Deadline: The Mongols bikie gang has fractured but their former members are living to tell the tale

Former Mongols bikies have found themselves on the wrong end of a gun but despite being shot up to eight times they’ve bounced back.

The former Mongols who are made of tough stuff.

The Mongols bikie gang might have fractured in recent months but those associated with it over the past decade appear to have tremendous powers of recovery.

Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim recently became the latest in a long line of former and current members who have found themselves on the wrong end of a gun since 2011.

Abdulrahim’s own photographic evidence of his wounds after a funeral ambush show just how lucky he was to survive.

Riddled with holes, he drove himself to a local police station after being jumped as he sat in his car at a cousin’s farewell.

He is said to be tracking well in his recuperation.

Sam Abdulramin is still in hospital recovering from the attempt on his life.

The bullet holes that prove how lucky The Punisher was to survive.

Abdulrahim’s close mate, the formidable Mark Balsillie, is another to have left the gang in recent times.

In 2017, Balsillie was attacked somewhere in inner-Melbourne and shot eight times in an attack which might well have ended his life.

The good mail is that the gunman was his former Comanchero MC running mate Hasan Topal, who has wisely made himself scarce in recent times.

Toby Mitchell – who we must make abundantly clear is also no longer a Mongol – was famously ambushed outside the Bandido MC clubhouse in Weston St, Brunswick, in 2011.

Two years later, he was wounded again as gunfire erupted on a visit to the Diablos clubhouse in Melton.

Mark Balsillie survived being shot eight times.

Toby Mitchell has survived two shootings. Picture: David Crosling

In August, 2019, Rocco Curra was hit with a hail of bullets – including one in the brain – as he sat in a parked car late at night in Bourke St, Bulleen.

He also pulled through.

In 2020, Shane Bowden was wounded in a driveway shooting at his Epping home two weeks after being freed from jail.

Survival was only temporary for Bowden, who had days earlier been expelled from the Mongols.

Later in the same year, he was fatally wounded in a late-night hit outside his Gold Coast home.

Even the bloke who has emerged as a senior figure in Mongol operations following April’s hostile takeover has some experience in the gangland ambush recovery process.

Years ago, Phillip Main was shot on the Gold Coast where he was, at the time, a leading light in the Finks MC.

A 2011 court hearing was told police visited him at his casualty ward bed where he declined to help and instead assaulted them for having the temerity to make inquiries.

He later refused to answer questions about the wounding in an Australian Crime Commission hearing.

Bikie’s strip a bad move

Mark Buddle is allegedly a transnational drug trafficker of vast wealth and influence in the world of organised crime.

He has, up until his recent arrest, lived a glamorous life in Europe, staying out of reach of police who want him over the 2010 Sydney murder of security guard Gary Allibon.

The Comanchero strongman was never far from the minds of our authorities and probably hasn’t been forgotten by some who frequent our King St strip club precinct, either.

It was little over a decade ago, years before he attained his current wealth and power, that Buddle was involved in a particularly vicious assault at the Spearmint Rhino venue.

Mark Buddle was easy to identify after he ripped off his shirt.

In 2011, he and clubmates jumped a group of concreters having a Christmas shindig at the club.

Buddle stomped on the chest of one victim and his mate, David Gavelan, cracked someone over the head with a bottle.

He wound up being identified from CCTV and charged because his name was tattooed across his chest.

The distinctive ink was conveniently revealed for investigators when he ripped his shirt off as the nudie bar violence exploded.

Even a reference from boxing legend Johnny Lewis could not save Buddle from a stint in prison.

The court heard he wanted to turn his life around and become a law-abiding member of society.

Grief for chief brief thief

The deviants once known as snowdroppers are no joke because of their tendency to go on to worse things.

Detectives from Darebin crime investigation unit are looking for victims of one of our city’s most prolific such offenders after searching a Reservoir house last week.

Inside they found about 5000 items of women’s clothing, mostly what a Victoria Police spokesman described as “intimates”.

Investigators are keen to talk to anyone in the Reservoir area who has had such garments stolen of late.

A Reservoir man, 34, has been charged with 10 offences, including stalking, theft, weapons breaches and trespass.

Two mail suspects

There was much excitement as two men were arrested in a quiet Glenroy street last week.

Was it perhaps related to one of the recent gangland shootings which have been troubling folk in the northern suburbs?

No was the answer.

It turned out the pair were burglars who had, among their booty, two cigar tins filled with stamps.

“They were well and truly licked under the letter of the law,” said a police source who should be detained under joke-labouring laws.

Long, long arm of the law

A story of persistence, and perhaps redemption, emerged last week when a man handed himself in over a 1993 hit-run at Prahran in which two police were badly injured.

The case never quite went away and reached a turning point when a police officer called Ashleigh Barrett this month phoned a man in Tasmania about what happened all those years ago.

Deadline has been told the same fellow arrived at Prahran police station days later, immaculately dressed and wanting to talk about the case.

Now aged 61, he has been charged over the same matter he dodged a court hearing for almost three decades ago.

The Arthur St smash, which left one cop unable to work again after being struck by a stolen vehicle, is said to have been something of a turning point for the driver.

We’ve been told that since that time he left for the Apple Isle and carved out a quiet life in the Hobart suburb of Oakdowns.