Underbelly (6 page)

Frustrated by Karam's greed and refusal to share the huge profits he was making and angry at what they claimed was the occasional $100 he threw them as wages, his ‘boys' became murderous.

‘Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he'd give it back,' Rossini alleged, giving an insight into the sophisticated distribution network that put cocaine on the streets.

‘Rent' payments depended on the number of sellers involved. ‘If you wanted to have four (drug) runners on the street it was $4000 a week rent,' Rossini told the Supreme Court.

Rossini said he and Kanaan helped put cocaine into capsules and took it to distributors at the Cross who passed it to drug runners. ‘They put it in their mouths and walked around the streets of Kings Cross selling it,' he explained.

The cash would be passed back to Rossini and Kanaan to give to Karam.

‘We did not get any of that money. Sometimes Danny gave us $100 a week,' he said.

There were times when Karam would become violent because the rent was too low. He would threaten to kill anyone who displeased him. And he used the three men as largely unpaid personal servants who grew marijuana and packaged cocaine to be sold to distributors as well as collecting money from drug runners.

When Karam decided to stay home, his men would also go out to buy his food, get videos, do his laundry and go training with him. At least, this was the picture they painted at trial. As everyone knows, the survivors get to tell the story.

Rossini told the Supreme Court that Karam had also borrowed $10,000 from Kanaan to set up a computer shop to launder money and had never repaid the loan. Kanaan said he had borrowed the money from his parents and that Karam's disrespect and failure to pay caused great friction in the group.

‘Kanaan was upset about being used. And told me “after all the work we've done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it”,' Rossini said.

The idea of killing Karam had been discussed by the three accused men and Charlie Gea Gea for around nine months before the actual shooting. ‘It was almost every day,' Rossini said.

A failed attempt to give poisoned heroin to Karam, so he might kill himself with a lethal injection while feeding
his habit, convinced the trio that shooting him was the only sure way to nail their tyrant.

‘I remember them (the shooters) talking about where they would stand when they shot (at him),' Rossini said.

One man, he thought it was Kanaan, emphasised that the men should stand at an angle so they would not get caught in cross fire.

The scenario suggested Kanaan, Mawas and Gea Gea murdered Karam in his four-wheel drive after being tipped off by El Assaad that the standover man had left the apartment.

Rossini conceded in the Supreme Court that he could have alerted Karam to the murder plot against him and stopped him leaving the unit.

Barrister (for Kanaan):
You never warned him: ‘I think there's a plot to kill you Danny?'

Rossini:
There's no way I could have done that. No.

Barrister:
Why didn't you warn him that he was about to get ambushed?

Rossini:
I was concerned for my own safety. I wasn't game enough to tell him what was happening.

Rossini said that although he was not involved with the murder plan he did not disagree with it.

Judge James Wood, co-incidentally the same man who heard Karam's original revelations when he chaired the Wood Royal Commission six years earlier, called Karam's murder cold-blooded and motivated by greed.

‘The principal motive (of) Michael Kanaan, I am satisfied, was to acquire an entrenched position for his subgroup in the trade of narcotics and to increase their standing within that section of the criminal milieu,' he said.

Judge Wood sentenced Kanaan to life and the other shooter, Mawas, to 25 years with a non-parole period of nineteen years.

El Assad, who made the crucial telephone call to alert the killers, was given 24 years, with eighteen years non-parole.

Kanaan was already serving two life sentences for murdering former National Rugby League players, 23-year-old Adam Wright and 24-year-old Michael Hurle, in a drive-by shooting as the two men stood outside a hotel in the inner-city suburb of Five Dock on 17 July 1998.

When her son's third life sentence was read out by Judge Wood, Kanaan's mother made a lengthy outburst from the public gallery, shouting her son's innocence. ‘I want to be beside you,' she called as she was led from the court room. ‘God be with you. He will prove you innocent one day.'

Kanaan called back: ‘It's all right. Don't worry about it.' He was more expansive in addressing Judge Wood saying: ‘Your Honour, I didn't kill those footballers and I didn't kill Danny Karam.'

Putting murderers in jail was a triumph but a bonus was the overflow of evidence collected in the Karam killing. The killers and their victim were linked to a renegade crime gang inflicting death and destruction at random to try and muscle in on Sydney's lucrative drug dealing.

The gang was suspected of sixteen shootings and four murders, including that of an innocent schoolboy. Ballistic experts linked the sixteen bullets taken from Karam's body to a gun found at the scene where a policeman, Chris Patrech, had been wounded.

They were also linked to a notorious drive-by shooting of Lakemba Police Station in November 1988.

Police are also convinced some of the dozen members of the outlaw gang were responsible for the stabbing murder of young schoolboy Edward Lee on a Punchbowl Street a few weeks before the Lakemba incident.

Karam had a 12-gauge shotgun in the back of his four-wheel drive but didn't get the chance to reach for it because his assassination was so swift. Police linked the gun to shots that were fired outside the EPI nightclub at Kings Cross in September 1998 and another shooting at a panel-beating shop.

Karam's shotgun was also forensically linked to a wild drive-by shooting in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, known for its indigenous population. As many as fifteen houses were sprayed with lead fired by shooters driving a stolen Mitsubishi Pajero later found torched in nearby Alexandria.

The attack was retaliation for a bashing in Lithgow Prison days earlier when Aboriginal inmates bashed Middle Eastern prisoners so badly that three had to be admitted to hospital.

The gunmen, who fired shotguns and rifles in the dawn raid, left an Aboriginal flag with a luridly painted message: ‘Fuck with our brothers inside and we fuck with your families outside. Blood 4 blood. P.S. Lithgow Jail 2 die 4.'

‘It was a most wanton act of indiscriminate shooting and at least fifteen homes were peppered with high-calibre projectiles. It is amazing no one was injured,' police said.

Indicating the gang's callous and casual attitude towards murderous violence, Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small said not all of the incidents were against targeted people. Others seemed random and could have been just spontaneous thrill killings.

‘Some of the crimes were committed by a small number of people who we believe targeted the victims following their association with the group,' he said. ‘Tragically, it would seem the shootings of Edward Lee, Michael Hurle and Adam Wright were not premeditated.'

He described the gang as a small group of very dangerous people without morals or compassion. ‘They are motivated by greed and have little loyalty to anyone around them.'

He said anyone associated with the group ran the risk of becoming the next victim. Just like Danny Karam.

–
WITH RAY CHESTERTON

‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked …'

 

 

BY the time the stripper starts, the men leering at her are half-pissed. Her moves to the taped music are not so much erotic as a parody of eroticism – but who cares? It does the trick for the mob of punters around her: they hoot, holler and whistle as the gear comes off. It's a bucks' night, a sleazy convention in their circles – a bogan brotherhood whose borderline criminal bravado is fuelled by booze.

The girl is in her twenties, more girl-next-door than vampy bombshell, not necessarily a disadvantage in a business with enough tricked-up transsexuals to make punters wonder what's real and what isn't.

But there are signs that not all her assets are natural and that at least one of the many contacts she has made since arriving in the Big Smoke is a plastic surgeon. Up close, the pert nose is a little too neat, the pert breasts a little too big,
the teeth even and white. It's not overdone – not a Michael Jackson nose above Pamela Anderson breasts but it's obvious she has been ‘pimped' in more ways than one. It's the thing old school friends notice when they see pictures of her, especially other women. She's instantly recognisable – but recognisably different.

She has the same, dark curly hair and white skin she had at high school but is more physical than the quiet, bookish schoolgirl she was back then. Not sporty as a teenager, now she flaunts the body of someone who works on fitness for a living, with the defined muscles that come from exercise and diet – strict vegetarian in her case – and with no signs of the drug use so common in her game. She looks like a professional and she is. And her profession, at least proverbially, is the oldest of all. That's part of the attraction for the men crowding around, waiting for what they know will happen next.

She begins the strip wearing a version of police uniform: blue culottes, crisp white shirt and swinging baton. Off comes the uniform, piece by piece tossed among the tossers in the crowd, until she is naked, bar a tiny G-string. Then she gets down to some dirty work with the baton. The watchers are getting rowdy, making remarks ranging from suggestive to obscene but, some time in the years since leaving home and school, she's been inoculated against that. Words are weapons but in a game where robbery, gang rape or bashing are occupational hazards, they can lose their sting.

She finishes the strip but the show's not over: stripping was only the entrée, a tease for ‘fans' now lining up in an
unspoken pecking order behind the unblushing bridegroom-to-be. He will have sex with her first. Then his mates will. Any or all of them: first served, first come.

‘There were hands coming from everywhere,' she would later tell a reporter. ‘They were all drunk, throwing beer cans at me and out of control. They were fond of me dressing up in police uniform and I had the complete outfit. I had such an effect on them that they were literally lining up afterwards for sex.'

At one strip show ‘about 60 of them were lined up and there were even punch-ups out the back over who would be first,' she remembered. There were two other girls in the show but some of the policemen would be furious if they were not ‘the first to get the girl of their choice.'

If she were getting cash from each man the sordid deal would have at least some crude equity to it. But there is something different about this scene. It is not only – or maybe never was – strictly commercial. The stripper-turned-hooker is not dulled by narcotics – or strung out and getting cashed up for her next hit. Her bright and brittle bravado obscures the fact that tonight she's debasing herself for next to nothing: working at a ‘discount'.

Why would she do that? Because the men queuing up for her are police – and she wants to be like them. Wanted to, she sometimes said later, ever since reading her father's detective manual when she was a child. ‘I used to mess around in my Dad's shirt playing police with my sister,' she once revealed. A lot of children play dress ups but this one was different: Daddy's little girl turned into a cop groupie who'd do anything for police because she wanted to be one, like her father used to be.

It was only when the ‘big blue gang' rejected her that the trouble started. That's when everyone got to hear about Kim Hollingsworth, the stripper who took on the New South Wales Police Force – and proved the truth of the saying about the fury of a woman scorned.

SO how did a nice girl like Kim end up in places like that, spending the best years of her twenties stripping for mobs of men, sometimes providing sex for as many of them as wanted to line up?

And what sort of police force would tolerate the fact the men in the queue were often serving officers, given that she performed for at least 30 police functions for crowds of up to 300 cops and their mates?

No wonder, perhaps, that Hollingsworth thought she could leave the sex game behind to become a New South Wales police officer: after all, she knew from personal experience that members of the force weren't fussy about matters of morality. In the end, of course, it wasn't morality that got her. It was hypocrisy.

Given her profession, Hollingsworth's view of police and the sex industry seemed oddly naïve. It began to sour when she felt the undertow of corruption as police put pressure on some of the brothels where she worked.

‘We thought we were earning a lot of money as prostitutes but the police were earning much more,' she would claim later. She saw how brothel madams who paid protection money to police were given special treatment – and saw that police demanded special treatment in return, with some demanding free sex as well as the cash.

‘They expected it and got it for free. You wouldn't dare refuse, after all. You do as a police officer tells you.'

One officer threatened to kill her when he didn't get his own way, she would say. ‘He held a gun between my legs with the hammer cocked and there were six bullets in it at the time. When it's in that position a gun only needs a touch of pressure on the trigger to go off, so had his finger slipped I would have been dead.'

But Daddy's girl was dogged. She still wanted to wear the uniform for real, not as a prop in a sleazy strip act. So she applied as a recruit in the New South Wales police service and began training in May 1995, when she was 28.