Underbelly

If you’ve wondered why Channel Nine’s The Golden Mile painted such an endearing portrait of its leading “Underbelly” character, King’s Cross figure John Ibrahim, it might well be because he’s had a hand in how he was portrayed in the script. 

Ibrahim – who paints himself as a publicity shy businessman annoyed by the fame generated by the show – was so concerned about his portrayal in Golden Mile, The Punch can reveal he even confronted an actor who turned down the chance to play the lead in the Channel 9 hit series.

Young Australian actor Les Chantery - star of 2009 Australian film Cedar Boys about Lebanese-Australian drug dealers in Sydney’s Western suburbs - rejected the opportunity to audition for the starring role of John Ibrahim in The Golden Mile out concern of having himself and other Lebanese-Australians typecast as thugs.

Continue reading "Has the Golden Mile given Ibrahim a soft underbelly?" »

Sundays for normal people are a little island away from the working week - a place filled with bacon and eggs, stretches on the couch, walks in the park and piping hot coffee. I’m a crime reporter for a weekly newspaper in Australia’s crime capital and my Sundays are usually a bit different. Sunday is typically the day I wake bleary-eyed to the sound of my ringing mobile closely followed by a spray of invective from some heavy character or other.

Sometimes it’s a colourful kickboxer or a colourful nightclub figure or a colourful race track identity who doesn’t like what I’ve written about him in that day’s paper. Sometime the unhappy customers who ruin my Sunday aren’t colourful at all – just angry criminals who have been convicted of serious offences.

On the scariest Sundays the voice on the line belongs to Roberta Williams.

Continue reading "Badlands: Getting on the wrong side of Fat Boy" »

Carl Williams was a human being. But he was a human being in the physiological sense of the word. He breathed oxygen, had two arms and two legs, he had all the defining physical characteristics which qualified him for inclusion in the homo sapiens species.

But he was shorn of the emotional characteristics which define humanity – empathy, compassion and kindness, remorse, guilt and shame. He murdered three people - one of them a father in front of his children at a school football game – and sold drugs on such a massive scale that one can only speculate as to how many people were poisoned or even killed by using his products.

It’s been said this week by Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland and others that any death is a tragedy. But some deaths are more tragic than others, and like most people I struggle to feel any sense of sorrow at Williams’ death.

Continue reading "Our only regret is we didn’t get to murder Carl Williams" »

Carl Williams became a household name outside Victoria thanks to the first of the enormously successful TV series Underbelly, which is now in its third season on Channel 9.

Williams, a career criminal, died today as a result of head injuries inflicted in an assault by another inmate at Barwon Prison, where he was serving a minimum of 35 years for three murders.

Williams became something of a grotesque poster boy for Melbourne’s gangland war which came to national attention six years ago as tit-for-tat killings between rival drug gangs became increasingly daring and public. The brazen public murder of Jason Moran - shot dead along with a fellow criminal in a car park after attending a kids’ footy clinic - was something of a watershed moment in the war and it was masterminded by Williams.

Continue reading "Williams: part-time TV star, full-time crook, now dead" »

In the movies the “underworld” stays on the right side of uncivilised – law abiding citizens, other than small-business owners in the wrong part of town never have to see it, interact with it, or admit to their parents they may have been out on a date with it once or twice.

But in Sydney, the line between the “underworld” and the rest of has always been a bit blurred.

A couple of years ago it wasn’t a red carpet without at least two members of the Bra Boys. The big PR fish was big wave surfer Koby Abberton, but if you couldn’t get him any old Abberton would do, even Jai, who was tried, but found not guilty of the murder of Anthony Hines.

Continue reading "Sydney’s red carpet running redder than usual" »