Prison walls no barrier to apex inmates amassing power and wealth

For the system’s apex inmates prison walls are no barrier to the accumulation of money and power, with some well-connected prisoners able to make the best of a bad situation.

For many, prison life is a mental and physical battle for survival.

But a small, well-connected element has over many years been able to make the best of what is a bad situation.

For the system’s apex inmates, prison walls are no barrier to the accumulation of money and power.

History has for decades shown that the business of crime can be done and, sometimes, positively flourish, from the big house.

And it doesn’t necessarily impede their ability to exert influence beyond the walls.

Big hitters

Inmates with long reach have been a factor in a number of Victorian gangland homicides in the past decade.

One victim was a young man suspected by a jailed gangland boss of trying to play both sides in conflict with a bitter enemy.

Another involved the murder allegedly commissioned by a crime lord who wanted to reassert his authority in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.

There is a long list of major organised crime figures who have finished a sentence in a stronger position than when they started it.

Kazem Hamad went inside for high-level heroin trafficking and was immediately deported to Iraq after walking out in mid-2023

By then, Hamad had made himself, arguably, the most influential figure in Melbourne’s underworld.

Kazem Hamad built up his power base while behind bars for heroin trafficking.

His allegiances and power base, some built in jail, were such that he was able to aggressively attack dominant players in the city’s lucrative illicit tobacco trade.

Hamad’s network of connections allowed him to call on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of soldiers to carry out arson attacks and standover work on smoke shops.

His bitter enemy George Marrogi, spent years pulling levers and making money from a cell where he set up the once-powerful Notorious Crime Family gang.

Marrogi, locked up for the 2016 murder of crime figure Kadir Ors, used a link to the outside to orchestrate massive drug shipments, while fantasising that he would one day escape.

Much of his influence had ebbed away in recent years after a massive police operation which also ensnared his girlfriend and accomplice Antonietta Mannella, resulted in the charging of many of his crew and led to the seizure of NCF’s assets.

The Daily Telegraph revealed last year that Talal Alameddine was the most powerful inmate in the NSW system.

George Marrogi is behind bars for the murder of crime figure Kadir Ors.

Support from the wider Muslim prison population allowed him to ascend to the top in recent years.

His family remains a dominant NSW underworld force on the outside.

In 2018, Alameddine went head-to-head with another jailhouse heavy, Brothers 4 Life gang boss Bassam Hamzy.

Though Hamzy’s clout is said to have diminished in recent years, he is suspected of having ordered major crimes from the most secure parts of the state’s correctional sector.

A succession or seized mobile phones which were suspected of being linked to him are believed to have been instrumental in his capacity to get things done beyond his highly scrutinised world.

Senior Victorian organised crime figure Rocco Arico is another who amassed power and wealth while in custody.

He went inside over a 2000 road rage shooting aged in his early 20s and, by the time he was released, controlled a fortune estimated at $10m.

Arico – who is nearing the end of another sentence – remains a formidable player in the system and is taken on by no one.

“He’s always had control in jail. Jail is part of his job,” a former prisoner said.

Senior Victorian organised crime figure Rocco Arico. Picture: David Crosling

Another of the city’s big gangland players, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was said to have virtually run a maximum-security prison where his word was law a decade ago.

His henchmen were responsible for brutal assaults as he controlled the drug trade at the facility and dictated business outside.

The late Mohammed “Afghan Ali” Keshtiar was a violent and frightening prospect long before he was locked up over a shooting.

He exercised enormous clout in prison where he reportedly threw himself into recruitment work for the Mongols bikie gang and controlled large numbers of inmates.

Before Melbourne’s gangland wars, Carl Williams did a short stretch on remand for drug trafficking.

He did not waste it.

By the time Williams came out, he had cemented a strong relationship with drug lord Tony Mokbel and a gangland hit man who would later be put to work eliminating enemies.

The man who killed Williams in 2010, Matthew Charles Johnson, is a powerful figure capable of pulling strings on the outside.

He founded the feared Prisoners of War gang, which has for two decades been responsible for bashings and standover work in jail.

Police suspect it doesn’t end there.

When the homes of Williams’ family members were shot at and targeted with firebombings in 2015, police believe it was Johnson who ordered PoW members Rodney Phillips and Sam Liszczak to do the work.