“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
― Louis D. Brandeis“Did you fix the testicle?” was the blackmailers’ code for the 2004 coup against the Strathfield mayor, Alfred Tsang.
In the modern version, which has been unspooling in all its tawdry detail before the current corruption inquiry, the alleged blackmailers were buoyed by the emergence of a “King of Swords reversed”, courtesy of a tarot card reader who’d been consulted to determine the timing of the mayoral coup against Matthew Blackmore.
Although the plots were separated by almost two decades, they both allegedly involved blackmail, dirty deals, double-crosses and a secret tape recording thrown in for good measure.
And, in both cases, the mayors alleging blackmail went straight to the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
At the heart of the first plot was a perennial ICAC favourite: Eddie Obeid. To advance their developments, the crooked Labor MP and a group of developer mates needed to install someone they could control as mayor of Strathfield.
They settled upon Obeid’s one-time business partner John Abi-Saab, who became the Labor mayor in September 2003.
The 68-year-old’s appointment to an inner-west Sydney council came as a bit of a shock to the good folk around Port Macquarie. Abi-Saab was known as “Mr Wauchope”, having spent most of his life in the small town nearby. He was also a lifelong Liberal.
A crisis unfolded when, after only a year, Abi-Saab lost the mayoralty to Tsang, from the Unity Party.
A corruption inquiry was later to hear that a string of local Lebanese property developers, who were friends and associates of Obeid’s and Abi-Saab’s, stood to lose millions of dollars if the new mayor altered planning proposals.
Enter Melhem (Michael) Saklaoui, a thickset, aggressive petrol station owner and developer, whom a Federal Court had heard had wielded a pistol at a supplier.
In July 2004, Saklaoui organised to have lunch with the new mayor at a quiet local restaurant, Angelo’s on the Bay, in Cabarita.
At nearby tables he had installed his cronies – two off-duty police officers and their wives.
The policemen were armed – not with firearms but state-of-the-art recording devices which Saklaoui had bought from the OzSpy store. One of the wives had a camcorder hidden in her handbag.
Saklaoui had also arrived at the lunch with $2500 and a fake mobile phone with a pinprick camera he’d bought from the spywear shop. The surveillance devices worked a treat. There on film was Mayor Tsang looking nervously around the restaurant as he crammed the money into his suit pocket.
Saklaoui rushed outside to phone Abi-Saab with the good news. During the call he also demanded that Abi-Saab reimburse him for the spywear he’d purchased. However, Saklaoui had forgotten to turn off his own recording device and their machinations were recorded.
By the very next day Tsang, struck by his conscience, returned all the money.
This plot twist was not part of the plan. But Saklaoui and Abi-Saab decided to push ahead with the blackmail as they still had the film of the mayor pocketing the money. They threatened to go to the ICAC.
Tsang was beside himself. His only hope was to get to the ICAC first. Investigators were goggle-eyed as Tsang outlined the whole bizarre episode. On August 3, 2004, 11 days after the bribery lunch, ICAC commenced an even more elaborate sting. They bugged Abi-Saab’s house and tapped his phone. And this time around, it was Tsang who was wearing a wire.
The ICAC investigators listened as Abi-Saab tried to pressure Tsang into relinquishing the mayoralty. Crucially, Abi-Saab didn’t want Tsang to resign from council. As part of the ongoing blackmail, Tsang would be offered the deputy mayor’s position and he would have to vote the way Abi-Saab told him.
“I know it is not easy but you have to sacrifice something to survive,” Abi-Saab says on one of the tapes. “Alfred, I’m telling you for your sake ... they could go to the press, to the ICAC, to the police.”
Investigators from the ICAC were listening as Abi-Saab later called Bechara Khouri, a well-known Mr Fix-It for the Labor Party.
The Khouri family were ICAC royalty, with Bechara featuring in three corruption inquiries while his brother Ellias was jailed for lying to the ICAC. Bechara’s former business partner, Eddie Obeid, would be jailed twice after ICAC inquiries.
But back to 2004, when ICAC was eavesdropping on Abi-Saab’s call to Khouri.
“Did you fix the testicle?” they heard Khouri ask. Abi-Saab replied: “Yeah, yeah.”
“So did they pull out the varicose vein or not yet?” Khouri asked.
“Not yet,” Abi-Saab said.
“So the doctor told you, you have to wait a little,” Khouri said, before adding, “Yeah, that’s good. So long as it doesn’t affect the penis.”
When ICAC raided Abi-Saab’s house, he tried to hide the Tsang blackmail video under his kitchen tablecloth. He then lied, saying an anonymous person had dropped it at his house.
Despite all this, the plotters had one last go at removing Tsang. The videotape was leaked to The Australian.
Friday, January 13, 2023, was an unlucky day for the independent mayor of Strathfield, Matthew Blackmore. He had agreed to meet two Labor councillors, Karen Pensabene and lawyer Sharangan Maheswaran, at the Artisaint cafe in Burwood.
Despite being the right-hand man of controversial developer Jean Nassif, when he nominated for council in 2021, Maheswaran had failed to tick the box recording that he was a close associate of a property developer.
Ominously, Maheswaran arrived at the cafe with a thick file.
The pair were trying to get Blackmore to honour an earlier agreement that he would hand over the mayoralty to Pensabene back in September 2022. The inquiry has heard that Maheswaran was planning to succeed Pensabene the following year.
Blackmore refused. Within days, Maheswaran stepped up the pressure, revealing that former police officers had had the mayor under surveillance for the previous five months. He showed Blackmore photos and even read out transcripts of conversations the mayor had had in coffee shops with previous mayor Antoine Doueihi, who’d resigned under a cloud, and controversial developer Charlie Demian, who’d featured in a previous corruption inquiry into Canterbury council. Evidence was given during that inquiry that Bechara Khouri, of the “did you fix the testicle” fame, had been lobbying Canterbury council on Demian’s behalf.
In 2025, Demian was acquitted of lying to the corruption watchdog.
Maheswaran warned Blackmore that he had enough to bring him down. As an added threat, three journalists, who’d been briefed by Maheswaran, sent questions to the mayor.
Blackmore, like Tsang before him, went straight to the ICAC. In his statement, Blackmore recalled Maheswaran saying to him, “What you’ve got to understand, Matthew, anyone that crosses me, I’ve got a reputation in the party that if I don’t like someone, they don’t get away with crossing me. It would take me about six weeks to take you down.”
Six weeks later, Pensabene replaced Blackmore as mayor. It was March 2, 2023, but Maheswaran was not at council to celebrate his spoils of victory. His boss Nassif had fled the country in December 2022, on the eve of a parliamentary inquiry into his dodgy dealings with Liberal Party operatives.
In late February, Maheswaran had made an emergency dash to Singapore to talk in person to Nassif, who flew in from Lebanon. Only days earlier, Nassif’s home and office had been raided by NSW police and his daughter Ashlyn was arrested over a fraud to secure a $150 million loan for her father’s business. She later entered a guilty plea.
As he flew back into Sydney on March 2, law enforcement authorities seized Maheswaran’s phone and laptop. This marked the beginning of Maheswaran’s problems which will see him return to the ICAC hot seat on Tuesday to face further grilling on his ousting of Blackmore.
He might be interested to learn what happened to the previous coup leaders.
The late Abi-Saab was fined $4000 for leaking details of the ICAC investigation. He also received a suspended jail term after pleading guilty to conspiring to give false evidence. But, in 2009, Abi-Saab was acquitted of blackmail. Indeed, the only person to serve any time in jail was the whistleblower, Alfred Tsang, who served four months’ weekend detention for accepting the $2500 bribe, which he returned the next day.
Who knows what the cards hold for Maheswaran, 36, but perhaps he should have looked closer to home when he offered his colleague Pensabene his interpretation of the tarot card “King of Swords reversed”.
“This card reversed can represent someone who’s intelligent and talkative but uses these qualities for negative means, such as to manipulate or hurt others,” he texted.
“And you’re suggesting to her that’s Matthew Blackmore?” queried counsel assisting the ICAC, Dr Peggy Dwyer, SC.
