‘Zombie killers’ and the ‘lost boys’ of Melbourne’s warring youth gangs

They call it the league and keep score online, but it’s hard to tell who’s winning. While teenagers mark key victories on maps, they also argue endlessly about who has racked up the most points. “Only bodies should count as points,” say some.

They’re not talking about a game. This league is playing out on the streets of Melbourne as rival youth gangs go to war. Look closer at those maps and you’ll see that they mark the more than 20 homicides linked to gang violence in the city in the past five years. Nasty injuries are also dutifully logged, a litany of sliced fingers, paralysed limbs and punctured lungs, though most agree those against innocent people – “or civs” – caught in the crossfire don’t count.

The Age spoke to more than a dozen sources working with youth offenders, some on condition of anonymity because of privacy restrictions, and pored through a trove of court documents, social media posts, and footage to gain a picture of how street violence has changed in Melbourne. Increasingly, experts warn, it’s being gamified.

Youth gangs come armed with machetes and hunting knives – marketed online as “zombie killers” – and film themselves cruising through enemy territory in stolen cars to “catch” rival crews.

One 18-year-old who asked to remain anonymous due to safety concerns says it’s not enough to say you are from the “east or west” of Melbourne in these so-called postcode wars. “If a carload pulls up on you, or you’re on the train, they asking where you from, you got to say the exact suburb now. They all wanna score points.”

Gang members have posted footage speeding in stolen cars and attacking rivals with machetes, often with many teens swarming a single victim on the ground.

At least one of the teens arrested for the violent brawl at the Northland shopping centre in Melbourne last month had his face covered as he drew his machete from a sheath. “He looked like something out of Mortal Kombat,” says witness Ali, who was in line for sushi when he found himself leaping in to break up the fray with other bystanders.

As blades whizzed by and Ali snatched away the boy’s fallen machete, the mask fell and he recalled looking at the boy’s face. “They were just kids,” says Ali. “I’d thought they were playing a game at first because they were just kids.”

Youth crime waves are nothing new in Australia. But those on the ground, from forensic psychologists and youth workers to detectives and researchers, say social media means rivalries now play out – and escalate – on a scale not seen before, breeding a new performative subculture of score-settling and live-streamed thrills.

“It’s become a weird new phenomenon,” says Abraham Kuol, a criminology researcher and South Sudanese community leader who helps run mentoring for teens caught up in gang violence. “Usually, you see young people committing crimes for financial gain, to try and get out of their poor circumstances.”

Now each crew is trying to prove they are the most vicious to an audience of thousands online, he says.

Criminology researcher and South Sudanese community leader Abraham Kuol says gang violence is escalating but there are still ways to reach kids caught up in it.Credit: Wayne Taylor

The problem in Victoria is not that hordes more teens have suddenly started committing crimes, adds Navin Dhillon, who runs crime prevention programs across the state’s north-west for Youth Support and Advocacy Service. “The problem is that those who do are escalating faster.” Teens with no criminal record will suddenly be arrested over a stabbing.

While Victoria’s rate of youth incarceration is at historically low levels, about 40 per cent of the young people in detention are there for the most violent crimes: murder and manslaughter, government and justice sources confirmed.

Even the drill rap that often serves as a local soundtrack to gang disputes has become more bloody and personal of late, naming names and glorifying in kills. A recent selection of tracks, released by Melbourne’s most prominent gangs and reviewed by this masthead, all reference real stabbings and people. That includes taunts about a teen whose fingers were recently chopped off in a fight and the shooting of a Melbourne rapper last year.

“It’s not drill rap itself, it’s the way lyrics are targeted now, the tallying of points,” says one youth worker. “The guys listen to it, day in, day out, even when they go inside.”

Most of the young people caught up in gangs are among the state’s most vulnerable, often bounced around refuges and foster care, looking for somewhere to belong. But youth workers say a new kind of gang member has also emerged in the past five years: teens from relatively stable, middle-class households swept up in the online infamy and lifestyle.

They now number among the 200-odd repeat offenders police say are driving Victoria’s youth crime wave, government sources confirmed. But, unlike kids from disadvantage, they are much more likely to get support to leave the lifestyle faster, says Kuol.

A government source not authorised to speak publicly recalled watching one of the most prolific young burglars in Victoria win bail as his wealthy parents spoke up for him in court. “But for other kids, mum doesn’t even show,” says a youth worker. “No one shows.”

Youth Support and Advocacy Services crime prevention manager Navin Dhillon said there’s more youth gang members on wait lists for support.Credit: Justin McManus

In recent months, the Allan government has banned machetes and drastically toughened bail laws and youth sentencing, in an attempt to stop the “revolving door” of teen offenders before the courts. But machete violence is continuing to spill out onto streets, and frontline services warn of dwindling funding for early intervention and school support.

Meanwhile, gangland bosses are circling, recruiting more young guns looking for street cred through “freelance crime” – dangerous jobs like shootings, home invasions and firebombings.

Not all the teens committing these crimes are in gangs. “But the young ones don’t care if they get caught,” says Kuol.

This masthead found teens known to have been charged with gang violence streaming videos online from inside stolen cars, speeding down freeways in masks and gloves, and clutching piles of cash. Graphic footage of machete slashings and stabbings against rival gang members are regularly posted on forums as crews compare points in the league, including, on at least one occasion, footage of a dead body.

Disorganised crime

Former detective Vince Hurley says youth gangs don’t have the discipline or longevity of the major organised crime groups he spent his career infiltrating and investigating.

“They’re like fireworks, shooting for stardom, and then they explode and fizzle out pretty fast.”

Their names and memberships often shift, as they form allegiances – or split in two. That makes them volatile, and hard to police.

While some gangs might run drugs at street level or steal high-end cars for organised crime, most have no major connection to the big syndicates. Violence tends to revolve around “beefs” between rival postcode crews, not illicit business.

“It’s almost like disorganised crime,” says one investigator. “It’s hard to track.”

Social media posts from youth gang members include footage of attacks and other apparent crimes.

Victorian police are actively monitoring 671 youth gang members across 37 gangs, staking out their haunts and knocking on their doors to check they are complying with bail conditions. Sixty of them have been arrested more than 10 times in the past year. But a police spokesman says gangs have shrunk by about 76 members since the Operation Alliance taskforce launched in late 2020 to target the worst of them.

While police don’t say the names of crews publicly any more (and those names change fast), this masthead has identified at least 10 consistently involved in serious violent crime in the past five years, including in more than 20 homicides.

Some gangs have formed from the “youngins” of older crews who “aged out”, a 19-year-old formerly associated with gangs explains. “They leave the life”, he says, or else “move on to bikie clubs [and other organised crime] which pays better.

“The young ones run ’round doing burgs, and stuff for their olders. They never seem to make real money, they still there asking me for $20. And they all end up having beef.”

An analysis of recent court judgments by The Age found most of the teens convicted for gang crimes carried similar stories – formative years rocked by family violence or homelessness, without an adult looking out for them. Or else growing up in a crowded household struggling with bills and, in some cases, cultural barriers as migrant families.

Crime data shows gang members are overwhelmingly Australian-born. Almost all are male, though girls are appearing as youth offenders more and more. And while Melbourne’s west remains a hotbed of gang activity – especially, police say, around Wyndham and Brimbank – youth workers report new gangs are rising in the south-east too.

Of late, Dhillon has seen an increase in children diverted to his crime prevention programs who have undiagnosed disorders affecting impulse control, such as ADHD. The majority of health problems diagnosed in youth offenders, including fetal alcohol syndrome, aren’t picked up until their first health screening in juvenile detention.

Some youth gangs are learning how to commit crimes faster by following bigger syndicates online, Kuol says. They’re inspired by gangland heavies splashing their luxe lifestyles across social media and talk of joining a “brotherhood” if they earn their stripes.

Dhillon says there’s a lot of pressure on kids to provide for their families, especially with seven or eight younger siblings. “Trying to convince a kid to give up a lucrative drug business and take a minimum wage job at Maccas? It’s a difficult sell.

“And copycat crimes are a lot easier when you can see little Johnny using a machete to steal a car on social media.”

Point for point

The “manosphere” and other internet realms that grew in strength as COVID lockdowns pushed more of life online have also become arenas for battle between rival crews. Spats that were once settled in the schoolyard to a limited crowd now pull an audience of thousands, driving gang members to retaliate and defend their honour in increasingly violent ways.

Youth gang members behind bars who have spoken to Kuol and his colleagues at Deakin University talk of the snowball effect of social media, as perceived slights and conflicts spread like wildfire online.

“The gang that commits the most serious crime, evades police or steals the most cars, has the most street credibility,” says Kuol. “With the postcode beefs that we’ve been seeing, [one group] might jump on social media live from somebody else’s territory, and they’ll be aggravating that person, calling them out … so a lot of them will feel they have to respond.”

Someone overheard at a party yelling a passing insult about a gang one night in 2022 saw members of that crew come out of the west into Reservoir and brutally murder 16-year-old Declan Cutler, who was not in either gang, as he was leaving the party.

And last month one gang member looking at a kid from a rival gang “the wrong way” sparked the machete brawl at Northland that left one young man with serious head injuries, a court has heard.

Youth gangs fought with machetes at Northland shopping centreCredit: Supplied

That day, one of those gangs – an emerging crew from Melbourne’s west, according to court documents and sources – had appeared in the territory of another with machetes concealed down their pants.

The Age has tracked how that gang was feuding with multiple youth crews across the state in the months before the Northland brawl, in a series of escalating attacks and “paybacks”.

Its members had carried out terrifying home invasions against boys in another rival gang – back home near Melton, a children’s court heard last month, and one member had been linked to a school stabbing. More recently, the group had posted a drill rap music video filmed on the territory of yet another gang in the north-west, igniting a fierce exchange of threats seen by The Age.

One man familiar with but not part of either crew says the western gang was also still reeling from the alleged murder of one of its own members in a street fight in December, a case which is before the children’s court.

Now, this gang from the west had started crossing into the east to feud with a whole new crew at Northland. Seven young men are before the courts over the brawl, with the exact motives of the fight still unclear.

Victoria Police calls social media “a contributing factor”, rather than a driving force of youth crime, given the myriad reasons teens become offenders, from substance abuse and mental health to family violence. But detectives do closely monitor social media to obtain intelligence, a spokesman said, “which often leads to quick arrests”.

It’s clear teens regularly “post and boast” of their crimes online, even livestreaming carjackings. But Kuol says they also know how to play coy when they need to, coordinating over encrypted apps or taking down incriminating rap music within 24 hours of posting. “Everything I talk about on the internet is false,” reads one helpful disclaimer on the Instagram profile of a south-eastern rapper and gang member.

“They’re tech-savvy,” says Kuol. “They use code words. They almost have their own language.”

The machete of choice in Melbourne, for example, is called the “zombie killer” or “ZK”. “Kids carry these knives for protection because they know everyone else is carrying them,” Kuol says.

One teen started carrying a machete because they were sleeping rough.

Running with a gang also offers “perceived protection”, police say.

“A lot these kids are scared, they’re anxious,” says Dhillon. “They can’t really vocalise their insecurities. But if you’ve got a big scary machete, suddenly, you don’t have to be the biggest kid around.”

“No Knives, Just Gloves”

John Coyne, who formerly worked in criminal intelligence at the Australian Federal Police, says Australia has a longstanding problem with “lost boys” that goes beyond one particular cultural or socioeconomic group. “We saw it with the Vietnamese street gangs in the ’80s”, he says, and the surf gangs that fuelled the 2005 Cronulla riots. “You have young men who see a lack of opportunity or identity here, they’re looking for a sense of belonging, for family. The kids they grow up with become their family.”

Youth gang members arm themselves with ‘zombie killer’ knives and machetes.

Organised crime and youth gangs radicalise these teens in the same way extremist groups tap into young aspirations, Coyne says.

Police say that, “once indoctrinated into the gang”, many teens disengage completely from their families and schools, from sport and hobbies. “Their loyalty to the gang transcends everything else.”

Some youth workers speak of “soft expulsions” at schools, where teens who have proven difficult are not formally moved on and so no one appears to check where they are if they don’t show up for class. “They end up congregating with their peers, sometimes abusing drugs, at shopping centres and things,” says Kuol.

This problem is now affecting teens from middle-class backgrounds too, he says.

“We’re seeing kids who might not be being monitored either but don’t have major problems at home joining gangs. For them, it’s a bit of fun. They’ll often get support and be able to move on eventually. But for a lot of kids from low-income households, it becomes really difficult. They end up entrenched in the system.”

Once a child becomes an offender, the clock is ticking to pull them out of crime. Research consistently shows the younger a child is incarcerated, the more likely they are to graduate to an adult criminal lifestyle.

Coyne and ex-detective Hurley warn against “knee-jerk tough-on-crime policies designed around election cycles” while basic frontline services for domestic violence, school engagement, and homelessness still fall short.

“When I was a young cop, I’d have said ‘just lock them up’ too,” says Hurley. “Now I know it just locks them in as criminals.”

Crime rates are up in Victoria, and youth offences hit their highest level since records began last year, but the numbers have been driven in part by that core group of 200-odd repeat offenders, and average youth crime rates are still below where they were 15 years ago. As of this month, there are 154 young people held in the state’s two youth prisons, as beds fill up under the Allan government’s bail crackdown – 93 of them are on remand awaiting trial.

Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny says: “The types of crime we’re seeing young people commit are serious and have tragic outcomes, and those criminals will be caught and dealt with.”

But she agrees the drivers are complex. “Being a victim of family violence and having no safe place to call home plays a significant role,” she says, adding that the government was building more social housing and strengthening family violence protections.

Of chronic offenders, Kuol says “it’s really hard to reach these kids”, but there are ways – mentoring by peers who have turned their lives around has shown particularly promising results.

Some former gang members speak of leaving their crew after being betrayed by their own, realising their brotherhood wasn’t really a family. “Or they get a wake-up call when they hit the adult prisons.”

One controversial fight night organised by locals after the Northland brawl has called for teen gangs to “fight it out” in the boxing ring on Saturday (“No knives, just gloves”) for a $10,000 cash prize (and promised high security and metal detectors at the door to stop unplanned skirmishes.)

Most youth workers argue for more early intervention work, such as family counselling, and others want a greater focus on aspiration and entrepreneurship in crime prevention programs.

The Age found some teens charged over recent gang violence with registered ABNs, spruiking burgeoning businesses or rap music labels online.

“These kids need a way to make cash that’s legal,” says Coyne. “That’s not to say we should be soft on violent crime, but these kids need hope.”

Dhillon recalls a teen busted for graffiti who came to his crime prevention program, and was linked up with an artist mentor, kick-starting a legitimate design career.

But that YSAS program, which has been running successfully for about a decade, lost a COVID-era funding top-up a year ago, meaning about a dozen staff were let go, each with a long caseload of teens. “Now waitlists have blown out,” he says. “Those referrals to us from police and schools are taking at least six to eight weeks, especially in the west.

“We’re seeing so many more cases where just the basic needs, shelter, safety, have to be met first. More cases where the offending has already escalated so much, we just wish we’d got to them sooner.

“These kids don’t start out like this.”

With Melissa Cunningham and Nicole Precel

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