Sam ‘The Punisher’ Abdulrahim joins long list of fighters to reach lethal end

Kickboxer Sam Abdulrahim has joined a long list of nasties who reached the lethal end of the crime caper via the boxing scene, Andrew Rule writes.

Another day, another gangster shot dead. Now the gun smoke has cleared, some things about the life and death of Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim are clear.

There’s no surprise that the kickboxer using the ring moniker “The Punisher” is another casualty from the long list of nasties who reach the lethal end of the crime caper via the fight game.

Punching for pay might be the second-oldest profession and it often goes hand-in-hand with the oldest, and both are heavily associated with organised crime. Which, these days, is mostly about illicit drugs and its old-fashioned cousin, the tobacco trade, recently the source of rivers of black cash thanks to punitive taxes that have backfired.

Most professional fighters seem to think that working 9-to-5 is a Dolly Parton song. Many of them have no interest in a humble working lifestyle when they can pocket fast bucks by throwing their weight around outside the ring.

Boxing is heavily associated with organised crime. Picture: Jason Edwards

Old fighters and slow fighters and lazy fighters and gullible fighters have been recruited to the dark side ever since the first paid pugilists duked it out for dough in the old-time prize ring.

Andrew “Benji” Veniamin was a flyweight fighter before he took up killing people with guns. The standover man who killed him in a clear cut case of self-defence, Mick Gatto, was a heavyweight boxer who decided there was more to life than trading leather.

Ex-pugs getting what they think is easy money “minding” crooks is such a well-worn career path it inspired one of the best comedy dramas of all time: Minder, starring the late Dennis Waterman as ex-club fighter Terry McCann and George Cole as artful dodger “Arfer” Daley.

Arfer and Terry became part of the language but there’s nothing funny about their real-world counterparts from the high street in West London to High St, West Preston.

Ask Ange “Goose” Goussis, wasting the best years of his life in prison because he started hanging out with crooks who hung around the boxing gym looking for “muscle” to do their dirty work.

Andrew ''Benji'' Veniamin was a flyweight fighter before he took up killing people with guns.

The gullible Goose copped the blame for shooting another risk taker who was quicker with his fists than his brain. That was Lewis Caine, whose bleeding body was pushed out of a car in a street not far from where “The Punisher” breathed his last on Tuesday morning.

Being a hard man didn’t work out for Caine and it didn’t work out for Gavin Preston, the head kicker shot at a coffee shop in Keilor in late 2023. And it didn’t work well for the hired hand who did the dirty work for Carl Williams, the pudgy drug dealer who’d ordered the Moran brothers and their father killed.

The hired hand ended up flipping Williams, who’d made the mistake of not paying him. But he spent years killing time in prison simmering about the fact he’d been stiffed by a man who paid him peanuts to kill people.

Williams ended up a marked man because he’d gathered too many enemies in his rise from suburban burglar and supermarket shelf stacker to drug dealer. Inside jail or out, his cards were marked.

Underworld figure Gavin Preston was shot dead in late 2023.

The difference between him and Abdulrahim was that Williams was only dimly aware of the danger he might be in, whereas Abdulrahim was repeatedly warned by police and others there was a price on his head.

Any doubt about Abdulrahim’s prospects was removed by the fact there were so many serious attempts on his life in the years since he apparently set up another middle-eastern crime figure, Kadir Ors, at Campbellfield Plaza in September 2016.

Ors died in a hail of bullets at the hands of the lunatic George Marrogi, who’s still serving a monster prison sentence for a brazen crime that could easily have killed innocent bystanders.

A similarity between Abdulrahim and Williams and several others, such as the doomed Jason Moran, was that they all insisted on returning to their usual haunts despite the danger waiting for them.

The Punisher returned from overseas the day before his execution. Picture: Jason Edwards

It’s true that Abdulrahim took evasive action, travelling often to South-East Asian countries and laying false trails in his social media accounts.

But he kept coming back to the city where there was, depending on who’s asked, either a $1m or $2m bounty on his life.

A million dollars buys a lot of secret enemies; two million buys more. Among them, you’d think, someone close enough to betray his whereabouts at a Quest apartment in the heart of his home territory.

The orders for the hit may have came from Abdulrahim’s bitter enemy in the middle east, Kaz Hamad. Regardless of who paid who, one thing is highly likely: if and when the police catch the shooters, among them will be faces known around the kickboxing scene.

Andrew Rule is Herald Sun Associate Editor