Every Bike Shop Owner’s Worst Nightmare Happens in Melbourne

Melbourne, Vic

Gary Cookson, founding owner of Melbourne-based store Cargocycles has been doing it tough since he received a call in the middle of the night from his security contractor and then arrived to see his premises and stock destroyed. Subject to the outcome of police investigations yet to be finalised, it appears he was caught in the crossfire of a Melbourne gang war over illegal tobacco distribution.

Most of the article below was first published by Ian Treloar of The Escape Collective, but the images were supplied directly from Gary after I spoke with him about the incident and how he’s going now. Gary stressed, “I don’t want anyone to think we are giving up. The wholesale side of the business is up and running already. So just a need for a new retail space and dealing with the trauma is a challenge.”

Fortunately Gary’s wholesale warehouse is in a completely separate location, so was unaffected by the incident that happened to his retail store on Lygon St in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne.

Clearly the owner of the premises from which Cargocycles had leased the downstairs for years should have heeded Gary’s advice when the already notorious gym applied to lease the space upstairs and not have allowed them to move in.

If anyone in the industry knows about a suitable bicycle store retail space of at least 250 square metres Gary would be interested in hearing from you. He’s not worried about being close to his previous location, saying anywhere up to 10 kilometres away on the northern side of Melbourne would potentially be suitable.

You can either contact Cargocycles directly or via The Latz Report and we’ll forward your information.

Here are excerpts from The Escape Collective Article:

Firebombed

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.

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.

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.