“It used to be an unwritten law, especially in organized crime, that you don’t touch the family, and you don’t touch women. I think that rule of engagement has been thrown out the window, it is now being ignored. I think they don’t care anymore, they don’t discriminate if you are a man or a woman,” he said.
The shooting has police and observers questioning why Fadlallah justified an organized hit and how involved she was with the criminal underworld. Was his death simply the product of the company he kept? Or was she a player? Have the norms changed for women or was she a woman who fell outside the usual norms for women associated with organized crime?
Sydney underworld figure Tilly Devine with former rival Kate Leigh in 1948 Credit: Sun News
Two of Sydney’s best-known organized crime figures have been women: the infamous Tilly Devine and her fierce competitor Kate Leigh.
The two women were not garden-variety criminals, but the city’s biggest crime figures during the 1920s and early 1930s, according to author Larry Writer who wrote about the duo in his book Razor, which formed the basis of Underbelly: Razor, a drama broadcast on Nine, the publisher of this newspaper.
“They were criminal masterminds,” he told The Sun-Herald.
“They had gangs that did their bidding. They had the equivalent of multi-million dollar brothel companies, sly grog [the unlicensed sale of alcohol] and various criminal enterprises”.
Several murders were committed at the behest of the two women, Writer said.
The duo managed to make their way in the patriarchal underworld of 1920s Sydney by being “more ruthless and smarter than the men”, Writer said.
“They were also very intimidating, overcoming obstacles through sheer force of will.”
In the intervening 100 years, no woman has been as prominent in the city’s criminal life as Devine or Leigh, but that doesn’t mean women haven’t played an important role in organized crime.
Organized crime has historically been “a very patriarchal thing” linked to traditional extended family values and structures, where a strong male figure looks after a larger group of families, the former NSW detective and associate professor of criminology said , Dr. Michael Kennedy, in The Sun-Herald.
Outsiders often incorrectly perceived women in these groups as powerless or subordinate, she said. But women involved in criminal families or organizations could be “necked” in the business and even allowed to dabble in their own businesses as long as they did not become a liability to the larger company.
Fingerprint dust covers a car on Hendy Avenue, Panania, where Lametta Fadlallah was shot. Credit: Nick Moir
These women tend to keep a lower profile and attract less police attention than their male counterparts, he said.
A senior officer said women associated with criminal gangs were not naive: “They are not going out, but they know what is going on.
“It’s rare that they’re top of the tree, but they’re certainly fair game if they are.”
Sometimes women have gotten their hands really dirty.
When a gang war was raging in the city’s south-west between the Bankstown and Blacktown chapters of the notorious Brothers 4 Life gang a decade ago, a Sydney paralegal with no criminal record began dating a member of a gang of ‘high profile while incarcerated at Goulburn High. -Supermax security.
The woman, who cannot be identified except by the court-appointed pseudonym of Witness M, became a highly regarded gang figure.
At 32, Witness M drove a getaway car from a hit-and-run and attempted murder in 2013. She later pleaded guilty to a charge of being an accessory before the fact of murder and having been an accomplice prior to the act of discharging a firearm with intent. cause serious bodily harm.
Earlier this month gangland widow and organized crime figure in her own right Roberta Williams pleaded guilty to blackmail and recklessly wounding a television producer in Melbourne.
Women have also been in the firing line before Fadlallah’s murder. As the two chapters of Brothers 4 Life battled each other, a woman, Lola Hamzy, was shot through the front door of her home in Sydney’s west. The 2014 crime remains unsolved. The previous year, Maha Hamze was shot 21 times with eight bullets hitting her legs as a result of a dispute over money between her relative and another man.
Kennedy believes Fadlallah “had become a liability for one or more reasons.” Since his death, the underworld has begun to speculate that he was cooperating with law enforcement. “In this area, everyone is always suspicious of others. If people have been arrested around him, questions would be asked.”
A senior detective who spoke to the Herald last week was willing to venture that Fadlallah was “the rarest of Sydney gangsters – a woman”.
Fadlallah’s mother last week described her not as a gangster but “the life of the party,” which Kennedy believes may have contributed to her death.
He told The Australian: “It might be fine to be the life of the party in Hollywood, but not if you’re part of an organized crime structure, where you want to keep a low profile.”
Fadlallah had become known to police through her two marriages: she was married to former Telopea Street gang member Shadi Derbas, who was jailed for five years for tampering with evidence in a murder, and then married the late Kings Cross man Helal Safi.
“The 48-year-old is known to police, has a history of associations and relationships with other identities known to police. Therefore, one theory is that she would more than likely have been the intended target. The 39-year-old woman sitting next to him for years is an innocent party in all of this,” said Doherty of the homicide squad.
Although Fadlallah had a limited criminal record, there are suggestions that she was involved in drug dealing. Investigators are looking for that, along with a romantic relationship gone bad or being in deep debt, as key lines of inquiry in the large-scale probe that will have officers interview dozens of witnesses, comb through months of footage of CCTV and speak at length to the sources of the underworld.
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“We have several crime scenes, we’ve recovered a lot of forensic exhibits, including vehicles and ammunition,” NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said on Thursday.
“It’s really just early and it’s too early to speculate on the cause, the reason, anything.
“They all take time, unfortunately. I wish it was CSI and it went really fast, but it’s not. That’s just the reality,” he said.
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