How Sam Abdulrahim’s big-noting and his Melbourne routine led to his downfall

Like many gangsters before him, Sam Abdulrahim couldn’t help but live in the spotlight in his hometown. And just like them, it painted a target across his tattooed back.

In prison, respect is hard to earn and easy to lose, as perishable as ice cream.

Sam Abdulrahim made a splash in the street but the puffed up chest and biceps and exotic Arabic ink didn’t rate inside. Jail makes for a tough audience.

One reason for the cool reception at the Metropolitan Assessment Prison was that the kickboxer and wannabe gangster was doing what hardened crims saw as a “squarehead” civilian sentence for a glorified driving offence.

Sure, it was “culpable driving” and he’d killed someone while driving a Ferrari. But the someone was a little old lady of 88 years, a totally innocent bystander named Muriel Hulett, whose life ended through Abdulrahim’s criminal stupidity.

Ramming four cars in the street like some teenage joy-rider was hardly calculated to impress serious crooks. It didn’t. Neither did his timidness when he was confronted inside.

One observant prisoner who happened to be inside at the same time as Abdulrahim in 2018 recalls the flashy “Lebo goose” being moved from section to section to keep him away from people who didn’t like him.

One inmate reportedly liked him so little he hit him in the head with a rock. A jailhouse rock.

That poses a couple of questions.

What is a rock doing in a prison yard, anyway? And why was Prisoner Abdulrahim so unpopular?

Alphonse Gangitano was shot dead in his underpants. Picture: Herald Sun

According to the former prisoner, the big man seemed willing to double cross those around him and attracted trouble inside the way he later attracted bullets outside.

His name first hit the headlines in 2015 when the then 23-year-old had “redlighted” himself by getting into an ugly brawl inside the Melbourne Magistrates Court that required police to use capsicum spray.

It was the sort of exhibition that self-respecting crooks saw as childish big-noting in a very safe public place; there was no chance he would be severely dealt with by police or guards given that everything was being filmed in the court precinct.

In other words, by the standards of hard crooks, Suleiman Abdulrahim was Sam the sham.

The court brawl was not unlike the display of calculated ferocity in a King St sports bar many years earlier that had led another narcissistic gangster to be condemned by his own circle for drawing police attention.

That man’s name was Alphonse Gangitano and his violent tantrum alienated his supposed friend Jason Moran, who resented being dragged into the legal fallout of the sports bar brawl so much that he shot Gangitano dead in his underpants. There was nothing decadent about this — it was just a hot summer night in Templestowe and Big Al wore his jocks around the house.

Abdulrahim was intimidated by hard people in the prison system. Picture David Geraghty

Moran complained to friends that Gangitano had gone “lulu”, crazily smashing innocent patrons with a pool cue to intimidate the proprietor into paying protection money.

But Gangitano’s craziness was selective. He hadn’t been nearly so reckless back when he’d been threatened by someone so genuinely unhinged they wore gelignite strapped to their body and held a lit cigar near the fuse.

When threatened that way in the 1970s, Gangitano jumped through a bathroom window to escape and spent a year overseas, paying money every month to keep the peace. Sometimes a standover man has to know when it’s safer to stand well away for some time, but that lesson was lost on Abdulrahim.

He would have been safer staying away from Melbourne for a long time but he kept returning to where dangerous people held him in loathing and contempt.

For a big, fearsome-looking man later briefly recruited by the Mongols bikie gang (who also soon turned against him) Abdulrahim had a problem: he was intimidated by hard people in the prison system.

“He buckled in there,” the watcher recalls bluntly.

And the kickboxer had another sort of reputation that no prisoner wants. “He was a lagger.”

So “The Punisher”, according to the jailhouse jury, was a coward and a snitch. Sam the sham was a lagger.

And if that wise old legal figure Justice Coghlan is any judge, he was also a liar, though not a very good one. It was Justice Coghlan who damned Abdulrahim’s evidence at the murder trial of his homicidal associate George Marrogi as “unsatisfactory and illogical”.

As Chopper Read once said, “Even Beethoven had his critics.” But critics can be deadly when they arrive with semiautomatic pistols and fast cars.

Abdulrahim spent years trying to dodge head shots — knockout punches — in the ring.

Abdulrahim spent years trying to dodge head shots — knockout punches — in the ring. The head shot that finished him didn’t involve eight-ounce boxing gloves, just eight grams of lead.

“The Punisher” had dodged death several times since playing a part in setting up the murder of a one-time associate, Kadir Ors, in late 2016. It turned out Ors was liked much better than Sam was.

The shooter in the Ors hit, the previously mentioned George Marrogi, was locked up for a very long time and his suspected collaborator Abdulrahim was earmarked for punishment by Ors’ furious friends, notably Kaz Hamad, now holed up in Iraq.

It was a matter of time until the price on Abdulrahim’s head reached seven figures, a sum apt to attract someone more professional than he was — or to buy someone willing to sell him out, which must be what happened to set up the high noon on High St. The tip-off that “The Punisher” was spending the night at the Quest apartments in Preston was fatally fresh.

Inevitably, the money caught up with him, given he couldn’t see the necessity to leave town to live somewhere safer, meaning almost anywhere beyond Victoria.

Crooks can behave like spoiled children even when the stakes are life and death. They want to be where the fast money is, regardless of consequences. If people want to shoot them there, that’s a risk some of them take.

Jason Moran would always return to his Ascot Vale home. Picture: Supplied

Jason Moran was an example. He knew there was a target on his back after the shooting of his brother Mark in June 2000 but, in between overseas holidays, he always headed home to the centre of his world: Ascot Vale. There, the enemy had every chance to nail him, and did.

Anything is better than the morgue and hiding out doesn’t have to mean spending millions in London or Paris. A beard, a hat and a modest rental in Sydney’s northern beaches, the Blue Mountains or outer suburban Perth might have baffled the Melbourne crooks that wanted young Moran dead, but that didn’t suit the Ascot Vale Kid.

Moran, born into the Carlton crew, loved football in general and the Blues in particular. He was especially dedicated to his children’s footy, which is how a hit man with two guns came to kill him and his mate Pat Barbaro in a van full of young kids.

Jason’s father, Lewis Moran, could have bankrolled him to stay away until it was safer but that didn’t happen. Lewis was a cagey old crook but he, too, died because he was also a pig-headed homebody.

Lewis Moran was a creature of habit when it came to pubs. Picture: Supplied

Despite being warned repeatedly, Lewis insisted on drinking on the same nights at the same time at the same Brunswick club, one that served cheap beer. Anyone with a watch and a gun could catch him there, and they soon did.

It should be noted that Lewis’s fatalistic “come at me if you’re good enough” attitude evaporated when the moment came. He ran away from the hit man like the terrified crock he suddenly was.

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, and that’s how it went for Sam Abdulrahim.

There’s a question hanging over Sam the sham. Given that he had survived the ordeal of being shot in the chest multiple times when ambushed at a cousin’s funeral in 2022, why didn’t he find a way to stay out of range?

One answer, perhaps, is that his home city was where he could make money in the mysterious ways that allow uneducated men in their 20s to drive Ferraris, not to mention the Mercedes G-wagon he was in when ambushed and shot at Fawkner cemetery.

Another motivation to return to Melbourne, specifically to the northern suburbs where he grew up, is that his family is there. Was it an impulse to protect them that drew him back?

Unlike old-school crooks traditionally reluctant to involve families, Abdulrahim’s enemies were willing to use his parents as bait to lure him. Last May, a hit team sat off his house in Thomastown while their associates torched three of his parents’ cars in nearby Brunswick.

As soon as his family called, Abdulrahim rushed out the door just as the waiting gunmen had planned. But, again, they shot and missed. Seventeen shots, in fact.

Threatening families is the sort of low act that old school identities would never stoop to using. But these are different times, and the middle-eastern gangs play by different rules. Especially the man now back in Iraq who’s picking off his enemies in a long-range war conducted by proxies.

A couple of things are certain.

The relatives of Muriel Hulett, the old lady Abdulrahim killed with a Ferrari, won’t be mourning him. And the chances of his family making any realistic retaliation are 100-1 against, and drifting.