Antonio Bagnato, the Sydney kickboxer and the grave in Pattaya

The grave was two metres deep, in the bushes beside a road outside Pattaya, near a Chinese temple, and the Thai police found it because the car the killers had hired had a GPS tracker in it.

The man in it was Wayne Schneider. He was an Australian, and a senior member of the Hells Angels, and he had been living in the Thai resort city in a villa of his own. A group of men had taken him from his home late in 2015. When the police dug him up, he had a broken neck and injuries to his face that a court would later call consistent with a severe beating.

The man the Thai courts sentenced to death for it was a young kickboxer from Sydney. He had come to Thailand, by his own account, to further his fighting career. The police in Sydney had another explanation. Fifteen months earlier, a young father had been stabbed and shot in a shopping centre car park in the inner west, and the kickboxer had got on a plane two days later.

They were moving and heartfelt statements

Justice Richard Cavanagh, on the Dillon family, 2024

Antonio Bagnato came from Sydney and fought Muay Thai. In the Thai boxing world he went by Tony Bang. He belonged to a group of young men who called themselves the Saint Michael fight club.

It began, by the accounts given in our film, as something like a church boys' club. It had a Christian name and members who were mostly Catholics of Italian background, from the same few suburbs, with a shared love of Thai boxing. It had perhaps twenty or thirty members at its height. It also had rules, of the kind a motorcycle club would recognise. Members swore loyalty to each other. They were not supposed to fall out over money or women. Bagnato and his cousin, Diego Carbone, were two of its senior figures.

Bradley Dillon was not a fighter in that sense. He was twenty-five, and he owned a cafe in Balmain. His sister had lent $2,300 to a member of the Saint Michael club, and the money had not come back. Dillon set out to recover it.

On 11 August 2014 Dillon went to a meeting in the underground car park of Leichhardt Marketplace, a shopping centre in Sydney's inner west. The other side had used a burner phone to set it up. Three men were in the car park, Bagnato later admitted, and two of them were Bagnato and Carbone.

Dillon was stabbed four times in the back. Then, as he tried to run, he was shot three times. He was pronounced dead where he fell, among the parked cars.

Two days later Bagnato flew to Thailand.

He went to Pattaya, the beach city south of Bangkok that has long been a magnet for foreign criminals. He joined a gym, and he found friends from home already there. One of them was Wayne Schneider.

Schneider was a long way up the Hells Angels. In Australian reporting he was described as the club's national head. Thai and Australian authorities alleged that he was also a major drug trafficker. Bagnato had worked for him as a bodyguard, by the film's account, and the two men had business together.

What went wrong between them has never been laid out in a courtroom in full. The film's account, drawn from police and press reports, is that a drug deal failed with heavy losses, and Schneider was blamed. Late in 2015, five men abducted him from outside his home. He was taken to a rented property, beaten and left bound. By the time his captors came back to him, he was dead. His body was put into a hired car and driven out of the city to the roadside grave.

The GPS in that car took the police straight to it.

Bagnato did not wait. With his wife he crossed into Cambodia, helped by another Australian who drove the family to the border and was later given a suspended sentence for it. Bagnato was arrested in Cambodia and brought back.

On 7 February 2017, in the provincial court at Pattaya, Bagnato was found guilty of murder, deprivation of liberty and disposing of a body. The judge said DNA and blood evidence put him at the scene, and that the weapons had been prepared in advance. He was sentenced to death for the murder, with a year added for hiding the body.

He denied it all. He told the court he had spent the night Schneider died at dinner, and then with a woman. His family, watching from the public gallery, declined to speak to reporters.

An American, Tyler Gerard, aged twenty-two, was convicted of the lesser charge of deprivation of liberty and given three years, reduced to two for his help to the investigation.

Our film is clear on one thing, and so are we. There is no evidence or suggestion that the Hells Angels had any part in Wayne Schneider's murder. According to the film, the club's members came to Bagnato's court case in numbers, and extra guards were brought in.

For most men, a Thai death sentence is the end of the story. It was not for Bagnato.

He was later released on appeal. Thai police re-arrested him on firearm charges. The New South Wales police, who had wanted him for Bradley Dillon all along, made a second attempt to extradite him, and that, a Sydney judge later accepted, kept him in Thai prison for about thirteen months longer than he would otherwise have been there.

In his statement to the Sydney court, Bagnato described a cell he shared with about 150 other men, "squashed like sardines", with a squalid toilet, food crawling with maggots and flies, and frequent water shortages. He said he had been "tortured". He said the experience had left him with post-traumatic stress.

In 2022 he was finally extradited to Sydney. The same year his cousin, Diego Carbone, who had been twenty-three at the time of the killing, fought the charge through two trials and in 2022 was jailed for Dillon's murder with a minimum of eighteen years.

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In December 2024, aged thirty-five, Antonio Bagnato stood in the NSW Supreme Court for the murder of Bradley Dillon. He had pleaded guilty, on a narrow basis. He admitted that he had agreed with Carbone to cause Dillon grievous bodily harm. He denied holding the knife. He denied pulling the trigger.

Justice Richard Cavanagh accepted that nobody could say who had actually killed Dillon. He found that Bagnato had entered a joint criminal enterprise with another man to inflict grievous bodily harm, and that was enough to make it murder. He called the killing objectively serious, with a high level of violence and no regard for the public in a busy shopping centre.

He would not reduce the sentence for the Thai conditions. They were, he said, largely the result of Bagnato's own decision to run. He accepted some remorse, "albeit in a late show of contrition", and some prospect of rehabilitation.

He spoke directly about Dillon's family, who had given statements to the court about what his death had done to them. "They were moving and heartfelt statements," the judge said. "They were expressed with determination and courage."

He sentenced Bagnato to seventeen years and three months, with a non-parole period of twelve years. With the time already served, he will be eligible for parole in 2033.

So the record now stands in two countries. In Australia, Antonio Bagnato is a convicted murderer, on his own plea, over a $2,300 debt that was not even his. In Thailand, the death sentence over the grave by the Chinese temple did not stand. One report says it was commuted, another that it was overturned on appeal, and Bagnato has always denied killing Wayne Schneider.

The full story, from the Sydney car park to the grave outside Pattaya, is in our film on Gangland.