The billion-dollar move crime boss made for Australia’s top illicit cigarette brand

Kazem Hamad’s crime empire has taken a major stake in the Manchester tobacco company in Dubai, cementing his grip on the illicit cigarette market from production to sale in hundreds of suburban shops across Australia.

Manchester United Kingdom, despite being illegal to import or sell in Australia, has become the most popular tobacco brand in the country as organised crime syndicates flood the market with cut-price, untaxed cigarettes, fuelling Melbourne’s so-called ‘tobacco war’.

Hamad, who was deported to Iraq in mid-2023, has emerged as the most powerful gangland boss in Melbourne’s underworld after creating a ‘cartel’ that controls the illicit tobacco market after a two-year campaign of firebombings and shootings.

The Australian Federal Police believes Hamad’s reach extends well beyond Victoria, with the cartel operating across five states and one territory in Australia.

The 41-year-old was arrested by Iraqi authorities in mid-January following intelligence provided by the Australian government. His current status in Iraq is unknown beyond a mugshot provided to Australian authorities by their counterparts overseas.

Four sources in law enforcement, intelligence and the tobacco industry, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose confidential information, say Hamad has taken a significant financial stake in the foreign tobacco company, which is headquartered in London but operates out of a free port zone in the United Arab Emirates.

Hamad’s involvement in Manchester has allowed his transnational criminal syndicate to reap massive profits by exerting control over every part of the illicit market, from production to import smuggling to wholesale distribution to street-level retail.

Hamad’s dominance over the market in Australia is rigidly enforced through violence, including running an extortion racket over hundreds, if not thousands, of shops around the country that are forced to sell the Manchester brand.

The profits are estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

Hamad’s involvement in Manchester came after he forced the surrender of major rivals, the Haddara crime family, in early 2024, taking control of their distribution networks, retail shops and profit share in the brand.

Manchester’s business model sees the company produce billions of cigarettes in the emirate of Dubai, which are legally sold to exporters who ship them around the world. That is despite the brand failing to meet most countries’ packaging standards and its widespread use to evade tax.

The cigarettes are smuggled into Australia by criminal syndicates and then distributed to wholesalers and retail shops.

Commonly in drug trafficking networks — such as those handling cocaine — each link in the chain is controlled by a different criminal gang, often in different countries. This is because no single syndicate is strong enough to control the entire network.

Dr John Coyne, head of strategic policing and law enforcement at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, described Hamad’s arrangement as a “fully vertically integrated criminal enterprise”.

“Organised crime groups are looking for vertical integration because it gives you a surety of supply. It allows you to make maximum profits,” he said.

“It means being able to control parts of the supply chain that aren’t illegal. It’s illegal to bring the tobacco into Australia, but they can maximise their profits and coordination by taking control of the part of the supply chain where it’s legal to manufacture and export it.”

Federal and state law enforcement authorities have declined to comment on the record about Hamad’s involvement in the Manchester brand.

But sources say the connection between Manchester and organised crime syndicates in Australia is long-standing and has fuelled the explosion in the illicit tobacco market, years before Hamad seized control of the black market from the Middle East.

Quintessentially British?

Manchester United Kingdom is a British tobacco brand – on paper at least.

Its logo is a heraldic shield standing between two unicorns, the national animal of Scotland also featured in the UK’s royal coat of arms.

“Inspired by Manchester city, Britain’s metropolis and the ever-beating urban spot in London, Manchester cigarette brand took on, since its naissance, the city’s vibe, glam and charm,” the company’s promotional materials say.

The headquarters of “Manchester United Kingdom” is in the very heart of London’s West End, occupying a prime spot on historic Regent Street.

Manchester regularly shows up at tobacco trade fairs in the Middle East and the US, where its marquees look more like display cases for high-end jewellery than cigarettes.

But there are easily identifiable cracks in its cultivated image.

The flash address near The Langham hotel and high-end clothing shops are all for show.

Manchester United Kingdom, owned by J.S.S. Tobacco Ltd, is just one of hundreds of companies that “occupy” a suite in the building, a virtual office that has been described as a “scammers’ paradise” by the British media.

The suite has appeared as a registered “place of business” in multiple legal proceedings and document leaks related to tax-avoidance schemes.

Incorporation records show J.S.S. Tobacco Ltd has just one employee in Britain and its operation is so small it is not required to file financial paperwork, except a declaration that “the company confirms that its intended future activities are lawful”.

Manchester’s real home is the Jebel Ali Free Zone, on the outskirts of the city of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

Jebel Ali is one of the busiest shipping ports in the world, serviced by a vast plain of factories and warehouses that enjoy special tax advantages, employment conditions and secrecy provisions governing their operations.

The UAE exports upwards of 100 billion cigarettes a year, making tobacco one of the country’s biggest non-oil exports.

The Jebel Ali Free Zone alone is home to more than 20 tobacco factories and has become a major transit point for illicit cigarettes smuggled into Australia, Europe and beyond, according to intelligence assessments and court records. The area accounts for 36 per cent of Dubai’s GDP.

The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Centre at George Mason University in the US estimates the UAE is responsible for a quarter of the illicit cigarettes sold globally, making the country one of the biggest contributors to the black market.

This masthead does not suggest the Manchester brand or its agents are committing any crime. The cigarettes are manufactured legally and are a legal product when they are exported from Dubai.

Manchester brand cigarettes are made by at least three factories in Jebel Ali under licence from the ultimate corporate owner, Adam International FZCO.

Almost nothing is known about the operation of the company or its value, as the UAE does not mandate disclosure of anything but basic information about the more than 11,000 businesses operating inside the Jebel Ali Free Zone.

A corporate investigation report commissioned by this masthead only stated its primary business is the “trade of tobacco” and “financial information was not available”.

“The shareholder structure of Jebel Ali free zone companies in the United Arab Emirates is generally not recorded at the commercial register and is not publicly available,” the report said.

“The subject’s financial statements were not available in the course of our investigation and respondents contacted at the company were not prepared to release such documents.”

Behind this cloak of institutional secrecy, Manchester became a dominant brand in the illicit tobacco trade and forged deep connections to Australian organised crime.

Representatives for Manchester’s parent company in Dubai, Adam International FZCO, did not respond to requests for comment.

Long-time player

There have long been suspicions in law enforcement that Manchester had links to organised crime, going back almost to the brand’s founding.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime researcher Ted Leggett said that for a long time, the position of tobacco companies had been to export their product to wholesalers and wash their hands of whatever happened next.

“If the wholesaler diverts that traffic into illicit channels, that’s not their problem,” he said.

But in Manchester’s case, there is little recourse for the brand to separate itself from the illegal markets their products get funnelled into.

Despite being manufactured legally in Dubai, Manchester cigarettes without health warnings can’t be legally sold in any major market in the world because they do not comply with packaging and graphic warning requirements in almost every jurisdiction.

That includes the countries with transit ports for shipments bound for Australia, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand, which debunks any possible claim that the cigarettes are being manufactured to be sold in those areas.

“When a producer produces cigarettes, the packaging that they’re in is unique to the country of destination,” Leggett said.

“Those packages without health warnings can’t be sold in any country which covers, I think I calculated, 97 per cent of the adult population of the world.”

But there has also been more direct intelligence.

As part of a sting operation in 2018, a well-known smuggler was caught boasting to undercover police operatives that he personally knew the owner of Manchester because he was the first person to ever import the brand illegally into Australia in 2009.

The smuggler, Ahmed Masri, and a covert police officer travelled to Jebel Ali to arrange for a container to be packed with 9.5 million Manchester cigarettes.

“[Masri] told [the officer] that his tobacco supplier in Dubai was ready and waiting for his order and could be trusted and relied upon 100 per cent,” according to court records.

This is just one of hundreds of containers packed with Manchester cigarettes that have flooded the Australian market over the past 15 years.

It is not known what market share Manchester now commands because Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence community was caught unprepared by the explosion in the market.

A freedom of information request has revealed the Australian Border Force has been unable to track the rise of Manchester.

“[ABF operations] have advised that brand names of illicit tobacco seizures are not recorded. Therefore, the department is unable to provide data on brand names of illicit tobacco seizures,” the agency reported.

What the Department of Home Affairs does track is the total number of cigarettes it has seized across all brands, including Manchester, Double Happiness, Mac, Esse and others.

In 2025, more than 2.5 billion cigarettes were intercepted at the border, up almost 500 per cent from 423 million ‘sticks’ five years ago.

Industry market intelligence says Manchester is now the top-selling cigarette – legal or illegal – in Australia.

Tobacco is now also the second most valuable illegal commodity after drugs, according to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

“The billions of dollars of profit available continues to drive serious and organised crime involvement in illicit tobacco – now estimated to represent the majority share of Australia’s tobacco market,” a commission spokesperson said.

Before the rise of Hamad in mid-2023, the illicit market had been dominated in Victoria by the Haddara crime family, which built an empire of legitimate businesses in the hospitality, auto repair and entertainment industries off the back of illicit tobacco imports.

They also have extensive land and business holdings in Lebanon, sources say.

The Haddaras held a tight grip over the trade for more than a decade, arranging some of the largest importations of illegal cigarettes in Victoria at the time. For law enforcement trying to crack down on the market, the syndicate was the number one player.

Manchester shipping records, obtained by this masthead, show an influential member of the Haddara crime family organising shipments of nearly a quarter of a billion Manchester cigarettes from suppliers in the UAE in the first half of 2023.

In the hands of illicit retailers on the streets of Australia, that six-month supply alone would be worth more than $100 million.

Law enforcement sources say the Haddaras, who also have deep connections to organised crime in Lebanon and Dubai, parlayed this influence into a stake in the Manchester brand itself.

The Haddaras’ ability to influence the supply chain made it a major power in the attempted formation of an organised crime “commission” in early 2023 that would attempt to regulate control of the illicit market among a number of organised crime gangs and outlaw bikie clubs.

That ended in February 2024, following a relentless firebombing and shooting campaign allegedly waged by Hamad from his base in Iraq, where he ordered dozens of targeted attacks on Haddara-owned or linked tobacco shops and family businesses.

The speed of Hamad’s rise caught the Haddaras off guard. The crime family was soon backed into a corner and their network of close allies began to splinter.

The turning point was when patriarch Fadi Haddara, the subject of a $1 million murder contract, found GPS trackers attached to the undercarriage of his car.

Underworld sources at the time said the Haddaras paid $1 million to Hamad to be left in peace, and handed control of a vast network of business interests to their rivals.

That marked an end to the dominance of the Haddaras. However, some segments of the syndicates were co-opted into the new cartel created by Hamad, who continues to use their deep connections in international smuggling networks.

In July 2025, the member of the Haddara family who was orchestrating those mass exports in 2023 came together with members of the Hamad cartel in “meetings” in Lebanon that were also attended by the operator of a major Dubai-based cargo clearing company.

Images of the encounter show members of the Haddara family posing with Hamad’s associates outside a hillside property overlooking a valley. In other photographs, the group can then be seen sitting on a large wrap-around couch inside a room decorated with golden jugs and cups and old rifles, sharing plates of fruit and a hookah.

The same member of the Haddara clan had four months earlier met with the cargo clearing company operator in Dubai for dinner at a fancy restaurant overlooking the city’s skyline.

The blow to the original Melbourne-based Haddara syndicate is perhaps best encapsulated in a social media post by Fadi Haddara the month after the Dubai meeting, showing an image of actor Leonardo DiCaprio along with a quote.

“A year ago I would have died for certain people. A year later half of them are dead to me.”

Fadi Haddara did not respond to requests for comment when approached via his lawyer.

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