Gavin Preston’s execution was a murderous play in three bungled acts

An underworld hit is arranged like a play in three acts: preparation, execution and escape.

The mysterious gangland mastermind who set in motion the plot to kill Gavin Preston had meticulously laid out a plan to ensure the death of the hated underworld enforcer.

Critical intel on where Preston would be. An interstate hit team, slipped surreptitiously into Victoria. A spotter to watch the target. Untraceable weapons. Four getaway cars in position for where the hit was most likely to go down in Melbourne’s north.

All that was left was for Preston to walk into the trap. He did as predicted on September 9, 2023 and died in a hail of bullets.

But ultimately, one of Melbourne’s most infamous underworld executions in decades would go awry, falling down in the third act after the contract killers bungled their escape.

On Friday, Sydney trigger men Jaeden Tito and Rabii Zahabe were convicted of murder and attempted murder by a Supreme Court jury.

This is the story of how the hit went down based on information from multiple underworld and police sources and evidence presented at the four-week murder trial.

A career crim gets sloppy

The hit should have gone perfectly. At first, it did.

Preston, a career criminal and notoriously violent man, had made the worst kind of mistake.

The convicted killer and standover man – apparently completely unconcerned about the masses of ill will he had created in the underworld – had become sloppy about his movements.

He’d started showing up at the popular Keilor breakfast spot Sweet Lulus in July 2023 often after a trip to the gym, and something about the place made him become an almost daily customer.

Preston always sat inside, his favourite table situated at the furthest point from the front door and closest to the kitchen, ensuring he was always facing the entrance.

He had good reason. Preston had only been out of jail for five months but had been bashing, robbing and raping his way through Melbourne’s underworld since.

It was not for nothing that Preston’s nickname was “Capable” – because he was capable of anything. His latest 11-year prison stint had been for two underworld shootings, one fatal.

The court heard Preston had been feuding with underworld figures like gangland boss George Marrogi, Waleed “Wally” Haddara, Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim and Preston’s former bikie club, the Comanchero.

For weeks, rumours had been swirling that Preston was a dead man walking and there was $5 million on offer for someone to take the job.

On the day Preston was executed, there was certainly something in the wind.

Underworld sources say a warning had gone out to powerful street crews – get out of town and go on holiday, create easily confirmable alibis.

“People were making moves. We didn’t know who they were coming for, but we could work it out,” a source said.

On that Saturday, a two-man hit team had been idling in an Audi Q5 in the parking lot of the Keilor Hotel for three hours waiting for Preston to hold to his Sweet Lulus morning schedule.

Jaeden Tito and Rabii Zahabe had come down from Sydney to do the job – to, literally, execute a murder contract on the detested 50-year-old.

The twenty-somethings had no criminal records for the kind of violent attack they were about to launch. Yet, they were tooling up to commit one of the most brazen public gangland murders in years.

A spotter car, a peacock green Holden Cruze, driven by someone who has never been identified, circled past Preston and his associate Abbas “AJ” Maghnie, apparently to check their position.

They probably couldn’t believe their luck that the pair had sat down at an outside table, sipping on orange juice and coffee.

After waiting for traffic to clear, the Audi Q5 with Tito and Zahabe pulled up outside the cafe and the duo jumped out wearing balaclavas and gloves and armed with pistols.

They opened fire from just metres away, hitting Preston and Maghnie while they were sitting in the packed al fresco area.

One gun jammed after two shots, leaving the second shooter to spray nine bullets.

Maghnie went down, shot once through the guts. Preston was hit seven times, falling to the ground hard and succumbing to his wounds over five minutes.

The force was enough to blow Preston’s diamond stud earring clear off his head.

It was all over in less than seven seconds.

Given the extensive planning involved, there was no reason to think Zahabe and Tito wouldn’t make a clean getaway and the murder would just become another of Melbourne’s unsolved gangland killings.

Going pear shaped

Preston went down at 10.17am. Triple Zero received its first call about two minutes later, and it took less than 10 minutes for police to reach the scene.

By that time, Zahabe and Tito had raced five kilometres across two suburbs and switched cars twice, cutting through nature reserves on foot before getting into the next pre-positioned car.

Until this point, they had no reason to believe they weren’t on the cusp of making a clean getaway.

Still wearing masks and with the first two getaway cars on fire, the duo made their way to the third drop point. Here, seemingly confident they were far enough away from the shooting, they removed their masks.

It was now just a 250-metre walk to meet their final ride to freedom – but it was a choice so ostentatious it was virtually guaranteed to draw all the wrong kinds of attention.

Using the encrypted Threema app, someone known only by the handle “Feature” had pre-booked a limo service for a one-way trip to Sydney at a cost of $2800.

What Zahabe and Tito didn’t know as the limo pulled away was that their “clean” escape had been irrevocably marred by a bunch of slip-ups at each drop scene.

Tito had flicked something burning into the Audi Q5, and the flames had taken hold strongly by the time they walked away. But residents had rushed out to extinguish the flames, preserving DNA samples.

The second car didn’t burn well at all, probably because they had closed the doors after starting the fire. Forensic investigators pulled a number of objects from the car, which yielded a DNA profile strongly pointing to Tito.

The third car, a Toyota Camry, was a disaster. Zahabe and Tito had walked away without setting it on fire, presumably to avoid drawing attention.

About 10 minutes later, a mysterious, the never-identified co-conspirator showed up in a green Holden Cruze. A masked man removed a bag from the drop car and then left.

But because it wasn’t torched, cleaned or driven away, it yielded a cornucopia of DNA evidence pointing conclusively to the accused.

On their long ride to Sydney, the limo driver at one point heard one of the men in the back seat say: “Now we are brothers.”

The mistakes would keep on coming.

Kill a bloke, take a holiday

After taking care to turn off his mobile phone in the lead-up to the hit, Zahabe switched it back on after getting to Sydney – on the evening of September 9, 2023 – and began leaving an incriminating data trail a mile wide.

Just one minute after powering up, Zahabe accessed and downloaded a picture of Preston from the internet.

About an hour later, he started googling “no extradition countries”.

Later that night and the next morning – apparently struggling with his conscience – Zahabe began searching for expressions and methods of forgiveness in the Koran, known as a “Du’a”.

“This Du’a for full repentance is a search referring to a supplication that God would accept as somebody repenting for an action,” Dr Rodger Shanahan, an expert in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, said during the trial.

Meanwhile, Tito began a spending spree, seemingly off – or anticipating – the profits from the contract murder job.

He and his girlfriend checked into a Sydney hotel, then upgraded to the Oaks Port Stephens Pacific Blue Resort in Salamander Bay and then the Port Stephens Koala Sanctuary.

Along the way, Tito spent $1237 in cash on a bracelet and ring for his girlfriend at Prouds Jewellery. Meanwhile, his girlfriend was making $1000 cash deposits in her bank account.

Tito was also seen carrying a backpack seemingly full of $50 notes.

It was a conspicuous scene for a sometimes roofer, then aged 22.

Tito’s girlfriend also took numerous pictures of him while on their jaunts, which showed what looked like burns he had sustained on his arms and wrist while setting one of the getaway cars alight.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Tito’s girlfriend, or that she knew about the murder plot or where the money was coming from.

Zahabe, on the other hand, was notably quieter; his movements so low-key that it didn’t leave a trail so easy to follow.

Still, the axe fell about a month after the killing, when he was arrested by NSW police acting on information from their Victorian counterparts.

That night, Tito texted an unknown person called “Cheeky B”.

“Hey brother, it’s J, Rabz’s coey [co-offender]. You free tonight,” he wrote.

The next morning, he followed up with the complaint: “You sleep much last night, haha. I sure as hell didn’t.”

Tito was arrested three weeks later, and his phone became an open book for detectives.

The no-motive murder

The Office of Public Prosecutions was crystal clear from the get-go during the trial that the “why” of Preston’s murder was completely irrelevant to Zahabe and Tito’s guilt.

“An example of something that we don’t have to prove to you beyond reasonable doubt … is the motive. The reason. The why. Why these two men killed Gavin Preston and attempted to kill Abbas Maghnie,” prosecutor Kristie Churchill, SC, told the jury during opening addresses.

Despite a three-year investigation and hundreds, if not thousands of hours of work, Victoria Police’s homicide squad could not bring the ringleaders to justice.

For the defence, the “lack” of motive was a critical point: Zahabe and Tito had no reason to kill Preston. They didn’t know him and they had no beef with him.

“During the course of that investigation, police have received information pointing to multiple people having been motivated to kill Mr Preston,” Zahabe’s defence barrister, Paul Smallwood, told the jury.

It was a pretty dry way to explain what was common knowledge in the underworld and among police by the time Preston died. As one former rival told The Age, triumphantly, on the day of his murder: “They’ll be holding the wake in a phone box.”

During their cross-examination of the homicide detective in charge of the case, Zahabe and Tito’s defence lawyers laid out the scale of the threats Preston had faced.

The lawyers introduced into evidence a series of “information reports” (IRs) – police intelligence gathered from anonymous sources and covert informers – that often jibed closely with the rumours circulating in the underworld at the time.

And some were quite plausible as motives for murder.

Preston had been pointed to, in at least two IRs, as being responsible for the attempted desecration of the grave of jailed gangland boss George Marrogi’s beloved sister and business partner, Meshilin. It was this that attracted the $5 million contract on his head.

(Detective Senior Constable Dale Myers gave evidence to the trial that it was the belief of police this information was incorrect and Preston was not responsible for the attack on the grave.)

Other IRs claimed Preston was attempting to get a toe-hold in the illicit cigarette market, which at that time was gripped by a brutal cycle of tit-for-tat violence that later became known as the “tobacco wars”.

In fact, it was alleged in one IR tendered to the court that Preston had burnt down a tobacco shop owned by underworld figure Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim.

Another claimed that tobacco kingpin Kazem “Kaz” Hamad wanted Preston dead.

It was also said that Preston had been on a tear seeking vengeance against anyone who was an enemy of, or he suspected was involved in the murder of his best mate, Nabil “The Mad Leb” Maghnie, in January 2020.

Maghnie was gunned down in the midst of a botched standover attempt in Epping while trying to extract money for a car accident involving his daughter.

“[Preston] was running around cleaning up anyone who had something to do with Nabil or AJ [Abbas Maghnie],” said one IR report tendered to the trial.

Others in the underworld pointed the finger at the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang.

Preston joined the club and proudly sported the OMCG’s tattoo on his neck, but refused to take orders from the gang’s hierarchy.

The antagonism hit fever pitch when Preston got out of jail, in early 2023, and began ripping off a host of people in the underworld, some of whom were linked to the Comancheros.

But the most plausible motive is actually the most anodyne.

“Gavin took (stole) somebody’s trucks, but the profits from those trucks belonged to someone else. That guy is very, very big in Sydney,” an underworld source told The Age.

“He called up Gavin and Gavin spoke very badly to him. He got real angry, he said, ‘OK then, mate, you can keep the f—ing trucks’.

“Then his friends go down to Melbourne and kill him. It was a Sydney job, all the way.”

The identity of that powerful Sydney crime figure has never been revealed.

“Gavin brought it on himself,” the source said.

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