and a Rebels bikie — were made to the alleged hitman in Brayden’s murder.
“There are numbers on that data extraction that are linked to you and material found in your cell,” Detective Sergeant Matt Woods told Hamzy in court.
But Hamzy successfully argued that the phone, found hidden in a gap between the wall and the ceiling, could have been someone else’s because the room was shared and inmates regularly rotated cells.
Asked for the most effective way to manage a problem inmate like Hamzy, Mr Woodham suggested locking him away without contact.
“ … which you couldn’t do these days,” he said.
“Keep searching him and searching him, turn his cell over and over,” he said.
“Annoy the hell out of him and that’s the only way to get on top of the contraband.”
Hamzy is first eligible for parole in June, 2035.
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