How Lametta Fadlallah became Sydney’s well-known female gangster

“It used to be an unwritten law, especially in organised crime, that you don’t touch family, and you don’t touch women. I think that rule of engagement has been thrown out the window, it’s disregarded now. I think they just don’t care any more, they don’t discriminate if you’re male or female,” he said.

The shooting has police and observers puzzling over why Fadlallah warranted an organised hit and how deeply she was involved with the criminal underworld. Was her death simply the product of the company she kept? Or was she a player? Have the rules towards women changed or was she a woman who stepped outside the usual rules for women associated with organised crime?

Two of Sydney’s best known organised crime figures have been women – the infamous Tilly Devine, and her fierce competitor Kate Leigh.

The two women were not garden-variety criminals, but the city’s foremost crime figures during the 1920s and start of the 1930s, according to author Larry Writer who wrote about the duo in his book Razor, which formed the basis of Underbelly: Razor, a drama broadcast on Nine, the publisher of this newspaper.

“They were criminal masterminds,” he told The Sun-Herald.

“They had gangs that did their bidding. They were running the equivalent of million-dollar enterprises in brothels, sly grog [the unlicensed sale of alcohol] and various criminal enterprises.”

A number of murders were committed at the behest of the two women, Writer said.

The duo managed to make their way in the patriarchal world of 1920s Sydney underworld by being “more ruthless and smarter than the men”, Writer said.

“They were also very intimidating, they overcame obstacles through sheer willpower.”

In the intervening 100 years, no woman has been as prominent in the criminal life of the city as Devine or Leigh, but that doesn’t mean women have not played a significant role in organised crime.

Historically, organised crime has been “a very patriarchal thing” linked to traditional extended family values and structures, where a strong male figure looks after a larger group of families, former NSW detective and criminology associate professor Dr Michael Kennedy told The Sun-Herald.

Outsiders often incorrectly perceived the women in these groups as powerless or subservient, he said. But women involved in crime families or organisations could be “up to their necks” in the business and were even permitted to dabble in their own ventures as long as those didn’t become a liability to the larger enterprise.

These women tended to keep a lower profile and attract less police attention than their male counterparts, he said.

One senior officer said women associated with crime gangs were not naive: “They aren’t out there doing drive-bys, but they know what’s going on.

“It’s rare that they are the top of the tree, but they are certainly fair game if they are.”

At times, women have got their hands very dirty.

As a gangland war raged in the city’s south-west between the Bankstown and Blacktown chapters of the notorious Brothers 4 Life gang a decade ago, a Sydney paralegal with no criminal background began dating a high-profile gang member while he was imprisoned inside Goulburn’s high-security Supermax.

The woman, who cannot be identified except by the court-appointed pseudonym of Witness M, went on to become a highly ranked gang figure.

Aged 32, Witness M drove a getaway car from one gangland hit and one attempted murder in 2013. She later pleaded guilty to one count of being an accessory before the fact of murder and being an accessory before the fact to discharging a firearm with the intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

Earlier this month, gangland widow and organised crime figure in her own right Roberta Williams pleaded guilty to blackmailing and recklessly injuring a TV producer in Melbourne.

Women have also found themselves in the firing line before Fadlallah’s murder. As the Brothers 4 Life’s two chapters fought against one another, one woman, Lola Hamzy, was shot through the front door of her western Sydney home. The 2014 crime remains unsolved. The year prior, Maha Hamze, was shot at 21 times with eight bullets hitting her in the legs as a result of a dispute over money between her relative and another man.

Kennedy believes that Fadlallah had “become a liability for one or a number of reasons”. Since her death, the underworld has begun to speculate she was cooperating with law enforcement. “In this area, everyone’s always suspicious of everyone else. If people have been getting arrested around her, there’d be questions being asked”.