Deadline: Bra Boy proves fame is best passport in Covid world

How do you get to fly out of Australia in these troubled Covid times? Be famous, or at least infamous. Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Koby Abberton is a contestant on the latest season of SAS Australia.

Melbourne’s top crime writers, Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule, with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

BRA BOY GETS FREE PASS

Fame has again proved the best passport in these troubled Covid days.

“Bra Boys” gang member Koby Abberton, a man with a colourful history, has managed to achieve what many others have been unable to do in the past 18 months: he has flown in and out of Australia.

Never mind that he has previously been convicted in New South Wales for perverting the course of justice in a murder inquiry and was locked up in Hawaii for assaulting a cop.

Abberton’s reason was to provide vital entertainment to the masses by appearing in Channel 7’s SAS Australia.

Koby Abberton at Maroubra Beach. Picture: Craig Wilson

Abberton is led out of a Hawaiian court after brawling with an off-duty police officer outside a Honolulu restaurant.

Last week, he was busy on Instagram back in his adopted home of Bali, living his best lockdown-free life and telling his 64,000 followers all about it.

Abberton has in recent times also posted a series of anti-government, anti-lockdown and anti-police posts critical of Australian authorities.

He’s labelled Australian police “corrupt” and “out-of-hand” after a series of violent anti-lockdown protests last weekend.

The Bra Boys, who originated in the Sydney suburb of Maroubra, have a fearsome reputation for enforcing their will with violence on the streets and in the surf.

Their defacing of a murder victim’s home on the west coast of South Australia some years ago left a sour taste in many mouths out that way.

Back in July, there was an outcry about British far-right commentator Katie Hopkins being allowed into Australia to film Big Brother with Seven.

She fouled her own nest by breaching Covid rules and was deported.

HOW A DIRTY, ROTTEN RAT SLUGGED

A dedicated reader (and mother of a former Herald Sun crime hound) can’t help thinking that the Slug Gate scandal at I Cook Foods reminds her of something.

It’s all coming back …

Her late husband was once involved in a legal case in a South Gippsland town where a food business (possibly a bakery) was under attack from the local council.

Sound familiar?

A picture of the slug allegedly found during a health inspection at I Cook.

Turns out that our source’s husband was a sleuth, as well as a lawyer, and took a long, hard look at the case and the people involved. He formed the view that the female health inspector who claimed to have found evidence of dirty premises had, in fact, set up the owner.

Apparently the beak agreed, because the case was dismissed and the Shire concerned had to pay costs, if not damages.

If our source’s memory is correct, the health inspector claimed to have found a dead moth and three pieces of rat manure. Perhaps the magistrate was sceptical about this detail, suspecting that real rats running around in a bakery would leave more evidence than that.

Three lonely vermin droppings are about as convincing as one lonely slug.

Meanwhile, the slug saga has hit the road.

A truck bearing a billboard with pictures of a slug and various slogans is out and about offering the public a chance to “share a selfie with the slug”.

A SHEIKHY CEASEFIRE

One of history’s less successful mediation sessions had its postscript last week when crime figure Omar Tiba faced court.

On January 17, 2017, a sheik was called in to help members of the Tiba family thrash out some financial differences with Middle-Eastern organised crime identity Mohammed Oueida.

Things didn’t exactly go to plan.

By the end of the evening, Omar Tiba had been shot at Campbellfield in an attack he blamed on Oueida.

It was Oueida’s turn in April when he was shot by Tiba outside a Coburg mosque in an attack that could easily have killed him.

The gunman hung from the passenger window shouting “run you bastard son of a bitch” in an underworld version of a Merv Hughes send-off.

Tiba, a member of one of Melbourne’s more colourful families, was last week sentenced to a maximum seven and-a-half years in jail for the mosque shooting.

Oueida is believed to be living the good life in warmer foreign climes.

AXEL’S AXLES OUTSTAY WELCOME

Those who love both movies and poring over court lists would have noticed a familiar name last week.

Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley in the hit ’80s movie Beverly Hills Cop.

Among those to appear before Melbourne Magistrates’ Court was a chap called Axel Foley.

Fans of 1980s cinema will remember this as the unusual name of Eddie Murphy’s detective character in Beverly Hills Cop.

The Melbourne Axel is only marginally on the opposite side of Murphy’s LA lawman version. Further checks show that the local namesake was in court merely to pay his debt to society for a carparking matter.

Does this mean he should spell his name Axle? And does he have a sister named Beverly?

So many questions.

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GUNPLAY IN THE SUBURBS

What sort of idiot tests a bulletproof vest — any bulletproof vest, let alone one bought online from China — by getting someone to shoot at them?

The word is that’s exactly what happened in a backyard in a certain suburb not long ago.

The offending article was bought online from the sort of people who sell you a set of ‘Ping’ golf clubs for $299.

“Buyer beware” takes on a whole new meaning when you’re buying body armour.

Someone who could do with a proper bulletproof vest, the sort that stops bullets, is the small business type in the northern suburbs who had his storefront decorated with bullet holes recently.

That was how he found out that disrespecting women can have serious consequences in these enlightened times.

Social media has proved a formidable weapon against blokes who put a hole in their manners in most social circles.

But in Melbourne’s north, feedback can sometimes come from the barrel of a gun.

The target of criticism might be keeping his crude comments to himself after someone, perhaps a relative of the offended party, did a spot of drive-by attitude therapy.