Housam ‘Sam’ Zayat slain 20 years ago in Tarneit paddock

By the time Housam Zayat came face-to-face with a shotgun in a deserted Tarneit field, he had earned a reputation as a thug for dangling a man out a window and menacing a child with a gun.

Housam Zayat met his end in a Tarneit paddock in September 2003.

Housam “Sam” Zayat was a man who played hardball.

He and feared Bulgarian-born underworld figure Nik Radev once dangled an associate from the seventh storey of the Stamford Plaza Hotel.

It was a literal shakedown aimed at extracting $120,000 from the terrified extortion victim, Sedat Ceylan.

Zayat was a violent career criminal with more than 100 offences running all the way up to attempted murder, a man heavily enmeshed in Melbourne’s drug trade.

It is 20 years next week since he was shot dead in a lonely expanse of paddocks at Tarneit, on the western edge of Melbourne.

Zayat was not one of the casualties of the main game in the conflict of the time between Carl Williams and the diminished forces of those aligned to the opposing Moran family.

But the world he operated in was no less treacherous.

Housam Zayat was a thug who played hard ball.

Housam Zayat’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery.

The 32-year-old did a lot of work with Radev, business which included drug trafficking and heavy standover activity occasionally involving the torture of victims.

The pair were once charged over a 1999 aggravated burglary in which a five-year-old girl was menaced with a pistol.

Her 71-year-old grandfather was pistol-whipped during the same terrifying episode in suburban Melbourne.

Four years earlier, Zayat was charged in a homicide investigation related to the death in Footscray of his lover, Ann Williams.

He was found not guilty of murder but convicted on a charge of the attempted murder of her 16-year-old son.

The activities of Zayat and his mate carried a degree of risk and, in April, 2003, Radev was murdered in Coburg.

He had become too big for his boots and was shot dead by gangland assassin Andrew Veniamin on the orders of Williams after standing over one of that crew’s best drug cooks.

In the same period, another associate, western suburbs drug dealer Mark Mallia, was murdered.

Mark Mallia, an associated of Zayat, suffered the same grim fate at the hands of Williams.

Nik Radev (above) and Zayat once dangled a man from the window of Stamford Plaza Hotel.

Mallia was tortured, murdered and bis body burnt before being dumped in a wheelie bin in a drain at West Sunshine.

It is unclear whether those deaths left Zayat vulnerable to what happened next.

He had become involved in a $200,000 dispute over a nightclub and, as was sometimes the case in those days, a meeting was convened in the middle of the night in what was then still the semirural fringe.

Zayat travelled there with Ali Aydin, a corrupt law firm articled clerk whose legal expertise had been useful to Radev and his ilk.

Aydin had once tried to bribe an organised crime detective to drop a case against Zayat, an offer accompanied by threats of setting Radev loose on the cop.

Zayat and Aydin’s rendezvous at Tarneit was to be with Nick Ibrahim, another formidable organised crime figure.

It is not clear how far negotiations got but they had clearly reached an impasse by the time Ibrahim produced a shotgun and blasted Zayat with five rounds of 12-gauge SG ammunition.

The panic-stricken Aydin reversed their car into a tree in his haste to escape Ibrahim who, he would later tell police, had smashed the windscreen with the butt of the weapon.

Aydin bolted through the fields and flagged down strangers who drove him to a police station.

He would later be sentenced to two months in jail for refusing to testify against Ibrahim about what had happened to his friend.

That was not to be Aydin’s last brush with the law.

Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to involvement in a high-level heroin-trafficking ring operated in the northern suburbs by heavy Middle-eastern crime figures.