How a Football Jumper Led to an Attempted Murder | The Sione Hokafonu Story
There is a phrase that cuts through the complicated legal language, the courtroom arguments, the bail hearings, and the years of investigation surrounding Sione Hokafonu.
Three words allegedly spoken by Sione himself when someone asked him why a man had been shot four times in the head and chest while sitting in his car on a quiet suburban Melbourne street.
Blood for blood.
In those three words, you get an insight into the world Sione inhabited.
A world governed not by courts or police, but by the ancient logic of retribution, where every act of violence demands an equal and opposite response, and where the line between victim and perpetrator shifts depending on which chapter of the story you begin reading.
Sione Hokafonu is a patched member of the Finks outlaw motorcycle club, one of Australia’s most notorious OMCGs.
The Finks, which now boasts roughly 2,000 members across the country, is an internationally recognized organization with chapters in multiple states.
Prosecutors who would eventually charge Sione described him as holding world status within the gang, a designation suggesting significant rank and standing.
His defense barrister, with understandable motivation, pushed back on that framing, describing his client more modestly as simply a member of a suburban Melbourne chapter.
Whatever the exact truth of his standing, what is beyond dispute is that by his mid-20s, Sione had become a prominent figure in one of Melbourne’s most active and violent bikie conflicts.
He grew up to become a father of five, a man whose parents would eventually offer $200,000 as bail surety to keep him out of remand, a detail that speaks to both the depth of his family’s loyalty and the seriousness of the charges he faced.
Before the violence that would come to define his public profile, before the courtrooms and the headlines, he was simply a man living in Clyde North, in Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs, a patched Fink navigating the codes and obligations of club life.
To understand what happened in the summer of 2019, you have to understand that it did not begin with a bullet.
It began with a jumper.
In July of that year, a group of Finks members, Sione among them, were watching the State of Origin rugby league decider at the Sporting Globe bar inside Fountain Gate shopping center.
State of Origin nights in Australia carry a particular electricity and bars fill up with passion and alcohol in roughly equal measure.
That night, a man wearing a white jumper, bearing the words “Support your local Mongols”, a rival outlaw motorcycle club, threw a salt container towards a television during the match.
The Finks took exception.
A brawl broke out and in the chaos, a Finks member allegedly ripped the man’s Mongols jumper from his body and kept it as a trophy.
It was a provocative act, the kind designed not merely to humiliate, but to send a message.
In the currency of outlaw motorcycle clubs, taking an enemy’s colors or gear is a gesture loaded with meaning.
The Mongols received that message clearly.
Hours later, in the early hours of the morning, Sione Hafoka Fonu arrived at Casey Hospital’s emergency department in Berwick with a gunshot wound to the foot.
He had been shot, widely believed to be payback by Mongols associates for the jumper incident.
When police arrived, Sione was unable to assist with their inquiries.
Whether from loyalty to the code, distrust of law enforcement, or both, he offered them nothing.
He took himself to hospital.
He received treatment and that was the end of his cooperation with Victoria Police.
But it was not the end of the chain of events set in motion by the jumper.
Within weeks, the Finks had allegedly begun planning their response.
The logic, according to prosecutors, was brutally simple.
The Mongols had shot one of their own, and so the Finks would retaliate.
The target did not need to be the specific person who had pulled the trigger on Seeney’s foot.
He simply needed to be a Mongol.
The trap was set through social media.
A female associate, Athar Almatrah, who knew Mongols member Rocco Cura through Instagram, allegedly helped the group create a fake profile.
The plan was to lure Cura to a quiet street in Balwyn, in Melbourne’s northeast, under the pretense of meeting a woman for a late-night rendezvous, a quick hello before bed, in the language used during the trial.
Cura, believing he was going
On a date, drove to Balwyn.
He arrived at the address, parked his car, and waited.
He did not wait long.
On the night of August 1st, 2019, CCTV cameras captured what happened next with horrible clarity.
A silver BMW swept in and blocked Cura’s car, cutting off his escape route.
Two men jumped out and immediately opened fire, emptying approximately a dozen rounds into Cura’s windscreen at close range.
Four shots found their mark, one in the head, others in the chest.
Cura managed to stagger from his car, and was eventually helped by a nearby resident, a good Samaritan who brought the bleeding man into his home and called for help.
“There was a lot of blood,” the resident later recalled.
“I’m still shaken.
”
Cura was rushed to hospital and underwent emergency surgery to remove a bullet from his brain.
He spent 24 days in hospital.
He survived, but only barely, and only through fortune.
The men who shot him, according to prosecutors, believed they had killed him.
The following day, at a Finks clubhouse, roughly 20 members allegedly gathered and celebrated what they thought was a successful murder.
The investigation that followed was significant in its scale.
Victoria Police’s Echo Taskforce, the unit specifically designed to combat outlaw motorcycle gang activity, launched a major operation.
11 warrants were executed across Melbourne.
Clubhouses in Cranbourne West and Brunswick East were raided.
Seven Harley-Davidson motorcycles were seized along with Finks club colors.
And in December 2019, 5 months after the shooting, police found one of the weapons alleged to have been used in the attack at Cioni’s home in Clyde North.
His fingerprints were on the magazine.
In January 2020, Cioni Hokafonu was arrested.
He was 26 years old.
He was charged with attempted murder and intentionally damaging property along with counts of prohibited person possessing a firearm and possessing anabolic steroids.
He appeared in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, made no application for bail, and was remanded in custody.
What followed was a years-long legal process complicated enormously by the COVID-19 pandemic, which created extraordinary delays throughout Victoria’s court system.
Cioni made multiple bail applications, at least three, each rejected.
Magistrate Tara Hartnett refusing his first application described his as a serious example of attempted murder and concluded that no conditions could adequately manage the risk.
A later application was rejected by Magistrate Philip Goldberg, who described Cioni as posing an unacceptable risk to the public.
His parents had by that point offered $200,000 as surety.
His lawyer had proposed strict bail conditions including a ban on associating with other Finks members.
Mr.
Goldberg was unmoved, noting that such conditions would effectively leave Cioni free to come and go as he likes and able to maintain whatever influence he may have.
The court also heard from prosecutors that Cioni had allegedly sought assurances from a witness that the witness’s girlfriend wouldn’t talk after the shooting and that he had been directing others in their movements surrounding the case.
Sione sat in remand for over a year before his case progressed meaningfully through the courts.
One magistrate acknowledged the situation was extraordinary.
A man charged with one of the most serious charges on the court calendar unable to get a trial within a reasonable time frame.
But even that sympathy for his circumstances was not sufficient to justify release.
The trial itself when it finally was held in Victoria’s Supreme Court.
Alongside Sione in the dock were two brothers, Poevai Su’a charged with attempted murder as an alleged getaway driver and Joseph Au Papo charged with intentionally causing serious injury in circumstances of gross violence as the alleged driver of the car that had swept in to block Kura’s escape.
A fourth man, Tavita Su’a was alleged to be the second gunman and faced a separate trial.
The prosecution’s case was built on CCTV footage, phone records, witness testimony and the discovery of the firearm at Sione’s property.
The alleged blood for blood quote attributed to Sione was placed before the jury as evidence of motive and intent.
Prosecutors told jurors that Kura had been targeted for no reason other than his membership in the Mongols.
A random Mongol selected simply because one was needed.
The defense pushed back hard.
Sione’s barrister Peter Morrissey QC challenged the identity evidence and suggested that the prosecution’s key witness, a person who could not be named, may themselves have played a role in the shooting.
Defense lawyers for all three men told the jury that their clients were not involved and that police had arrested the wrong people.
They urged jurors to look carefully at who might have had reason to frame or implicate the accused.
And in March 2023, after a week’s long trial, the jury returned its verdict, not guilty on all serious charges.
Sione, Seita, and Apapo walked free on the 14th of March, acquitted of attempted murder and the related charges.
The Crown subsequently withdrew all serious charges against Tevita Soane as well.
Meanwhile, Athar Al-Matrah, who had helped lure Corrah to the Bullen address, was separately convicted and jailed for her role in the ambush.
Corrah himself, the man who had taken four bullets including one to the brain, never received justice in a criminal court for what was done to him that night.
The men accused of shooting him walked free.
The story of Sione Hokafonu does not end with the acquittal.
Even as his legal team had been telling Melbourne Magistrates Court in 2022 that their client had left the outlaw motorcycle world behind, that his priorities were now being a husband to his wife, a father to his children, and throwing himself into work, other events were unfolding that would suggest the
Relationship between Sione and the Finks was not entirely in the past.
In August 2023, Sione was among 10 Finks members charged after they rode their motorcycles in formation along the Southbank Promenade, the busy riverside pedestrian walkway in central Melbourne, wearing their club colors.
Police initially laid charges of reckless conduct endangering serious injury and dangerous driving, charges that drew scathing criticism in court.
Defense lawyers labeled the prosecution a grotesque abuse of power and a waste of police and court resources, pointing out that members of the public had been filmed walking up to the bikies and engaging with them, and that four e-scooter riders and a skateboarder had been moving faster than the motorcycles.
Magistrate Tara Hartnett, the same magistrate who had refused a Sione bail years earlier, ultimately dismissed the charge of driving on a footpath after ruling it proven, having already watched the two more serious charges withdrawn.
All 10 men walked free once again.
Throughout the entire arc of this story, the Finks themselves were operating in an increasingly turbulent environment.
Their clubhouse in Cranbourne West was raided by police following the Cura shooting, then raided again months later as part of a separate guns and carjacking investigation.
In 2020, the same clubhouse and a Finks-linked supplement store in Frankston were targeted in a series of suspected arson attacks.
Witnesses reported an explosion before the Cranbourne West building went up in flames at 1:30 in the morning.
Police found CCTV footage of two cars sitting in the street for about 15 minutes before firefighters arrived.
No suspects were ever identified.
The atmosphere around the Finks at this time was one of siege, raids from police above, attacks from rivals below, and their own members cycling in and out of custody.
The Echo Taskforce, for its part, had been watching the Finks activities closely for years.
It observed the gang’s recruitment drives, noting that senior figures had been recruiting young men from the Mongol Mob street gang, itself an organization with New Zealand origins that had established itself in Melbourne’s southeastern suburbs.
Police
Described the Finks as trying to mirror a model of violence that had previously characterized the Comancheros.
“They are looking for ones who have a propensity for violence,” Echo’s Commander told journalists.
“Each club is trying to bolster its numbers, and they will resort to acts of violence.
”
What then do we make of Sioune Hokafonu?
He is, legally speaking, an innocent man.
A jury of 12 people heard weeks of evidence and concluded that the Crown had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that he was one of the men who shot Rocco Curra.
That verdict must be respected.
It is the cornerstone of any fair legal system that acquittal means acquittal, regardless of what headlines have said or what detectives believe.
But his story is also a window into something larger and more troubling, the ecology of organized crime in suburban Melbourne, where disputes over a football jumper escalate into ambushes, where men in their mid-20s find themselves facing life-altering charges while their parents mortgage everything they have for bail money, where innocent residents of quiet family streets find bullet-riddled cars outside their homes and are still shaken months later.
The chain of events, the jumper, the brawl, the retaliatory shooting, the attempted murder, the years in remand, the acquittal, forms a kind of tragic geometry.
Each point connects to the next through the logic of blood for blood, a logic that serves no one, that builds nothing, and that leaves Rocco Curra with a bullet surgically removed from his brain, leaves a good Samaritan still haunted by the blood in his home, and leaves the streets of Melbourne a little less safe for everyone.
Sione Hokafonu walked free, but in the world he has inhabited, freedom is a temporary condition.
The debts of loyalty, revenge, and reputation in that world have a way of compounding.
History suggests the ledger is rarely settled.
Let me know what you think of Sione Hokafonu’s story down below in the comments.
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