Deadline: More shots fired in Melbourne gangland’s social-media war

Melbourne’s gangsters are an innovative bunch, they don’t just rely on bullets, knives and fists to punish their enemies.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest crime buzz.

A.I. going gangbusters

Melbourne’s gangland phony wars have fired up yet again.

In the latest development, artificial intelligence has been used to insert one of Melbourne’s biggest gangland names into a scene from the 2013 Hollywood film, This is the End.

The original also had some big names, including Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, James Franco and Channing Tatum, who appeared as a trouserless gimp on the end of a lead held by Danny McBride’s cannibal leader character.

In the fresh local version, the face of a Melbourne organised crime figure we’ve chosen not to name has been inserted into the naked gimp part.

He is threatened with some, ahem, rough treatment, and subjected to a number of nasty allegations, levelled using McBride’s voice.

The snippet from This is the End.

We revealed last month that someone had produced a fake news report using the voice of a Channel 7 reporter, Cassie Zervos, to roll out some disturbing false claims against two chaps who have clearly upset someone’s apple cart.

If Deadline enjoyed a bet, we’d wager that the latest production and the faked Zervos report came from the camp of exiled underworld wildman Kazem Hamad.

Hamad was some time earlier on the receiving end of the AI revolution when a taped call to one of his foes was reproduced, complete with fake video of him voicing some very menacing recorded comments.

It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, as the saying goes. Don’t rule out the possibility this could all go pear-shaped down the track.

Giving Melbourne the bird

There was plenty of outrage recently when Pam the Bird graffiti appeared on the face of the historic clock above Flinders St railway station.

It was the most visible example yet of a symbol which Melburnians — especially those in the west — have seen with increasing frequency for years.

Graffiti covers one of the Flinders Street station clocks. Picture: Ian Currie

Whoever does the Pams, and we assume there is more than one person, have sprayed hundreds, maybe thousands of them round the place.

They’re everywhere from freeway gantries to railway sidings, buildings to small cafe barriers.

Many people wonder how certain graffiti “artists” can cover Melbourne with their highly distinctive work and never seem to come unstuck.

Perhaps it’s apathy or some Banksy-style fantasy about this stuff enhancing the city that stops random vandalism being viewed as an act of criminal damage.

Two of the biggest graffitists are whoever creates the Pams — and someone called Lush.

A Deadline spy recently noticed the two had come together, striking on a big bare wall at Williamstown.

Two of Melbourne’s most prolific vandals teamed up to tag this Williamstown building.

We’ll stay here, yasiree!

It emerged last week that a young bloke called Yasir Al-Qassim had been charged over a Christmas-time gun incident in the northern suburbs.

Shots were fired at the Fawkner home of the parents of gangland figure Mohammed Oueida, who is on remand in Perth on drug charges.

Mr Al-Qassim, 20, walked free from court last year after prosecutors dropped attempted murder charges over the 2022 shooting at Fawkner Cemetery of Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim.

It left us pondering what had happened with two young blokes suspected of being directly involved in the Abdulrahim ambush.

They headed for Dubai in the aftermath of the bungled attempted hit which left Abdulrahim alive, albeit with a startling number of holes in his torso.

Word is they haven’t returned and won’t be any time soon.

Here I am

Police stations should be top of the list of places to avoid when you’re wanted over a robbery.

That’s exactly where an (alleged) bandit slipped up after robbing a Donvale store on Friday, reportedly making threats to force frightened staff to hand over cash.

Two days later, the same guy (or his body double) was out for an early Sunday stroll on a route which took him past Doncaster police station.

Unfortunately for him, he was instantly recognised and arrested.

The 35-year-old from no fixed address was charged by Manningham CIU officers with robbery, making threats to kill, making threats to injure and possession of a drug of dependence. If there were laws against stupidity, he’d be charged with that, too.

Suicide sniper: Someone’s friend, someone’s son

It is 40 years this month since a lonely youth with a rifle climbed high on the Chadstone shopping centre building and started shooting.

It was only a low-powered .22 rifle and the youngster wasn’t a good shot.

To be fair, the confused and depressed 18-year-old might not have wanted to hurt anyone except himself. But a then young reporter (now an old reporter compiling Deadline) didn’t know that at the time.

This reporter provided an even younger newspaper photographer, Wayne Ludbey, with a shoulder on which to lean his long lens to take long-range “shots” of the shooter.

Ludbey, who would years later shoot the iconic image of footballer Nicky Winmar lifting his jumper and pointing at himself, took several photographs during a strange and sad afternoon that included the shooter reading from a book of Shakespeare (and George Orwell’s Down And Out in Paris and London) before calmly killing himself.

His name was Dean Wright and if his brain hadn’t snapped on that chilly winter day, he might today have been a vague and kindly grandfather, instead of a tragic footnote to Melbourne law enforcement history remembered by nobody except those who loved him.

Like some more sinister figures of that era, such as the Queen St killer Frank Vitkovic, Dean Wright was able to buy a firearm all too easily. The day before the Chadstone incident, he had wandered into a Clayton store and bought a .22 Sterling bolt-action rifle with telescopic sight for $128. He had a shooter’s licence he’d obtained just days earlier.

He was, a shop assistant would recall, a scruffy-looking figure with messy dark hair and a vague manner.

The next night, watching television, the salesman recognised the rifle being carried by a detective on the evening news.

So who was Dean Wright? He was highly intelligent and exceptionally well-read for his age. He believed in Karl Marx’s teachings on the values and goals of socialism and feared that the Cold War was moving the world towards a nuclear Armageddon. As can happen with introverted people who become obsessed with an idea, or an ideology, he decided on one mad act.

Dean was disturbed but, in the end, he was too nice to kill anyone. Over several hours he broke a shop window or two with the rifle and put a hole in a car windscreen before eventually turning the gun on himself.

“As far as I’m concerned,” a female friend of the dead youth later told a reporter, “Dean was far too intelligent for our group. He should have finished HSC and gone on to university and met people who were of the same intelligence as he was.” She and his teachers had tried to persuade him to stay at school but he had left in the first term of Year 12, claiming it was too easy.

Three weeks before he ended his life, the lonely boy who read literature had finished a casual job delivering telephone books.