Murder of unpredictable gangster Nabil Maghnie a ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle

Nabil Maghnie was an out-of-control gunman whose death echoes one of the most venerated crime stories in Melbourne’s blood-spattered underbelly.

Nabil Maghnie was an out-of-control gunman with a penchant for shooting at people who shot back.

Exactly a year ago this weekend, out-of-control gangster Nabil Maghnie was shot dead outside the house of someone who’d had the bad luck to collide with his daughter’s car.

Maghnie had gone to the address in the northern suburb of Epping to demand, with menaces, $50,000 to make the road rage go away.

But in the time it took for an unknown gunman to empty a pistol into him and two henchmen, everything changed. As one poker-faced investigator put it, “Negotiations have broken down.”

After killing the standover man and wounding his 44-year-old “minder” and son, Abbas Maghnie, the shooter calmly walked off.

He hasn’t been in custody because apparently no one is saying who he is, let alone where.

The triple shooting was on January 9 at 8.30pm, still daylight. Neighbours and passers-by could see or hear what was happening. Someone filmed Mahgnie’s body lying on the ground outside a brick veneer house in Dalton Rd, Epping.

They also filmed the terrified and bloodied Abbas limping around outside the nearby Taco Bill restaurant, immediately dubbed “Taco Nabil” by hungry reporters who flocked to the crime story of the new year.

But after the ambulances left and police started asking questions, answers were few and unhelpful. So unhelpful that on this first anniversary, investigators seem no closer to an arrest than they were on the first night.

It is as if the shooter walked down the street and vanished. If the police later recovered the killer’s handgun, they are not saying so. If they have any details of a vehicle linked to him they have not released them.

This does not mean investigators are not trying. They are, not because Maghnie is a great loss to society — he isn’t — but because whoever killed him should be off the streets, too.

Leaving aside the future possibility of the legal defence of self-defence, anyone who kills one man and shoots two others might become as much a public enemy as Maghnie was, which is very dangerous indeed.

Meanwhile, the case has turned into a Where’s Wally puzzle.

Some speculate that the mystery gunman flew overseas soon after the shooting and has never returned.

Sabrine Maghnie.

Maghnie was gunned down.

Others suggest that the person who left the country was a nervous member of the family that Maghnie had been trying to extort on the pretext of a minor car accident involving his trouble-prone daughter, Sabrine.

If so, the travelling family member is not necessarily the shooter but merely afraid of reprisals that, so far, have not happened. Now that Bad Dad is pushing up daisies, his son Abbas is gun-shy and seeking a low profile.

Without the recklessly violent Nabil riding point, the family has dropped well down the criminal pecking order.

It was only a matter of time before Maghnie ran out of luck and friends. His taste for violence was matched by his appetite for cocaine, a combination apt to end badly.

By late 2019, Maghnie had turned from a career criminal into a menace to everyone around him — even to the family he loved.

He committed or threatened acts of extreme violence that demanded retaliation and so, as Abbas discovered, the chance of family members suffering collateral damage was getting higher with every outrage.

Nabil Maghnie was a key suspect in the brazen shooting deaths of two men outside the Love Machine nightclub in Prahran in April, 2019, a crime over which his son Jacob Elliott, 18, and one Allan Fares, 22, were arrested.

Maghnie was also reputedly involved in the execution of gangland figure Mitat Rasimi at Dandenong a month before the Love Machine shooting.

He once punched on with a posse of Mongols bikies at a brothel and was reputed to have shot outlaw biker Toby Mitchell and plotted to do the same to Mick Gatto. Maghnie’s judgment didn’t match his nerve.

Maghnie leaving court in 2019.

By the time his daughter Sabrine came home with a bruised eye and dented pride after a minor road accident in late 2019, Maghnie was looking for any way to make fast money without working for it — and without the risk of carrying drugs.

The supposed injury and insult to his daughter was merely another excuse to extort cash from people he saw as soft targets. But it seems the standover man got it wrong.

Either they were so terrified by the attack that a panicked friend or family member jumped in first. Or the targets, fearing for their lives, had decided to fight fire with fire and found a bodyguard.

There is the 1000-1 chance that a random pistol-packing passer-by or visitor happened to be around when Maghnie started bashing his victim outside the house.

Coincidences do happen but detectives don’t believe in them. Meanwhile, they could do with some random luck themselves.

The stalemate is all the more baffling because, with modern forensic methods and security and dashcam cameras and mobile phone data, most killers are arrested relatively quickly after a homicide.

A body so fresh it’s still bleeding, and someone nearby with a clear motive, not to mention witnesses, would usually mean “case closed”. But not this time.

Even if police suspect they know the answer to the riddle then it seems no witnesses wish to testify. In some neighbourhoods, witnesses’ eyesight, hearing and memory are unreliable. People can be unwilling to get involved.

This could be because of a shared mistrust of police as authority figures. Or because of a higher loyalty to the offenders than to the law, or because they are more scared of the offenders than of the law. Most likely a combination of all three.

The code of silence is not restricted to the tight knit Middle Eastern communities that throw up organised crime groups like the one Maghnie belonged to.

Frederick William “The Frog” Harrison.

A different generation of crime investigators ran against Italian mafia groups and their code of “omerta” when those groups moved up from extortion to murder in the 1960s.

Not that the Italians invented the code of silence. No-one was more “staunch” than old-style Irish-Australian crooks tied to the Painters and Dockers union on the waterfront.

The “dockies” nearly all had long criminal records and short police statements, invariably fabricated by old-style cops who had their own code of silence.

The code goes back to the bushranging days and beyond, to the convict era, when even those people who didn’t necessarily commit crime themselves stayed silent about those who did.

The life and death of Nabil Maghnie echoes one of the most venerated crime stories in Melbourne’s blood-spattered underbelly.

Back when Epping was just paddocks of thistles waiting for shonky developers to cash in, Frederick William “The Frog” Harrison was like Nabil “Bullseye” Maghnie 60 years later: an out-of-control gunman who made the mistake of standing over people who shoot back.

“The Frog”, someone once slyly quipped, was teflon-coated even before teflon was invented, and his violence mostly went unpunished because witnesses suffered memory lapses. He was also a heavy cocaine user, making him dangerously unpredictable.

So unpredictable that in February 1958, on a pig-shooting trip, he shot three fingers off his “friend” Harold Nugent before the former boxer Jack Twist wrestled the shotgun from him.

On February 6 Harrison pulled up at South Wharf in his Ford Customline to return a borrowed trailer and pick up his pay packet for “phantom” shifts he hadn’t worked. While he unhooked the trailer, an unidentified man produced a shotgun, said “This is yours, Fred” and shot him in the head.

“The Frog” was an unpredictable hitman.

The croaking of the Frog went down in folklore, not least because when police tried to interview potential witnesses, a dozen of them claimed to have been in the toilet when the gun went off. It was a two-man toilet.

Even one “dockie” covered in blood couldn’t help because, he said, he had looked away and walked in the opposite direction.

Harrison’s death was never solved and the betting is that despite the wonders of modern policing, Nabil Maghnie’s exit might also remain a mystery.

In the underworld, as in Washington, the old order gives way to the new. Not only does Maghnie’s son Abbas have a limp and a nervous twitch but his sister the road rage “victim” seems to have gotten on with her life without more collisions.

They no longer share Maghnie’s delusion he was immortal having twice survived being shot, once in a near-fatal 2016 ambush.

On that occasion, “Bullseye” drove himself to hospital, blood streaming from a head and chest wounds. Some time after that, he filmed himself doing impromptu carpool karaoke, belting out Ride Like The Wind by Christopher Cross in his speeding car.

At the time he seemed to take special pleasure in one verse:

“Always spoke my mind with a gun in my hand

Lived nine lives, gunned down ten.”

Like most outlaws, he died with his boots on.

In crime, there are few new plots, just new headstones.

Originally published as Murder of unpredictable gangster Nabil Maghnie a ‘Where’s Wally?’ puzzle