Dangerous movers and shakers of Melbourne’s north
Melbourne’s north has long been dogged by on-again, off-again gang conflicts, with drugs, greed and revenge the motive for these notorious movers and shakers.
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Melbourne’s north suburban gangland has long been a jungle full of dangerous movers and shakers.
The area has been dogged by various on-again, off-again conflicts for more than a decade, some of it generated by the drug trade, by greed or by plain revenge and hatred.
Some of the most prominent combatants have wound up dead, others in jail and a few have managed to flourish in a dog-eat-dog world where alliances can break and danger emerges with little warning.
Mark Buttler and Anthony Dowsley look at some of the major players.
George Marrogi
The only thing predictable about George Marrogi was that he was headed for a long stint in jail.
Marrogi, 32, who is known as Cross, was last year convicted of the 2016 murder of drug dealer Kadir Ors.
It took four trials for a jury to find him guilty but his long-term removal from the streets, specifically in Melbourne’s north, would have had many breathing easier.
Marrogi was a prolific triggerman who made money through drug trafficking.
He was rarely without a firearm nearby and graduated to murder when he shot Ors at a bus stop at Campbellfield Plaza in September, 2016.
His reputation as a wild man meant Marrogi has been a suspect in many crimes, including some he did not commit.
Even some of his contemporaries, who were connected criminals, were afraid of him.
One of them even described Marrogi as “nuts”.
Marrogi also seemed to have eyes and ears throughout the north.
A rival who visited a northern suburbs police station in the days after the Ors shooting was promptly threatened with an anonymous text.
“If you open your mouth to the cops or to anyone else we will kill (your sister) …”
Marrogi is believed to be a leading light in the Notorious Crime Family gang.
Nabil Maghnie
The Comanchero-linked strongman was shot dead at Epping in January, 2020, in an as-yet unsolved homicide.
It was third time unlucky for Maghnie, who had been shot twice previously but survived both attempts on his life.
One of those was in an ambush as he sat in his car in 2016.
Critically wounded, the man with the Mad Leb tattoo then drove himself to hospital for emergency surgery.
It’s unclear exactly what Maghnie got up to over the years but there is general agreement that it was plenty.
In the period before his death, he had been investigated in the double-fatal drive-by shooting at the Love Machine nightclub and the murder at Dandenong of underworld figure Mitat Rasimi.
His teenage son, Jacob Elliott, has been charged over the Love Machine shootings.
Maghnie, a heavy cocaine-user, infamously brawled with rivals at the Gotham City brothel and Crown casino.
He and a mate were investigated over the 2011 attempted hit on Bandido Toby Mitchell and, in the same period, the pair were arrested in a car outside Melbourne Town Hall.
There was suspicion they were en route to shoot Carlton Crew figure Mick Gatto.
Sam Abdulrahim
The kickboxer, nicknamed The Punisher, is involved with the Mongols outlaw motorcycle gang and was for some time a gangland target.
Abdulrahim – who did time for culpable driving after causing the death of an 88 year old woman while speeding in his ferrari in Reservoir – was sitting with Kadir Ors at a bus stop in September 2016 when George Marrogi arrived in a red Commodore and started shooting.
Ors died but Abdulrahim and another man, Alex Harouk, were able to escape unhurt.
Police subsequently took the extraordinary step of opposing his bail because of the risk to his safety.
Adult Parole Board lawyers argued he had been the intended target in two shootings and was a risk to the public while out of jail.
Abdulrahim was a mate of the late Nabil Maghnie and, at one stage, dated reality TV personality Jessika Power.
In 2015, Abdulrahim duked it out with fellow kickboxer Omar Bchinnati in an outlandish stoush inside the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court.
He now wants a payout from Victoria Police over his treatment during that confrontation.
Rami Margus
The gunman, drug dealer and kidnapper was once described as the “Veniamin of the North”.
Margus was jailed in 2020 over his involvement in a major heroin trafficking syndicate which entangled other prominent players in the north suburban MEOC sphere.
He was a suspect in numerous shootings before being arrested over the drug matter in 2014.
Margus once wounded a man at Justine Ave, Glenroy, because he believed the victim was a police informer.
He was later seen dumping spent and unspent ammo in a drain in the same suburb.
The 2010 fatal drive-by shooting of Saleh Dheibech is also suspected of being linked to the Baghdad-born Margus.
Dheibech was shot outside his Campbellfield auto workshop in a crime police suspect may have been linked to vehicle crime standover activity.
Margus was also investigated over the shooting of a Hells Angels associate in the period before his incarceration.
He is said to have been influential in mentoring and inciting younger offenders to commit high-level crimes.
Ahmed Al Hamza
A well-connected armed robber, drug dealer and shooting suspect, Al Hamza was last year acquitted by a Supreme Court jury of the 2017 murder of Anwar Teriaki.
Police had alleged he shot Teriaki at the front of a Roxburgh Park home after chasing the young drug dealer in local streets.
There was strong underworld speculation that Teriaki died on the orders of a jailed drug boss out to reassert his authority.
Al Hamza is regarded as smart and a keen student of police methodology.
He is a suspect in one unsolved shooting but has not always been on the right end of a gun.
In 2016, while enmeshed in the drug trade with older criminals, he was wounded outside the Al-Diwan cafe in Campbellfield.
Al Hamza has spent recent years in prison over his links to the 2018 heist on the O’Reilly’s Firearms store in Thornbury.
He and an associate were busted moving guns from the stick-up to his Audi vehicle, parked at his Docklands apartment.
Al Hamza is regarded as a formidable factor in the northern suburbs underworld.
Maytham Hamad
Co-accused in the Anwar Teriaki death case Hamad, 27, was eventually sentenced to 742 days jail on a charge of intentionally causing injury to the victim, after earlier being charged with statutory murder for a killing committed in the course of another violent crime.
A witness testified Hamad and Ahmed Al Hamza had tracked Teriaki in the period before his murder.
It had been alleged he later provided a script for another man to confess to the killing.
Hamad migrated to Australia from Iraq as a four-year-old and has a limited criminal history.
He was at Campbellfield Plaza the day Kadir Ors was murdered in 2016.
The Supreme Court heard it appeared Hamad chased the gunman through the streets in a white Jeep in the minutes after Ors was shot.
Hamad was reluctant to co-operate and prosecutors applied for him to be compulsorily questioned in a magistrates’ court.
Hasan Topal
An exiled gun-for-hire regarded as the loosest of cannons, Topal made a rapid ascension through Comanchero bikie ranks in 2016-2017, around the time he is suspected of carrying out a wave of shootings.
Among them were the bungled contract hits which claimed the lives of Muhammed Yucel at Keysborough and Zabi Ezedyar at Narre Warren.
The intended targets are believed to have been two Mongol-linked figures.
In the same period he also shot a former bikie mate, wounded two Bandidos as they crossed the Bolte Bridge and did a drive-by on a Richmond luxury vehicle hire business.
He was later jailed over a brutal internal Comanchero brawl at a Canberra strip club and got out of Australia soon after his term ended.
Topal is now living in Europe, far from the police and Melbourne gangland figures who would love to catch up with him.
But they are not his only problems.
Topal is believed to have been one of the proponents of the AN0M encrypted app which was adopted by Comancheros and other crime figures with disastrous consequences.
Mohammed Keshtiar
A MEOC mystery man who was the intended target of one of the 2017 killings suspected of being the handiwork of Hasan Topal.
Zabi Ezedyar, a 26-year-old plasterer, got out of his car and walked to the front door of Keshtiar’s Kurrajong Rd property.
He died in a hail of bullets, the likely victim of a mistaken identity blunder.
The volatility of the situation was such that police immediately arrested Keshtiar for breaching his bail conditions.
Little has been publicly heard of Keshtiar, also known as Afghan Ali, in recent years.
But in the period prior to the shooting, he was regarded as a key figure for the expansionist Mongols bikie outfit.
He was suspected of actively recruiting members while doing a prison term.
This posed a threat to the rival Comanchero gang’s heavy influence in Melbourne’s drug trade.
Keshtiar has done prison time for two attempted murders and a separate shooting.
Mohammed Oueida
No one tried to emulate Tony Mokbel quite like Mohammed Oueida did.
Oueida, 46, saw himself as a businessman, whether those operations were legitimate or not, and also liked the finer things in life.
Mokbel, a Lebanese Christian, warmed to Oueida, a Lebanese Muslim, who identified him as a smooth operator.
They flaunted their wealth by investing in property and turned up to meetings in a Ferrari.
Oueida was a high flyer, both figuratively and literally.
On the weekends he flew his own private plane after earning his pilot’s licence. He might have even used the private eight-hole golf course and tennis court on his $2.8m Greenvale property as a visual marker.
Even in court his own lawyer would call him a ‘’terrible show-off’’’ while a prosecutor added his lifestyle was ‘’beyond extravagant’’.
Oueida paid for his luxurious lifestyle while also spiriting away $6m in a Swiss bank account.
In 2006, Mokbel, fled a trial while facing charges for cocaine importation. After hiding out in Bonnie Doon he travelled across the Nullarbor, a trip Oueida is familiar with.
To escape the country, Mokbel boarded a yacht named the Edwena, which he had refurbished with a gold toilet, and headed for Greece.
Five years later Oueida also needed to make a quick getaway.
Instead of a yacht, Oueida headed for Essendon Airport where he tried to fire up his light plane.
Police were on to it and he was arrested before he got near his plane or the tarmac.
There are differences between Mokbel and Ouieda, though.
Oueida has been stood over, kidnapped and shot outside a mosque.
He’s also had a number of wives, at last count four.
Omar Tiba
Tiba knew where to find powerful rival Mohammed Oueida to shoot him.
“Run you bastard son of a bitch” he yelled at Oueida as he ran towards a Coburg mosque for cover in 2017 after plugging him with a bullet in the guts.
The April shooting was over a drug debt, but also revenge.
Tiba, 35, had plenty of reasons to feel angry.
In an earlier incident in January in the popular Campbellfield Plaza, the Coolaroo resident had part of his penis shot off.
The gunman was an associate of Oueida.
The Supreme Court in 2021 was told Tiba, who was a passenger in a car driven by his brother Osman, acted impulsively when he fired upon Oueida.
The judge, however, wasn’t buying it, saying the attack on Oueida was premeditated and that Tiba showed no remorse.
“I am far from satisfied the thought only entered your head when your brother drew up alongside him,” Justice Christopher Beale said.
Tiba was described by his lawyer as a drug addict who was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder after his own shooting in 2017.
The Tibas are considered one of the north’s most prolific crime families, along with the Haddaras, Kheirs and Chaouks.
Those families, along with others, have contributed to a wave of gun violence throughout the northern suburbs.
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