Nick Martin: How a Bikie President Was Targeted at a Family Race Night

Nick Martin: How a Bikie President Was Targeted at a Family Race Night

It was a warm Saturday night out at Quinana, south of Perth.

Engines screaming down the strip.

Nitro cars throwing flame off the line.

The kind of family night where the grandstand fills up with kids in ear muffs.

Mums with esis.

Bloss leaning on the fence with a cup of chips.

The Perth motor on a race night.

Loud, bright, ordinary.

Up in the spectator area, a heavy set bloke in his 50s sat watching the cars with his wife beside him and family around them.

Hundreds of people in the stands.

And from somewhere out in the dark beyond the fence, a single shot crossed the night and found him.

He did not survive.

His son-in-law, sitting close by, was also hit.

The man in the seat was Nick Martin, 51 years old, the president of the rebels in Western Australia, and one of the best known bikey figures in the state.

This was the 12th of December, 2020.

And what happened that night wasn’t a brawl or a bar fight or a deal gone wrong in some back street.

It was a targeted hit carried out in front of families from more than 300 m away.

a sniper shot in Australia at a drag racing meet.

For a long time, the public knew almost nothing about who pulled the trigger.

The name stayed locked behind a suppression order for years.

What they did know was the price tag.

Police alleged the contract ran into six figures, one of the biggest murder contracts this country has seen.

Over the next 40 minutes, we’ll walk through who Nick Martin really was, the biky rivalry that put a target on his back, and the cold, methodical planning that went into one shot.

We’ll follow the manhunt, the million-doll reward, the covert recordings, and the courtroom twist that finally put a face to the gunman in 2026.

A man was killed in front of his own family at a public event by someone he never saw.

So, how does a hit like that even get planned and who paid for it? That’s what we’re chasing today.

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This one’s got layers.

The man in that seat wasn’t some hanger on.

By 2020, Nick Martin was one of the most recognizable bikey figures in Western Australia.

He was the state president of the rebels, the biggest outlaw motorcycle club in the country.

That title carries real weight.

In the OMI world, the president runs the chapter.

The respect, the reach, the headaches, and the enemies all land on him.

Martin had been around that world a long time.

Court appearances, police attention, the kind of paper trail that follows a senior bikey for decades.

He didn’t hide it.

He wore the patch.

Everyone knew his name, and he lived loud for a man in his position.

By his 50s, he was a big presence in every sense.

Broad, bearded, the sort of bloke who filled a doorway.

To the public, he was a headline.

To the rebels, he was the boss.

WA’s bikey scene through the 2010s was busy and tense.

The rebels were entrenched, but other clubs were musling in.

The common cheros most of all, expanding hard right across the country.

territory, status, and the trade running underneath it were all up for grabs.

When one club pushes into ground, another considers its own.

Friction follows.

Sometimes it stays at standover and posturing.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Martin sat dead center of that, senior enough to matter, visible enough to be a symbol, and as president, the name that carried the most weight when a rivalry turned personal.

For years, the reporting cast him as a proper heavyweight of the WA underworld, not a flashy newcomer, an established figure with history behind him, the sort of bloke whose movements you could set your watch by because he’d been doing the same things in the same places for years.

That’s the quiet danger of the top job.

You become the face, the fixed point.

Everyone knows who you are, what you drive, where you’ll be on a Saturday night.

And Martin liked the drag racing.

He went often.

He had his spot in the stands, same as always.

To anyone watching closely enough, his weekends ran like clockwork.

A pattern someone had been studying very carefully.

Every contract has someone behind it.

The man prosecutors point to had a name, David James Pi.

Pi wasn’t a stranger to Martin.

The two went back years.

There’s a court photo from 2013 of the pair walking out of the Perth District Court side by side.

Not rivals, not then.

In these circles, the bloke standing next to you today can become a problem tomorrow.

Alliances bend.

Friendships cool.

What once looked like a partnership had somewhere along the way turned into something far more fraught.

By 2020, the relationship had broken down completely.

And what the prosecution laid out in court was a motive that flipped the usual logic of a case like this.

The claim was this.

Pi had come to believe he himself was the one being targeted.

That there was already a plan in motion against him.

Whether that belief held up or not almost didn’t matter.

What mattered, according to the case, was that Pi decided he wasn’t willing to wait and see.

He’d act first.

That’s a different kind of danger to a feud over money or turf.

Its fear turned into a decision.

A man so convinced he was the one at risk that he allegedly chose to move before anyone could move on him.

The court heard it framed as preemptive, getting in ahead of a threat he believed was real.

Pi contested the case.

These were allegations to be argued and tested, not settled facts going in.

But the prosecution’s version painted a sobering picture of how these choices get made.

Not in a temper, not mid-aru.

A calculated decision reached cold, that arrival had become a problem worth removing.

And it didn’t stop at one.

Investigators later alleged the same arrangement reached further, that there was talk of a second job aimed at another bikey figure entirely, a plan that was never carried through.

one alleged decision, opening the door to the next, so the warning signs here weren’t loud.

No public stou, no shots in the street beforehand.

The danger to Martin built quietly inside the head of a man he’d once walked out of court beside, a man who’d convinced himself he was the one with everything to lose.

By late 2020, on the prosecution’s account, that conviction had already taken shape as a plan.

Martin had no sense the clock was running.

The Perth Motorlex at Quinana is exactly what it sounds like.

A motorsport venue south of the city built for drag racing and speedway.

On a big meet, it pulls a serious crowd.

Families, kids, rev heads, the lot.

It’s licensed.

It’s flood lit.

It’s about as public as a place gets.

Inside the fence that night, everything was normal.

The strip lit up, the stands filling, engines you don’t so much hear as feel.

The noise rolling back over the grandstand in waves.

People had come out for a good night.

Burgers, ear muffs, the smell of fuel, a proper Saturday.

Martin had his spot in the spectator area.

Family around him, settled in like any other race night.

From where they sat, there was nothing to suggest the evening was anything other than ordinary.

Beyond that fence was a different world entirely.

thick scrub, no lighting, the kind of overgrown ground.

Nobody in the stands gives a second thought to the bit past the edge of the venue where the flood lights give out and the bush takes over.

To the crowd, it was just darkness at the perimeter.

To one person out there, it was a position.

That contrast is the whole story of the night.

On one side of a chainlink fence, hundreds of people enjoying a family event.

on the other meters of vegetation and a clear line of sight back to the seats.

Two worlds separated by almost nothing, and only one of them knew the other was there.

When it happened, the noise and the chaos of the venue worked against everyone in the stands, with engines roaring down the strip.

Plenty of people didn’t immediately register what had taken place.

There was confusion before there was understanding.

By the time the crowd grasped that something was badly wrong, the danger had already come and gone from somewhere they couldn’t even see.

Martin did not survive.

A family member close by was also caught up in it.

His wife was beside him through the worst of it, in front of hundreds of strangers on a night that had been meant for nothing more than watching cars.

In the hours afterwards, the flood lights stayed on while officers worked the stands and others pushed out into the dark scrub past the fence.

Torches sweeping the ground the crowd had never once looked at.

The person out in that scrub wasn’t a hotthead with a grudge.

He was trained, a former soldier, an exarmmy reservist who’d served as an artillery gunner.

He understood weapons.

He understood range.

and he brought that knowledge to bear with unsettling patience.

The groundwork started long before race night.

The court heard he flew a drone over Martin’s home, studying the layout and the security around the property.

He wanted to know how his target lived, where he came and went, what he’d be walking into.

The racetrack got the same treatment.

On one occasion, he came in and got close within about 10 meters of Martin, near enough to be certain of the man and the spot he favored.

He wasn’t guessing.

He’d looked his target in the face and walked away unnoticed.

Then there was the obstacle from where the gunman intended to set up.

Something was blocking a clean view of Martin’s usual seat, a safety ramp sitting in the way.

So on a separate night, he slipped into the venue and shifted it.

He didn’t adapt to the venue.

He rearranged it to suit himself.

Weeks ahead, he practiced, too.

Out in isolated bushland, away from anyone, he put his high-powered 308 rifle through its paces, firing around 200 rounds at a small target until the result was repeatable.

He worked through the things a marksman has to account for, the drop over distance, the pull of the wind.

Nothing was being left to luck.

On the night, all that preparation collapsed into a routine.

A camouflage suit, gloves, a gap in the perimeter he’d already identified, and a slow crawl through the thick growth to the exact position he’d chosen.

He settled in, unseen, with everything he needed already worked out in advance.

What made this case sit so heavily with investigators wasn’t temper or chaos.

It was the opposite.

cold, deliberate, methodical, closer to a military operation than a crime of the moment.

Every step measured, every variable removed.

A bloke who’d once, by his own account, held down regular work, including a stint at a major mining company, had turned that discipline to this.

The same care that makes a good soldier had been pointed deliberately at one man in a crowd.

And by the time he was in position, the hardest part of the job for him was already done.

The public picture of a bikey club is bikes, beards, and brotherhood.

Loud runs down the highway, a code of matip who look after their own.

That’s the brand.

It’s also in large part the marketing.

Underneath the colors, law enforcement describes something far more commercial.

Outlaw motorcycle clubs in this country have long been linked to the drug trade, to stand over work, to money moving through channels that don’t show up on any tax return.

The patch isn’t just an identity for the senior end of these organizations.

It’s the front of a business.

That framing changes how you read a case like this one.

It stops being a personal quarrel between two men and starts looking like what it was.

An act with a logic to it carried out within a world where serious money and serious risk sit side by side every single day.

In that environment, removing a problem isn’t unthinkable.

It becomes to some just another cost.

And the people brought in to handle that aren’t always club members at all.

That’s one of the quieter shifts in modern organized crime.

The work can be outsourced.

A specialist brought from outside with no obvious tie to the dispute and no patch on his back to connect him to it.

Clean in the cold sense the criminal world means it.

What happened to Martin showed how seriously the authorities took the whole landscape, not just the one event.

It set off a sweeping crackdown across Western Australia.

Police moved hard on the bikey scene.

Raids, searches, a wave of charges.

Public reporting put the number of people charged in the broader operation well into the hundreds.

One night at a racetrack became the trigger for a statewide reckoning with the clubs.

That tells you something about how the loss of a senior figure lands.

It doesn’t stay contained to the people directly involved.

It ripples out into rival clubs bracing for what comes next.

into police running flat out to get ahead of any retaliation.

Into a scene suddenly under a level of scrutiny it hadn’t worn in years.

Strip it all back and the case sits on an uncomfortable foundation.

A world that markets itself on loyalty and freedom, running on something much harder underneath.

The bikes and the brotherhood are real enough on the surface.

What the Martin case forced into daylight was everything sitting beneath them.

In the moment, the investigators had almost nothing to hold, no face in the crowd, no witness who could point and say, “Him,” the person responsible had melted back into the dark before most of the venue understood anything was wrong.

On paper, it was close to the perfect job.

So, the breakthrough didn’t come from the racetrack.

It came from the slow, patient work that the public never sees.

A task force was stood up to run it, Operation Rall.

And at its peak, it had around a 100 officers attached.

That scale matters.

It tells you the authorities weren’t treating this as one isolated matter to be quietly filed away.

They threw everything at it.

The real progress came through covert work.

Police moved a suspect under surveillance and started gathering quietly.

Investigators later spoke of covert recordings made during the manhunt and of evidence drawn from undercover operatives working close to the people of interest.

Slowly, piece by piece, a picture formed that the silence of the underworld couldn’t paint over.

And then there was the human flaw that undoes so many of these cases.

For all the discipline in the planning, the man at the center of it reportedly confessed to someone close to him.

That’s the thing the criminal world can never fully control.

Plans can be perfect.

People aren’t.

A word said to the wrong person.

In a moment of trust can carry more weight than any forensic trace.

Within weeks, having been watched in connection with the racetrack, he was in custody.

What followed broke the code from the other direction.

The man who’d carried out the job agreed to give evidence against the figure police alleged was behind it.

For his own protection, the courts suppressed his identity.

He became the unnamed gunman, convicted, sentenced, but officially without a face while the wider case ran its course.

That arrangement says everything about how these prosecutions actually get made.

The famous wall of silence around organized crime is real.

People genuinely won’t talk, but it isn’t solid all the way through.

Apply the right pressure, offer the right deal, and even the person who pulled it off can end up as the prosecution’s most valuable witness against the one who arranged it.

A million-doll reward made the headlines.

What actually cracked it was surveillance, a confession in the wrong ear, and a willingness in the end to talk.

Behind the patch and the title was a husband and a family man who happened to live at the top of a world that runs on risk.

How he was sent off captured both halves of that at once.

His farewell just before Christmas in 2020 was a genuine spectacle.

Hundreds of bikes from the rebels and from other clubs rode in to pay their respects.

His coffin was carried in wrapped in images of $100 bills.

a final flourish that fit the larger than-l life persona he’d spent years building.

Around 200 police officers watched the proceedings with surveillance overhead, keeping eyes on the gathering of patched members as they said goodbye.

Sit with that image for a second.

The cash covered coffin, the wall of police, the sea of colors along the route.

It’s part tribute, part show of strength, part theater.

Even at the end, the persona was doing its work.

projecting wealth, loyalty, and reach to anyone watching, which on that day was a great many people.

But a persona is a costume, and underneath it was something far more ordinary and far more painful.

A wife who’d been beside him through the worst night of her life.

A family who’d lost someone in the most public way imaginable with strangers and cameras as witnesses.

Whatever Martins standing in the underworld, the people closest to him were just that, people carrying a grief no spectacle could dress up.

The fame had a price, and his loved ones kept paying it long after the crowds went home.

In the years since, his widow has taken legal action over what happened, including a civil claim that drew in the venue and the circumstances around that night, leaning on long-standing law that allows claims where a loss is caused wrongfully.

The fight didn’t end with the farewell.

It moved into the courtrooms and stayed there.

There’s a hard thread running through all of it.

In this world, profile and danger are the same thing measured two ways.

The bigger your name, the more of everything comes with it.

The respect, the reach, and the exposure.

Martin built one of the biggest names in the WA scene.

The cash draped coffin was the public proof of how far he’d risen.

What it sat on top of, the loss, the courtroom years, the family left behind, was much heavier than any image could carry.

For years, one piece of this stayed in the dark.

The man who’d carried out the job was convicted and locked away.

handed a 20-year sentence, but the public wasn’t allowed to know who he was.

The suppression order held while the rest of the case worked its way through.

The reasoning was practical.

He’d agreed to give evidence against the figure police alleged had arranged it all, and that cooperation put him at risk.

So, the courts kept him nameless, the unidentified gunman, shielding him while the proceedings ran.

Then, the larger case reached its end.

The man accused of being behind it was convicted.

The prosecution’s account ultimately accepted.

With that settled, the ground shifted.

In April 2026, the gunman himself asked the court to lift the order.

His reasons were almost startlingly ordinary against the scale of everything else.

The court heard the suppression was making prison life difficult.

Mail wasn’t reaching him.

Visitors were struggling to book in, and he couldn’t enroll in a university course under a name no one was allowed to print.

He wanted to study while serving his time.

“The prison already knew exactly who he was,” his lawyer told the court, “and he had no fears for his safety and protective custody.

” The judge agreed and the order came off.

After more than 5 years, the faceless figure finally had a name on the public record.

A former soldier who’ turned his training to this, now asking, in effect, to simply get on with his sentence.

There’s something quietly telling in that the man who’d planned everything down to the last detail, who’d accounted for every variable, in the end just wanted his post to arrive and a course to enroll in.

The enormity of it all shrunk down to prison paperwork.

So, here’s where it leaves us.

A senior figure lost in front of his own family at a public event.

A trained specialist who treated the whole thing as a job to be done well.

A rival who allegedly decided he couldn’t wait.

And a family still fighting it out in the courts years later.

Nearly everyone in this story has paid a price, except you could argue the things that drove it, the rivalries, and the money that made it all possible.

So, I’ll leave the question with you.

When a life can allegedly be reduced to a price and a plan, who carries the real weight of it, the hand that did the work, or the world that set the terms? Tell me what you reckon in the comments.

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