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someone he called a ‘little Arab upstart’.
    Ibrahim, the second child of poor Lebanese Muslim immigrants from the port city of Tripoli, was never going to have it easy. And he was never going to stand by while others took the lion’s share of the world’s riches. But whereas too many of his contemporaries – including his older brother ‘Sam’ – relied only on violence to get their way, John had other tricks as well.
    He has not only punched but charmed, beguiled and traded his way to the top of Sydney’s nightclub scene. As an entrepreneur he is a little like a riverboat gambler – behind the poker player’s calm gaze and ready joke is the lingering suggestion he is quick on the draw when the chips are down. In fact, Ibrahim has negligible convictions for violence or anything else, but implied menace is a tool of his trade. Whatever that trade is, exactly. All that can be said with certainty is that it must be highly profitable.
    In an underworld full of Armani-clad gorillas fuelled by drugs, ego and stupidity in equal measure, Ibrahim stands out because of his tenacity and ability to roll with the punches, qualities that have helped him survive a quartercentury in a notoriously rough game.
    He can also lay claim to being, perhaps, the subject of the most surveillance and monitoring in the history of Australia. He claims that more than a thousand intelligence reports have been written about him by nearly every law-enforcement body in the country. But at the same time he denies the picture painted of him by law enforcement and the media, describing his reputation as a criminal overlord as hyperbole, myth and rumour-mongering.
    Undisputed, however, is that the nightclub entrepreneur and property developer has been involved with some of the highest-profile crime figures in Australia. In the Cross, that goes with the territory.
    He was once a driver and errand boy for the Kings Cross drug baron turned convict, Bill Bayeh, and is often seen with the sons of Sydney’s infamous illegal bookmaking and race-fixing king, the late and mostly unlamented George Freeman. Ibrahim often says he was a bodyguard and driver for Freeman senior – although, given he was barely out of his teens when Freeman died of an asthma attack in 1990, that claim might be one of his trademark exaggerations.
    Like many before him, the narcissistic Ibrahim is not one to let facts stand in the way of a good story – especially one that adds to the mystique that helps him stay at the top of the pile in a dangerously fickle business. Besides, themore mud he can throw in the pool, the harder it is for others to see the bottom. But he is at pains to ensure that his reputation as a businessman is kept separate from his brothers’ penchant for crime.
    The official line runs like this. John Ibrahim is a nightclub promoter, entrepreneur and ‘consultant’ who works with seventeen (some say more) clubs in Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, and owns multimillion-dollar properties in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
    According to his lawyer, Stephen Alexander, Ibrahim’s reputation as a ‘criminal mastermind’ is undeserved – the result of rumour and innuendo.
    â€˜John always says, “Either I’m the smartest criminal out there, or I just run a legitimate business and people want to fantasise”,’ Alexander told the
Sydney Morning Herald’s
ace crime reporter Dylan Welch in January 2009.
    â€˜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?’
    The hundreds of police reports, intelligence briefs and secret strike forces are nothing more than the proof of a police obsession with him, he said. ‘At the end of the day it’s just rumour and innuendo, because if