The ABC reporter, the underworld postman and the ‘sinister threats’

An award-winning ABC reporter passed on menacing messages from an organised crime gang to journalists, one of whom became so fearful he reported the matter to police.

“These people kill people,” Mahmood Fazal, 33, a former outlaw bikie gang member turned Four Corners reporter, is alleged to have told Kristo Langker, a producer and researcher who works with popular YouTube figure Jordan Shanks, known online as FriendlyJordies.

On January 19, Langker made a statement to the NSW Police’s Organised Crime Squad, expressing fears for his and Shanks’ safety after a series of calls and texts from the Four Corners reporter.

“I am scared because I am being threatened. These people have serious reputations and I know they have the capacity to carry out these threats,” Langker said in his police statement.

Over a week in January, the ABC reporter repeatedly told Langker that he’d been communicating with “very serious gang figures” who were threatening that “something bad is going to happen” if a FriendlyJordies video, which featured associates of the notorious Alameddine crime family, wasn’t deleted from YouTube, Langker told police.

In November 2022, three months after the video was first broadcast, Shanks’ house was firebombed. An Alameddine foot soldier has since been charged over the arson attack.

Apart from 20 tit-for-tat murders, the Alameddine and rival Hamzy (also known as Hamze) clans have engaged in kidnapping, arson and torture as they battle for control of Sydney’s lucrative drug trade.

In his police statement, Langker said the ABC reporter revealed he’d been summoned to a meeting in January with his underworld contacts. “I had a guy who just got out of prison for attempted murder, basically tell me what I need to do,” Fazal allegedly told Langker.

What the crime gang was demanding, Langker told police, was the removal of the video.

Fazal claimed he was only acting as a messenger because he too was being threatened. “I’ve received direct face-to-face threats from very scary people,” Fazal is alleged to have told Langker.

Fazal, who has described one of his former roles as being an “underworld postman”, is no stranger to violence and crime, having previously been the sergeant-at-arms of outlaw bikie gang the Mongols, which has been designated an organised crime group by the Australian Federal Police due to its history of murder, money laundering, extortion and ongoing involvement in the drug trade.

Following his departure from the Mongols in 2016, Fazal has parlayed his unique experiences into a successful media career.

Reporting on a cocaine cartel for Four Corners last year, Fazal explained on camera that underworld figures would normally never speak to the media but “before I was a journalist I was involved in the criminal world … it allows me to forge relationships with people who are also involved in that world”.

One of the relationships Fazal forged was with rapper Ay Huncho, 27, a member of the Alameddine crime family.

‘Cold crosswinds of a thug life’

In his police statement, Langker explained that the Alameddine crew’s alleged displeasure about the FriendlyJordies video was because it featured photos of themselves taken for an August 2021 Rolling Stone article titled “Australia’s Most Dangerous Rapper”.

The article was written by Fazal about his rapper friend, Huncho, whose real name is Ali Younes.

“I’ve been around the biggest gangsters in Australia,” Huncho said in Fazal’s story.

Huncho was referring to his infamous cousins, Rafat and Talal Alameddine.

Talal, jailed for supplying the revolver used to kill NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng, was recently described as NSW’s most powerful prisoner. Older brother Rafat, understood to be in Lebanon, is alleged to be the clan’s kingpin.

Fazal also wrote that joining Huncho in “the cold crosswinds of a thug life”, was the rapper’s best friend Masood Zakaria, “a member of Australia’s most violent street gang, Brothers 4 Life”.

Until his recent extradition from Turkey, Zakaria was on the nation’s “most wanted list”.

Regarded by police as the second-in-command of the Alameddine crime clan, Zakaria is currently facing charges of conspiracy to murder a member of the Hamze clan, supply of a prohibited drug and directing a crime group. Last week, Zakaria was charged with two additional murders.

In September 2022, Four Corners ran “The Postcode Wars”, a program featuring teenagers in rival street gangs who were being groomed as footsoldiers for organised crime.

Fazal had facilitated the participation of his friend Huncho in the story.

On camera, Fazal said a lot of his rapport with the rapper was due to Fazal’s own background. “I was mixed in with the streets when I was young.”

Fazal explained that Huncho didn’t trust the mainstream media because of the way his family, the Alameddines, had been represented in the news.

But Huncho was not pleased with the final story, which featured a tense interview between the rapper and reporter Grace Tobin. The ABC “flipped the script on me hard” and made him “look bad”, Huncho complained on social media.

Having secured the interview, Fazal watched as Tobin interviewed the rapper. It’s understood that Huncho was not happy with Tobin’s decision to include footage of a senior member of the Alameddine crime family, who was directing the rapper’s answers off-camera.

“Make it very clear that the Alameddine organised crime network does not exist. It’s a police-made thing,” instructed the handler.

“Yep,” Huncho replied, before turning back to the camera. “There’s no criminal network. That’s something that the police and the media have made up. There’s no such thing.”

But in his Rolling Stone article, Fazal wrote: “This year, the rapper has made headlines as a member of Sydney’s most notorious crime family; the Alameddines.”

Asked by Fazal how his family had “ascended the ranks of the underworld”, Huncho replied: “I’ll say it with my whole chest, it’s because we’ve never let any outsiders in and we’ve stuck to a mad code of loyalty.”

The identity of Huncho’s handler on Four Corners was not revealed, but law enforcement sources claim it was Mohammed Salim Noorzai, 29, who survived an assassination attempt outside a Prospect gym in November 2021.

Because of the escalating violence between the Alameddine and Hamzy networks, in December 2020 the commissioner of police took court action to ban Noorzai, Huncho, Zakaria and others from having any contact with Huncho’s cousin, alleged kingpin Rafat Alameddine.

Noorzai, Zakaria and Huncho all featured in the photo shoot for Fazal’s Rolling Stone story. The same photos were used in the FriendlyJordies video.

When Fazal’s feature on the rapper came out in 2021, Fazal posted a reel on Instagram showing his friend Huncho waving Fazal’s cover story in front of an armed police officer from the Raptor Squad, which targets organised crime, particularly among outlaw motorcycle gangs.

“my bro @ayhuncho making sure my @rollingstone feature is read by those that need to read it. #raptorsquad #nswpolice,” posted Fazal, accompanied by a rolling-on- the- floor laughing emoji.

In March, Huncho was arrested by the Raptor Squad. He is facing serious kidnap charges, which can attract a 25-year jail term.

Detective Superintendent Grant Taylor said of Huncho’s recent arrest: “That person has always been very closely aligned with individuals that we have been investigating in the Alameddine syndicate for time immemorial.”

Langker purchased the Rolling Stone photos from a freelance photographer for use in the FriendlyJordies video, “Coronation”, which was broadcast in August 2022. Three months later, Shanks’ Bondi house was firebombed.

An Alameddine associate was arrested at the end of last year, but Langker told police that the threats over the video only increased after the arrest.

“Jordan has already been firebombed, what more could it take to take the video down,” Fazal is alleged to have told Langker, 24, the writer and producer of the video, in a phone call on January 11.

In a heated eight-minute call on January 17, Langker told Fazal: “You’re a Four Corners journalist. You’ve got to decide what you are. You’re not one of them.”

From biker gangs to prison

Fazal has been open about his controversial past as a high-ranking member of the Mongols.

“I naturally acclimatised to the violence and honoured the criminal code, where your word is everything,” Fazal told The Walkley Magazine in 2018 of his time in the outlaw gang.

Fazal reassessed gang life after several friends were murdered because of what he described as “the brutal treachery of gang politics”.

“I buried my best friend. He was shot in the face,” he told the Australian True Crime podcast in June 2019. The string of violent killings, and the fact he had “more friends in prison than on the outside”, led Fazal to step away from the life of a gangster, he told the podcast.

“These days my skin is inked with the names of murdered friends, a portrait of Gaddafi, dates of imprisonment, and a 1%er diamond,” Fazal wrote in Vice magazine in 2017.

The “one percenter” is a reference to 99 per cent of motorcyclists being law-abiding citizens, implying that one percenters operate outside the law. Fazal wrote that his tattoos “form a visual portrait of ideas and events that transfigured me”.

In winning the 2020 Walkley Award for Media Diversity for his podcast, No Gangsters In Paradise, Fazal talked of his journey “from biker gangs to prison” to now having a mission to amplify the voices of those marginalised by society.

Tapping into his underworld contacts, in May 2023, Fazal fronted a Four Corners investigation into an Australian cocaine cartel. In August, he was given a permanent position as an investigative reporter on the ABC’s flagship current affairs program. Fazal recently delved into the “highly secretive, illicit world” of the methamphetamine trade.

‘It’s not worth it’

Late in the afternoon of January 11, Langker, accompanied by his lawyer Mark Davis, also a former journalist, met Fazal at Bambini Trust, a coffee shop outside Davis’ law firm in Elizabeth St, in Sydney’s CBD. Fazal again agitated for the removal of the video because of the danger it posed to all of them, including himself.

Langker and Davis wanted to go to the authorities. “Mahmood didn’t want to involve the police,” said Langker in his police statement.

On January 16, Fazal texted Langker, saying that refusing to take the video down after the firebombing wasn’t “some kind of weird battle”. Shanks “already has lost”, texted Fazal, and “these people tried to kill him and now they’re threatening others, it’s not worth it”.

Langker replied in a text, “Mahmood this is sounding increasingly sinister. I’m starting to take your messages as threats and I’m considering going to the police.” Three days later, Langker did so.

Speaking to the police has long been an anathema to the former gang member. “We don’t talk to police, that’s part of the code,” Fazal told the podcast The Felon Show in 2021.

In response to questions from the Herald, NSW Police said that the investigation into the threats reported by Langker has stalled due to the reluctance of Fazal to provide a statement. “As such this impacted any further investigative avenues,” said the police in a written response.

Neither the ABC nor Fazal would say it was in his capacity as an ABC reporter that led him to attend meetings and take calls with associates of the Alameddine crime family in January or whether he notified his bosses or the police that serious threats were being made against journalists from other organisations as well as against himself.

NSW Police said neither Fazal nor the ABC had reported any threats. The police added that they are satisfied that currently there is no risk to Fazal's safety.

In response to detailed questions, an ABC spokesperson said, “Mahmood Fazal does extremely challenging, impactful and important public interest journalism for the ABC and the ABC stands by his reporting. For obvious reasons, the ABC won’t comment on security threats to our employees, measures we take for their safety or any dealings we may have with police.”

Fazal declined to answer specific questions. Instead, he demanded his lengthy statement, in which he denied any unlawful conduct and complained of ethnic stereotyping, be published in full or not at all.

“The connections you seek to draw between myself and events are serious and which I find profoundly offensive,” Fazal said. “I am troubled that you appear to have relied on the ethnic background of the people to whom you refer in order to imply unlawful conduct on my part. This very much appears to be a case of attempting to stereotype me.

“If you are in possession of any credible information that suggests I have engaged in any unlawful conduct (which I have not), I suggest you provide that information to the police so they can deal with it properly rather than publishing untested allegations in the paper,” Fazal told the Herald.

With Fazal declining to assist police over the FriendlyJordies’ threats, the investigation went nowhere and, on February 1, Shanks took down the YouTube video.

“You win. We’re taking down the video,” said Shanks without naming any person or group in his statement. “Congratulations. You run this city.”

He also said that it was now a year after his house was firebombed, yet “these figures are once again venting, threatening dire consequences if the video isn’t taken down”.

Shanks said he couldn’t live with the prospect of “the death of innocent people” hanging over his conscience.

The YouTuber also had a subtle dig at Fazal: “The real shame in all of this, of course, is that it would have made a great story for self-proclaimed home of investigative journalism Four Corners, that touts that it exists to serve the public interest.”

The FriendlyJordies video “Coronation” related to former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro’s post-politics job as executive director of Sydney property development company Coronation. Barilaro has featured extensively in Shanks’ videos.

The former NSW Nationals leader successfully sued Google, which owns YouTube, over two videos Shanks published in 2020 wrongly accusing Barilaro of corruption. In October 2021, Shanks settled with Barilaro, paying $100,000 in costs.

Andy Nahas, 35, is Coronation’s builder and former company secretary. Coronation, which is run by Nahas’ older brother Joe, is a major property player with “over $5.3 billion in mixed-use projects in the pipeline”.

Unwelcome headaches

Photographs of Andy Nahas on a night out with Huncho and his Alameddine associates, which featured in Fazal’s Rolling Stone story, caused headaches for the builder.

In December 2021, Rolling Stone received a demand from Andy Nahas’ lawyers requesting that the image of Nahas be removed “as a matter of urgency” as the inclusion of the photograph suggested Nahas was associated with criminal activity.

In one of the photos, standing next to Huncho and with his arm around Andy Nahas, is John Ray Bayssari.

Last week arrest warrants were issued for Bayssari, 33, and Rafat Alameddine, 30, over “one of the worst organised crime assassinations we’ve seen in Australia”, according to Assistant Commissioner Michael Fitzgerald. He said the pair, who are overseas, are alleged to have been behind “the callous murders of father and son, Toufik and Salim Hamze”.

On Wednesday, police also charged Zakaria with the same murders, which occurred in Guildford in 2021.

The magazine complied, but the photos were tabled in NSW Parliament less than a fortnight after they were published in August 2022 by the Herald and appeared in the Coronation video.

“That photograph that I’ve provided to you comes from a story that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine about a rapper, Mr Younes [Huncho]. It shows Mr Andy Nahas, who was the secretary of Coronation Property, with a number of other people,” said Labor’s Adam Searle on August 31, 2022.

The photo was shown to NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb and her deputy Dave Hudson, who were appearing at a budget estimates hearing. Hudson quipped that many in the photo were known to him due to their alignment with the Alameddine family.

Asked if he was concerned “about any connection between Coronation and these people?” Hudson replied, “I am concerned about any people or any organisation that that particular group is associated with.”

Searle also noted that Barilaro had lobbied planning officials on Andy Nahas’ behalf during his brief employment with Coronation.

The Herald is not suggesting any wrongdoing on the part of Barilaro or Andy or Joe Nahas.

Joe Nahas has previously told the Herald: “I doubt any Lebanese person in Merrylands doesn’t know, or know of, at least one Alameddine. Living in close proximity, of course we have had social interaction with members of the Alameddine family. Nevertheless, we do not have any association with them.”

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