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The arrest of Kazem Hamad in Iraq is welcomed by Australian authorities, although the illicit tobacco trade that built his brutal empire shows no sign of waning. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.

The making of a tobacco warlord

Kazem Hamad pictured in Melbourne before his deportation.

Credit: Instagram

Long before he became “one of the world’s most dangerous wanted men”, as a suspected broker of Iranian terrorism and alleged orchestrator of Australia’s murderous tobacco wars, Kazem Hamad was just a troubled young man on a psych’s couch.

He was born in Basra, Iraq, in 1984, when the war with Iran, foolishly begun by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein four years earlier, was still four years from its ceasefire. Overly optimistic about his country’s capacity to exploit Iran’s recent tumult of revolution, and underestimating their strength, Saddam embarked on almost a decade of attritional warfare that ended half a million lives.

Among his professed aims was curbing the regional influence of the newly enthroned Shia theocracy. Despite Shia Muslims long comprising a majority in Iraq, Saddam’s Ba’athist regime was principally Sunni and practised vicious and indiscriminate persecution. A Shia uprising in 1991, following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, led to massacre.

Kazem Hamad’s family were Shia. Not long after the first Gulf War, they fled Iraq and spent the next few years in refugee camps across Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. War at home, and the subsequent itinerancy, severely curtailed Hamad’s education.

In 1998, when Hamad was 14, the family moved to Australia as refugees. By his late teens, he was estranged from them and sleeping on the streets of Melbourne.

His serial offending – his criminal record describes an unbroken chain of offences of escalating severity – obliged his appearance before several drug counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists. The opinion of one was that Hamad had once been traumatised by scenes of mutilated bodies in the streets of Basra, but he had since integrated violence – normalised it. Police would later describe him as an enthusiastic practitioner.

Hamad’s first court appearance was in 2001, when he was 17. By 2010, Victoria Police’s database held 19 pages dedicated to his criminal history. Before his appearance in court on charges of assault and kidnapping in 2010 – these never made it to trial as the alleged victim later made a statement of no complaint – Hamad already had convictions for burglary, armed robbery and assault with a weapon.

By his late teens, Hamad was a heavy drug user – typically, he only stopped when imprisoned. A steady diet of ice, cannabis and medicinal depressants led to several psychotic episodes. Psychologists would note that Hamad had little insight into his drug use, and in 2010 a Supreme Court judge thought he seemed indifferent to changing this.

The psychological profile of Hamad that emerges in court documents is an unflattering one. He’s variously described as a man of modest intelligence and poor self-regulation. Impulsive, indulgent, violent and unapologetically antisocial. He likely had a personality disorder, one therapist said, with only a “tenuous grasp of his emotional world”.

All of which led the police to consider him extremely dangerous.

During a bail application hearing in 2010, prosecutors made several arguments as to why Hamad should not receive this privilege – one was their suspicion that Hamad, and his associates, had previously intimidated victims and witnesses into silence. In two cases involving allegations of kidnapping and/or assault, the matters ended with statements of no complaint from alleged victims or witnesses.

Hamad was convicted in 2011 on a separate kidnapping charge and spent two-and-a-half years in jail, but, police allege, the string of convictions and spells in prison never chastened his criminal ambitions. Instead, they grew.

By now, police say, Hamad was enmeshed in Melbourne’s gangland and prosecuting a violent rivalry with the Haddara crime family – one in which, they say, he eventually triumphed. There was a body count – his brother-in-law was shot dead in the street in 2015 while standing next to Hamad, the likely intended target – and in the same year Hamad was convicted of trafficking heroin. He spent eight years in jail, and was deported to Iraq shortly after his release in July 2023.

Police believe Hamad plotted, then directed, the so-called “tobacco wars” from prison – and continued to do so from Iraq. One question, naturally, is how a man could emerge from jail more powerful than when he entered almost a decade previously.

“It’s not unusual for organised crime figures to remain in control of organisations from prison,” says James Martin, an associate professor of criminology at Deakin University with a special expertise in black markets. “We’ve seen this with Italian Mafias, say. It’s easy to smuggle phones in. People visit. You’re still embedded in your networks and, funnily enough, prisons are a fantastic place to meet other criminals.”

Hamad saw early the enormous profitability of illicit cigarettes in Australia. He was also distinguished by his cultivation of loyalty and his ruthlessness – exceptional even in an environment defined by violence.

Since 2023, there have been at least 200 firebombings of tobacconists, grocers and delis across Australia. Once concentrated in Victoria, this phenomenon has spread nationally. In the past fortnight, several shops have been torched in Western Australia. Police there have established their own “tobacco war” taskforce.

James Martin says there are basically two methods cartels use to expand their market share: purchase their own tobacco businesses or conscript legitimate small businesses into selling their contraband. Failure to comply is met with a Molotov cocktail through the window. The same holds for rival gangs who establish competitive sites.

These bloody campaigns found their obscene nadir last January, when a home was torched in Melbourne’s west – killing its occupant, Katie Tangey. Police described her as an innocent bystander, prey to the cruel stupidity of thugs who got the address wrong.

Police believe Hamad, from his fortified home in Iraq, ordered the bombing – as they believe he ordered the professional execution, in the same month, of gangland rival Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim in the underground car park of his Melbourne hotel. Victoria Police this month said they are still investigating Abdulrahim’s murder.

The expansion of tobacco’s black market has been swift and enormous – Victoria Police now estimate there are 1300 vendors of illicit cigarettes in their state alone.

In October last year, the Australian Taxation Office made an extraordinary admission: their methodology into determining the size of this market, and the subsequent calculations about government revenue lost through tobacco excise, was badly wrong. As a result, “the total illicit market is significantly higher than what we have previously estimated”.

Previously estimated at 18 to 20 per cent, last month the federal government’s Illicit Tobacco and E-cigarette Commissioner released a report saying that contraband now comprised a majority of the total tobacco market. If tobacco consumption trends upwards, the report said, then the black market will quickly comprise 60 per cent of it, and be worth $6.9 billion – at a continued cost to the federal government, in lost excise, of several billion dollars a year.

Enshrined in the Victorian parliament a year ago, legislation compelling vendors to hold a licence to sell tobacco products will be enforced from next month. So far, fewer than half of the approximately 8000 state vendors have sought one. The enforcement of the legislation also introduces an anxious role for the state’s 14 tobacco inspectors.

James Martin says the federal government has long emphasised the tactic of diminishing supply – of increasing law enforcement budgets to seize illicit drugs at the border. But, he says, this ignores so many other drivers – not least, demand. “In 2009/10, there was a $1.2 billion budget for law enforcement and drugs,” he says. “By 2021/22, that budget, our entire drug enforcement budget, was $3.5 billion. The idea was minimising drug-related harms by making drugs harder to get – and increasing the price of those drugs that do hit the streets.

“Now, I’m not slamming the police here. Every year, more or less, police made good use of that money. They had record levels of arrests and seizures. They did their job, but the impact on the market was the same as it was in 2009 – there was no impact on availability. Plus, purity increased for most drug types and prices declined substantially.”

Last week, Iraqi officials arrested Kazem Hamad. It was announced by the country’s Supreme Judicial Council, who described the accused as “one of the most dangerous wanted men in the world … he is involved with outlaw gangs that have extensive influence within Australia and the Middle East and are responsible for carrying out murders, shootings, money laundering, fraud, assaults, arson, and drug trafficking on a global level.”

Though the new Australian Federal Police commissioner, Krissy Barrett, had described Hamad as her “No. 1 target” and a “national security risk”, many were surprised by the arrest. Hamad’s Iraqi exile had been comfortable and years-long, and Australia does not have a history of meaningful cooperation with the country of his birth.

What happens next is speculative. The AFP have officially been reticent to discuss the case, and Australia has no extradition treaty with Iraq. Nor, it seems, do we have the political appetite to seek his return here for trial. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said this week he had no desire to see Hamad back in Australia and would be happy to see him locked up overseas.

So why did Iraqi officials arrest him now? The AFP’s interest in Hamad intensified when it began to suspect his involvement, on behalf of the Iranians, in organising the torching of a Melbourne synagogue in December 2024. This led to pressure on the Iraqis. The ABC has also reported that Hamad was arrested in relation to allegedly separate local crimes.

In Australia, officials have welcomed his arrest. James Martin, though, cautions against optimism. “Hamad is a symptom of our policy decisions,” he says. “The conditions that created the illicit market are still in place. An extraordinarily high tobacco excise, a lack of appealing accessible alternatives for vape consumers and, given there’s a lack of affordable options for the third most popular recreational drug and demand is stable – well, that demand incentivises illicit supply. So if it’s not Hamad, it will be someone else.

“After the death of Pablo Escobar, and the collapse of his Medellin cartel, the Cali cartel soon filled the space – and Colombian cocaine production actually increased. Al Capone’s arrest did not end the sale of bootleg liquor – it increased. Here, the market drivers remain in place and you’ll see adaptation.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 24, 2026 as "The making of a tobacco warlord".

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