They were responsible for one of the bloodiest periods in NSW criminal history, a drug gang that killed its own boss and set out to rule Kings Cross.
Now, 12 years later, DK's Boys are captivating a new audience with their five-month Sydney crime spree the focus of the final episodes of the hit series Underbelly: The Golden Mile.
Everyone was a potential target for the young gang, from the police who pursued them to strangers outside a pub.
Cocaine was their trade and kneecappings their preferred negotiation method, but the members of this gang didn't confine their violence to the criminal milieu. They sprayed their hate around.
Between July and December of 1998, the gang terrorised Sydney, committing four murders and at least 16 shootings - the most notorious of which feature in Underbelly, with the series finale airing tonight.
Victims of their random, unprovoked violence included two footballers shot dead outside the Five Dock Hotel, in Sydney's inner west, in July, 1998 and a 14-year- old boy who was stabbed to death three months later after mistakenly going to a gang member's home instead of a nearby birthday party.
"They were just animals," said a retired officer who worked out of Lakemba in the late 1990s. He declined to be named.
"They weren't just after drug money, they actually wanted to kill police - that's how far their hatred and psychopathic nature went."
Their leader, Michael "Doc" Kanaan, 35, will never be released from Goulburn's Supermax prison after being sentenced for three murders including that of the gang's original leader, Danny Karam. Kanaan was a university student who attended Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham, and came from a stable Lebanese Christian family. But with his gang members, aged in their teens and 20s, he became a reckless killer inspired by the American gangster movies he watched repeatedly.
Kanaan had a hatred of police and a dangerous sense of invincibility that climaxed when he took on police in a gunfight on a tennis court at Paddington's White City in December, 1998 - an event dramatised in tonight's
A month earlier, members of the gang had fired 17 bullets into the Lakemba police station during a drive-by shooting.
DK's Boys were also linked to a plot to murder "Tongan Sam", the bodyguard of current "king of the Cross" John Ibrahim, and the shooting-up of Ibrahim's nightclub.
The Underbelly interpretation has the gang made up of four angel-faced 20-somethings.
In reality, the gang comprised at least 10 men in their teens and 20s whose reign of terror came to an end only when one member took the pseudonym Alan Rossini and turned police informant.
Until then, police had been unable to crack the "wall of silence". Hundreds of witnesses to the gang's crimes were too afraid to speak out.
Rossini has since given evidence at dozens of committal hearings and trials and sent many of his former friends to jail. Danny Karam, the man who founded the gang and named it after himself, was shot 16 times by Kanaan and other gang members as he sat in his car outside their Surry Hills safe house in December, 1998.Karam had been vying for control of the Kings Cross drug trade after the departure of former kingpin Bill Bayeh. He recruited young men from suburbs around Lakemba to sell his drugs.
At its peak, the gang was collecting $14,000 a week from selling drugs. But Karam was tight and didn't share the proceeds, paying his young drug runners a miserable wage while he raked in thousands.
That greed cost him his life.
The group, including Kanaan, Rabeeh "Rabs" Mawas, Wassim El-Assaad and Charbel "Charlie" Geagea, attempted to poison Karam, a heroin addict, by giving him a dose of the drug spiked with poison.
When that didn't work, they gunned Karam down.
Five days later, the gang members planned to kill again.
This time, the target was Tongan Sam. The plan was to make it look as though he had killed Danny Karam.
Giving evidence in court, Rossini said he, Kanaan, El-Assaad and Mark Cheikh had reached White City that night after leaving their car when they were chased by two police officers who had fol- lowed them.
Kanaan shot one of the officers in the thigh as he was climbing a tennis-court fence, then exchanged fire with the other. The gunfight ended with Kanaan suffering bullet wounds to the buttocks, both legs and his right wrist.
He also shot himself in the foot while firing at one of the officers and was confined to a wheelchair after the gun battle.
In 1999, controversial magistrate Pat O'Shane dismissed attempted-murder charges against Kanaan, saying the two police officers involved in the White City shootout had been "stupid, reckless and foolhardy" and that the incident was "police harassment of youth".
But in May, 2006, after another two aborted trials, Kanaan was finally sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to 12 years' jail on charges of malicious wounding with intent.
In June, 1999, while on bail over the White City matter, Kanaan held a 32-hour siege at his Belfield home when police attempted to conduct a drug raid.
In 2001, he was given two life sentences for the Five Dock Hotel murders. Rossini testified that he, Kanaan and others had been driving along Great North Rd and were stopped at a red light when they happened to see a brawl on the footpath outside the hotel.
Rossini yelled to the men: "Come on, fellas, punch on," to which one of them replied: "You f****** wogs." Kanaan then pulled a revolver and shot two of the men. They died in hospital.
The gang's most senseless killing was that of 14-year-old schoolboy Edward Lee, who was stabbed to death by Moustapha Dib in Telopea St, Punchbowl in October, 1998.
His crime? Arriving at the gang's house instead of a birthday party at a nearby house.
In February, 2003, the then 20- year-old Dib was sentenced to 10 years' jail for murdering Edward.
Kanaan was given another three years for his role in trying to cover up the murder.
In May, 2005, Kanaan and El-Assaad were found not guilty of the attack on the Lakemba police station, but in May this year another gang associate, Saleh Jamal, 35, was sentenced to 12 years' jail for it.
Jamal had already been jailed for nine years for shooting a man at Greenacre in 1998.
By Brendan Hills, The Sunday Telegraph, June 27, 2010
-----
Every Sunday, gang boss Danny Karam would collect his rent. It was not payment for leasing property across Sydney. His "tenants" were paying the standover man for the right to sell cocaine on the streets of King Cross.
The protection payments ranged from $4000 to $28,000 a week, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.
The court also heard how on a Sunday night in 1998, Mr Karam collected his final rental payment. Angry that they were doing all the work and not receiving any of the profits, three of his gang members - known as DK's Boys - allegedly murdered him, shooting him as he left a Surry Hills apartment.
Michael Kanaan, 26, Rabeeh Mawas, 25, and Wassim El-Assaad, 25, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Karam on December 13, 1998.
Yesterday, one of DK's Boys, Alan Rossini, who has been given indemnity from prosecution for giving evidence against the three accused, revealed the workings of the gang and the events leading up to the killing.
Mr Rossini said that from 1997 to the time of his death, Mr Karam would get him and Kanaan to collect money for him from drug dealers in Kings Cross.
"If you wanted to have four [drug] runners on the street, it was $4000 a week rent," Mr Rossini said. He and Kanaan were also involved in putting cocaine into capsules and taking it to the "manager at the Cross" who passed it on to the drug runners, Mr Rossini said. "They took the capsules, put it into their mouths and walked onto the streets of Kings Cross and sold it."
The money from the sales would then be passed back to them. "Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he'd give it back."
Mr Rossini said they did not receive any of the money. He and Kanaan were sometimes given $100 a week. He said Mr Karam would become violent when the "rent" they collected was too low. "I remember we were short for rent, that was the first time [Kanaan] said we should knock this c---."
Mr Rossini said Kanaan was upset he was being used, and told him: "After all the work we've done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it."
Mr Rossini said he was with the three accused and another man, Charlie Gea Gea, on a few occasions when there were discussions about killing Mr Karam.
The Crown alleges Kanaan, Mawas and a third man, who has not been named, ambushed Mr Karam in his car and that El-Assaad had phoned them earlier to tell them when Mr Karam was leaving the gang's unit.
The trial continues.
By Ellen Connolly
April 23 2002
Video: Underbelly - Best of Danny 'DK' Karam
Now, 12 years later, DK's Boys are captivating a new audience with their five-month Sydney crime spree the focus of the final episodes of the hit series Underbelly: The Golden Mile.
Everyone was a potential target for the young gang, from the police who pursued them to strangers outside a pub.
Cocaine was their trade and kneecappings their preferred negotiation method, but the members of this gang didn't confine their violence to the criminal milieu. They sprayed their hate around.
Between July and December of 1998, the gang terrorised Sydney, committing four murders and at least 16 shootings - the most notorious of which feature in Underbelly, with the series finale airing tonight.
Victims of their random, unprovoked violence included two footballers shot dead outside the Five Dock Hotel, in Sydney's inner west, in July, 1998 and a 14-year- old boy who was stabbed to death three months later after mistakenly going to a gang member's home instead of a nearby birthday party.
"They were just animals," said a retired officer who worked out of Lakemba in the late 1990s. He declined to be named.
"They weren't just after drug money, they actually wanted to kill police - that's how far their hatred and psychopathic nature went."
Their leader, Michael "Doc" Kanaan, 35, will never be released from Goulburn's Supermax prison after being sentenced for three murders including that of the gang's original leader, Danny Karam. Kanaan was a university student who attended Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham, and came from a stable Lebanese Christian family. But with his gang members, aged in their teens and 20s, he became a reckless killer inspired by the American gangster movies he watched repeatedly.
Kanaan had a hatred of police and a dangerous sense of invincibility that climaxed when he took on police in a gunfight on a tennis court at Paddington's White City in December, 1998 - an event dramatised in tonight's
A month earlier, members of the gang had fired 17 bullets into the Lakemba police station during a drive-by shooting.
DK's Boys were also linked to a plot to murder "Tongan Sam", the bodyguard of current "king of the Cross" John Ibrahim, and the shooting-up of Ibrahim's nightclub.
The Underbelly interpretation has the gang made up of four angel-faced 20-somethings.
In reality, the gang comprised at least 10 men in their teens and 20s whose reign of terror came to an end only when one member took the pseudonym Alan Rossini and turned police informant.
Until then, police had been unable to crack the "wall of silence". Hundreds of witnesses to the gang's crimes were too afraid to speak out.
Rossini has since given evidence at dozens of committal hearings and trials and sent many of his former friends to jail. Danny Karam, the man who founded the gang and named it after himself, was shot 16 times by Kanaan and other gang members as he sat in his car outside their Surry Hills safe house in December, 1998.Karam had been vying for control of the Kings Cross drug trade after the departure of former kingpin Bill Bayeh. He recruited young men from suburbs around Lakemba to sell his drugs.
At its peak, the gang was collecting $14,000 a week from selling drugs. But Karam was tight and didn't share the proceeds, paying his young drug runners a miserable wage while he raked in thousands.
That greed cost him his life.
The group, including Kanaan, Rabeeh "Rabs" Mawas, Wassim El-Assaad and Charbel "Charlie" Geagea, attempted to poison Karam, a heroin addict, by giving him a dose of the drug spiked with poison.
When that didn't work, they gunned Karam down.
Five days later, the gang members planned to kill again.
This time, the target was Tongan Sam. The plan was to make it look as though he had killed Danny Karam.
Giving evidence in court, Rossini said he, Kanaan, El-Assaad and Mark Cheikh had reached White City that night after leaving their car when they were chased by two police officers who had fol- lowed them.
Kanaan shot one of the officers in the thigh as he was climbing a tennis-court fence, then exchanged fire with the other. The gunfight ended with Kanaan suffering bullet wounds to the buttocks, both legs and his right wrist.
He also shot himself in the foot while firing at one of the officers and was confined to a wheelchair after the gun battle.
In 1999, controversial magistrate Pat O'Shane dismissed attempted-murder charges against Kanaan, saying the two police officers involved in the White City shootout had been "stupid, reckless and foolhardy" and that the incident was "police harassment of youth".
But in May, 2006, after another two aborted trials, Kanaan was finally sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to 12 years' jail on charges of malicious wounding with intent.
In June, 1999, while on bail over the White City matter, Kanaan held a 32-hour siege at his Belfield home when police attempted to conduct a drug raid.
In 2001, he was given two life sentences for the Five Dock Hotel murders. Rossini testified that he, Kanaan and others had been driving along Great North Rd and were stopped at a red light when they happened to see a brawl on the footpath outside the hotel.
Rossini yelled to the men: "Come on, fellas, punch on," to which one of them replied: "You f****** wogs." Kanaan then pulled a revolver and shot two of the men. They died in hospital.
The gang's most senseless killing was that of 14-year-old schoolboy Edward Lee, who was stabbed to death by Moustapha Dib in Telopea St, Punchbowl in October, 1998.
His crime? Arriving at the gang's house instead of a birthday party at a nearby house.
In February, 2003, the then 20- year-old Dib was sentenced to 10 years' jail for murdering Edward.
Kanaan was given another three years for his role in trying to cover up the murder.
In May, 2005, Kanaan and El-Assaad were found not guilty of the attack on the Lakemba police station, but in May this year another gang associate, Saleh Jamal, 35, was sentenced to 12 years' jail for it.
Jamal had already been jailed for nine years for shooting a man at Greenacre in 1998.
By Brendan Hills, The Sunday Telegraph, June 27, 2010
-----
Every Sunday, gang boss Danny Karam would collect his rent. It was not payment for leasing property across Sydney. His "tenants" were paying the standover man for the right to sell cocaine on the streets of King Cross.
The protection payments ranged from $4000 to $28,000 a week, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.
The court also heard how on a Sunday night in 1998, Mr Karam collected his final rental payment. Angry that they were doing all the work and not receiving any of the profits, three of his gang members - known as DK's Boys - allegedly murdered him, shooting him as he left a Surry Hills apartment.
Michael Kanaan, 26, Rabeeh Mawas, 25, and Wassim El-Assaad, 25, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Karam on December 13, 1998.
Yesterday, one of DK's Boys, Alan Rossini, who has been given indemnity from prosecution for giving evidence against the three accused, revealed the workings of the gang and the events leading up to the killing.
Mr Rossini said that from 1997 to the time of his death, Mr Karam would get him and Kanaan to collect money for him from drug dealers in Kings Cross.
"If you wanted to have four [drug] runners on the street, it was $4000 a week rent," Mr Rossini said. He and Kanaan were also involved in putting cocaine into capsules and taking it to the "manager at the Cross" who passed it on to the drug runners, Mr Rossini said. "They took the capsules, put it into their mouths and walked onto the streets of Kings Cross and sold it."
The money from the sales would then be passed back to them. "Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he'd give it back."
Mr Rossini said they did not receive any of the money. He and Kanaan were sometimes given $100 a week. He said Mr Karam would become violent when the "rent" they collected was too low. "I remember we were short for rent, that was the first time [Kanaan] said we should knock this c---."
Mr Rossini said Kanaan was upset he was being used, and told him: "After all the work we've done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it."
Mr Rossini said he was with the three accused and another man, Charlie Gea Gea, on a few occasions when there were discussions about killing Mr Karam.
The Crown alleges Kanaan, Mawas and a third man, who has not been named, ambushed Mr Karam in his car and that El-Assaad had phoned them earlier to tell them when Mr Karam was leaving the gang's unit.
The trial continues.
By Ellen Connolly
April 23 2002
Video: Underbelly - Best of Danny 'DK' Karam
They were responsible for one of the bloodiest periods in NSW criminal history, a drug gang that killed its own boss and set out to rule Kings Cross.
Now, 12 years later, DK's Boys are captivating a new audience with their five-month Sydney crime spree the focus of the final episodes of the hit series Underbelly: The Golden Mile.
Everyone was a potential target for the young gang, from the police who pursued them to strangers outside a pub.
Cocaine was their trade and kneecappings their preferred negotiation method, but the members of this gang didn't confine their violence to the criminal milieu. They sprayed their hate around.
Between July and December of 1998, the gang terrorised Sydney, committing four murders and at least 16 shootings - the most notorious of which feature in Underbelly, with the series finale airing tonight.
Victims of their random, unprovoked violence included two footballers shot dead outside the Five Dock Hotel, in Sydney's inner west, in July, 1998 and a 14-year- old boy who was stabbed to death three months later after mistakenly going to a gang member's home instead of a nearby birthday party.
"They were just animals," said a retired officer who worked out of Lakemba in the late 1990s. He declined to be named.
"They weren't just after drug money, they actually wanted to kill police - that's how far their hatred and psychopathic nature went."
Their leader, Michael "Doc" Kanaan, 35, will never be released from Goulburn's Supermax prison after being sentenced for three murders including that of the gang's original leader, Danny Karam. Kanaan was a university student who attended Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham, and came from a stable Lebanese Christian family. But with his gang members, aged in their teens and 20s, he became a reckless killer inspired by the American gangster movies he watched repeatedly.
Kanaan had a hatred of police and a dangerous sense of invincibility that climaxed when he took on police in a gunfight on a tennis court at Paddington's White City in December, 1998 - an event dramatised in tonight's
A month earlier, members of the gang had fired 17 bullets into the Lakemba police station during a drive-by shooting.
DK's Boys were also linked to a plot to murder "Tongan Sam", the bodyguard of current "king of the Cross" John Ibrahim, and the shooting-up of Ibrahim's nightclub.
The Underbelly interpretation has the gang made up of four angel-faced 20-somethings.
In reality, the gang comprised at least 10 men in their teens and 20s whose reign of terror came to an end only when one member took the pseudonym Alan Rossini and turned police informant.
Until then, police had been unable to crack the "wall of silence". Hundreds of witnesses to the gang's crimes were too afraid to speak out.
Rossini has since given evidence at dozens of committal hearings and trials and sent many of his former friends to jail. Danny Karam, the man who founded the gang and named it after himself, was shot 16 times by Kanaan and other gang members as he sat in his car outside their Surry Hills safe house in December, 1998.Karam had been vying for control of the Kings Cross drug trade after the departure of former kingpin Bill Bayeh. He recruited young men from suburbs around Lakemba to sell his drugs.
At its peak, the gang was collecting $14,000 a week from selling drugs. But Karam was tight and didn't share the proceeds, paying his young drug runners a miserable wage while he raked in thousands.
That greed cost him his life.
The group, including Kanaan, Rabeeh "Rabs" Mawas, Wassim El-Assaad and Charbel "Charlie" Geagea, attempted to poison Karam, a heroin addict, by giving him a dose of the drug spiked with poison.
When that didn't work, they gunned Karam down.
Five days later, the gang members planned to kill again.
This time, the target was Tongan Sam. The plan was to make it look as though he had killed Danny Karam.
Giving evidence in court, Rossini said he, Kanaan, El-Assaad and Mark Cheikh had reached White City that night after leaving their car when they were chased by two police officers who had fol- lowed them.
Kanaan shot one of the officers in the thigh as he was climbing a tennis-court fence, then exchanged fire with the other. The gunfight ended with Kanaan suffering bullet wounds to the buttocks, both legs and his right wrist.
He also shot himself in the foot while firing at one of the officers and was confined to a wheelchair after the gun battle.
In 1999, controversial magistrate Pat O'Shane dismissed attempted-murder charges against Kanaan, saying the two police officers involved in the White City shootout had been "stupid, reckless and foolhardy" and that the incident was "police harassment of youth".
But in May, 2006, after another two aborted trials, Kanaan was finally sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to 12 years' jail on charges of malicious wounding with intent.
In June, 1999, while on bail over the White City matter, Kanaan held a 32-hour siege at his Belfield home when police attempted to conduct a drug raid.
In 2001, he was given two life sentences for the Five Dock Hotel murders. Rossini testified that he, Kanaan and others had been driving along Great North Rd and were stopped at a red light when they happened to see a brawl on the footpath outside the hotel.
Rossini yelled to the men: "Come on, fellas, punch on," to which one of them replied: "You f****** wogs." Kanaan then pulled a revolver and shot two of the men. They died in hospital.
The gang's most senseless killing was that of 14-year-old schoolboy Edward Lee, who was stabbed to death by Moustapha Dib in Telopea St, Punchbowl in October, 1998.
His crime? Arriving at the gang's house instead of a birthday party at a nearby house.
In February, 2003, the then 20- year-old Dib was sentenced to 10 years' jail for murdering Edward.
Kanaan was given another three years for his role in trying to cover up the murder.
In May, 2005, Kanaan and El-Assaad were found not guilty of the attack on the Lakemba police station, but in May this year another gang associate, Saleh Jamal, 35, was sentenced to 12 years' jail for it.
Jamal had already been jailed for nine years for shooting a man at Greenacre in 1998.
By Brendan Hills, The Sunday Telegraph, June 27, 2010
-----
Every Sunday, gang boss Danny Karam would collect his rent. It was not payment for leasing property across Sydney. His "tenants" were paying the standover man for the right to sell cocaine on the streets of King Cross.
The protection payments ranged from $4000 to $28,000 a week, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.
The court also heard how on a Sunday night in 1998, Mr Karam collected his final rental payment. Angry that they were doing all the work and not receiving any of the profits, three of his gang members - known as DK's Boys - allegedly murdered him, shooting him as he left a Surry Hills apartment.
Michael Kanaan, 26, Rabeeh Mawas, 25, and Wassim El-Assaad, 25, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Karam on December 13, 1998.
Yesterday, one of DK's Boys, Alan Rossini, who has been given indemnity from prosecution for giving evidence against the three accused, revealed the workings of the gang and the events leading up to the killing.
Mr Rossini said that from 1997 to the time of his death, Mr Karam would get him and Kanaan to collect money for him from drug dealers in Kings Cross.
"If you wanted to have four [drug] runners on the street, it was $4000 a week rent," Mr Rossini said. He and Kanaan were also involved in putting cocaine into capsules and taking it to the "manager at the Cross" who passed it on to the drug runners, Mr Rossini said. "They took the capsules, put it into their mouths and walked onto the streets of Kings Cross and sold it."
The money from the sales would then be passed back to them. "Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he'd give it back."
Mr Rossini said they did not receive any of the money. He and Kanaan were sometimes given $100 a week. He said Mr Karam would become violent when the "rent" they collected was too low. "I remember we were short for rent, that was the first time [Kanaan] said we should knock this c---."
Mr Rossini said Kanaan was upset he was being used, and told him: "After all the work we've done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it."
Mr Rossini said he was with the three accused and another man, Charlie Gea Gea, on a few occasions when there were discussions about killing Mr Karam.
The Crown alleges Kanaan, Mawas and a third man, who has not been named, ambushed Mr Karam in his car and that El-Assaad had phoned them earlier to tell them when Mr Karam was leaving the gang's unit.
The trial continues.
By Ellen Connolly
April 23 2002
Video: Underbelly - Best of Danny 'DK' Karam
Now, 12 years later, DK's Boys are captivating a new audience with their five-month Sydney crime spree the focus of the final episodes of the hit series Underbelly: The Golden Mile.
Everyone was a potential target for the young gang, from the police who pursued them to strangers outside a pub.
Cocaine was their trade and kneecappings their preferred negotiation method, but the members of this gang didn't confine their violence to the criminal milieu. They sprayed their hate around.
Between July and December of 1998, the gang terrorised Sydney, committing four murders and at least 16 shootings - the most notorious of which feature in Underbelly, with the series finale airing tonight.
Victims of their random, unprovoked violence included two footballers shot dead outside the Five Dock Hotel, in Sydney's inner west, in July, 1998 and a 14-year- old boy who was stabbed to death three months later after mistakenly going to a gang member's home instead of a nearby birthday party.
"They were just animals," said a retired officer who worked out of Lakemba in the late 1990s. He declined to be named.
"They weren't just after drug money, they actually wanted to kill police - that's how far their hatred and psychopathic nature went."
Their leader, Michael "Doc" Kanaan, 35, will never be released from Goulburn's Supermax prison after being sentenced for three murders including that of the gang's original leader, Danny Karam. Kanaan was a university student who attended Christian Brothers High School, Lewisham, and came from a stable Lebanese Christian family. But with his gang members, aged in their teens and 20s, he became a reckless killer inspired by the American gangster movies he watched repeatedly.
Kanaan had a hatred of police and a dangerous sense of invincibility that climaxed when he took on police in a gunfight on a tennis court at Paddington's White City in December, 1998 - an event dramatised in tonight's
A month earlier, members of the gang had fired 17 bullets into the Lakemba police station during a drive-by shooting.
DK's Boys were also linked to a plot to murder "Tongan Sam", the bodyguard of current "king of the Cross" John Ibrahim, and the shooting-up of Ibrahim's nightclub.
The Underbelly interpretation has the gang made up of four angel-faced 20-somethings.
In reality, the gang comprised at least 10 men in their teens and 20s whose reign of terror came to an end only when one member took the pseudonym Alan Rossini and turned police informant.
Until then, police had been unable to crack the "wall of silence". Hundreds of witnesses to the gang's crimes were too afraid to speak out.
Rossini has since given evidence at dozens of committal hearings and trials and sent many of his former friends to jail. Danny Karam, the man who founded the gang and named it after himself, was shot 16 times by Kanaan and other gang members as he sat in his car outside their Surry Hills safe house in December, 1998.Karam had been vying for control of the Kings Cross drug trade after the departure of former kingpin Bill Bayeh. He recruited young men from suburbs around Lakemba to sell his drugs.
At its peak, the gang was collecting $14,000 a week from selling drugs. But Karam was tight and didn't share the proceeds, paying his young drug runners a miserable wage while he raked in thousands.
That greed cost him his life.
The group, including Kanaan, Rabeeh "Rabs" Mawas, Wassim El-Assaad and Charbel "Charlie" Geagea, attempted to poison Karam, a heroin addict, by giving him a dose of the drug spiked with poison.
When that didn't work, they gunned Karam down.
Five days later, the gang members planned to kill again.
This time, the target was Tongan Sam. The plan was to make it look as though he had killed Danny Karam.
Giving evidence in court, Rossini said he, Kanaan, El-Assaad and Mark Cheikh had reached White City that night after leaving their car when they were chased by two police officers who had fol- lowed them.
Kanaan shot one of the officers in the thigh as he was climbing a tennis-court fence, then exchanged fire with the other. The gunfight ended with Kanaan suffering bullet wounds to the buttocks, both legs and his right wrist.
He also shot himself in the foot while firing at one of the officers and was confined to a wheelchair after the gun battle.
In 1999, controversial magistrate Pat O'Shane dismissed attempted-murder charges against Kanaan, saying the two police officers involved in the White City shootout had been "stupid, reckless and foolhardy" and that the incident was "police harassment of youth".
But in May, 2006, after another two aborted trials, Kanaan was finally sentenced in the NSW Supreme Court to 12 years' jail on charges of malicious wounding with intent.
In June, 1999, while on bail over the White City matter, Kanaan held a 32-hour siege at his Belfield home when police attempted to conduct a drug raid.
In 2001, he was given two life sentences for the Five Dock Hotel murders. Rossini testified that he, Kanaan and others had been driving along Great North Rd and were stopped at a red light when they happened to see a brawl on the footpath outside the hotel.
Rossini yelled to the men: "Come on, fellas, punch on," to which one of them replied: "You f****** wogs." Kanaan then pulled a revolver and shot two of the men. They died in hospital.
The gang's most senseless killing was that of 14-year-old schoolboy Edward Lee, who was stabbed to death by Moustapha Dib in Telopea St, Punchbowl in October, 1998.
His crime? Arriving at the gang's house instead of a birthday party at a nearby house.
In February, 2003, the then 20- year-old Dib was sentenced to 10 years' jail for murdering Edward.
Kanaan was given another three years for his role in trying to cover up the murder.
In May, 2005, Kanaan and El-Assaad were found not guilty of the attack on the Lakemba police station, but in May this year another gang associate, Saleh Jamal, 35, was sentenced to 12 years' jail for it.
Jamal had already been jailed for nine years for shooting a man at Greenacre in 1998.
By Brendan Hills, The Sunday Telegraph, June 27, 2010
-----
Every Sunday, gang boss Danny Karam would collect his rent. It was not payment for leasing property across Sydney. His "tenants" were paying the standover man for the right to sell cocaine on the streets of King Cross.
The protection payments ranged from $4000 to $28,000 a week, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.
The court also heard how on a Sunday night in 1998, Mr Karam collected his final rental payment. Angry that they were doing all the work and not receiving any of the profits, three of his gang members - known as DK's Boys - allegedly murdered him, shooting him as he left a Surry Hills apartment.
Michael Kanaan, 26, Rabeeh Mawas, 25, and Wassim El-Assaad, 25, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Karam on December 13, 1998.
Yesterday, one of DK's Boys, Alan Rossini, who has been given indemnity from prosecution for giving evidence against the three accused, revealed the workings of the gang and the events leading up to the killing.
Mr Rossini said that from 1997 to the time of his death, Mr Karam would get him and Kanaan to collect money for him from drug dealers in Kings Cross.
"If you wanted to have four [drug] runners on the street, it was $4000 a week rent," Mr Rossini said. He and Kanaan were also involved in putting cocaine into capsules and taking it to the "manager at the Cross" who passed it on to the drug runners, Mr Rossini said. "They took the capsules, put it into their mouths and walked onto the streets of Kings Cross and sold it."
The money from the sales would then be passed back to them. "Danny said he was putting the money away for us and he'd give it back."
Mr Rossini said they did not receive any of the money. He and Kanaan were sometimes given $100 a week. He said Mr Karam would become violent when the "rent" they collected was too low. "I remember we were short for rent, that was the first time [Kanaan] said we should knock this c---."
Mr Rossini said Kanaan was upset he was being used, and told him: "After all the work we've done for Danny to build up his business we have got nothing for it."
Mr Rossini said he was with the three accused and another man, Charlie Gea Gea, on a few occasions when there were discussions about killing Mr Karam.
The Crown alleges Kanaan, Mawas and a third man, who has not been named, ambushed Mr Karam in his car and that El-Assaad had phoned them earlier to tell them when Mr Karam was leaving the gang's unit.
The trial continues.
By Ellen Connolly
April 23 2002
Video: Underbelly - Best of Danny 'DK' Karam
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