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How the King of the Cross won his crown

EYEBROWS arched, white teeth flashing, John Housain Ibrahim drapes one arm over the co-owner of the Trademark Hotel, Mimmo Salvato, the other over the actor Nick Giannopoulos.

Standing in the middle of the Trademark's Piano Room as an A-list crowd - topped by the rent-a-celebrity Paris Hilton - swirls around him during New Year's Eve celebrations, Ibrahim looks like the king of the world.

After 21 years of wheeling and dealing he is at the top of his game, and he knows it.

The question is, how did he get there?

The Kings Cross nightclub entrepreneur concedes hundreds of intelligence reports have been written about him by NSW and federal police, and the NSW and Australian crime commissions. Their version of his world is fantasy, he says.

Described by some as "Teflon" John, to others he has a much simpler sobriquet: King of the Cross.

An important witness in the Wood royal commission in the 1990s, Ibrahim, 38, has crossed paths with some of the biggest names in NSW organised crime.

But his role in Sydney's red- light district is clouded by story and counter-story. He is a nightclub promoter who works with about 17 clubs in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, and owns multimillion-dollar homes in Sydney's east.

He declined to be interviewed for this story but one of his lawyers, Stephen Alexander, outlined Ibrahim's version of the "John Ibrahim myth".

"John always says, 'Either I'm the smartest criminal out there, or I just run a legitimate business and people want to fantasise'," Alexander said.

"Go back to the many hundreds of police intelligence reports that do not even substantiate one iota of any allegation. All you've got is an illogical quantum leap. Everyone tries to assume that it's XYZ … but [where's the] evidence?"

It sounds almost like a taunt, but no one can argue with the logic. Dozens of organised crime syndicates have been broken up and members jailed in NSW during the two decades Ibrahim has been around, but police have not, in 21 years, provided anything that proves any serious criminal conduct.

Not once. Nothing.

"At the end of the day it's just rumour and innuendo, because if you don't have a colourful character to have a go at, well it's not going to be the Cross," Alexander said.

Accused of being the "lifeblood of the drugs industry of Kings Cross" during the Wood royal commission in 1996 - a claim denied then and now - Ibrahim has long said he despises drugs, and is in fact an exercise addict and a non-smoking teetotaller.

"There's nothing about alcohol that does anything for me. I have one drink and I'm all over the place. Cigarettes make me dizzy," he once told a reporter.

Nor has Ibrahim ever been convicted of a serious offence.

As a teenager he was convicted of assault following a fight with another boy. As an adult he has been charged with murder and threatening a witness in the armed robbery trial of one of his younger brothers, Michael Maummar Ibrahim.

In both cases Ibrahim did not even get to make a plea, with the cases thrown out early on.

However, what nobody disputes is that Ibrahim is prominent among the characters who run business along the 500-metre strip of Darlinghurst Road that is Kings Cross.

Nor does he deny his former involvement with two of the most well-known crooks in NSW history. In the 1980s and 1990s he was, variously, a driver and bodyguard for Bill Bayeh and George David Freeman.

Bayeh was the head of a Kings Cross drug syndicate who was sentenced to 15 years' jail in 1996. Freeman, about to feature in the new Underbelly series, was Sydney's original "colourful racing identity" and made millions under police patronage.

Ibrahim remains close to the Freeman family. One of Freeman's sons, David George Freeman - while not following in his father's footsteps - is also a nightclub promoter and the pair are solid friends.

A search of Ibrahim's business records shows he has no legal association with any licensed premises in NSW, only with two nightclub promotions companies.

Alexander declined to provide names for the two companies but says they are registered and operate wholly within the law.

Even Ibrahim's birth details are hard to nail down. He has said he was born in Australia. However some ASIC documents list his birthplace as Tripoli, in Lebanon, while others state Sydney.

Business documents also record two dates of birth; one suggests he is eight years older than the 38 years he lays claim to.

His rise from humble origins as the son of poor Lebanese Muslim immigrants is perhaps a success story. He is one of Sydney's pre-eminent nightclub operators, almost comparable with the rich kid Justin Hemmes, and has a fortune to match.

He wears designer clothes, drives a Bentley and drops astounding amounts of money defending his brothers when they face court.

When his older brother Hassam "Sam" Ibrahim faced trial in October for a 2004 shooting, Ibrahim hired the services of Constantine Heliotis, QC, a Melbourne barrister who has defended a number of Victoria's gangland elite.

A source involved in the case told the Herald Ibrahim spent more than $400,000 to retain Heliotis for the four-week trial.

Sam Ibrahim was found not guilty on all charges. The Herald does not suggest anything improper occurred, but the money spent on his brother's defence is a handy indicator of Ibrahim's wealth.

By the time Ibrahim was 22 he had amassed enough capital to move out of his family home near Parramatta and rent a 528-square-metre cliff-side property at Dover Heights. Records show that in 2001 he bought it for $1.165 million. Last year, before he embarked on a major renovation, the house was worth more than $3 million.

He also owns two townhouses in the same street, bought in March 2007 for $2.5 million.

In 1993 he penned a chapter in a book about Kings Cross, People Of The Cross. His chapter, named after the first club he owned, The Tunnel, listed his identity as "John Ibrahim, nightclub owner at nineteen".

While full of youthful bravado, it is also the most revealing glimpse into Ibrahim's life.

He writes his parents came to Sydney from Lebanon before he was born to visit friends and stayed here. Sam and he were born shortly after.

His father, a "well-known businessman" in Lebanon, travelled between the two countries and one day just vanished, Ibrahim wrote.

"Something happened in Lebanon and he's what you call 'missing'. I don't think his absence has influenced me really, but it would have been good to know him. He's a bit of a character himself apparently."

Ibrahim learned tae kwan do from the age of nine, representing NSW as a teenager. When Sam started working as a bouncer at a strip joint, Studio 44, Ibrahim started exploring the Cross with a group of friends.

"We could've easily gone bad but I liked to think we just stayed on the border," he recalled.

Impatient with school, at 14 Ibrahim was planning a career in the Cross. "The principal made the best sort of prediction," he wrote. "He said I had three options - I'd be a very wealthy man, or I'd be in jail, or dead."

He left school and started doing odd jobs for Bill and Louis Bayeh. Both Sam and John would tell the Wood royal commission they had known the Bayeh family since the mid-1980s and, before falling out, had helped the Bayeh brothers by doing odd jobs and providing muscle.

A month before his 16th birthday Ibrahim saw one of the Bayehs, possibly Louis, being attacked by two men. He went to help and ended up with a kitchen knife jammed into his chest. He was in hospital, unconscious for three weeks with damage to a lung, his liver and intestines.

After a year-long recovery, Ibrahim was back at the Cross. Taking that knife for the Bayehs had its benefits, he found.

"I'd proven myself, and my status had been lifted. The person I'd helped gave me opportunities," he wrote.

His rise was meteoric.

"I moved into different circles with people who had more money and more knowledge."

Referring to himself as a "kept man", he said at 16 he and his friends reaped the benefits of their association with "certain people".

"Wherever we went - in the coffee shops, the clubs, the discos - we'd get everything we wanted because of our association with certain people. At 16 that was a big thrill."

In the last few years of the 1980s - in his late teens and already a Cross identity - Ibrahim began to build for his future.

At 19 he became a Kings Cross nightclub owner when he bought a 20 per cent stake in Tunnel Cabaret, in Earl Place, for $70,000.

But Ibrahim denied a suggestion by counsel assisting the Wood royal commission, John Agius, QC, that five years later he and Sam were taking over the Kings Cross drug market from Bill Bayeh, whose influence was on the wane.

"You are the new lifeblood of the drugs trade in Kings Cross, aren't you?" Agius asked the then 25-year-old Ibrahim, when he took the stand on October 18, 1995.

"So it would seem, but no, I'm not," Ibrahim replied.

"Isn't it the case that you and your brother have filled the gap to the extent to which Mr Bill Bayeh's industry has contracted? Haven't you expanded to fill it?" Agius asked.

"No, I haven't," Ibrahim said.

In 1999 Tunnel Cabaret was sprayed with about 50 bullets.

Ibrahim sold the club in 2001 and its name changed to EP1. Later that year, following a series of high-profile club raids, police applied to have it shut down, alleging it was part of a well-organised drug trade in the Cross.

That action was defeated and the allegations were never proved. New owners became involved and oversaw the club's refurbishment and relaunch as Dragonfly in 2004.

But perhaps it is the final paragraph of Ibrahim's self-penned chapter that is most revealing. In it, the then 23-year-old outlined the way he saw his life unfolding.

"Society conditions you from the minute you go to school to be a good citizen, work and keep quiet. You live out your life, pay all your debts to the government, and you really haven't enjoyed any of it." he wrote.

"It's the people who don't listen to that, the ones that break away, who let their minds grow, who end up getting somewhere. I still live in about four different worlds, but I think my time is still coming. All I hope is I know when it's there, but I like to think I'm on the right track."

Whatever people may say about John Housain Ibrahim, however hard it is to get to the bottom of the myth, one thing is certain. Fifteen years after he wrote that paragraph, as he sits in his multimillion-dollar mansion, with luxury cars in the garage and a slew of celebrity friends, there is no doubt he is there.

What remains is establishing where "there" actually is.

By Dylan Welch
January 17, 2009
Sydney Morning Herald