If you didn’t know much about Stojakovic’s great mate George Bejat you could be mistaken for thinking this fish and chip shop owner and personal trainer was the unluckiest bloke in Queensland.
He can’t seem to leave the house without inviting unwanted police attention, no matter how trivial it may seem.
He was unlucky enough to be nabbed in January for the high crime of allegedly using his mobile phone while sitting in his parked car on Melbourne St, South Brisbane.
The charge was later dropped.
In July, while driving to report for bail at Fortitude Valley police station, he was slapped with a charge for doing a U-turn across a “single continuous dividing line”. That case is due to go to a hearing in March next year.
He is also facing a charge of speeding in a 60kmh zone along Kessels Rd, in Nathan, in Brisbane’s south, on June 8, and of carrying a BlackBerry phone on April 15 when he was on Chester St, in Teneriffe. Police allege the BlackBerry could be tainted property.
Just last month, on August 20, he was charged with running a red light on Lutwyche Rd in Windsor. That charge is in court for its first mention on December 15.
It’s the same place where he was convicted and fined $261 for speeding more than 10km over the limit in a 40kmh zone along the road outside the office of a surveyor consultancy along Lutwyche Rd, in Windsor, on Brisbane’s north side in March 2019.
All these nuisance offences and apparent misfortune probably wouldn’t make sense.
Except that Bejat, a Serbian citizen and convicted cocaine trafficker who favours designer labels and has a playboy reputation, is probably the best-known bikie in South East Queensland.
Bejat grew up in humble public housing at Morningside, in Brisbane’s east, but more recently took to filling his Facebook with photos of holidays in Spain and Thailand.
He calls modern high-rise apartments in inner city Hamilton and Newstead home, but is also known to visit luxury hotels with Stojakovic and other mates.
Stojakovic and Bejat, are both of Balkans heritage, and have been tight since the Broadbeach brawl.
Bejat shares Stojakovic’s taste for bold tattoos and flashy European designer clothing and they have often been pictured leaving court together.
They sat in the public gallery in a Brisbane court in 2016 during pre-trial hearings for their mate, Bogdan Cuic, who was convicted of the 2012 manslaughter of Jei “Jack” Lee outside an Eight Mile Plains shopping centre in Brisbane’s south, in a drug deal gone wrong.
Now free on parole, Cuic together with co-offender Marko Cokara, are two of the “recognised offenders” named on two consorting warning notices issued to another Comanchero mate of Stojakovic and Bejat; William Samra.
VALLEY VIOLENCE
Before the pandemic, the nightclubs of Fortitude Valley, in Brisbane’s inner north, were the gangsters’ stomping ground.
And Bejat was not someone you’d necessarily want to cross on one of his nights out.
On New Year’s Day 2015, he threatened to kill a Fortitude Valley security guard when he was denied entry to The Met nightclub on Wickham St at about 2.20am.
More recently, he was sentenced to two months’ jail, suspended for a year, for his part in a random “violent pack assault” of a former footballer after 3am outside the trendy Mr Mista nightclub in February 2020.
Former timber worker Matthew Mackay and labourer Paea Talakai – who were accused of fracturing the footballer’s cheekbones in the melee with more than a dozen blows – were also convicted over the attack, which was partially caught on video.
Bejat was seen on the video “laughing and taunting bystanders” to the obscene violence.
Detective Superintendent Roger Lowe, boss of Queensland police’s specialist anti-bikie Taskforce Maxima, described the men’s behaviour at the time as “cowardly, vicious and unprovoked”.
“I would describe it as fierce, hunting in a pack and unprovoked – to the extent that this person was assaulted while clearly unconscious on the ground,” he said.
“It got to the extent that members of the public, including women, intervened to stop these three people.”
Bejat helpfully tendered a reference from his Serbian Orthodox priest Nicola Stepanov during his sentencing for the affray.
For his part Talakai, a towering giant at well over six foot, was sentenced to six months’ prison, suspended for 15 months for affray and handed a 12 month banning order, prohibiting him from entering Fortitude Valley.
It wasn’t Talakai’s first rodeo, having been convicted of affray after a brawl involving the Comanchero bikies and associates at the Capital Men’s Club, a strip joint in Canberra.
That violent all-in melee occurred after the Comanchero’s annual run to Canberra in August 2017.
Their co-offender Mackay had also previously faced allegations of brutal acts of violence.
He was acquitted on appeal for “sucker punching” Brisbane nightclub patron Maricio Arias at the Blackbird Bar on the river at Eagle St on a Saturday night in September 2016. Mackay’s conviction was overturned due to Mr Arias’ contradictory evidence describing the person who attacked him.
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