Deadline: Why Melbourne gangsters are avoiding Instagram, TikTok

In a time when Melbourne gangsters are being shot dead at cafes and outside gyms, there’s no point making the task easier for a man with a gun by bragging about your life on TikTok or Insta.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Under the radar, prudence rules

Some big underworld players are suspecting it’s time to keep a low profile in what is one of the Melbourne gangland’s most volatile periods.

Players who were previously prominent on social media now prefer to keep their heads below the parapet as tobacco war friction and various other disputes ratchet up the danger.

Others are making big changes to their daily routines to be on the safe (and alive) side.

Deadline has been told that more than one fearsome figure has been sleeping away from home to stay out of the crosshairs, knowing there are people of bad character who’d like to do them terminal harm.

Talk’s cheap but the contracts aren’t. There is persistent speculation about big money being available for those willing to put in the work to make bad things happen to bad people.

For prospective targets, and there are plenty of them, there’s no point making the task easier for a man with a gun by blabbing on TikTok or Insta about a favourite gym, restaurant or latest distinctive set of wheels.

After some fellow travellers went down for the permanent count last year, no one could blame various individuals for this newfound prudence.

The likes of Mohammed Keshtiar and Gavin Preston were hardly small fry but both were taken out in a deadly period which also claimed Robert Issa.

One of Gavin Preston’s (second from left) final social media posts days before he was gunned down at a Keilor cafe.

The spate of deaths has slowed but the firebombings of tobacco shops and assets owned by the illicit industry’s players have not.

Last week, evidence emerged that one of the state’s most notorious loose cannon crime families has signed up as combatants.

Things aren’t expected to cool off any time soon, as exiled gangland identity Kazem Hamad continues to reshape the status quo from abroad.

Organised crime police believe Hamad will keep right on pulling the strings from his Middle-Eastern base and that has no shortage of willing helpers on call. He believes there is safety in numbers — as in the huge number of kilometres between Melbourne and the Middle East, about 12,500 of them.

One of Hamad’s alleged assistants, Majid Alibadi, recently rode from the Melbourne Assessment Prison in a Rolls-Royce after being granted bail.

Just days later, by sheer coincidence, the Furlan Club at Thornbury and the Emerald Reception Centre at Thomastown went up in flames.

The Furlan Club was to have held a boxing event involving prominent underworld figure Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim the following weekend.

Mohammed Keshtiar’s killers knew his routine when they ambushed him outside a South Yarra gym. Picture: Luis Enrique Ascui

The motive for the Emerald fire is unclear but odds-on to be something to do with an upcoming function someone wanted to see sabotaged.

Tobacco war attacks have evolved somewhat in recent months. The conflict started off last year with the firebombing of tobacconists, mostly linked to Fadi Haddara and others connected to Abdulrahim.

It then pivoted to damaging the business interests of key players, including restaurants, fitness centres, shops and cafes.

More recently there have been a number of attacks centred on timing, calculated to cause maximum disruption to an upcoming event.

The sad by-product of this is the collateral damage inflicted on innocent parties, like the blameless community members who run the Furlan Club.

The latest innocent victims were a family who own a western suburbs hardware severely damaged in a firebombing directed at a neighbouring tobacco outlet.

A grilling for Graham

Most of us remember Graham Ashton as the former Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police.

But those who really know the man are aware he’s a rabidly competitive barbecue enthusiast, as keen on cooking a good hunk of meat as he was about locking up crooks.

The Brisket Bros Facebook site recently showed the extent of the Ashton passion in its coverage of the Steak Cookoff Association finals at Fort Worth in Texas.

Taking pride of place on their page was our former top cop chugging down a beer and looking right at home at the competition, in which he was reportedly a section finalist.

It would be tempting to dub Big Graham the BBQ King but that title was taken long ago by another noted figure known in Melbourne’s law and order scene — career criminal Alex Tsakmakis, who in 1984 reacted badly to taunts from loathed killer Barry Quinn and launched a fiery attack in the old Pentridge Prison.

Tsakmakis doused Quinn with model aeroplane glue before setting him alight, which is a well-known fact. Not so well-known is that Graham Ashton was born and bred to braise and broil bulk beef in the mild west. His dear old dad was an Adelaide butcher. Allegedly.

Graham Ashton (centre) living it up in a Fort Worth barbecue joint.

Street legal

Marcus Denning is a lawyer who doesn’t muck around.

He recently walked out of his St Kilda office and came across a bloke in handcuffs waiting to be transported to a police station.

The MK Law legal eagle was immediately appointed the detained man’s lawyer and given instructions, our colleague Miles Proust tells us.

It seems there had been some kind of fracas in the street which had left a local fellow in cardiac arrest.

Denning’s high-quality legal representation has become even more vital to the man in the cuffs since then because things took an even more serious turn when the injured party later died.

It is not yet known whether charges will be upgraded.

Fashion police

Horsham cops pulled the right rein when they intercepted a ute near the town last Friday.

The Ford Ranger was being driven erratically on Stawell Rd when officers decided to have a word to the driver, who turned out to be wanted for break-ins on the Mornington Peninsula.

Inside, they found designer clothes from the high-end Rebecca Vallance label with a total value of $60,000.

The threads had allegedly been stolen in a burglary at the company’s High St, Armadale store earlier in the week.

Also on board the Ford was methamphetamine and 1-4 butanediol, an industrial solvent sold as GHB by reptile drug dealers.

A 29-year-old Frankston man has been charged with burglary, theft and drug offences and a Frankston woman, 35, faces counts of drug possession, handling stolen goods and driving offences.

There are those who believe the fancy clothing would not have been destined for sale in little ol’ Horsham.

“Clearly, these people must have been passing through,” one hard marker from further down the Western Highway remarked last week. People can be so cruel.