One of Australia’s most notorious gang leaders has changed since orchestrating a major drug ring from his high-security prison cell while serving a lengthy sentence for murder, a court has been told.
Bassam Hamzy was found guilty of supplying more than 450g of methamphetamine in late 2017 and early 2018, and dealing with $14,000 as the proceeds of crime.
At the time, the head of the Brothers 4 Life crime gang was an inmate of Goulburn’s High Risk Management Correctional Centre – commonly known as “Supermax” – where he remains alongside many of the nation’s most dangerous offenders.
Hamzy overcame intensely restrictive conditions behind bars to direct five separate drug deals using a contraband mobile phone and by giving directions through his lawyer Martin Churchill, who has since died.
Defence barrister Dennis Stewart told a sentence hearing in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court today that Hamzy had changed in the years since the crime.
“A lot of water’s gone under the bridge in five years,” Stewart told the court.
“He has changed. His state of mind has changed. His view of the future has changed.”
Stewart also questioned prosecutors’ assertion Hamzy was using profit from the drug deals to fund ongoing criminal activity by Brothers 4 Life, a gang he said was no longer operational.
“Whilst Brothers 4 Life may well have had criminals in it … that was not the entire reason for its existence,” he said.
“It was set up for other reasons.”
Bassam Hamzy conducted drug deals using a contraband mobile phone while behind bars.
Hamzy has spent the past quarter of a century behind bars since being taken into custody when he was 19 over a fatal shooting on Sydney’s Oxford St in 1998.
The now 46-year-old won’t be eligible for parole until June 2035, when whatever sentence he receives for the drug offences is expected to start.
Stewart said the conditions Hamzy had endured since being sent to the Supermax jail in 2002 were akin to torture and it was remarkable he had not gone insane..
“Those custodial arrangements appear to be probably the strictest conditions and the most onerous conditions of any prisoner in New South Wales,” he said.
“One can only imagine or try to imagine … the impact of Mr Hamzy being in this type of custody for many years, decades.
“It’s a level of isolation and restriction which the most psychologically strong person and well-equipped person would find very difficult to endure.”
Judge Antony Townsend accepted the conditions placed on Hamzy were onerous, but said the “elephant in the room” was that he continued to offend while under those restrictions.
“I don’t think there is any dispute that there is a high degree of isolation, a high degree of restrictions,” he said.
“Those restrictions were wholly unsuccessful in relation to stopping the offender committing further offences.
“It’s an extraordinary situation that phones get into such a restricted facility.”
