Abuzar Sultani: How Rebels bikie rose within outlaw motorcycle gang
In the outlaw world of the bikies, clubs demand slavish loyalty but Abuzar Sultani commanded devotion only to himself.
Police & Courts
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It was a summer morning in 2016 in one of the bare exercise yards at Sydney’s busy Silverwater jail and Abs Sultani, locked up on remand for murder, was walking around in those never-ending circles with one of his fellow bikies.
“What do you think the Rebels would say if they knew a president killed two members?” Sultani laughed, according to evidence given by his fellow prisoner. If you weren’t with Sultani, he was against you.
In the outlaw world of the bikies, slavish loyalty is demanded to the club along with respect for the club’s colours. Only other members can touch them. When you join a motorcycle gang, you don’t just leave, they have you for life.
Court documents reveal that in the Rebels Burwood chapter, young gun Sultani commanded devotion only to himself.
The 24-year-old had burst onto the police radar in early 2013 as an influential and violent member of the Rebels. At 24, he was one of the country’s youngest bikie chapter bosses. His timing was impeccable. Just a few months later, the Rebels national president, Alex Vella, left to visit his friends and family at home in Malta and while he was there, his residency visa was cancelled by the Australian government.
In the hierarchical structure of an OMCG, Vella, aka the Maltese Falcon, was a chieftain powerful enough through the force of his personality built up over decades to control some of the toughest bikies in the country. With him stranded in Malta and three of his top men locked up because of a war with the rival Bandidos, there was a power vacuum.
There was no-one to keep the hotheads like Sultani in check. Nicknamed The Boss – as well as Bruce or Wayne – he ran the chapter as his fiefdom.
He had already cemented himself in the city’s underworld after latching onto construction industry figure George Alex. In 2012, Sultani was trusted to sign a union deal with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union’s Victoria branch after the agreement was arranged by Melbourne underworld boss Mick Gatto. Neither Alex nor Gatto are suspected of any wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court murder trials of Sultani and his deputy Siar Munshizada heard that Sultani was a director of a number of Alex’s construction, labour hire and property investment groups.
Sultani was also close to standover man and construction figure Joe Antoun. On the night of December 16, 2013, when Antoun was shot dead outside his Strathfield home, Sultani had just dropped him off after a meeting at Alex’s house. Antoun was a business partner of Alex’s, the court was told.
The following narrative is pulled together from evidence given and tendered in trials.
After two years with the Rebels, Sultani struck out by himself. He broke away from the gang in late 2014 or early 2015 and went freelance, taking with him almost the whole of the Burwood chapter, around 17 blokes, happy to do his bidding.
A number of them called themselves Murder Crew 13 and wore their membership as a tattoo but they were known on the street as “the Afghanis”.
One member posted on his Facebook page: NO MERCY. NO REGRET. ONLY VIOLENCE.” Another post said: “I relate to the phrase chillin’ like a villain”.
He explained what it meant: “It implies that I’m calm but ready to murder at any time”.
Court documents tendered to the Supreme Court said that both while with the Rebels and later with his “murder crew”, Sultani “controlled and directed the activities of a sophisticated criminal group involved in serious criminal offences including assault, commercial drug supply, firearms trafficking, fraud and murder”.
It was a strange group, described more like a family with them calling each brother and player soccer and basketball. Despite being “bikies”, they never had any motorbikes.
Among the men who followed Sultani was his deputy, close mate Siar Munshizada, aka Ziggy, 33, who had been sergeant-at-arms of the Burwood Rebels chapter “in charge of handing out the discipline and punishment”. He was the best driver of them all. The inner circle included Munshizada’s cousin Mirwais Danishyar, aka outtacontrol, now 28, and Joshua Baines, aka Screamers, now 29.
Another was former private Catholic schoolboy Jarad Prakash, aka Chin Check, then an 18-year-old. He would later sum up what it all meant for him and probably for the other young men around him when he pleaded guilty and was jailed for a string of crimes committed while with Sultani including drug dealing and being an accessory after the fact to murder.
He told a court psychologist that he remained in the group because they had “good family values and a good worth ethic” and he felt they were like his family.
He “knew it was wrong but I didn’t want to lose the boys”, Prakash said.
His mother told the court that “the group promised him the world” at a time when he was struggling to provide for his family.
Munshizada had been “vulnerable” to manipulation by Sultani who he met in jail between 2008 and 2010 while the courts were also told how Sultani exercised charisma and control over the men.
Another member who followed Sultani was a computer whiz kid who looked after the Phantom Secure encrypted Blackberrys which they used to stay under the police radar. The devices were provided to each member by Sultani. Their camera and phone functions were disabled and they were used solely so Sultani could control their criminal activities.
Each had their own BlackBerry handle. Sultani used several including “unconfirmed”. Munshizada used the handles ”limit1es” and ”bullet proof”. Baines used his nickname ”screamers”. Danishyar used ”tyga888” and ”outta-control”. Another called himself ”FameNFortune”.
It was a smooth if violent operation.
They operated a number of companies including Civic Traffic Group and Labour State Wide Traffic Group which provided a legitimate mask for their income and otherwise unexplained wealth from multimillion-dollar bank and insurance fraud, gun-running and kidnapping, the courts have been told.
They dealt in false number plates for stolen cars. Sultani would message one of the bikies the year, make, model and colour of the vehicle and the bikie looked through online car sales for a matching vehicle. He wrote down the details for an associate who made the false plates.
The vehicles were then either burnt-out or got rid of through dodgy associates who ran car rebirthing businesses. One of their side businesses was the Westside Grill takeaway at St Mary’s, run by the group and party-owned by Sultani.
If you weren’t one of them, you were against them.
One of the two Rebels Sultani boasted about killing was enforcer Michael “Ruthless” Davey, 31, known as the ‘Prince of Penrith”. While on bail on drug charges, he was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Stafford Street, Kingswood, just after midnight on March 30, 2016 after receiving a phone call from a “friend”. Sultani later said Davey had to go because he was involved in a “bad pseudo deal” with “the crew”.
Then there was the ongoing conflict between the Penrith City Chapter of the Rebels and the Burwood Chapter. Sultani was furious that Davey had been “treating him like a gronk”.
His father, William Davey, told the court in a victim impact statement that they had abandoned his son on the footpath and he hoped the image of him “drawing his last breath” would remain with Sultani and Munshizada forever.
Another was John Salafia, 38, who also allegedly died at Sultani’s hand, according to court documents. On June 26, 2013, the ex-Rebels bikie was shot three times in the head and chest after answering the door at his home in Kings Point Drive, Kings Point on the NSW south coast. Two members of Rebels Ulladulla chapter, Sami Eski Hamalainen and Robert McCloskey, were convicted of being accessory after the fact to murder.
Sultani was never charged but court documents allege he pulled the trigger. Sultani’s murder trials also heard that his favourite firearms were handguns and semiautomatics, especially 9mm. One ex-Rebels bikie told police that he alone had sourced up to 100 firearms for Sultani between 2013 and 2016 including AK-47s, .22 calibre rifles, sniper rifles, Mac10 sub-machine guns and .50 calibres.
He also had a number of silencers made for Sultani. He would go to a property at Central Mangrove to test fire the guns. Despite thinking he had picked up all the cartridges, police later matched two to the weapon used to kill Davey.
In February 2016, apartment 2803 at 1 Australia Ave, Sydney Olympic Park became the group’s unofficial headquarters when Sultani and Munshizada rented it and lived there, unaware that just weeks after they moved in, police had the place bugged with listening devices and cameras. The computer whiz lived in another unit in the same block.
When the gang was brought to a screaming halt on November 29, 2016, by the mass arrests by heavily armed police, Sultani‘s inner circle remained tight. Some of the other former Rebels thought it best for their own futures if they turned on their former leader and turned Crown witness. Those who did, continue to live in fear.
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