It was the early hours of November 10, 1997, in a dingy cellar below the Blackmarket Cafe nightclub – also known as Hellfire – that five men faced each other in a tense stand-off.
Upstairs the club was rocking with hard core partygoers, some fuelled by the freely available drugs in the venue controlled by the Rebels bikie gang.
The Hellfire club – named for the kink and bondage nights held there with whips, hot wax and fetish devices – had given the place its reputation.
Located in Sydney’s grimy inner city Chippendale, the distinctive 19th century building at 111 Regent Street, the club was about to get even more notorious.
What actually happened before all hell broke loose has never been told before due to the code of silence even among enemy clubs.
But now Rebel bikie Kon Georgiou, is telling the story from a cell in Australia’s toughest jail, Supermax, where he secretly wrote a book despite the prison governor forbidding him to do so.
On the evening in question, Georgiou recounts, 14 members of the Bandidos club had breached rival territory and entered the Rebel club, their arrival alone a provocative act.
The Bandidos were notorious for violence since their fiery clash with the Comanchero bikie gang in western Sydney in the infamous 1984 Milperra Bikie Massacre.
At the Blackmarket club, these weren’t just any Bandidos. Among them were the national president Michael “Kaos” Kulakowski and sergeant-at-arms, Sasha Milenkovic.
Kaos had brought a girlfriend who was a former flame of the club’s Rebel manager and thus barred from entering.
Called back to the cafe by the troubled manager, Kon had picked up two 9mm pistols, a Beretta and a Smith & Wesson, and another Rebel, Bruce “Harry” Harrison.
Although red flags kept rising in his mind about the coming meeting with the Bandidos, he did not expect to use the weapons.
But, he writes: “This was not a normal situation.
“I did not want to go into the Blackmarket, let alone down the stairs to the cellar
“But we were there now and we just had to go with it. I had to convince myself this was just a misunderstanding.”
And so around 1am on this fateful Sunday morning, Kon Georgiou and Harry squeezed into the cellar with Kaos, Sasha, and fellow Bandidos Rick de Stoop and, hidden behind a stair, Robin David.
Handshakes were exchanged, but not with De Stoop, a 120kg bodybuilder who Georgiou says had briefly joined the Rebels, left owing money, and defected to the Bandidos.
De Stoop refused to remove his hand from his bumbag to clasp Kon’s already outstretched mitt.
What happened next Kon reveals in his new book, Memoirs of a Rebel: Black Market Shooting; he refused to disclose these details during the three murder trials which ensued.
It is common knowledge that the sound of gunfire that morning was not heard in the thunderous rock music overhead.
But when the police eventually arrived they found the dead bodies of Kulakowski, 41, Milenkovic, 33, and De Stoop, 24; Robin David survived with minor wounds.
Harrison was apprehended in a nearby street and Kon Georgiou went on the run for 11 weeks.
In the days after the shootings, the dead Bandidos were farewelled in funeral processions with a massive turnout of bikies.
Kon was rumbled in February 1998 carrying a demonstrably false passport and $11,000 cash aboard a cargo ship due to set sail for Japan from Botany Bay.
Awaiting trial in custody, Georgiou spent years being moved from jail to jail as he locked horns with prison officers.
He doesn’t elaborate in his first book, but a prison record seen by news.com.au says he was known for getting mobile phones into maximum security and “involved in lighting cell fires”.
Georgiou and his co-offender Harrison were found guilty of triple murder at their first trial, but successfully appealed the conviction.
A second trial was aborted and they were found guilty again at the third trial in 2003.
At trial, Kon says“we didn’t really explain what happened. We told the court everything but the truth (because) you never let the law know what goes on between two bikie clubs.”
Both Harrison and Georgiou received a maximum 33 year sentence, with Kon’s behaviour behind bars ensuring he was classified up to an extreme high-risk inmate.
He was sent to Supermax, the new High Risk Management unit at Goulburn maximum security correctional centre which opened in 2001.
He would be confined in a 4.25m by 2.5m “concrete coffin … a hollow cube barely spacious enough to accommodate a heavily pregnant woman”.
Behind a reinforced steel door he could hear the sound of other high risk inmates “screaming, laughing, throwing expletives, preaching, doors being kicked, people making animal noises”.
But despite the restrictions and the governor expressly denying him permission to write a book, the now 56-year-old decided to do just that.
“My name is Konstantinos Georgiou and I am a born rebel. My last 15 years have been at Supermax in solitary confinement.
“I don’t want anyone’s sympathy.”
Now two decades into his maximum 33 year sentence for three murders and one attempted murder, Georgiou had been largely forgotten despite the high profile Blackmarket cafe killings.
In 2016, he made headlines when prison authorities using an X-ray machine detected a contraband mobile phone hidden up his backside during a body scan in Supermax.
Georgiou immediately went on a two-week hunger strike, but the phone was eventually passed, and that story and tales from Supermax and other jails will be the subject of his next book.
For this book, which culminates in the Blackmarket shootings, Georgiou charts his life before incarceration, starting work as a manager of strippers in Sydney’s Kings Cross.
“The moral of my fable is that I am a rebel. It’s in my nature,” he writes.
“This is the book they tried to stop from being written. But … no-one tells KG you can’t do that”
Kings Cross
In the mid-1990s, Georgiou earned up to $1800 a week managing strippers, and then up to $10,000 more managing cocaine runners for the notorious Danny Karam.
Kon was working for one of the country’s most ruthless gangsters, with a reputation for violence and a hot temper, who had taken over the Cross’s drug trade.
These are the years recounted in Underbelly: The Golden Mile and Karam would nevertheless himself be shot 16 times by three of his own “DK’s boys” gang members in 1998.
Georgiou recounts his time in the Cross and how, despite himself, he was lured into the Rebels Outlaw Motorcycle gang through a friendship with a member.
“I didn’t care about the motorcycle club, I had never really fancied bikies,” he writes.
“To me they were nothing but a bunch of huge thugs with tattoos, rings and bandannas.”
As he graduated to full membership of the Rebels, Georgiou’s life of drink, drugs and girls expanded, and he became known to the police.
“I was snorting plenty of coke, driving around in flashy cars and partying hard nearly every night,” he writes.
“I was doing everything to excess.”
Cocaine arrest
Everything came to a screaming halt when a large team of police officers “with sledgehammers and guns” turned up at his apartment.
To show the extent of the high life he had been living, the NSW Crime Commission seized
his 930 Turbo Porsche, his “fat boy” motorbike, a new Honda, $30,000 in cash, $30,000 in gold and his boat.
Georgiou tells an amusing tale of what he found when he returned to his flat, something the police had miraculously missed, and provides a recipe for making pure cocaine.
Georgiou was facing a trial on drug charges and probable prison time when he was called back to the Blackmarket cafe on the night the Bandidos arrived.
He has a theory of what the Bandidos were up to that night, which he expounds in the book.
Georgiou has written many tales about different characters, beautiful women, making piles of money and skirmishes between bikie gangs.
He is a natural storyteller, articulate and has a modesty and respect for (some) others which comes out in this fascinating book, which can be ordered online or as a hard copy.
For the benefit of the Crime Commission, any money earned from the book sales go not to Kon but to refund the costs incurred by his sister.
She is responsible for typing her brother’s manuscript and getting the book edited and published.
“I bought the books and am selling them to pay (for) the costs associated,” she told news.com.au. “It has nothing to do with Kon.
“He comes from a very loving middle class family (who have taken) it very hard.
“We didn’t know that part of his life. He knows what he did and is paying the price for it.”
However, the family believes Kon’s treatment in Supermax was unjust, and unfairly harsh at the hands of one particular prison officer.
Georgiou was moved from Supermax after the phone incident, which will be detailed in the next book his sister is writing with him, Memoirs of a Rebel.
He has since moved to Bathurst prison where, his sister says, “he highly respects the governor”.
Not due for parole for another dozen years, Georgiou will immediately be deported back to Greece, having emigrated here aged four with his family, but never naturalised.
In prison, and in lockdown in Bathurst after a virus outbreak, he is familiarising himself with Greek culture and trying to learn a little of the language.
He is also tattooing barbed wire, starting from his hand, and telling his story for every year he’s spent in prison.
Memoirs of a Rebel: Black Market Shootingis available for $A25 in hard copy and $A6.75 as an online copy from akgcrimwear.com.au.
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