BACK in 1995, John Ibrahim was a brash young nightclub owner who had just come to the attention of the media when he was called before the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service. Soon afterwards he spoke with news.com.au’s Editor-in-Chief Kate de Brito, revealing an ambitious young man who wanted to rule Kings Cross.
JOHN Ibrahim likes to think he was destined to own a Kings Cross nightclub.
“I can’t sing, I can’t dance. What else am I going to do?” he laughs.
Like a prince in plain clothes John, 25, is slouched in a chair at a Victoria Rd cafe talking to three friends about his club, The Tunnel, which is undergoing renovations.
He is also talking about the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service and the heavy toll it has exacted from Sydney’s red light district.
After spending the previous night watching videos with friends, John is in a buoyant mood.
At a nearby table comedian Vince Sorrenti is shouting to a group of workmen performing noisy roadwork.
“Can you turn it up a little,” he jokes above the laughter of his friends.
It is a sleek, confident crowd.
The clouds have finally lifted over Kings Cross after days of rain. The sun is shining and John is sparkling with good humour.
“Forget Melrose Place, the Royal Commission is a better soapie,” he grins.
Like a trash TV junkie he watches the commission on television at every opportunity.
After almost a decade working in Kings Cross, the startling revelations of graft, corruption, drug dealing and prostitution are like office gossip to John.
If it seems sometimes that he lacks respect for the Commission, it’s because he does.
John is still smarting from the cuff across the ears doled out by the Commission when he was hauled into the St James Centre in October to answer questions about his Kings Cross connections.
John Agius, counsel assisting the inquiry, went so far as to allege that John was the new driving force of the Kings Cross drug trade.
In seeming retaliation, John’s attitude on the witness stand remained one degree short of insolence.
Yet in his own surroundings, the streets of Kings Cross, John is charming.
Dressed in beige jeans and a blue and white checked shirt, John is the quintessential young eastern suburbs entrepreneur. Smart and casual, he exudes a faint air of wealth.
Tanned, fit and small in stature, John has full lips, sleepy eyes and a subtly engaging persona.
And when he speaks, the people around him listen.
A friend embarks on a monologue about the imprudence of talking to the press and John quiets him with a simple “That’ll do”. His friends (and there are many) call him the “most wonderful person in the world”. Those who have crossed him no doubt have a different story to tell.
Later John confides: “All these people, we’ve been together since we had nothing. Yeah, I am the leader in some ways. But a group always has a dominant personality.”
To an outsider, the life of John Ibrahim is surreal. A cafe lifestyle by day and at night, entry into any Sydney club he chooses to visit.
He is at pains, however, to portray himself as a normal working businessman who is at a loose end during the renovation of his club.
“You’ll find we are very boring. We do the same things every day. We eat at the same places and we go to the same clubs,” he says.
“That’s the business we’re in. You’ve got to know what’s happening. Everywhere we go we know each other. I know everyone involved in the nightclub industry and they all know me.” Even his late nights out are not wild ones, says John. He neither drinks nor smokes.
“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 admits.
“Running a club is perfect for that sort of thing, but it’s not for me. My brother Sam and I have always been pretty healthy. We used to kick box together. We used to do taekwondo together. We went to state level.”
While the club is being renovated John keeps up a fitness regimen, working out at the City Gym on Crown St more than four times a week.
“Sometimes when we finish work at three or four in the morning and we’ve still got too much energy to burn we bring a change of clothes, get changed and we come down to the gym and have a workout,” he says.
“Then you go home, have a shower and sleep very well.”
John, it seems, is inclined to oversimplify the details of his existence.
Who can deny that his life is often stranger than fiction?
Convicted cocaine dealer Bill Bayeh and his brother Louie are old friends of the family.
Russell Townsend, described in Royal Commission evidence as an alleged drug dealer, is a friend and gym partner.
Former policeman and private detective Charlie Staunton, jailed by the Royal Commission for refusing to answer questions about his relationship with Bill Bayeh, is another close friend with whom he has travelled.
The relationship with Bill Bayeh was severed on the day John appeared before the Commission and heard a conversation between supergrass Trevor Haken and Bayeh, taped at Birkenhead Point Tavern in December 1994. In it Bayeh alleges that “Russell (Townsend), Sam Ibrahim and John: They got the whole street”. He asks Haken to do something about it because “I ain’t making nothing”. “Well, you’re the new lifeblood of the drug industry in Kings Cross, aren’t you?” Mr Agius asked John after the tape was played.
“So it would seem, but no, I am not,” came John’s cocky reply.
Mr Agius persisted: “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?”
“No, I haven’t,” he returned.
John is dismissive about the context in which his relationships with colourful Kings Cross identities are viewed.
“Friends are very overrated,” he says, taking a long gulp of his coffee.
“I have worked with some pretty funny people. I know a lot of people in Sydney. What they do for their living and what they do for their business is none of my business.
“I always concentrated on what I did.
“That’s always kept me out of trouble the majority of the time.”
He is vehement when he says he does not deal drugs.
“I’ve never sold drugs. I don’t believe in drugs,” he says.
“I have always stayed away from the drugs and the gambling and prostitution. I am a Muslim.
“Billy Bayeh was talking to Trevor Haken because he knows I have the respect in the Cross to wipe them out.” Respect and a cache of favours awaiting repayment.
“They’re more important than money,” John confides. “We’ve got so many favours owing to us we’ve lost count.”
John’s older brother Hassam, known as Sam, told the Royal Commission he had been helping people out, including protecting drug dealers, around the Cross for years.
As John cruises up and down Darlinghurst Rd looking for a friend, he is greeted with casual waves. A fruit vendor gives him two nectarines for free.
A local bum holds the door open when he sees John, who has been known to sling him a $50 note. In the TAB John is asking around after his friend when he gestures to a tall skinny man and says quietly: “The worst thing you can be in the Cross is a KX (a protected Commission witness) because everyone knows who you are.”
John’s club The Tunnel is still in chaos after more than a month of renovations but he remains optimistic.
Closed for two months after a minor liquor licensing violation, John took the opportunity to put a fresh face on the club.
When it reopens on Thursday it will have a new image and a new name: Earl Place 1.
John was 16 when he first started working on the door of Images nightclub at Parramatta. It was owned by the father of one of his friends and he lied about his age to get the job.
Not long afterwards John dropped out of school. His principal once told him he would wind up dead or very rich.
His classroom became the streets of Kings Cross and like any student, some lessons were hard to learn. More than once he was cut by the teacher’s cane.
At 15 John was stabbed during a brawl in the Cross. He’d been cruising its streets since he was a schoolboy, piling into a car with a group of friends looking for action.
Ten years ago Kings Cross was the only suburb open late.
John is reticent to discuss the fight that left him hospitalised for three months with a stab wound in the stomach. He received compensation for his injuries but will not say how much, just that it “wasn’t a lot”. Later, John hitches up his T-shirt to reveal his smooth, hairless abdomen. It is crisscrossed with scars.
They are proof of a violent youth but John says simply: “They’re my scars. I don’t need to tell anyone how I got them.” On his rise as a businessman in Kings Cross, John is more forthcoming. He is passionate in his philosophy that “nothing comes easy”. He chose to begin business in the Cross because “in a different suburb I wouldn’t make the same money. You have to be where all the action is”. “Once you find your place you know. You just feel it. That’s where you belong,” John says.
“There was not much point in me going to school. I learned how to read, I learned how to write. Anything else was probably a waste of time.
“Believe it or not I did very well at school but it just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get amongst it.
“Every job I got was eventually going to lead me to where I am now.
“I just had to waste time and plod along until I got there. I knew I wanted to be in the nightclub and restaurant industry.”
After leaving school John began working in Kings Cross at the Tunnel Cabaret nightclub. According to John, the then owner was being stood over by local heavies and ripped off by his managers.
With another club in Surfers Paradise, also called The Tunnel, he wanted to free up his commitments in Sydney.
“He (the owner) was getting robbed right left and centre. I came in there and cut it all out. I knew them all and they wouldn’t have been standing over my business. It was in everyone’s best interests (that I buy into the club),” John says.
“It cost me $70,000 to buy 20 per cent. I paid the majority of it later. Once I was in, the club paid for itself. I put everything we made back into the club.
“The club’s turned over close to $6m in the six years it’s been there. It’s not money that’s been laundered. It’s money that’s all accounted for. Tax has been paid on it.”
John was 19 when he became part-owner of the Tunnel but he had already armed himself with a formidable collection of contacts and friends.
“It’s all who you know. Sydney’s very small. Everybody knows everybody. All you need to do is get your foot in the door,” John says.
“I have gotten what I wanted out of the Cross. I’ve got the best education money could buy. You can’t not be there and see what’s going on. You get an education at school but it doesn’t help you when you’re out dealing with people. Instead of learning how to read books, you’ve got learn how to read people and see what they want from you.
“I’d like to think (I’m a good judge of character) but then everybody thinks they know something about something.
“I bluffed well for a long time when I was 18. No one really knew that I didn’t know what I was doing, except me.”
The view from John’s Dover Height’s home is breathtaking. The balcony gives way to a vista encompassing Sydney Heads and a massive expanse of deep blue ocean.
It is a rental property, the owner a widow and friend of the family.
The lounge room, covered in thick white carpet, is clean but untidy, giving the impression of an archetypal boy’s house.
John lives here with the Tunnel’s restaurant manager, who was first employed as a kitchen hand at the club after moving from China to Australia six years ago.
John moved out of the Parramatta home he shared with his mother, his brothers and his sisters four years ago.
“But I still go home once a week to have a cup of tea with my mum,” he says.
An old, sloping billiard table is the living room’s centrepiece, closed in on two sides by leather couches. Two video games stand idly on opposite sides of the room. A telescope is trained on the water.
Some nights John goes fishing off the rocks. Most often he is alone because, he says, his friends are too impatient for such an unhurried pastime.
Another hobby is jetskiing. His garage houses two jet skis. One belongs to John, the other to a friend.
On both levels of the house the curtains are drawn across the windows. It typifies John’s blithe attitude to life.
John is out on the balcony bantering with his female assistant, a longtime friend.
She is preparing a guest list for the opening of the club and is using a computer in an anteroom off John’s bedroom. She grumbles because she arrived early to work on the list but was unable to get into the room.
“I’ll show you how to do it,” she tells John.
“Yeah, as if,” John says sarcastically.
“That way you can train whoever’s in your room to do it,” she responds with a smile.
Although wealthy, good looking and self-assured, John is, in many ways, an ineligible bachelor. Until last year he was involved with a girl whom he had been dating for 10 years. They split and she lives overseas, although he still wears her ring on his wedding finger.
While there seems to be no shortage of female friends in John’s life, he says he is not prepared for a serious commitment.
“I’ve given up on women,” he insists.
When John changes into a sports singlet for the gym he reveals a worn band which he wears around the top of his arm. The band supports a small triangular leather pouch, inside of which is “family shit”. It was a gift from his grandparents and it keeps his enemies away.
John has only been to his parents’ country of birth, Lebanon, once. He hated it.
“I went back home for three days (last year) with Charlie Staunton. We flew from Amsterdam straight to Lebanon. We were supposed to be there a week but we couldn’t stand it so we left after three days.
“The war’s over but the war’s still inside the people. Everyone’s miserable. We looked like Martians. We didn’t fit in. It wasn’t for me.
“That was another episode when we said `Aren’t you glad to be an Australian?’
“Then we came home and the Royal Commission had just started.”
John believes the shockwaves caused by the Commission have only just begun.
“If you don’t own a business there (Kings Cross) you could not understand how much it’s affected it,” he says.
“People just don’t want to go there. I didn’t want to be there at one stage.”
From the Earl Place door to the Tunnel nightclub John can wave at the Kings Cross detectives. Their building also backs onto the street.
“You can’t not have a relationship with coppers and own a business. In the course of them doing their job they’ve got to stickybeak everywhere,” he says.
“In every station you get two or three corrupt coppers. In Kings Cross because there were so many people there was a bigger majority.
“But it’s not only police. There’s corruption going on in every section where you could do somebody a good turn or a bad turn.
“There’s corruption on every level.
“People think police are machines. They’re only people. They go home, they’ve got social lives, they go out. They’ve got everything you and I have.”
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