Someone wants underworld bikie boss Jay Malkoun dead — but who?
Bikie boss Amad Jay Malkoun’s Mercedes erupted into a fireball when he turned the key. The Comanchero heavyweight has many friends and foes across the globe — which one of them wanted him dead?
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Amad “Jay’’ Malkoun got out of prison and got into a yellow Lamborghini bearing the number plate ‘’EASY10’’.
The winged doors made him feel like he could fly — he was still young and had earned his stripes taking the rap over a multimillion-dollar heroin bust for those higher up the chain.
It hadn’t taken long for Malkoun to return to the high life.
But for such a smooth operator, it was curious he would tell young women he liked the look of that he was a chicken farmer.
Almost 20 years later, as the 56-year-old went to Mega Gym in the Greek seaside suburb of Glyfada, near his penthouse apartment, his chickens came home to roost.
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It was another luxury car, a Mercedes, he was getting into when the explosive device stuck to it was detonated — the fireball remarkably killing no one, but leaving Malkoun with severe burns to his arms and legs.
It is stating the obvious that someone wanted the savvy underworld figure, a one-time world champion kickboxer, gone.
The former boss of Victoria’s Comanchero bikie gang has friends and foes across the globe. He can flick between society’s establishment and its less savoury types with ease, but he has learned the hard way that he can trust few of them.
In February 1988, a young Amad, along with his brother Elie, was among a 16-man syndicate charged with large-scale heroin trafficking. At the time, the Melbourne-to-Perth operation was the biggest bust of its kind.
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The pair were sentenced to a maximum 18 years behind bars.
Behind the sting was criminal associate, Rajacic, who himself had been arrested and charged with trafficking. To save his own skin, Rajacic undertook a “number of operations under the surveillance of the police’’, recording conversations on major drug deals.
His biggest scalps were the Malkoun brothers, who were young but had climbed on to the ‘’bottom rung of the top tier’’ of this drug cartel.
They were buying heroin in the pounds and supplying purchasers below them in the “middle tier’’. It amounted to trafficking heroin in the millions of dollars — $5.5 million was the official figure.
Amad would use his time in Pentridge to build his network. He even spent time with Gregory David Roberts, who would author the worldwide bestseller, Shantaram — the story of a convicted bank robber and heroin addict who flees to a tumultuous life in India.
Legend has it that Roberts was the best man at Malkoun’s lavish wedding reception at Crown Casino and gave a cracking speech about their time together in the clink.
Before he was stung, Amad “Jay’’ Malkoun was running a nightclub in Perth with another brother. But he would stay at his parents’ house in Reservoir, then a strugglers’ suburb in Melbourne’s north, when he returned home for “business’’.
The Lebanese immigrant family were highly religious, with framed pictures of Jesus adorning the walls.
The tall and swarthy Malkoun never had any trouble attracting women, including a relationship with a young aspiring Australian actor who went on to become a Hollywood starlet.
By 1987, Malkoun owned a property in Wandong, 50km up the Hume Highway, where he left a pound of heroin for the man who would bring him and his brother down within months.
Malkoun collected $85,000 for the heroin — just one of many transactions — and, given the evidence, the Malkoun brothers pleaded guilty.
A Pentridge Prison chaplain would tell a court of “Amad’s contrition and his desire for reform’’.
By 2010-11 — years after he walked out of jail and into that yellow Lamborghini — Malkoun was the most powerful outlaw bikie in the state.
It was an odd fit.
He didn’t look like a bikie and didn’t come across as menacing.
Anti-bikie police officer, Wayne Cheesman, saw the other side of Malkoun during one conversation.
Malkoun, showing the imposing detective through his South Melbourne clubhouse, complete with snakepit and stripper pole, dropped into conversation that his club would co-operate with him when tensions needed to be soothed, but he warned that if the Comancheros were harassed, “your guys will be murdered’’.
The smooth, approachable Malkoun was testing the mettle of his new nemesis.
The softly spoken Cheesman reacted with a calmness that was chilling: “What will be, will be,’’ he dryly replied.
When crossed, however, Malkoun could be extremely volatile.
It was another side to the man who had married well — wedding a private school-educated girl from Sydney with model good looks and social graces. .
The Malkouns lived in a penthouse next to police headquarters in Flinders St, with the Maserati parked next to the Harley Davidson.
They owned Arabian horses for the property they had at Donnybrook and on wintry weekends, headed for the mountains in the exclusive Dinner Plain area near the ski fields of Falls Creek.
Sitting in an Italian restaurant in South Yarra, a Bentley Breitling watch on his wrist, he was asked by the Herald Sun the secret of his success.
His answer was straight out of the gangster playbook, “good friends’’.
Those friends included his backers in the King St Spearmint Rhino strip club, which he owned but, because of his criminal history, could not be found on any of the company records.
There was myriad shell companies — including one that imported luxury vehicles.
His fortunes, for more than a decade, had him pegged as one of Australia’s most savvy underworld players.
Now the question is: who wanted Malkoun gone?
If police intelligence is correct, the self-assured Malkoun has been mixing with European gangsters since his sudden departure from Melbourne in 2013.
It is an allegation he refutes.
With his wife and children, he moved to Dubai, where he is rumoured to have mixed with the royal Al Maktoum family.
Eventually, his wife, Samantha, split from him amid rumours Malkoun had been enjoying the company of multiple Russian women, and returned to Australia.
Back home, however, there has been an escalating internal feud between “old school’’ and “new school’’ Comancheros about the direction of the club.
Tensions have led to shootings between the factions, with Malkoun understood to be firmly in the “old school’’ camp.
His influence, with large networks in Europe — were the gang has established chapters from Russia to Spain — is considerable.
Malkoun, however, has resisted a permanent return home.
His departure from Melbourne came after an undercover police operation into his activities was thwarted. There was innuendo Malkoun had been able to scupper the investigation through his deep contact book.
Intelligence would later emerge of a suspected worldwide gun smuggling operation.
According to a police informer, weapons including M16s, M25 sniper rifles and mini Uzis were imported via a private plane and used to arm Comancheros.
For two years, Malkoun went quiet.
But in November 2015, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His proximity to the murder of Australian Hells Angel Wayne Rodney Schneider in Thailand got him back in the headlines.
Schneider had returned from a drinking session with Malkoun in the seaside town of Pattaya, a known play-spot for organised criminals, when five masked men abducted him at gunpoint from the villa where the pair were staying.
Malkoun told police he slept through the entire ordeal.
Thai police found the bikie-drug dealer in a shallow grave days later.
This week, Malkoun checked himself out of the Greek hospital where he had been under police guard, as well as protection from his personal security detail.
With his former wife by his side, Malkoun has told police he does not know who would want to harm him.
Most believe the threat stretches back to his homeland.
Originally published as Someone wants underworld bikie boss Jay Malkoun dead — but who?
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