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you’ve got no one to answer to.” Everyone joined. To our boys, the bikies were so up high in the crime world that if you were one of them, it’s like you were so powerful that you were untouchable.’
    The chapter quickly grew to become one of the most feared outfits in Sydney, and ‘Sam’ Ibrahim was the unquestioned chief of what police repeatedly alleged in court was an organised crime outfit.
    Here, in the real world outside the social pages, ‘Sam’ was not playing the media-friendly game. He was, in fact, proving a headache for smooth-talking John because of his long involvement with the outlaw motorcycle club and his reputation as a violent standover man with a hair-trigger temper. If not a hair-trigger, full stop. Bikers were always big on guns.
    The Nomads went to war with the Rebels – Sam even went so far as to challenge Rebels national president Alessio ‘Alex’ Vella to a ‘fight to the death’ – and feuded constantly with Mahmoud ‘Mick’ Hawi’s Comanchero City Crew.
    But in the end it was an internal feud, between members of the Newcastle and Parramatta chapters, which crippled the club.
    In September 2004 a group of Sydney Nomadstravelled to Newcastle and attacked a group of senior Newcastle members, believing their colleagues were ‘not properly catering for the financial needs’ of a jailed member and his family.
    Two men, Newcastle sergeant-at-arms Dale Campton and member Mark Chrystie, were bashed and shot in both kneecaps. This seemed unnecessarily robust, even by western suburbs standards. Sam Ibrahim, Orrock and Sydney West chapter boss Paul Griffin were charged over the double shooting two years later, when Campton agreed to give evidence. All three were eventually found not guilty by a jury in late 2008, but it meant that Sam, placed on remand in December 2006, was off the streets for almost two years.
    In April 2007, only a few months after Sam’s departure to jail, a van was driven through a roller door of the Parramatta chapter’s clubhouse and torched. The fire destroyed several motorcycles and caused extensive damage to the building. The Nomads hierarchy, perhaps tired of the continual warring, disbanded the chapter and its members dispersed, filling the ranks of the Bandidos, the Rebels, other Nomad chapters … and, for a small group of hardcore Ibrahim supporters, the newly formed gang, soon to be Notorious.
    SOME dirt sticks even to Teflon. One of the reasons John Ibrahim has not been able to whitewash his past the way he would have liked is the voluminous contents of the Wood Royal Commission in the mid-1990s.
    More specifically, a single sentence has haunted Ibrahim since his two days in the witness box at the age of 25.
    Both Sam and John were called to give evidence before the Commission and John, with his trademark insouciance, seemed almost to enjoy being grilled by counsel assisting the commission, John Agius, QC, even when the prominent prosecutor dropped this bombshell: ‘Well, you’re the new lifeblood of the drug industry at Kings Cross, aren’t you?’
    With a smirk, Ibrahim replied: ‘So it would seem, but no, I’m not.’ But what he perhaps did not realise then was that Agius had placed on the record the central allegation that has dogged John and his brothers ever since: that they were – and remain – involved in the illicit drug trade.
    A quick scan of newspaper articles reveals Agius’s sentence has been referred to or quoted more than 40 times since, and has become the reflex allegation against the nightclub baron.
    But that sentence wasn’t the only revelation about Ibrahim contained in the pages of the Commission’s transcripts, and his evidence gave an insight into his business life and his falling out with the Bayeh brothers.
    Early in his examination of Ibrahim, Agius asked him whether the Tunnel nightclub had a bank account.
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