John Ibrahim. (Illustration credit: Guilhem Dorandeu)
Who could have predicted that a five-year-old boy, who once stood beside his mother and siblings in 1975 as they patiently awaited a boat’s departure from Tripoli, would rise to become the owner of Sydney’s most extravagant night-life venues three decades later and half a world away?
Escaping the horrors of Lebanon’s 1975-90 Civil War, Ibrahim’s mother boarded a ferry with her five children, and left everything —her husband, her home, even her family name — behind.
“Is John’s father named Ibrahim Jamhour?” asked Australian customs before replacing his father’s surname with his first name.
“John Ibrahim” was born.
“A new name, a new country, a new life,” Ibrahim would reflect later in his 2017 autobiography, “The Last King of the Cross.”
Despite coming from a vulnerable single-parent Lebanese family, John Ibrahim would transcend his circumstances. Soon, he would ascend the ranks of organized crime in Sydney’s iconic Kings Cross district.
His path was marked by knife fights (he reports being stabbed once) and gunshot wounds and he continually managed to evade justice. After three decades of “blood, sweat, and tears,” as his autobiography recounts, Ibrahim became the head of a sprawling empire boasting over a dozen vibrant nightlife venues in Sydney.
While he rubbed shoulders with celebrities like Paris Hilton and Mike Tyson, Ibrahim kept his humble mother in mind. Back in Lebanon, his father had remarried and later struggled with gambling addiction.
Fight club
When they were schoolboys, John and his older brother Sam had to work odd jobs to support the family. They made their first money fighting.
By the age of 15, Sam already had a black belt in taekwondo, which he soon started teaching. John became Sam’s manager, coordinating classes and handling payments from some 75 students.
It was “a glimpse of my future self,” he later wrote.
The family home’s garden evolved into a sort of “fight club,” where John learned that sustaining a bloody nose was something to take pride in.
The two siblings made it to the national championships in Sydney. This didn’t launch them into a dazzling sports career however. Instead, it marked its definitive end.
As John’s opponent taunted him, Sam goaded his younger brother in retaliation with a left hook. The rules of taekwondo are quite unlike those of boxing, but John obliged. The entire team was disqualified as a result.
The days of practicing on tatamis were now behind them and Sam soon became a bouncer at a nightclub in Parramatta, a suburb in western Sydney.
When Sam left the family home in 1985 John, who was just 15, took on the role of breadwinner.
“We lived with very little,” he reflected in his autobiography. “It could have been worse; we could have grown up in Lebanon.”
When stealing milk bottles in the morning was no longer enough to make ends meet, Ibrahim landed a job as a bouncer at Images nightclub. The experience was an eye-opener for him.
“That’s when I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up: become the owner of my own nightclub.”
Organized crime
Sydney nightlife in the 1980s was dark. Illegal gambling and brothels flourished. To keep their businesses afloat, nightclub owners paid $500-$1,000 a week to a Lebanese fiend named Louis Bayeh, in exchange for “protection” against robberies and raids by the cops — who were handsomely paid to turn a blind eye.
This was a mafia-style operation. Sam swiftly became entangled in the web when Bayeh, having witnessed his fighting skills, made him his personal bodyguard, later entrusting him to collect “pizzo,” protection money.
It was in his older brother’s shadow that Ibrahim stepped into this dark life. It fascinated him.
He started working at Kings Cross, now known as Little Lebanon, the nerve center of Sydney’s night life.
At 2o, Sam was in charge of Bayeh’s protection rackets in the district.
John, for his part, relied on charm more than his brawn to establish a foothold in the criminal underworld.
It started when he hid in the trunk of Sam’s car one day. Next thing he knew, he was a driver for collecting protection money. He got $400 a week for the work.
A dream come true at 20
When Ibrahim was 17 the teachers at his night school were “gamblers, bandits, drug dealers, pimps, and strip club owners.”
As he went about his collection duties, he absorbed the insights of inspirational nightclub owners, notorious figures like Ashtray Frank, Skinny Steve, and Fat Steve. They told their tales at venues like Porky’s, Pink Pussycat, The Love Machine and Lovebirds.
Before he could join their ranks, Ibrahim kept punching — the best way to earn respect in a world that was “dangerous, brutal, but exciting.”
One night, during a routine scuffle on Darlington Street, he says he took a butcher’s knife to the stomach.
This first brush with death left him with a scar running down his abdomen. He spent three months recovering.
During his involuntary nightlife hiatus, he made a decision: no more collecting gangsters’ protection money. He wanted to become the boss.
Once he left the hospital, he invested $70,000 for a 20 percent stake in a club called The Tunnel.
Soon, he bought out his partners and assumed full control of the club. At 20, his dream of owning a club became a reality.
Ibrahim acquired a nightclub license and committed himself to staying legitimate — a promise it proved challenging to keep.
Unlike Sam, John’s vices weren’t illegal.
While he might have had a penchant for women, especially those that were young blond and model material, he refrained, he said, from substance abuse. The proliferation of drugs surged significantly in the mid-1990s, wreaking havoc on Kings Cross and ruining his brother Sam, who fell victim to cocaine addiction.
Things took a turn when a club called Laser opened in Kings Cross. Billy Bayeh, Louis’ brother, oversaw this arcade, which was really a front for drug distribution, purportedly under the tacit approval of the police.
Like other illicit ventures in the neighborhood, corrupt cops received a cut — referred to as a “laugh” — to turn a blind eye to such operations. This transformed Kings Cross into a hotbed for drug dealers and users.
The influx of drug money, and evidence of other malfeasance, grew to such proportions as to attract suspicion from within police ranks and the Wood Royal Commission was launched in 1994.
One of the corrupt cops agreed to cooperate with investigators to avoid conviction. Over a span of eight months, he gathered incriminating evidence against his colleagues.
By the time the investigation concluded in 1997, several police officers were dismissed, hundreds more resigned, and a dozen committed suicide. A number of criminals were arrested, including Billy Bayeh, who received a 16-year sentence.
In 2010, Louis Bayeh told the Daily Telegraph that “Bill was a good boy in prison.”
‘Sexy John’ vs ‘Sam the biker’
Ibrahim managed to evade the law. Despite being the target of more than 540 police investigations, the Australian press says the only blemish on his record is a minor offense from his teenage years.
Adapted to his surroundings, Ibrahim had one foot in the underworld, providing security for several Kings Cross clubs. He did not involve himself in drug trafficking and operated a legitimate nightclub.
This was enough to frustrate prosecutor John Agius, who lacked the evidence to convict him.
“It seems you’re the new lifeblood of the Kings Cross drug trade, isn’t it?” Agius once told Ibrahim.
Known by the moniker “Sexy John,” Ibrahim spent the rest of his career in the nightlife scene trying to shake off this tainted image.
It was a bad time for the Ibrahims, but the brothers took drastically different trajectories.
While John says he mingled with Mike Tyson in Las Vegas and shared a limousine with Paris Hilton, Sam headed a motorcycle gang, the Nomads. He dove head first into drug trafficking and urban gun battles. Asked about his activities prior to the Wood Commission, an unfazed Sam Ibrahim testified: “I steal and oversee drug dealers.”
Confined in pre-trial detention for several years, Sam was eventually deported to Lebanon in October 2020. According to a report in Australia’s Daily Mail, right up until the last minute police feared that Sam’s gang would try to free him before he could be deported.
Sam and John’s younger brother Micheal followed in Sam’s footsteps. In 2020, he was handed a 30-year prison sentence for complicity in attempting to smuggle 1.9 tons of drugs into Australia.
Nightclub king to property developer
After two years living the good life in places like Ibiza, Las Vegas, and Greece — where he once came close to fatally injuring a man suspected of assaulting his former girlfriend — John Ibrahim resurfaced on the Australian nightclub scene.
In the wake of the Wood Commission, the early 2000s, John re-directed his efforts to the Oxford Street area, adjacent Kings Cross, securing control over Australia’s largest nightclub, DCM (Don’t Cry Mama).
In just one year, John gained ownership of eight other nightclubs along Oxford street as well, in addition to four others in Kings Cross.
Ibrahim stopped collecting protection money and remade himself as a law-abiding businessman. He paid taxes and ran successful and reputable street-side establishments.
Police continued to monitor his phone conversations, however, convinced of his involvement in illegal activities like his brothers, whom he now mostly saw during prison visits.
Caught between two worlds, Ibrahim found himself being pulled between his career’s upward trajectory and his brothers’ deteriorating circumstances, which could drag him down.
When his brother Fadi was shot five times in 2009, everyone expected John to seek revenge. He had too much at stake. With assets that included a multimillion-dollar villa in Dover Heights and several newly established venues in Kings Cross, frequented by celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Beyoncé, he had too much to lose.
Ultimately, it was a law that brought an end to his domination over Sydney’s nightlife.
In 2014, following the tragic deaths of two young people in Kings Cross, a law was enacted prohibiting alcohol sales after 3 a.m. and the reception of customers after 1:30 a.m. Kings Cross declined. The Covid pandemic delivered another blow to the district.
After that, Australian newspapers began to report on the district’s gentrification, characterized by brunch restaurants and yoga classes.
“Who knows?” Ibrahim quipped in his autobiography. “Maybe they won’t call me King of the Cross anymore — maybe I’ll be real estate developer John Ibrahim? What a bore!”
According to Australia’s Daily Mail, he currently oversees an empire estimated at $52.5 million.
Even with his participation in producing “The Last King of the Cross,” a Paramount Plus series chronicling his life, it appears that Ibrahim isn’t content.
In March 2023, Ibrahim boldly presented a real estate development proposal to Sydney municipality amounting to almost $20 million. This ambitious endeavor aims to transform the Kings Cross nightclub district into an upscale residential enclave. As his book suggests, Ibrahim’s most prominent quality remains his adaptability.
Note: Ibrahim declined our requests for an interview. We compiled information from different media outlets which reported on him, as well as from his autobiography.
This story originally ran in French in L’Orient-Le Jour, translated by Sahar Ghoussoub.