Two years of data from Sydney’s gangland wars has revealed the bloody front line across the city’s west that has claimed 19 lives, riddled homes with bullets and condemned dozens of teenagers to become underworld soldiers.
The data investigation by the Herald has also spotlighted the communities wearied and cowed by criminals, who, according to Premier Chris Minns, no longer fear being caught.
“Their chances of committing an offence and getting away with it are close to zero, and yet they continue to do it anyway,” Minns said.
Sydneysiders were shocked this week after a would-be hitman armed with a pistol ran toward an innocent father and daughter during school pick-up in Fairfield.
The man and his teenager, whose only “offence” was a familiar relationship with an underworld figure, fled on foot. Police believe the gun jammed, sparing their lives.
Days earlier, a hooded figure fired almost 30 rounds from a modified military-grade SKS rifle into the front of a Punchbowl funeral home, believed to be hosting the mourning family of a slain gangster Lorenzo Lemalu.
Police say two people allegedly in the stolen car, including the accused gunman, were aged just 17. The eldest was 23.
For two years the tempo of the city, particularly in the south-west, has been marked by the sound of gunfire.
NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon vowed to stamp out the shootings. He stepped into the job at the height of inter-gang violence. Eight months on, and he conceded the conflicts remain “completely unacceptable”.
“They’re unacceptable to the police, they’re unacceptable to the community,” Lanyon told the Herald.
“Organised crime and its callous disregard for the lives of the community is not something we will ever tolerate.”
Lanyon said the anti-gang Taskforce Falcon had made 500 arrests since the start of the year, many for conspiracy to murder and public shootings.
The Herald analysed police and media reports since April 2023 and detected 120 gang-related shootings in Sydney.
A further 52 targeted arson attacks and 40 kidnappings were also pulled into the data set.
Most shootings were clustered around the suburbs of Merrylands, home of the Alameddine Organised Crime Network (OCN), and gunmen mostly targeted homes.
The suburb south of Parramatta recorded more shootings than any other, with eight homes being targeted. It also topped the arson category, with four businesses and two cars being set alight since 2024.
Guildford West has had three homes shot at and two public place shootings, while Greenacre has been the scene for three shootings that resulted in injuries and one fatality. Auburn and Lidcombe have both recorded two separate shootings each where people have been injured.
The shootings have changed pace over time; there was a spike in early 2023, then a lull throughout 2024.
In that year, gang violence accounted for one in every four non-domestic violence, non-fatal shooting recorded by police.
But shootings began to climb in mid-2025 as the Alameddine crime network fell out with former allies, including groups of Polynesian men who had acted as enforcers known as KVT.
The erstwhile allies traded shootings into homes and cars throughout the first half of 2025, with an Alameddine bodyguard shot dead in a ute in Parramatta and his boss, a gang leader, targeted repeatedly by gunmen over a period of months.
The Alameddine-KVT feud culminated in the murder of John Versace, an innocent tradie shot dead outside his home in Condell Park in a case of mistaken identity.
Along with the spike in shootings, the nature of the attacks has also changed. Senior NSW Police say the weapons are becoming more powerful and those responsible are getting younger.
Lanyon said it represented a “change in the organised crime environment”.
“We are seeing crime as a service, people becoming engaged in parts of the organised crime scheme that never would have been there, young children being contracted online and on the dark web,” he said.
“For the sake of making a small amount of money to participate in one of these crimes, they could go to jail for a number of years. They need to think of the consequences.”
Lengthy prison sentences and the high likelihood of arrest aren’t working to deter young people from engaging in violent organised crime, Minns conceded.
He said police would be provided with the resources to crack down on organised crime networks that are younger and more brazen than ever.
“It’s appalling that someone would attempt to recruit a child to commit these kinds of atrocious violent acts … we can’t have a situation where even though these people, some cases are underage, there’s a sense or a belief that there’s a green light to that violent behaviour.”
Sydney’s current wave of gang violence, which has seen teenagers routinely caught up in “kill crews” for a few thousand dollars, centres on the Coconut Cartel.
Like KVT, they are made up largely of Pasifika men who have been both perpetrators and targets of attacks from the Alameddines and other organised crime groups.
But they are not alone, the data shows.
Lesser-known gangland groups, including the Badger OCN and Final Crime Family, allegedly ordered their own shootings within Vietnamese and other communities.
The alleged abduction and murder of Bankstown mother Thi Kim Tran in April last year was allegedly ordered by the Badger OCN after Tran’s meth-cook husband stole from his boss, police suspect.
Meanwhile, the alleged kidnapping and murder of Ryde grandfather Chris Baghsarian in February was allegedly carried out by a small cell trying to extort another lesser-known criminal family.
That was a case of mistaken identity.
Outside the Fairfield school, the day after the failed shooting, parents wondered why ordinary families were forced to reckon with the gang violence.
“Usually everything is OK here … School is usually a safe place, something we should be not worried about,” one said.
“Whoever’s in organised crime – they’ve got no life,” another said.
With Jessica McSweeney, Amber Schultz and Jack Gramenz
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