Sayet Erhan Akca: fugitive who gave up everything ... but hate
When Sayet Erhan Akca climbed into the ring just before Christmas four years ago, chock full of bravado as always, he knew the law was closing in.
When Sayet Erhan Akca climbed into the ring just before Christmas four years ago, chock full of bravado as always, he knew the law was closing in on him. But he was pumped and he needed a win.
Just three days before, police had raided his house and found $147,000 in cash hidden in a safe and in the luggage compartment of his car. Akca – known to his friends as Aron, or simply Az – was already facing charges of conspiring to import 500kg of drugs. That could mean life in prison.
It’s a measure of his single-minded determination that the bodybuilder turned multi-millionaire gym owner could put that out of his mind for one night and pummel his opponent into submission. But even Akca knew when it was time to turn and run.
And in September 2023, he did just that, leaving behind a shattered wife and their bewildered two-year-old son as he secretly boarded a boat in far north Queensland, bound for Thailand.
The alleged circumstances around that journey played out on Friday as lawyer-turned-sailor Sean Eamon Ryan faced court in Bundaberg charged with smuggling Akca out the country in a vessel that collected him from Thursday Island in an at-sea transfer before setting out on a nearly six-week voyage to Phuket.
The court hearing also provided an answer to the question police had batted away for more than a week: Aron Akca was indeed the alleged mastermind behind the Dural caravan “terror plot” and a series of violent anti-Semitic attacks in Sydney that had shaken the country to its core.
But many more questions remain unanswered.
Chief among them: what did police know about Akca when they claimed that the terror “hoax” was not motivated by racist or religious ideology, but was simply to leverage a lenient court sentence by providing fabricated information to police.
Last week The Australian revealed that Akca had posted vile anti-Semitic slurs for years before fleeing Australia, after being charged with alleged drug importation offences. A picture has now emerged of a man with almost Messianic self-belief who built a business empire worth millions but became seduced by the prospect of even greater wealth, and ended up losing what treasured most: his wife and young son.
Teenage Jackass
Aron Akca, the small, skinny kid from Liverpool, in Sydney’s southwest, had always wanted to stand out from the crowd. School friends recall him as a joker, but close to his Turkish migrant parents and extended Muslim family.
When the Jackass phenomenon arrived in the early 2000s, encouraging teenagers to carry out harebrained and painful stunts in front of the camera, the young Akca couldn’t resist.
Dressed only in a pair of jeans that had to be held tight with a belt, his friends filmed him attaching electrodes to his nipples and switching on the current while he screamed. The video went viral, at least among his mates, and Akca had his first taste of notoriety. He liked it.
This was “my teenager jackass attempt that became a sensation”, he later boasted.
The young Akca wanted to build a gym business. He started by rebuilding his own body. Friends say he had a little help – illegal steroids he would refer to as “supplements”. “You could tell, right?” says one of his friends, laughing. “He was a skinny boy and he was very self-conscious about being skinny. And maybe that would also account for some of the behavioural changes.”
The scrawny kid became a champion body builder, power lifter and Muay Thai boxer. He soon realised there was a niche for gyms that catered to southwest Sydney’s multiethnic population, often turned off by the inner-city one-size-fits-all chains.
He built his first Fitness Republic gym in Miranda, another in Cabramatta and another in Merrylands. Then he opened a childcare centre and a cosmetic laser clinic. Before long he helped start up Instarent, a self-management property app.
The money was starting to roll, just as he met the woman who would become his wife, Georgia, four years his junior, in 2014.
Friends say it was love at first sight, at least for Akca, who would happily agree with friends that he was “punching above his weight”.
Within a few months they’d moved in together, into a waterfront apartment in Cronulla. “I’m in a big ass penthouse in the Shire overlooking the entire city,” he bragged to friends.
On a beach on the Greek island of Santorini, Akca got down on one knee and proposed. Georgia was good for him, friends say, a moderating influence on a man with few boundaries.
‘A Jew disorder’
Friends say they don’t recall him voicing his fierce anti-Semitism in conversation. He left that for his social media accounts, where he would vent at Israel or praise Hitler, usually in barbed exchanges with like-minded souls.
“I ain’t racist, I have a Jew disorder,” Akca would say.
In one post he claimed that “Hitler was only washing earth, they made him out to be evil”.
In another: “How did 6 million die when only 3.2 registered Jews in Europe at the time?”
Many of these conversations involved a fellow weightlifter named “Ronny” who claimed to have become a neo-Nazi after reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a book he proudly displayed on his Facebook page, sitting between two skulls, with the words “Aryans assemble” below it.
Akca responded: “Rise of the 5th Reich. Heil Ronny.”
Akca had been brought up a Muslim but to most of his friends had never appeared deeply religious. On a trip to Turkey with Georgia in 2017 he prayed at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and appeared to find it deeply moving.
When he posted a picture of himself kneeling in prayer, a friend from his body-building days, Ahmad Hraichie, reached out, telling him: “Well said mate. I love the blue mosque. What history there.” Akca replied: “Yeah, stunning brother.”
Hraichie, a respected Muslim funeral director widely known for his work in multi-faith forums, says he found it hard to reconcile Akca the fugitive with the man he had known.
“He would be the last guy I would think would do anything like that. He was a quiet guy, friendly, respectful, a small guy, he didn’t overshadow people. Wow, it goes to show you, there’s some hidden people out there. It’s sad because I never took him as a guy who was passionately into this political stuff that’s going on.”
After visiting the mosque, Akca posted a bizarre “common question” about whether it was true “that Muslims believe they get 40 virgins for act of terror / mass suicidal murder?”
His answer: “Let me ask, would you like to pop 40 cherries? Would you like to change 40 bed sheets? So Yes, we believe that you go straight to hell for killing yourself or any of God’s creatures unless it’s for eating purpose and done the Halal (natural) way. Not with a c4. #DumbestTheorySinceFlatEarth. No Pun Intended … but no one besides the educated would understand that anyway.”
Most of those who worked out at Akca’s gyms were unaware of his increasingly irrational rants.
But plenty were gobsmacked when Akca decided to become a self-help guru in the style of his idol, Tony Robbins, claiming to have mentored half a dozen people who were “already millionaires” and felt bound to share the secrets of his success.
In one video he expounds on his theory of “the blueprints of a human being … and for those who wonder what is wrong with them and can’t figure it out, I’m here to help”. “We’ve also got 8 levels of consciousness and you can’t get to level four without figuring out who you are,” he says.
The newly minted business sage boasted of having his own private investment firm that was “up 300% in valuation since our last raising a year ago”. In reality Akca owned just five of more than 170,000 shares in the parent company. The outfit would go into liquidation – as most of Akca’s ventures did – just a couple of years later.
Pity for Georgia
By now Akca had already fallen out with many of his old friends.
“He started to become a real narcissist, just talking a lot of rubbish,” one long-time friend told The Australian. “In his world, it’s all about him. The last time I saw him he never once asked about me or my family and I haven’t spoken to him since.
“I feel so sorry for Georgia, with her name and face all over the papers. She’s just collateral damage now.”
Many of his lapsed friends hadn’t realised he’d been charged or fled the country in 2023.
By then, Georgia had left him and taken their son, distraught at the implosion of their once-perfect life.
Even Akca’s mother says she only discovered when she was contacted by The Australian last week that he was allegedly facing serious drug charges and had fled overseas.
“I haven’t been in touch with him for more than 2½ years, basically,” she said.
Ms Akca said she had battled cancer for many years, and her son had in recent years been absent and showed a lack of care.
One friend has stuck by him through thick and thin.
Ronny told Akca “the Jews r always watching me”and warned him: “Maybe they even hacked into your gym CCTV, who knows?”.
Akca responded: “Zeig heil, Zeig Heil Zeig heil !!!!!”
The Jews weren’t watching Akca. But the cops were.
The gym owner was one of hundreds of suspects who had been lured into using the AN0M app, meant to encrypt messages so thoroughly that no police force could ever break it. In reality, AN0M was a creation of the police themselves.
In November 2021, the AFP set up Operation Ironside East Comic specifically to target Akca, and the following month raided his new palatial home in Sandringham, seizing phones, computers and $147,000 in cash.
They already had a fair idea who he’d been talking to. They’d been watching his conversations with a shadowy group of criminals with codenames like “Lazarro”, “Tonto” and “R34L”, courtesy of a sting operation on the message app AN0M.
By September 2022 Akca had been charged with dealing in the proceeds of crime and conspiracy over the importation of 500 kilos of drugs.
In March 2023, Akca was revealed to be among 66 alleged criminals who had joined a class-action style lawsuit challenging the legality of the AN0M app.
Akca decided he wasn’t going to wait for the High Court to decide his fate.
Six months later he climbed aboard a boat on Thursday Island and left his old life behind.
Now we know he couldn’t shake all of it. Some hatreds die hard.
