Underbelly by John Silvester

Author:John Silvester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2011-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

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GET LOUIE

Hearing whispers on the street that he shouldn’t be buying any green bananas, Louie started asking well-informed people’s opinions about his life expectancy. The answers weren’t reassuring.

LIKE his namesake Louie the Fly, Louie Bayeh was bad and mean and mighty unclean but at the end of the day, he was just a crook who got lucky … for a while. For a long time, he was worried there was trouble ahead and he was right.

The notorious criminal and standover man had more minders than Madonna for his rare public appearances because of death threats he claimed corrupt New South Wales police officers had made against him. He said the threats had been confirmed by a senior policeman – and by the infamously psychotic and violent Lennie McPherson, Sydney’s Mr Big.

Corrupt police wanted Louie dead because, like other allegedly tough guys on the streets – including his brother, the drug czar Billy Bayeh – he had cracked under pressure, telling an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) hearing in the early 1990s the names of officers he paid and how much he paid them.

Hearing whispers on the street that he shouldn’t be buying any green bananas, Louie started asking well-informed people’s opinions about his life expectancy. The answers weren’t reassuring. McPherson, his former partner in crime, sent a chill down his spine by telling him he was the target of a proposed assassination attempt by an alleged drug dealer who was facing charges.

McPherson said the deal bent police were offering was that in return for killing Bayeh they would drop the charges. It was a ‘win-win’ for everyone in the game – except for the now rather rattled Louie. The planned hit was confirmed by senior policeman Merv Schloeffel, who was then working in internal security. The alleged dealer was again named as the likely assassin.

Bayeh contacted the would be assassin to get it from the horse’s mouth. The man confirmed the deal. His reward for knocking Bayeh, he explained, would be to walk away from charges scot free. Bayeh didn’t like the answer but couldn’t fault the logic. He’d do exactly the same thing if the boot were on the other foot.

It was a stunning turnabout for Bayeh: to go from being predator to being the prey, a reversal of the role he had made for himself since arriving in Australia from Lebanon in 1953, aged fourteen. He’d been in trouble ever since as he worked his way up the criminal career ladder.

An ICAC report from the mid-1990s said Bayeh had been convicted of five offences, mostly involving violence, but had never been sent to jail. Probably the closest he came to imprisonment was being found guilty of malicious wounding in 1980. He was ordered to pay fines and compensation of $3000 and put on a good behaviour bond for four years.

In 1990 he was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service for discharging a firearm near a public place. They were minor offences compared to the criminal heights

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