Guns on the run

Alen Moradian died alone and fast in a black Audi when the gunmen waiting in the garage of his Bondi Junction hideout fired

- BERNARD LAGAN

His killers didn't wait for the 48-year-old crime lord, known as Sydney's Tony Soprano, to arrive at his gym on the Tuesday morning last month they put seven bullets into him. Of the 20 gunned down in Sydney's bloody crime gang wars within the past two years, plenty have met their end in a shabby suburban gym car park - the assassins' killing ground.

Moradian, who had been hiding out in the rented apartment for eight months after police warned him that criminal rivals wanted him dead, was a big wheel in Australia's cocaine pipeline. In 2011, after Moradian admitted his Golden Gun drug syndicate was behind the importation of 300kg of cocaine into Sydney, a judge gave him 16 years. He was released in December 2017 and back with his wife in their northwestern Sydney mansion where, police claimed in court, they dined off golden Versace cutlery, beneath a painted ceiling inspired by Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel.