The drug dealers, their mother and the Sydney drive-by shootings

Raptor Squad officers have charged a man with conspiracy to murder after a Concord home belonging to the mother of convicted cocaine dealers was shot up this year.

In the early hours of July 3, a two-storey home in Davidson Avenue, Concord, was peppered with bullets. No one was at home at the time.

The house is owned by Hasna Frangieh, 77, the mother of convicted drug dealers Ray and Joe Frangieh. According to corporate records, her property-developing son Joe, 48, and his wife, Sharon, list the Davidson Avenue home as their residential address.

Roni Korovou-Tokaduadua was arrested in Mascot on Wednesday morning. Police later raided premises in Granville where they seized five electronic devices, a Taser and balaclavas. The 27-year-old was subsequently charged with conspire and agree to murder any person, participate in a criminal group, and two counts of possess prohibited drug.

This was Hasna Frangieh’s third drive-by shooting. In September 2003, the Frangieh family’s home in Bristol Street, Merrylands, was the target of up to a dozen shots. No one was injured.

A second targeted shooting of the Frangieh home in December that year proved fatal.

On the evening of December 7, 2003, Hasna’s daughter, Elizabeth, and other members of the family had just arrived home when a man wearing a stocking over his face jumped out of a car and pulled out a gun. Elizabeth fled but her father, Sayed, 59, who had come out onto the porch, was killed by a single shot to the chest.

It emerged the intended target was Ray Frangieh. Ray and his brother, Joe, had been released from prison in February that year, having been jailed for cocaine supply.

Ordered to pay restitution to the NSW Crime Commission, Ray Frangieh had sold his yellow BMW to another crime figure, Ken Tan. When Tan failed to pay the $50,000 for the car, Ray reported the matter to the police. According to court records, the first drive-by shooting occurred on the same day the police confiscated the BMW.

Earlier on the day of the second shooting, Ray had run Tan off the road in a road-rage incident, which prompted Tan to retaliate by sending associates to shoot up the Frangieh house. Tan was later jailed for manslaughter.

In Brisbane’s Supreme Court in 2021, Ray Frangieh, a former Gold Coast nightclub promoter, pleaded guilty to trafficking in dangerous drugs including cocaine. His ex-wife, Melissa, narrowly avoided jail for money-laundering almost $200,000, which the court heard was the criminal proceeds from her husband’s drug supply empire.

Ray Frangieh, 45, also has a conviction for assault, and in 2022 he pleaded guilty to dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage by deception when he falsely nominated the previous owner of his car as the driver when he was caught doing 83km/h over the speed limit in Lane Cove Road at North Ryde.

Ray and his brother, Joe, had been jailed in NSW in 2002 over cocaine supply.

For more than a decade, Joe Frangieh was embroiled in a long-running dispute with the Australian Tax Office over an audit of his tax affairs dating to 2007. According to court documents, there was $3,234,064 in unexplained deposits made into Frangieh’s account that year.

Frangieh subsequently provided a number of statutory declarations from family and friends claiming that “certain deposits” made to his account were repayments of loans or payments for motor vehicles.

He claimed some of the deposits were loan repayments from Ray, whom he’d lent $200,000 to buy a car.

Joe Frangieh also claimed his sister, Elizabeth, and mother, Hasna, had deposited money with him to make property investments.

Although Frangieh’s dispute with the ATO was settled, he sued the ATO for $8.75 million in 2017, claiming its pursuit of him had caused “humiliation, embarrassment, stress, anxiety, emotional hurt and inconvenience”. He lost and was ordered to pay costs.

His appeal was also unsuccessful. “Mr Frangieh submitted that malice, bad faith and conscious maladministration” had been demonstrated by an ATO official. “None of these grounds is made good,” the NSW Court of Appeal held.

Korovou-Tokaduadua was refused bail on Thursday morning. He will next appear in court at the Downing Centre on December 4, and made no application for bail.

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