Once there was another city here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it any more, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it.
These words were written by legendary American newspaper columnist Peter Hamill about his New York but could now be written about our Melbourne, once the world’s most liveable city.
Millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it.
Melbourne is my town. I have lived here all my life and will die here. I have seen it lit blue to mourn police killed on duty and deserted during COVID lockdowns. I have joined (as an observer) patrols hunting car thieves and drug dealers, got on the tear with detectives, lawyers and crooks, seen guns drawn, and entered crime scenes where lives were lost and families broken.
I have been to the Police Academy to see the new start their journeys to the quick graduation march, and the old end theirs, carried out in coffins to the slow funeral one.
In that time, there has not been one street I would not walk – until now. I wouldn’t go to a bar in Prahran these days, which means organised crime is winning.
The crooks know that if they don’t blink, we will.
It is not the headline crimes but the minor ones that are death by a thousand cuts.
I went to see an old friend at the weekend. He has just put a security cage at the front entrance after an attempted home invasion on a neighbour.
Around the corner from me, a man who chased off three armed offenders attempting to break into his family home is struggling with the psychological aftermath.
After a burglary at a police officer’s home, his teenage daughter would not sleep in her room for weeks.
Home invasions and carjackings are now dinner party conversations rather than a rarity. Crime is no longer someone else’s problem.
My son finally bought a decent family car, which he expected to last 10 years. It was stolen about 7am with the keys inside his house. He had just finished a nightshift. He is a policeman. That car, with a child seat in the back, is now either sitting ready to be used as a getaway vehicle or has been dismantled to be put in a container bound for the Middle East.
The dealership where he bought it is now selling old-fashioned manual security locks to immobilise the steering wheel.
Outlaw bikies roar down Chapel Street on a Saturday night making a mockery of our anti-gang laws. They are sending a message that they own the street.
Australia has massive natural resources, a stable economy, rule of law and a grounded political system. So why are we so angry, self-centred, frightened and rude?
My mother died 48 years ago this month. I was 11 years old. To her, the rules of good manners were unbreakable statutes.
One never ate while walking along a street; you would ask may I, never can I; chewing gum was a filthy American habit; and eating a meal in front of the television was an activity restricted to the incapacitated or those living in caravans.
Why are we so angry, self-centred, frightened and rude?
There was an excuse for old shoes but not dirty ones.
Children gave way to adults on a footpath – not barge along in a straight line, head over a mobile phone.
We would hold doors open for others; now we cut them off in traffic.
We would say please and thank you to those who provided us with hospitality. Now there are signs telling us not to abuse them.
A well-dressed woman smashes into a waitress just trying to earn a living. The self-entitled pedestrian with a water flask (hydrate and irate) marches on, her victim left shocked and bleeding.
A French bakery near me has closed, replaced by an American confectionary shop selling illegal cigarettes. In the same strip there is a milk bar that no longer sells milk.
Nearby there are six seedy Thai massage parlours open all hours advertising parking at the rear. There are two legitimate physiotherapy clinics, open only during business hours, with parking at the front.
I was brought up in a Housing Commission home in a working-class suburb. Not once did I consider myself disadvantaged.
Too many kids today from similar backgrounds see crime as their only ladder to success.
Melbourne’s bar wars are serious, and police fear they will soon turn deadly serious.
This week there was an attempt to burn down Prahran’s Electric Bar. The young offenders sloshed enough fuel to create a fireball that would have killed them and taken out half of Chapel Street. Somehow, it failed to ignite.
A second crew was spotted nearby. Police don’t know if they were sent to finish the job or had taken the same contract.
Those with long memories know how deadly a combination of extortion and firebombings can be. In March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, was set on fire, killing 15 people.
Police have cracked multiple sources listing proposed targets for attack. Owners are being warned to increase security.
Every night in Prahran, Port Melbourne, Windsor and South Melbourne, police are chasing off young suspects.
On the other side of town, 10 shots were fired into a Yarraville brothel. A decade ago, that would be front page news. Now it is hardly worth a mention.
In the madness there appears a level of sophistication. There have been drive-bys involving young suspects on e-bikes wearing balaclavas acting as decoys to lure police away from bars on the bomb list.
Teenagers in stolen cars are cruising past venues. Police refuse to leave the at-risk bars to chase them.
While the gang communicates through Signal, someone is using WhatsApp to make threats. Using a trick called spoofing, the messages appear from a US number but could be coming from anywhere.
One says: “If you want the knife off your throat, contact us.” Another says: “We will hurt you in ways your brain can’t comprehend.” A third says: “We’re after you, your family, your business, your homes and souls.”
The messages seem personal, designed to terrify, and do not include extortion demands. They end with a “thank you”, so maybe manners aren’t dead after all.
Police are changing shift times to have numbers during firebombing rush hours. The crooks are changing theirs.
One owner of a premise under attack is no stranger to bad luck. As a property developer, he had multiple white goods delivered – when he slipped off to buy a pizza the expensive appliances disappeared, leaving him to make a large insurance claim.
Owners are being attacked at home and premises targeted more than once. Some abductions go unreported as the victims fear if they go to the police they will be attacked again.
In an underworld war, the reasons are usually obvious – a power struggle, the control of a market or a deadly feud – but not this one. Everyone is guessing.
Police believe it is connected to the lucrative illicit alcohol industry, but there will be more.
Detectives say if this is the softening-up period, there will be specific demands following the tobacco war playbook.
If that trend is followed, the demands will be that your bar will be protected on the condition you buy our spirits, use our security, allow our drug dealers inside, and pay thousands in protection.
The fallback position is the attacks continue, patronage drops off, and the businesses become unsustainable and are bought by frontmen at bargain prices.
It could be that one powerful criminal overseas is picking off the venues owned by people he wants to ruin.
When drug boss Carl Williams was trying to wipe out his rivals, he had fewer than two dozen criminal associates to do his dirty work.
Illicit tobacco king Kaz Hamad’s syndicate has hundreds of kids on the books, ready to do jobs for a few hundred dollars, recruited anonymously via encrypted apps.
While many of Williams’ team eventually turned on him, Hamad’s soldiers have no information to trade.
Hamad’s crew (he has been arrested in Iraq) have become the most powerful organised crime gang in Australia’s history, and we laid out the red carpet for him.
Massive excise on tobacco, initially designed to deter smoking but eventually nothing but a lucrative federal government revenue stream, opened the billion-dollar market for illicit cigarettes.
Hamad saw the commercial gap, and crushed his opponents with a campaign of violence.
A further development is the pending release of Comanchero’s former sergeant-at-arms Tarek Zahed from a Sydney prison.
Zahed had plans to move to Melbourne and wants to be a player in the nightclub scene. He is quite a determined chap, having survived being shot about 10 times in an ambush that killed his brother, Omar.
He is an ally of Hamad – present postal address, a stink-hole cell in Iraq – and the notorious underworld figure Jay Malkoun, who is in custody in Dubai.
Before Zahed was jailed, he was involved in an assault on security staff at Prahran’s Love Machine (since burnt down) and a fracas in King Street.
Today, the most popular cocktail in Melbourne is a Molotov.
Once there was another city here, and now it is gone.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
