Janet Fife - Yeomans
The Daily Telegraph
August 12 2013
AT least 11 had done time behind bars, four were on bail, most were bikies and all of them were known to police.
The victims of the city's deadly gun wars were figures used to looking over their shoulders: one had been inside over a double murder, another two had been suspects in homicides and one had caused a death by dangerous driving in a car chase reaching 150km/h.
But they left behind grieving wives, girlfriends and families, children who will grow up without a father.
Matthew Hedges, 25, who was shot through a window at his Chester Hill home on December 31 last year not long after his release from jail was a father of four.
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Two of his children, aged two and four, were in the house when he was murdered.
"It makes absolutely no difference to a police investigation what the background or the involvement of any victim is," Detective Chief Superintendent Mal Lanyon, head of the organised crime directorate, said yesterday. "No family should have to go through what the family of anyone murdered has to go through."
With legal gun ownership in Australia back at pre-Port Arthur massacre levels, police believe they are making headway against illegal firearms. In the 2012-2013 financial year, police seized 9506 illegal firearms, 729 of them handguns, the type of guns commonly used in the slayings.
Supt Lanyon is also head of Operation Apollo, targeting gun crime, and said police still faced a wall of silence as they investigated the underworld slayings. "We don't receive a lot of information or support from the type of witnesses we would hope to get information from," he said.
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While there have been a number of arrests over the slayings, he appealed for the families of these men to speak up about what they know.
"That is why we also work so hard to take illegal firearms off the street because while there are illegal firearms in the community there is the potential for those who wish to engage in conflict to settle that conflict with those firearms," Supt Lanyon said.
The gun wars have claimed 18 men since the O'Farrell government took office, in shootings mostly blamed on drugs and revenge.
Some were linked to an escalating turf war between the Hells Angels and Comanchero bikie gangs, others were members of the Brothers For Life street gang, founded by Australia's highest-security prisoner and murderer Basam Hamzy.
Lone Wolf bikie Neal Todorovski, 37, shot through the back during a row outside his Sans Souci unit on January 4 last year, was farewelled in a $42,000 gold-plated coffin paid for in cash by his bikie mates.
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Former Comanchero Darko Janceski, 32, who had left the gang on bad terms a year before his death in April last year, had been linked by police to the investigation of two suspected murders. His crimes included dangerous driving causing death and malicious wounding of a man who lost an ear.
His house had been burnt down and for months before he was shot dead in Berkeley, Janceski had been in fear for his life. He was on bail for possessing drugs and stealing cars from his employer.
Gemahl Maika, 38, a father of two, was due to give evidence in a trial involving a multi-million-dollar cocaine syndicate when he was gunned down in April 2011.
Detectives found a bundle of $50 notes the size of a house brick and other cash totalling more than $31,000 in the car of Hussein Khanafer, 31, not long before he was shot dead in February at Blackett.
Police believe a single Middle Eastern crime syndicate is behind five killings: that of Roy Yaghi, 33, a drugs cook for the Hells Angels; Jamie Grover, 27; Comanchero bikie Faalau Pisu, 23, at a wedding; Ali Eid, 38, and his relative Bachir Arja, 28.
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