Michael Ibrahim wanted Nomads bikies to ‘take’ Seadeck party boat
It’s the luxury party boat that cruises Sydney Harbour serving guests high-end vodka and champagne. Michael Ibrahim was so impressed with Seadeck he planned to take over the 42m yacht. All he needed was a little muscle.
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For three decades, Sydney has regarded the House of Ibrahim with fear and fascination.
Now, for the first time, we take you inside the private world of this complicated family thanks to an enormous cache of surveillance material tendered to a NSW court.
There are more than 880 phone calls and texts that were covertly recorded by police over more than a year, revealing the truth about feuds, grudges and family lore, including the secret tunnel under patriarch John Ibrahim’s Eastern Suburbs mansion.
There are hundreds of police photos taken inside Ibrahim homes during police raids, and an even larger collection of surveillance photos taken by police tailing family members and associates through the city’s streets.
The material sheds new light on the family’s networks, reaching beyond brothers John, Fadi, Michael and Sam to the far reaches of entertainment, night-life, property and crime.
On their private calls, the brothers and their associates detail their rivalries and power struggles, as well as moments of “us against the world” camaraderie and black humour.
When Michael Ibrahim and his mates got together for a drug-fuelled night of debauchery and mayhem, they had two favourite venues.
One was Double Bay nightclub Casablanca, and the other was on board a luxury party boat, Seadeck, that cruised Sydney Harbour.
A world away from the sleazy inner-city dive bars frequented by earlier generations of Sydney crooks, Seadeck and Casablanca were the high-society celebrity haunts Michael and his squad aspired to fit in with.
Michael liked Seadeck so much, he was captured on police phone taps tendered in court hatching a plan to take ownership of the 42m boat, possibly with the help of the Nomads bikie gang.
On board Seadeck, the colour scheme is a nautical themed white and blue.
The deck is lined with luxury seating and formal dining settings rounded out with floral arrangements. The menu features high end delicacies like stuffed coconuts ($14) and baja fish tacos ($16).
Michael and his crew celebrated their victories by booking VIP table packages, which max out at $2000 for 10 seats on the top deck. This buys two 750ml bottles of Ciroc vodka, one bottle of Moet Chandon, four Red Bulls, olives and spiced nuts, and a waitress.
In a call on March 8, 2017, where an associate asked if he was going to take over 10 per cent of Seadeck, Michael corrected him.
“I’m planning to take the whole boat,” Michael said.
The associate replied: “I forgot who I’m talking to.”
Six days later, Michael spoke to a senior member of the Nomads bikie gang, who can’t legally be named, about 30 of the gang’s members on Seadeck.
However, it is unclear from the conversation, which was tendered in court, if this was part of a takeover attempt, a bikie bonding exercise, or both.
“That would be like a Nomad boat,” Michael said.
Later in the conversation, the senior Nomad said: “All right, so … when do you want … to go down to, um, f*** Seadeck?”
“Bro, I’ll send you down about 20 f**king coconut(s) each one as big as a donkey, bro,” the bikie said.
“If you see the Mount Druitt Westside Chapter now, you’ll freak. Every one is a f**king coconut, every one is bigger than the other, bro …”
Michael told the bikie the occasion was “for them to go and have a good time”.
The bikie agreed but added his musclebound minions could “put on a show anyways.”
“And every one of them is just young, fit, built, tatted up, every single one of them, I swear,” the bikie said.
When he first became aware of Seadeck, Michael talked it up as the next best thing on the Sydney Harbour night-life scene.
“It’s going to be the next Island, better than The Island, they reckon,” Michael said in reference to a party boat owned by one time Cleo Bachelor of the Year finalist Julian Tobias.
While the settings for their partying were classy, the behaviour was not.
In a call on November 5, 2016, Michael told an associate through laughter that he was so intoxicated he found himself locked in a cubicle at an unspecified party spot.
The associate had spiked a substance or drink that Michael ingested. It was revenge for New Year’s Eve 2015 when Michael did the same to the associate.
Inside the cubicle, Michael said a mate came to his rescue with a bag of cocaine.
“I grabbed it, I couldn’t even climb up,” Michael said. “I just put it straight in my pocket.”
Another friend came into the cubicle to administer the drug.
“I couldn’t even do it,” Michael said.
“He rolled up a note … and then stuck it up my nose. I just breathed up like that and took it up and then I woke up a little bit.”
Michael joked about the massive amount of the drug he had been given that was the size of “Like a 20 cent piece, bro”.
“That was like a gram,” Michael said.
However, like all social groups, birthday parties in the Ibrahim clan can lead to tension among the group members.
On February 22, 2017, Michael called older brother Fadi Ibrahim to ask if he was coming to “Nasser’s birthday” at Double Bay nightclub Casablanca.
“I wasn’t invited,” Fadi said.
Michael tried to talk Fadi into coming, but the situation was now awkward.
“If you would’ve told me I could’ve f**king you know, said, yeah,” Fadi said.
“But you just springing on bullshit, like, a non-invite.”
Casablanca was a favourite Eastern Suburbs celebrity haunt before it moved to Kings Cross to reopen as the Miami-themed Flamingo Lounge.
When it was at Double Bay, Casablanca was the site of one of Team Michael’s largest benders.
Another call tendered to court showed that on April 17, 2017, Ibrahim cousin and cafe owner Fares Derbas recapped the bender by telling Michael he had been given an extra strong MDMA dose by one of their drug dealing mates.
“Cuz, they gave me a date rape drug,” Derbas said. “That’s not M, bro. That’s like — like he put ice with heroin, with everything in there, bro.”
He later told Michael: “Cuz, I was f**king stuck in (a cubicle) all by myself, tripping out, bro, for like an hour sitting there … I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t see. I didn’t know what was going on, bro.”
Michael said he sent an associate to the cubicle “to give you a line of rack” explaining “it would’ve straightened you up”.
But Derbas was already in his car at that stage, planning a very dangerous 20km drive from Double Bay to his Greenacre home.
He explained to Michael that “I turned the ignition on and I flew off, bro”.
“It felt like, hey, every hundred metres I would speed, the car would fly up in the air, I’d be floating, then I’d come back on the road,” Derbas said.
“I … felt like I was in a video game … I felt like my head’s going to roll off my body.”
After miraculously getting home without incident, Derbas crawled in the door and was confronted by his angry wife.
“My wife turned on me,” Derbas said.
He left the house to chase some teens he thought were trying to steal his father’s car.
“They were too quick,” Derbas said.
“But I was spinning out, my head felt like a million kilos so I couldn’t — I had to stop running ‘cause I felt like my head’s going to fall off my body.”
He eventually returned home and sent himself to sleep by watching wildlife videos on YouTube.
“So I started watching a lion chasing ostriches,” Derbas said. “Like f**king tigers in the wild life … and I slowly started nodding off, bro.”
Casablanca and Seadeck also hosted Kemel “Blackie” Barakat, 29, for some partying before he was killed on March 10, 2017.
Two days after the killing, where Barakat was shot by assassins in a Mortlake home, Michael lamented that he had only recently been at the two party spots with the dead gangster.
“I love that G, man,” Michael said.
Originally published as Michael Ibrahim wanted Nomads bikies to ‘take’ Seadeck party boat
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