Russians, bikies, neck tattoos making Bali a sunny place for shady people

A popular nightclub in the section of Bali now known as “Little Moscow” won’t serve anyone with neck tattoos — it’s the easiest way to keep out undesirables and potentially violent criminals.

Swap two letters in the word Bali and you get “Bail”, which figures.

For years, Australian crooks have joined others from around the world among the legitimate tourists who flock to what some might call a sunny place for shady people.

In fact, it’s where Victorian detectives took their supergrass, Nicola Gobbo, the X-rated lawyer herself, to decompress after a hard year selling out and setting up her clients.

On one notable occasion, bemused detectives reported later, Gobbo got into a drinking school with US sailors on shore leave and drank them under the table.

Bali is still that sort of place. Only more so.

The undesirables live notoriously hard, drinking to excess, although they stick mostly to themselves in places like Munggu and Canggu, as well as tourist central — Kuta, site of the Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people in 2002, almost half of them Australian.

Regardless of their criminal “form” at home (whether that’s Australia, the UK or eastern Europe) most of the “fly in, fly out” crooks want to avoid trouble with Indonesian police and a tough judicial system where heavy sentences can mean anything from 20 years to execution.

The visitors seemed to drop that caution last weekend when two shooters killed an Australian criminal and seriously wounded his friend in a holiday villa in the village of Munggu, north of Kuta.

Sanar Ghanim is treated at the scene of the shooting that killed his friend. Picture: Supplied

Police officers outside the home where Zivan Radmanovic was gunned down. Picture: Lukman S. Bintoro

The arrest within four days of three Australians allegedly involved in the killing underlines the increasingly menacing presence of international criminals in the once famously peaceful island.

Crime is not unknown in Bali but shooting is rare. Some regulars who live there semi-permanently have formed cosy relationships with certain local officials known in the past to wink at irregularities in building codes, employment law and taxes.

Outsiders who marry locals sometimes have had a “walk-up” start with officials. Such as in the case of former AFL player Ricky Olarenshaw, whose Balinese wife was able to help set up a massage parlour with a “fantasy room” in which “anything and everything was available,” say Bali regulars who don’t approve of such sordid and blatant sex tourism.

But shady business and rule bending is one thing, gunplay quite another.

Unlike the regular violence in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and the Gold Coast, shootings are rare in a place where the guns are carried by police and the army, not foreign criminals on sabbatical from home territories.

The messy execution of Melbourne’s Zivan Radmanovic and serious wounding of his kickboxer mate Sanar Ghanim last Saturday night was the first criminal shooting that the Bali ex-pat community can recall in more than a decade.

Back in Australia, Ghanim had some notoriety because he had been the partner of Roberta Williams’ daughter Danielle Stephens.

Darcy Francesco Jenson one of the Australian suspects that have been arrested at Jakarta Airport over the shooting. Picture

Radmanovic, a known offender, once had to wear the sort of electronic ankle monitor that cashed-up drug dealers often negotiate as a form of house detention to avoid being held in a crowded Australian jail system.

The killers were ruthless and violent but hardly clinical — spraying at least 17 shots around the villa where they trapped Radmanovic in a toilet while his partner, Jazmyn Gourdeas, cowered underneath the bed covers.

Despite the number of shots, the attackers failed to kill Ghanim, who is in hospital with several wounds.

In Bali, guns are rare in the community and illegal possession is heavily punished. But the sheer number of what the Balinese call “bule-bule” (whites) arriving in recent years has altered parts of the holiday island almost beyond recognition.

One long-term resident born in Australia, and another Australian businessman involved in the Bali tourist industry, both point to the influx of Russians and Ukrainians since the Russian-Ukraine war began.

Some of the Russians and Ukrainian arrivals are shadowy people with the contacts, the confidence and the cash to evade the military draft in their own countries by lying low in Bali for as long as it takes — or as long as local officials tolerate them.

The Canggu district north of Kuta has been dubbed “Little Moscow,” although some Russians have been quietly squeezed out by the government lately because of resentment at the way they ride roughshod over planning, employment and taxation laws.

Scenic Kuta Beach, where you’re just as likely to run into a man with a neck tattoo as a cocktail.

Their shared desire to dodge being drafted to fight in the Ukraine war has not improved relations between Russians and Ukrainians in Bali.

Recently the Russian “mob” abducted and tortured a Ukrainian entrepreneur in Bali to force him to reveal passwords for his cryptocurrency stash, robbing him of huge sums.

Russian mobsters have been around for years in Indonesia but have tended to use bribery and corruption to curry influence with local powerbrokers to exploit timber contracts — or to build more of the slipshod developments now seen as a liability by locals and long-term residents who mourn the vanishing Bali of the past.

Then there are the Australians. There was a time when half the 1.4 million Aussies who visited Bali each year were from Perth, which shares a time zone and relatively short flight times. Now, most from other Australian states — and, according to Bali sources, among them is a highly undesirable group.

“I had a meeting with an Aussie (about a business proposition) the other day and honestly thought I was talking to a bikie,” says a successful Melbourne businessman who has been involved in hospitality in Bali for many years.

“I wished him luck and left him to it.”

He said it was likely that those behind the shooting last Saturday would fit in with a floating population of others who look much like them.

“There are plenty of them and they look the same, mostly heavily tattooed,” says the businessman.

Place like Kuta almost resemble an Australian suburb.

The old “hippy trail” types have largely been infiltrated and displaced by a tougher crew.

“For years people have run to Bali to get off the grid and live somewhere where they can colour outside the lines,” says the businessman.

“A lot of them are big drinkers, alcoholics who go hard every day, using cheap nannies to look after their kids.”

At one end of the scale, their misbehaviour runs to all-day parties where people do stupid things like jump off roofs into swimming pools, cause trouble in bars and ride around recklessly on motor scooters without helmets.

There are so many Australians with neck tattoos that it is like a self-imposed identifying device, he says.

Finns club at Canggu, which is promoted as “the world’s best adults only beach club,” won’t serve anyone with neck tattoos, as management finds it the easy way to screen out undesirables and potentially violent criminals.

In the district people call “Little Moscow,” Russian voices tend to dominate the streets and cafes and bars.

But elsewhere in Kuta and Canggu “it’s like an Australian suburb,” says the Australian-born resident who has lived and worked at Ubud most of his adult life and plans to stay on despite the toughening of laws belatedly imposed to curb the latest influx of outsiders.

He is part of the old guard who wishes the mobsters and wannabe gunmen would leave Bali in peace.

The likely fate of the three arrested Australians might help his cause.