Gavin Preston, the breakfast at Sweet Lulus and the question nobody has answered

At 10.17am on Saturday 9 September 2023, Gavin Preston was sitting at an outdoor table at Sweet Lulus café in Keilor, looking at his phone, when a stolen grey Audi stopped in the street beside him.

He did not look up. Two men in black balaclavas jumped out. In the next ten seconds they fired eleven bullets. Seven of them hit Preston, and he was dead before he reached the ground.

The two men were later caught, tried and jailed. The judge who sentenced them found they had never met Preston, had no quarrel with him, and had come down from Sydney to kill him for money. Who paid them is a question the court could not answer.

An execution, in a public setting for profit, is an act which must be unequivocally condemned

Justice Michael O'Connell, sentencing Zahabe and Tito, 8 September 2026

Preston was fifty. He had spent most of his adult life in prison, and he had been out for only a few months.

He was born on 7 October 1972 and grew up in Sunshine, in Melbourne's western suburbs, the elder of two boys. His father drove trains. His mother stayed at home, with some work as a swimming instructor. He stayed at school until the end of Year 11, and, as a judge later put it, "throughout your high school years you associated with various characters who have become known in Melbourne criminal circles".

The record started in July 1991, when he was eighteen, with an assault. A year later he was jailed for causing serious injury. In 1996 he got eight and a half years for armed robbery. There were more convictions for violence after that, and in 2004 police in Port Macquarie caught him with a loaded gun. Our film records what he once told a judge about why. He would not blame drugs, he said, and he would not blame his childhood.

Inside, he made a name. The prison gang the Prisoners of War grew up in Victoria's jails in the 1990s, and press reports have put Preston and Matthew Johnson, who later beat Carl Williams to death in Barwon, among its founders. The court records are more careful. In 2015 a judge referred only to Preston's "involvement in prison gangs previously".

For a while it looked as if he had got out of it. From about 2007 he lived with a partner and held down a job in construction for five years, with no convictions that mattered. His lawyers told the court that he had become "like one of the people on the tram". Then, in 2011, his younger brother died of a heroin overdose. The judge said it "plunged you deep into despair". He walked out of his job and went back to the old life.

Early in 2012 it went badly wrong, twice in twelve days.

On 30 January he shot a man named To-Lam Duong in a garage at Sunshine North, over a batch of methamphetamine worth about $2,500 that another man said was poor quality. On the night of 10 February he drove to an apartment in North Melbourne belonging to Adam Khoury, a heavy drug trafficker. The police were following him. In the early hours of the next morning, alone with Khoury, he shot him three times. The last shot was fired into Khoury's head as he lay on the carpet.

He was charged with murder. The Crown said he had planned it: the alibi, the gloves, the gun. Nine days into the trial the case changed. Preston pleaded guilty to defensive homicide, a charge Victoria has since abolished, on the basis that Khoury had produced a gun, that Preston had taken it off him and fired believing his own life was in danger. He also pleaded guilty to the Sunshine North shooting.

In August 2015 Justice Macaulay gave him eleven years, with a minimum of nine. He was serving it in protective custody. "Two attempts have been made to return you to mainstream custody," the judge said, "each of which resulted in you being attacked and injured by other prisoners, on one occasion quite significantly." He was released early in 2023.

By that September Preston had a routine, and a routine is the most dangerous thing a man like him can own. For two or three months he had been having breakfast at Sweet Lulus most mornings, usually with his fiancée. The café sits on the corner of the Old Calder Highway and Arabin Street, a short walk from the Keilor Hotel.

The Audi had been stolen from Northcote in May. By September it wore false number plates copied from a very similar car, and its windows were heavily tinted. At 7.14am on 9 September it drove past Sweet Lulus, turned into the Keilor Hotel car park and parked in the far corner, beside a skip bin. Jaeden Tito, twenty-two, was in the driver's seat. Rabii Zahabe, twenty-three, was beside him. Both normally lived in New South Wales.

They sat there for about three hours.

Preston knew none of it. At 8.28am he sent a WhatsApp message to his friend Abbas Maghnie, saying he was going to the gym and asking whether he wanted breakfast. He trained at the Brimbank Aquatic and Wellness Centre until 9.47am. Maghnie parked in the hotel car park, the same one, and the two men walked to Sweet Lulus together, arriving at 9.59am.

Preston usually sat inside, facing the door. That morning he took an outdoor table on Arabin Street.

At 10.14am a second car, a Holden Cruze, drove past the café and paused in the road outside for about three seconds before moving on. A minute later the Audi left its corner. It got as far as Arabin Street and found a car reverse parking across the road. So it went back in, drove a slow lap of the car park, and waited at the exit for sixteen seconds.

At 10.17am it turned into Arabin Street again and stopped level with the table.

The CCTV caught the moment. "Maghnie was drinking his coffee, whilst Preston was looking at his phone," the judge recorded. Zahabe ran round the front of the car with a silver handgun and fired at Maghnie until the gun appeared to jam. Maghnie turned and ran for the café as other customers threw themselves down. Tito crossed to the other side of the street and fired at Preston.

"Preston did not look up from his phone as you, Tito, started to fire at him," the judge said. He bounced in his seat, slumped forward and fell headfirst to the ground. He was killed instantly. One bullet hit Maghnie, who survived with serious injuries. He refused to help the police.

The Audi drove 630 metres to Blair Court. Tito set fire to it and the flames caught his own left arm. He ran from the car slapping at his sleeve.

The rest of the plan worked. A chain of other cars took the two men away from Keilor, and in the end a hired Audi Q7 with a chauffeur drove them up the Hume Freeway to Sydney.

The night before, the chauffeur had been booked on the messaging app Signal by somebody using the name Feature. The booking was for four passengers, "two boys and two girls". When the driver mentioned that he had been told there would be four, he was told that now there were only two. On the drive north he heard one of them say, "We are brothers now."

At 8.07pm Zahabe switched his phone off airplane mode for the first time in nine days. About a minute later it downloaded a photograph of Preston and his fiancée. At 9.36pm it was used to search Google for "no extradition countries".

Zahabe was arrested in New South Wales on 10 October 2023, and Tito on 25 October.

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The trial ran through April and May 2026. On 8 May a jury found both men guilty of the murder of Gavin Preston and the attempted murder of Abbas Maghnie. Both men deny they were the shooters.

On 8 September 2026 Justice Michael O'Connell sentenced each of them to thirty-four years. Zahabe must serve twenty-seven before he can apply for parole, and Tito twenty-six. The Crown had asked for life. The judge found the planning was "of the highest order" and that the two men had "ample opportunity" in those three hours to change their minds. "Despite that, when the time came, you did not hesitate."

He also said something about the dead man. "An execution, in a public setting for profit, is an act which must be unequivocally condemned," he said. Preston might well be said to have lived outside the law, but "his life deserves the protection and vindication provided by the law, just as anyone else in our community".

The rest of it the judge set out in plain terms. The evidence showed the two men "did not know or have any connection with Gavin Preston or Abbas Maghnie". The only reasonable inference was that "this was a contract killing". He accepted there was no direct evidence that either of them had organised it.

So two young men from Sydney who had never met him knew which café he used, which table, which car park and which road out. Somebody gave them that. Somebody had a stolen car with false plates ready for them, and somebody calling himself Feature booked the ride home for four people, not two.

None of those people has been named. The judgment records one line about them. "The investigation as to who organised this killing remains ongoing."

The full story of the man they called Wrecking Ball, inside prison and out, is in our film on Gangland.