Standover man Roger Hanna linked to failed Surfers Paradise nightclub
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From: The Courier-Mail
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December 15, 2011
A STANDOVER merchant leading a double life as a Bond University student and Hells Angels prospect was the middleman in a multimillion-dollar Surfers Paradise nightclub venture killed off by police intervention.
Roger Hanna, 32, who was jailed over the 2005 kidnapping of a Sydney toddler, has emerged as the criminal link in the ill-fated Orchid Avenue venture.
The Courier-Mail revealed in October that a deal to lease the $320,000-a-year venue collapsed after police warned the landlord it was a front for bikies.
It is understood it was Hanna who threatened a journalist then researching the story.
A man who identified himself as "Roger" in an October 1 phone call said he would "smash your face in" if a story were published.
"I know where you are, I know where you go," he said.
Inquiries by police, who traced the call to a woman in NSW, led to Hanna, a Bankstown Grammar School dropout who sports a Jesus tattoo on his left forearm and is known by at least eight aliases.
Hanna is well known to NSW police, who alleged he had a role in holding a Sydney drug dealer and his family captive for two days in 2005 following a dispute over drug money owed to the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle club.
His conviction for abducting the dealer's 15-month-old son was quashed on appeal, but a retrial saw him jailed for three years for assault in 2008.
The next year Hanna was sentenced to another three years' jail, suspended after 225 days, for the unlawful wounding of a Brisbane man linked to the "rebirthing" of stolen cars from NSW.
The nightclub's Sydney-based financier, who has links to a national franchise chain, said Hanna was "a business associate" of the club's aspiring owner, a Bond University graduate in his 20s.
"I've known Roger for 20 years ... I suppose it was him that recommended me to (the graduate) to open up a nightclub," he said.
He denied any knowledge of Hanna's criminal background or his role in the venture but warned: "Whatever you're doing, drop it because ... if he's really threatened you like that ... I never knew him to be like that but I would just drop it."
The aspiring club owner claimed he did not know Hanna but said the financier, who offered to arrange security for the club, had "a nephew who is a Bandido". He declined because "some sort of bikie in their security team ... is not what I would have wanted".
Police warned the landlord the venture had links to the Bandidos. But Gold Coast underworld sources said Hanna was a Hells Angels nominee who studied at Bond and had boasted of opening a nightclub at the site of the Drink.
Hanna is from a new breed of bikies on the Gold Coast with roots in western Sydney's Middle Eastern street gangs.
They have tested the outlaw world's traditions of loyalty by switching clubs en masse from the Nomads to the Bandidos and to the Hells Angels.
Hanna's cohort includes Peter Sidirourgos, whose Helensvale gym was showered with bullets last week.
The Courier-Mail sought to make contact with Hanna through the university but he did not return messages.
