It was a normal Tuesday morning until it wasn’t. At 2.50am, the owner of Cargo Cycles in the inner Melbourne suburb of Brunswick East was woken by a phone call from the security company that provides alarms for his business. “All the alarms were going off, all the sensors were being activated, and I logged into the cameras – nothing was working,” Gary Cookson told Escape Collective.
With rising panic, he jumped in the car and drove down to the shop where he was confronted with the worst-case scenario: “at least five to seven fire engines blocking the streets in both directions, and the aftermath of a ram raid and firebombing.”
A stolen black BMW four-wheel-drive had been driven repeatedly into a roller door at the side of the business, and once it had broken through, a group of perpetrators had torched the shop. One of them was seen running from the scene with his arm on fire. In the aftermath, two dozen firefighters were trying to stop the blaze spreading to other properties as it tore through the inside of Melbourne’s best-known cargo bike shop.
You can probably imagine Cookson’s reaction in that moment: a mix of despair, anger, confusion, and sadness. Cargo Cycles has been in operation since 2011, and at this location since 2017, on the busy corner of Lygon Street and Glenlyon Road, setting hundreds of families and riders up with useful bikes to integrate into their daily lives. And after all that, a seemingly senseless attack on this nice business doing nice things for nice people. Why?
Over the coming hours a picture began to emerge. Police and arson chemists swung into action once the fire was extinguished, investigating the likely motive: a targeted attack on the gym upstairs from the bike shop, presumably in the hopes that the flames would spread upstairs and gut the entire building. “We’ve never had an unhappy customer in our store,” Cookson told me. “We’ve been trading a long time, and the gym upstairs moved in four months ago. The previous gym that they operated from was up the street, and also had a fire in mysterious circumstances.”
A police statement helped join some of the dots. The blaze is being investigated by Taskforce Lunar, which since late 2023 has been targeting organised crime syndicates active in Victoria’s illegal tobacco trade; the upstairs gym, Power Gymnasium, has been linked to underworld figure Sam ‘The Punisher’ Abdulrahim. Abdulrahim is a former member of the Mongols outlaw bikie gang, has survived multiple assassination attempts, and been targeted by at least five arson attacks; his boxing promotion business Power Promotions was formerly registered at the same address as the gym.
In this context, the attack on Cargo Cycles is less of an outlier – there have been more than 100 arson attacks linked to the tobacco trade in the last year, and as of October 8, Taskforce Lunar’s investigations have resulted in the arrests of 82 people – many of whom have been charged with serious offences such as extortion, arson, firearm offences, and aggravated burglary. According to a statement provided to Escape Collective by Victoria Police, the criminal syndicates “are comprised of personnel from Middle Eastern Organised Crime groups and Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, who are then engaging local networked youth, and youth gangs to carry out the offending.”
It’s big business, too: the syndicates are sophisticated enough that they’re not just importing off-the-books vapes and cigarettes, but even have tobacco farms in rural Australia, making it a literal and metaphorical cash crop for the unscrupulous. Just from the search warrants executed by Taskforce Lunar, a total value of over $37 million in cash, tobacco, and vapes has been seized, along with multiple weapons.
For those that are caught in the crossfire like Gary Cookson and his team, that’s cold comfort. He estimates that there’s been “about half a million dollars worth of stock loss”, along with upcoming costs of “another half a million to try and rebuild it.”
There are different ways to measure the impact of this event than the merely financial, however, and a series of events since the initial fire have made this awful event even worse. On the day afterwards, a pile of bikes – “vaporized aluminum frames – there’s just nothing left” – were piled up out the front of the shop, with cardboard boxes on top. “As the day warmed up, one of the batteries in the burnt out bikes started another fire, creating a lot of smoke,” Cookson says.
Further salt in the wound came that night, when thieves broke through the boarded-up outside of the shop and stole five bikes: one “lightly charred” e-mountain bike by the high-end Moustache brand, a further four Moustaches that were in storage in the warehouse behind the shop, and a number of workshop tools that had survived the initial fire relatively unscathed. “That’s the kind of low quality of people we’re talking about,” Cookson tells me, sounding pretty defeated.
“I’m lurching between wanting to give up and being determined not to … I don’t know. I don’t want the tobacco wars to be the end of my business,” Cookson says. “It’s a challenging time, and I’m taking it day by day.” Even so, he’s finding the positives: his eight staff have all been “amazing”, he says, swinging into action to try to keep things going, and there has been an outpouring of support from the local community. “Everyone’s offered so much help,” Cookson explains – a local developer has even offered space in a building as Cargo Cycles gets back on its feet. “We hope to be back in business as soon as we can … so there’s some positives at the end of this horrible situation.”
In the wake of what’s happened to the business, a revived Cargo Cycles store seems like a bigger thing than just one shop getting back on its feet: this business is an important resource for those that are exploring a greener, cleaner lifestyle for themselves and their families. The store and its extraordinarily helpful staff were vital in my family’s journey into the world of cargo bikes six years ago, patiently letting us take different styles of cargo bikes – Christiania and Babboe trikes, Yuba longtails – for rides outside the building that is now a charred shell. We ended up with a Triobike Boxter off the back of these test rides, and whenever people stop us and ask about where you can get one from – even though we got lucky finding a second-hand one in the end – I’ve told them to go to Cargo Cycles.
As any cargo bike owner will tell you, they’re an important vehicle in a way that not all bikes are: more like a member of the family, where foundational memories are formed for children and parents, while replacing a car and encouraging little adventures. Cargo bikes have a bigger purpose too: as the most humanising type of bike, bringing smiles and encouraging empathy for even the most anti-bike motorist.
That’s perhaps the saddest part of this attack: Cookson says that in addition to the new bikes ready for sale there were “about eight customer bikes that were in the shop. They were all destroyed, but we’ve told them we will work on getting them replacements. If you’ve seen any footage from the fire, there’s a specialist disability bike for a wheelchair-bound child that’s visible out there – that will take a little bit longer to get replaced, but we will replace everything that people have lost.” Luckily, Cookson says, the insurance company has been helpful so far.
After two fires and a theft, you’d hope that was all the misfortune that Cargo Cycles had to confront – but the illegal tobacco trade is a vengeful beast. On Sunday night, five days after the blaze that brought a family-owned cargo bike shop to its knees, arsonists returned, this time targeting the staircase up to the gym.
After the initial attack, which totally destroyed the retail space downstairs, there wasn’t much more harm that could be done that hadn’t already been done: “Hasn’t made our place any worse, really,” Cookson told me over email, before signing off with a hefty dose of gallows humour: “Fun times.” Until Cargo Cycles rises from the ashes, hopefully there’s no more of this type of fun lurking around the corner.
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