A burned-out truck sits amid the twisted wreckage of what used to be the Grab n Go convenience store in Mickleham, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
It’s been there since 1.20am on Sunday, when a gang of youths reversed the Toyota Hilux up the kerb, across a pavement and through the front door. Then they doused the stolen vehicle in petrol and set it alight.
In a vaguely comic twist, CCTV footage later obtained by the police suggests that at least one of the arsonists accidentally set his pants on fire as he fled.
By the time the Mail showed up, 24 hours later, the pavements had been cleared of ash, but an acrid stench lingered. The community’s GP surgery and kindergarten, both of which were next door to Grab n Go, were also in ruins.
It was an odd spectacle, all told, with apocalyptic piles of charred metal and melted plastic sitting incongruously next to the respectable neighbourhood’s manicured lawns and pressure-washed driveways.
Yet here in the Victorian capital, such scenes are common. Since last March, no fewer than 110 local stores have been firebombed as innocent shop owners are preyed on by ruthless crime gangs, and the violence has spread to South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.
Nor is it only the thousands of convenience stores popping up around Australia that are at risk, as any business that can be pressured by the syndicates – from tobacconists and mini supermarkets to gift shops and newsagents – could be targeted next.
This crime-wave has become an almost daily feature of news bulletins. During the 10 days before my visit to Melbourne, there were two other reported late-night arson attacks, on shops in the suburbs of Thornbury and Frankston, plus an incident in inner-city Flemington, where a storekeeper wielding an axe drove off assailants armed with machetes and Molotov cocktails.
The twisted wreckage of what used to be the Grab n Go convenience store in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. There is no suggestion illegal tobacco products were being sold here
A Daily Mail Australia reporter was pictured buying illegal vapes with ease in January this year – she had a 100 per cent success rate after visiting several stores
It affects even the smartest neighbourhoods. Walking through Port Melbourne, a ritzy suburb where homes set you back $3million, I find a burned-out shop amid a line of boutiques, upscale cafés and yoga studios. Locals tell me it was firebombed in August, by a gang using a stolen Porsche SUV.
To understand what is fuelling this explosion of violence only takes a few minutes. In fact, you need only visit one of Victoria’s 1,000-odd convenience stores that have not (yet) been set on fire.
There, behind the till, they will generally display a price list for cigarettes. And the amount they cost is positively mind-blowing. The store next to my hotel sells Marlboro Reds for $68.10 a packet.
The soaring prices are the result of punitive tobacco taxes brought in at the behest of Australia’s powerful public health lobby. They now account for between 60 and 85 per cent of the cost of a cigarette, depending on its brand.
Originally, these tariffs were designed to price smokers out of their habit. But they’ve now been ratcheted up so far that they’re causing a nasty side effect. Namely: Australia’s criminal gangs can now make huge profits by smuggling cheap cigarettes from overseas and selling them under the counter in local stores.
A pack that costs $2-$3 in Asia or Latin America can be sold for $15 or $20 on the country’s booming black market.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis caused by soaring mortgage rates, there appears to be no shortage of consumers. And profit margins are growing each year: under the reign of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, cigarette prices are being jacked up each March and September, by around five per cent above inflation.
Crucially, the whole thing is now fuelling a gangland ‘tobacco war,’ with bloodthirsty cartels fighting it out for control of convenience stores that sell their product. And this, in turn, is causing the firebombings.
Daily Mail journalist Guy Adams at the scene of the Grab n Go convenience store in Mickleham about 24 hours after it was burned down
‘In Australia, tobacco is the new cocaine,’ is how one of Melbourne’s veteran underworld observers puts it.
‘The profit margins aren’t far off narcotics, and you don’t need to run street dealers, or crack houses, because people will just buy the stuff out of proper shops. Plus the penalty for being caught is tiny. You get busted bringing cigarettes in via a shipping container and it’s treated as an excise offence, so you get months not years in jail. The tariff for a coke shipment of similar value might start at a decade.’
‘Of course, when there’s so much money to be made, you’ll find that bad people will do some very ugly things.’
For gangsters, the economics of tobacco smuggling are as follows: you can fit around 15 million cigarettes into a single shipping container. Get it into Australia, and you are looking at $4million in profit.
Figures from the Australian Crime and Intelligence Commission suggest only one in 30 containers needs to make it through the border for a smuggling syndicate to make a profit. And the Border Force checks only about one per cent of containers coming in through the ports. So the odds are very good indeed.
In a country that boasts about two million smokers, it all adds up to a billion-dollar industry. But to carve out a proper niche, gangs must prevent rival operators flooding ‘their’ patch with cheap cigarettes. And that’s why so many shops are catching fire, according to Detective Graham Banks, who heads the Victoria Police taskforce battling this crimewave.
‘For people who are into drugs or illicit tobacco, they’re making millions of dollars, so to fork out at the highest $20,000 to do an arson, it’s chump change to them,’ he told reporters recently. ‘They’ll target multiple premises that are simply associated with that person. It’s a demonstration.’
Attacks are happening across Australia – in the last couple of months, stores have been ‘catching fire’ in every state – but things are currently at their worst in Melbourne. That’s because of a vicious feud between rival gangs that have traditionally controlled the city’s underworld.
Kazem Hamad, a burly 40-year-old from Basra in Iraq who came to Australia with his parents in the 1990s, as a refugee from the first Gulf War, is at the centre of Melbourne’s underworld
At its centre is Kazem Hamad, a burly 40-year-old from Basra in Iraq who came to Australia with his parents in the 1990s, as a refugee from the first Gulf War.
A violent drug user, with what court documents have dubbed ‘substantial anger management issues,’ he was first imprisoned in 2003. By 2010, his record of criminal convictions, largely for gang-related offences, stretched to some 19 pages.
Hamad’s fortune, which was partly spent on Lamborghini and other supercars which he posed with on social media, initially came from drugs. In 2015, he was found guilty of running a large heroin-smuggling operation and thrown behind bars for eight years.
During his incarceration – when he seemed able to retain control over a sprawling crime syndicate – he decided to diversify into the illegal tobacco trade, which in turn meant driving rival Melbourne gangs out of business.
Around the time of his release, in 2023, Hamad duly ordered his associates launched a string of violent attacks on the ‘assets’ of other organisations, targeting not just tobacco stores but restaurants, beauty salons, and in one grizzly heist, the grave of rival crime lord George Marrogi’s sister, who’d died aged 30 in 2021 from complications related to Covid.
His underlings wore gas masks during the raid on Preston General Cemetery, just north of the city centre, busting open her coffin and removing a $100,000 diamond ring from her finger. The desecrated corpse was left at the scene in what reports dubbed a ‘state of disarray’.
As ever, violence begat violence. Hamad’s rivals retaliated by burning down tobacco stores selling Hamad’s wares.
The whole thing places storekeepers in an impossible position. Although Hamad was deported in 2023, and is since believed to have based himself first in Dubai and later Iraq, he continues to pull the strings of his Australian tobacco smuggling operation via mobile phone.
‘A gang member will go into the shop and say “someone is here to talk to you”,’ says one law-enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘They will hand over a phone and Hamad pops up on Facetime saying “pay me or suffer consequences”. To be frank he’s more trouble since we shipped him back to Iraq.’
Only recently, Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper published two messages posted on a group chat used by convenience store owners.
One was from Hamad: ‘I like to ask for every shop $1,500 a month. If you don’t like it, please get off the group chat. When I call you outside this group chat, u be paying 5k a month and goes up every 6 months (and) if you don’t pay u see ur shop on the news one day,’ it read.
The other came from a well-known figure in a rival gang. It suggested that his associates would attack stores whose owners did business with Hamad. ‘Think smart and hard… any dogs who wanna pay the Kaz tax, enjoy the news clips,’ it read.
In other words, storekeepers are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. There is no suggestion, for example, that the firebombed Grab n Go store in Mickleham was selling any illegal tobacco products.
Little wonder that increasing numbers are selling up and moving out of the business altogether, with those left behind forced to pay soaring insurance premiums.
More than 75 tobacco retailers in Victoria currently have their businesses listed for sale, the newspaper added, quoting one store owner from the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton saying: ‘I live in the back of my store. Every day I am fearful I will get a knock on my door that will end up in my shop being destroyed. I don’t want to be in danger, so it’s not worth it anymore.’
To critics, the whole sorry state of affairs exposes the limitations of Australia’s sprawling nanny state, which in recent years has become one of the most coercive in the developed world.
Aside from its counter-productive war on smoking, the government sees fit to regulate everything from whether adults should wear a bicycle helmet (they are mandatory) or buy fireworks (they are largely outlawed).
Since last March, no fewer than 110 local convenience stores have been firebombed including this Grabn’Go store in Melbourne
The national obsession with lawmaking, which became starkly apparent during the country’s hardline Covid lockdowns, has exacerbated the tobacco crisis via not only the punitive taxation on cigarettes, but a strict regulatory regime for vapes.
Disposable ones are banned – and other vaping products can only be legally sold in pharmacies. Initially, consumers were required to gain a prescription from their GP if they wanted to buy them, though that requirement was dropped last month. There is also talk of a ‘ban on recreational vaping’.
As night follows day, this has fuelled a rampant black market.
‘Over a million people vape every day, but only about ten percent have been doing it through a prescription, so this is clearly not working,’ says Kevin Hogan, a frontbench MP for Australia’s National Party.
‘It has opened up the industry to criminal gangs, and the product people are buying illegally is completely unregulated, so we have no idea what’s in it. Prohibition simply isn’t working. It’s putting real lives in danger. There has been an arson attack in my constituency [the Canberra suburb of Page]. People were living above the store. It’s genuinely dangerous.’
Hogan is campaigning for vapes to be legally sold in normal stores. But the rest of Australia’s political class, who have grown accustomed to approaching complex problems by simply banning things, seem unlikely to listen.
In Victoria, the government has announced plans to combat the tobacco war by setting up a licensing system for stores selling tobacco.
Supporters say that will make it easier to close down shops breaking the law, thereby making it harder for gangs to sell their product. Opponents point out that international crime syndicates tend not to be so easily fazed. But for now, Australia’s convenience stores continue to burn.
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