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- [00:04]
A
Kazam Hamad rose rapidly to become one of the nation's most powerful organized crime players. The syndicate he is accused of heading waged a relentless turf war for control of Australia's multi billion dollar illicit tobacco trade, which has seen firebombings around the country. But Hamad's arrest last week was unexpected because it happened not in Australia, but thousands of kilometres away in Iraq. I'm Julia Karkatzel filling in for Samantha Selinger Morris and you're listening to the morning edition from the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Today, senior reporter Chris Vedolago on the capture of one of Australia's most wanted accused criminals. It's Tuesday, January 20th. Welcome back to the podcast, Chris.
- [00:54]
B
Thank you.
- [00:54]
A
So Chris, last time you spoke to us about Kazem Hamad, it was around the height of the tobacco wars in late 2023 and also around the height of Hamad's powers. How did Hamad in your view, manage to completely upend the order of the underworld in such a short amount of time?
- [01:13]
B
Basically he was, he was born in Iraq, he lived in Iraq in the time of Saddam Hussein. His family came over as a result of what was going there. He arrived when he was 14, pretty much almost immed, became a trouble, like a problem. He's a lifelong criminal, it's fair to say. He originally got arrested for drug trafficking, heroin in 2015 and he went to prison for eight years. And in that eight years he became inside a massive figure which also goes to the heart of what's wrong with the prison system where somebody can be a high security prisoner that goes out 10 times more powerful than they went in. During his time in prison he'd come up with a plan and he recognized that the tobacco market was extraordinarily lucrative because of taxes, but it was, wasn't particularly organized and some, some of the long standing players had gotten quite comfortable in the position that they were in. And he realized if he applied a lot of pressure really fast, he could take control of the market, intimidate rivals, force shop owners and wholesalers of an illegal product basically to work for him. And so through a succession of dozens of firebombings and allegedly shootings and a few murders, he basically forced a new order by going further, faster and harder than anyone else. And it was a real take no prisoners approach.
- [02:30]
A
And so for those who aren't aware of the tobacco wars here in Melbourne, can you just give us a brief kind of history of what we're seeing here, what we've seen over the past two Years, sure.
- [02:40]
B
Look, tobacco has always been partially an illicit market because the taxes in Australia are so high. In the last decade, the taxes have gone sky high, so that something that was once worth $20 is now worth $55. Basically what the illegal market saw was that there was a huge opportunity for a massive amount of profit if they began distributing illegally sourced cigarettes overseas. And so that's what they did. They flooded the market with containers and containers and containers that would hold 10 or 15 million cigarettes. They only needed 1 in 20, 1 in 30 to get through in order to make a profit. And the upside for them as well is, unlike cocaine or methamphetamine, if you get busted with a container of cigarettes, you'd be lucky to get a few months or a year's jail and probably a fine, which you're never going to pay. Whereas you do 20 kilos of coke, you're going to jail for 20 years. There was no real regulation. I mean, the Australian Border Force was stopping it at the border, but it was a very low priority compared to people trafficking or drugs or guns. And there was this, basically this kink in the market that they exploited nationwide. These places started popping up everywhere, these illegal tobacconists. And there's something like 1300 in the state of Victoria right now. And the way the extortion worked was basically a couple of guys would walk into a shop owned by some regular person and say, look, you work for us now, you pay 2,000. Originally it was a month tax, a protection tax rate, now it was, now it's $5,000 a month. And they say, here on the end of this phone is someone that wants to talk to you. And that person, often, as we've heard from court proceedings, turned out to be Kazamad, who says, this is our territory, you want to work here, you pay the tax, you buy the cigarettes off us. You don't listen, your place gets burned. You don't listen, it gets burned again. You don't listen and you get shot. Melbourne's tobacco war is taking its toll with eight firebombing attacks in just seven days. Very direct, very brazen, often captured on cctv. Funnily enough, there's heaps of it out there from Victoria Police, where these guys just walk in and they say, this is our place now. And that's how it worked. And it became very much almost a franchise model. If you paid, then you were able to operate in a particular area and other shops that tried to open up would get shut down. And then there's shops that the Syndicate that Hamad controls directly owns as well, like they run their own shops, hundreds of them.
- [05:01]
A
And they're all over the country, all over the country.
- [05:03]
B
There's 1300 in Victoria, there's hundreds in New South Wales, hundreds in Queensland. Either directly controlled or as part of this kind of extortion network who pay the tax and get distributed the illegal products when it comes off the dogs. And we know for a fact because we've seen people arrested that far down the coast, they're in the deep Gippsland and there's a member of an organized crime family running a tobacco shop in a town that the only other thing there is a pub and a post office, like that's it. And they go to the trouble of setting up there and then standing over the people around them in the town saying you can't sell tobacco. This is our area. Got places near me, they're all over the place, they're open 24 hours. They have tobacco on the sign outside. You go in there, they don't sell, they don't even bother to sell legal cigarettes.
- [05:51]
A
And there's been not only shop owners stood over but completely innocent bystanders who have been victims in this war over the tobacco trade.
- [06:00]
B
Right, well look, sometimes these fires, they force people out of apartments and homes basically. The first, the first firebombing recorded that's attributed to this so called tobacco war was, was March of 2023 and it was kind of a slow start. By August of 2023 we were seeing multiple fires a week. They went on for over a year and it was primarily tobacco shops, but then some restaurants, some people's houses. It was primarily one sided in one direction about who was doing it and why. And alongside that came the public murder of a number of figures shot in the street, shot in a car parking lot, that sort of thing. And along the way there's been innocent victims. Katie Tangy was murdered by accident in January of 2025. It was a case of mistaken identity. I mean they don't even believe they were in the right suburb and they burned the wrong house and this poor woman died. Katie Tangy's heartbroken mother says she's lost her best friend, a beautiful soul who was happiest on stage. Part of of Kaz's MO has been to seek revenge or to take out both personal and business enemies. A long standing enemy of his something like 10 years was Sam the Punisher. Abdul Rahim was a like a former bikie turned boxer. He crossed Kaz in 2015 over the piece there's been something like 18 attempts on his life or attacks on his family members, firebombings, bashings, shootings. And then the Punisher was killed in a parking garage in Preston In January of 2025, about a year ago, actually. And then that's largely attributed to Hamad and the pressure that him and his crew put on him.
- [07:37]
A
Police have basically described this as an ambush style attack on one of Melbourne's most notorious gangland figures. It has been incredibly tense down here. Now, Hamad was arrested last week in Baghdad. Before we get to his arrest, why was he in Iraq?
- [07:53]
B
So after he served eight years for heroin trafficking, he finished his present sentence in July of 2023. And because he was a permanent resident but never a citizen, he was immediately marked for deportation. And so basically the day that his sentence was up, they put him in a van, they took him to the airport, they put him on a plane and they sent him back. He was determined not to stay in Iraq for a little while, so he moved to Dubai. But things got a little hot there and he got kicked out of Dubai by the authorities and went back to Iraq. And what basically happened was he was living in a fortified compound in Baghdad, surrounded by security. He had supposedly the protection of certain elements in the Iraqi military and internal security services. And his business model was very much to run the syndicate or the crime empire from Iraq, but it was focused on Australia. So they weren't really committing crimes in Iraq. They were looking at basically running the streets, running the markets in Australia from a third country which has a history of really bad relations with Australia because of the war. And for a long time, I mean, I wrote it myself about a year ago, he was untouchable, or so we believed.
- [09:00]
A
And he was untouchable because of his, as you say, networks in Iraq and then his mass amount of wealth and influence. So if he was so untouchable and invulnerable to authorities, what changed? What happened?
- [09:12]
B
Well, this is what was so surprising about what happened last week was because we were always under the impression that whatever he was doing, he was doing in Australia, he wasn't committing crimes in Iraq. But the Iraqi judicial authorities and the system is very different over there versus the way it works here. But basically a cadre of judges came to the decision that he needed to be investigated. They had been given intelligence information from Australian law enforcement. They acted on that intelligence. And according to what the Iraqis have said publicly in a statement, they believe that Hamad was engaged in serious criminal activity inside Iraq, including some kind of drug activity, which in Iraq is a very serious crime punishable by death. And so last Tuesday, the Judicial Council of Iraq basically announced that they had arrested him on drug trafficking charges or drug related charges, which changed the entire game.
- [10:05]
A
Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council has confirmed that it has arrested Kadim Malik Hamad Rabar Al Hajami, which the Australian Federal Police has confirmed is the same person as King Kazem.
- [10:20]
B
When he was committing crimes in Australia and Australians were maybe telling the Iraqis about it, there didn't seem to be much pressure. And also the Australian authorities were very reluctant to apply pressure because of this death penalty issued. But something shifted and the Iraqis got involved and now he's in custody. It's been almost a week and as far as we know, he's still in custody, but we have no idea of what's happening.
- [10:40]
A
And so what are the next steps? Will Hamad be extradited to Australia or could he be prosecuted in Iraq?
- [10:48]
B
This is the big question because there's several ways this can go. The Iraqis can choose to deal with him domestically, as in basically charge him, try him, and whatever happens, they could also possibly with, with an application from Australia. Although it's very convoluted process because there's no official extradition treaty, Australia could attempt to, to extradite him here. The other option is it being Iraq, is he might pay a massive bribe and just simply slip away. We're hearing on background the police would, the police in Australia would very much like this to be dealt with in Iraq because it obviously makes things a lot simpler for him. The last time he was in Australia and he was in a high security prison, he was, it turns out, almost unmanageable in the sense that he was able to build an empire under the nose of Corrections Victoria where he basically walked out the door and picked up a fully fledged criminal empire on his way out. Not a good look for Corrections Victoria. And I can only imagine what a nightmare it would be if they brought him back and had to manage him in that environment again. But it's an open question, we just don't know. And the system over there is very hard to decipher. It's very different to ours. It's also in Arabic and we don't really understand what the ground rules are, but we're trying to find out what happens next.
- [12:07]
A
Off to the break.
- [12:08]
B
They are feared, they are well motivated, they are extraordinarily well resourced. And the idea that this is all just going to topple over like a Hollywood movie. It just doesn't. I don't see it.
- [12:27]
A
Last time we spoke to you about this topic, Chris, you said that these underworld wars only really stop when two things happen. Either all the players are arrested or all the players are dead. Do you think that Hamad's arrest will have any significant effect on Melbourne's underworld wars?
- [12:44]
B
You know, when he was arrested, there was a lot of chatter out there that this was the end of his syndicate. I don't necessarily think that's true. As we wrote last week, this isn't just some kind of garage operation that he set up when he moved to Iraq. They decentralized the organization so that his second in command was in a completely different country than he was. He's in Iraq, his second in command is in Iran or may now be elsewhere in the Middle East. Our understanding of this was it was done in order to prevent law enforcement or anything. If something happened to one of them, the other side still can continue until whatever the problem is for the person who's arrested gets sorted out. So the idea that this thing is going to topple over on itself overnight, I just don't see it. There's also. They've put in a substantial amount of work on building an infrastructure. I mean, there's something like 100 guys that report to this organization domestically and internationally. They are feared, they are well motivated, they extraordinarily well resourced. And the idea that this is all just going to topple over like a Hollywood movie, it just does. I don't see it.
- [13:50]
A
And we do know that Victoria is planning to ramp up its crackdown from next month on tobacco. Can you tell us what changes are expected and if you think they'll make any difference?
- [14:02]
B
So basically, from the 1st of February, any place that sells tobacco in Victoria needs to have a license. That doesn't matter if it's a Kohl's or, or like a kiosk inside a shopping center or one of these illicit tobacco shops or a gas station. They all have to have a license with the intention that there's gonna be these guys that go around from this new tobacco licensing Victoria organization checking for licenses. And if you don't have a license or you're selling an illegal product, they're gonna fine you and, you know, you'll go through the system and get jail or what have you. That's the idea in principle. Now, there's a couple of problems with the system, the way the government set it up. Number one, they could find somebody and the next day the shop opens up. Again, because they don't have powers to close it. And the one thing these guys have learned from having their shops burned out and threatened is you don't keep a million dollars worth of stock in the back of the shop. It comes by in a white van every couple of days in small batches. The other part of the problem is a lot of the people that work in these illegal tobacco shops, they're paid out of the day's takings, they don't know who they're working for. And if it opens up three stores down, three doors down, it doesn't make any difference. The other problem is for some reason the state has decided to hire only 14 inspectors for a state the size of Victoria where there's something like 8000 tobacco selling shops, 1300 of which are illegal that we know about. The scale of what the tobacco licensing authorities are gonna have to deal with is enormous because this problem has been allowed to fester for years. I go out and do mystery buy things all the time, find out where the price is at and in order to do that, you can't walk into this place and go, excuse me sir, how much is a pack of cigarettes? I buy cigarettes and I talk to the people that run them and they do not seem concerned. That being said, things are not going to be as blatant as they were. The signs are going to come down, they're going to be a little bit more subtle. I mean, it had gotten so brazen that the cigarettes were on display next to the vapes, next to the nicotine patches, next to the nangs. Like it's all just sitting on the counter now. Before it used to be behind like a towel or under the table. That brazenness is going to stop. But these guys who have invested to open these shops are not going to stop selling cigarettes. So they're going to find alternative distribution channels. And there's already places with, it's just a steel roller door. You show up on a Tuesday night at 6pm, the door goes up, you buy five cartons of cigarettes and two cartons of vapes and you're on your way. And these aren't criminals that are doing it, these are regular working people that are, that are accessing this system because tobacco products and nicotine products in Australia are so expensive.
- [16:32]
A
Well, we'll definitely be watching this very closely, Chris. So thank you so much for your time today.
- [16:36]
B
No worries. Thank you.
- [16:41]
A
In other news today, opposition leader Susan Lee will work with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to pass a watered down hate crimes bill overriding the nationals and Conservative coalition backbenches. Albanese split his bill in two to salvage political support before this week's two two day parliamentary sitting. One bill is now centred on gun restrictions and will be passed with green support. Australian tennis star Alex Diemenaur has effortlessly clinched his first round match of the Australian Open against American Mackenzie McDonald, winning in straight sets. And in an exclusive interview with our mastheads, MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon says U.S. president Donald Trump will seek an unconstitutional third term in 2028 to, quote, save the country. You can read these stories and more on theage.com or smh.com au Today's episode was produced by me, Julia Carr Katzel. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and our podcasts are overseen by Lisa Muxworthy and Tom McKendrick. If you like our show, follow the Morning Edition and leave a review for us on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening.