The preacher, the wife and the husband who hired a hitman at Bunnings

By David Estcourt

The Bunnings car park in Craigieburn.Credit: Jason South

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People expect to get almost anything at Bunnings. But only Pierre Assaad, sitting in a car park outside the hardware giant’s Craigieburn store with nearly $5000 in his pocket, thought he could procure a hitman.

Assaad, a businessman and shop owner, was trying to hire an assassin to kill Silas Issa, his former pastor. Assaad believed Issa had meddled in his marriage, over allegations of domestic violence, causing it to end.

For more than a decade Issa had been senior pastor at International Baptist church, which met in various places around Essendon, devoting his life to tending a flock of mostly Christian Lebanese parishioners in the northern suburbs.

The well-dressed and handsome new generation pastor had refined his natural charisma as a child growing up in Texas and Lebanon before moving to Melbourne in the late 1990s.

The attempted killing did not come out of the blue.

Issa was an idealistic preacher and had adopted a progressive approach at his church. He resisted the inclination of some parishioners to ignore signs of domestic violence. If a woman had bruises, he wouldn’t avert his gaze.

This is what happened with Rachael*, Assaad’s wife.

One day, Rachael was dropping off her children at the YMCA hall being used as a temporary church. Issa noticed a limp.

“I said, ‘What’s wrong?’, and she started crying,” Issa tells The Sunday Age.

“She said he had stabbed her with a knife in her leg.”

That inquiry set in motion events which would jeopardise Issa’s life.

‘It was hush-hush’

Issa looks up and down at a red brick Baptist Union church on Buckley Street, Essendon, one of the places his congregation called home, and doesn’t recognise anyone.

He ended his time as a pastor a decade ago as the congregation was absorbed by another church, which later moved to Donvale.

Silas Issa outside Baptist Union church in Essendon, where his congragation met for a time when he was senior pastor.Credit: Jason South

Issa had inherited the position as senior pastor from his father in December 1998, when he was in his late 20s.

He had studied theology at university and immediately chafed against a congregation he viewed as conservative and patriarchal. His openness to talking about harassment meant women started to report it, he says, but it also put a target on his back.

“It made me very popular with young people and very unpopular with older generations,” he says.

Issa weaponised the pulpit. He was restricted from contacting police, for privacy reasons, so he spoke out directly to his flock.

“I knew what was happening in these communities, and it was hush-hush,” he says.

“I remember being criticised by [a congregant] saying, I’m ruining their family’s reputation. I’m like, no, boundaries have to be set now.”

Issa had known the Assaads for decades. As Christians in south Lebanon, Pierre Assaad’s family had struggled. They had endured various hate crimes, including his family home being burnt down when he was eight. His father was kidnapped when Assaad was in his teens.

“He wasn’t an evil man,” Issa recalls, “he didn’t come across that way, but an angry man, a disturbed man.”

They were a hard-working family with five children who owned a few shops and petrol stations. As long-term occasional parishioners, Issa got to know them. In 1995, when Issa visited Melbourne before moving here, Assaad drove him to Healesville. He still has a picture he took of Assaad standing next to his broken down car.

Pierre Assaad leaning against his car, which had broken down in Healesville in 1995. Silas Issa took the photo.

Later, when Issa became senior pastor, he was invited to the Assaad home to converse about the community, the church and deliver sermons.

‘Looking over my shoulder’

In 2014, Issa got a call from police in Ringwood. Rachael was at the station, seriously injured and asking for him.

By then, Issa had left the church and was working on changing his career. Police insisted that he come and see Rachael, even though he was no longer her pastor.

It wasn’t the first time Issa counselled Rachael about the violence perpetrated by her husband, and he urged her to sign the report she made to police about the incident.

Issa told Rachael he wasn’t sure if he could continue being her friend if she didn’t sign it.

“I bullied her into signing that piece of paper to protect her,” he says.

Issa later attended a court hearing in Ringwood, supporting Rachael: “Her son saw me there, and that’s when they knew of my involvement.”

Assaad was convicted of intentionally and recklessly causing injury, and a magistrate placed him on a community corrections order for 12 months. That year, Rachael and Assaad divorced.

A few months later, Rachael warned Issa to be careful. She believed her ex-husband wanted to do something.

“I told her, like, he’s bluffing, to calm her down,” says Issa.

He didn’t believe Assaad was going to hurt him, but the thought did stay in his mind.

“I was kind of looking over my shoulder.”

‘The Bunnings man’

To Assaad, Issa was “a bastard” who needed to be dealt with. He didn’t want to do it himself, so he inquired about a hitman.

After making inquiries with a prominent crime family involved in a tobacco smuggling syndicate in Melbourne’s west, Assaad was introduced to Max*. The pair arranged to meet at the Bunnings car park in Craigieburn on May 21, 2020.

It was around 12.30pm on a Thursday. As DIYers and tradies loaded their cars and vans with supplies, Assaad and Max discussed the details of a plan to murder.

Is it better the death looked like an accident, or like the person just disappeared? How much would need to be paid in advance?

The pair talked for 30 minutes that cold May day, wrapped in big coats, hands buried in their pockets. Where once Assaad confided in Issa, now he confided in Max.

‘I don’t regret anything I did … I would do it again in a heartbeat … even though it came to me at a huge price.’

Assaad told Max Issa targeted rich women and that he “takes your wife” after which “the whole family breaks”. Assaad had been waiting for six years for this moment and said he wouldn’t feel relaxed until he took his revenge.

“He broke the whole family,” Assaad was recorded telling Max. “He’s a shifty arsehole.” He derided him as an American and called him “a big con man”.

A few weeks later Assaad contacted Max again, calling himself “the Bunnings man”. They organised to meet again, in the same car park, on June 14.

This time, Assad brought a blue folder filled with a brief of information on Issa: his ABN, a few pictures, the details of Issa’s new employer, various social media and other information.

A court later heard that Assaad handed Max $4950 in $50 notes – the deposit – and reassured him he was “1000 per cent sure; well, 2000 per cent sure” he wanted Issa dead.

They agreed Assaad would pay the rest of Max’s fee – which totalled $40,000 – after Max took a picture of Issa’s dead body with his driver’s licence held against his head.

Four days later police raided Assaad’s tobacco shop in Kilmore. Max, the man he trusted to exact his vengeance, was an undercover detective acting on a tip-off.

Keeping the sting secret

The whole case – detection, plot and arrest – was all carried out without Issa even knowing.

Soon after Assaad was taken into custody, Issa pulled into the concrete driveway of his northern suburbs home to find police outside his front door.

“When they identified themselves as detectives the first thing that came to my mind was, like, ‘Man, I didn’t know they sent you guys for unpaid parking tickets’,” Issa jokes.

Later, in a court hearing, Assaad’s lawyer said he was remorseful. But Issa says he never got an apology for what happened.

“I’m sitting in court for the first time hearing details of how I’m meant to be murdered … [and] the crazy part of this is that he cannot accept that his wife left him because he abused her,” says Issa.

“It had nothing to do with me. I always just happened to be the person who was along the journey.”

Silas Issa says his mental health and business has suffered, but he doesn’t regret intervening to help Rachael.Credit: Jason South

In December, Assaad was convicted of incitement to murder. Supreme Court Justice Michael Croucher sentenced him to five years with a non-parole period of 2½ years. Assaad has attended a bible group in prison.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get one like it again,” says Detective Acting Senior Sergeant Cameron Mitchell, from the now-disbanded anti-gangland Purana Taskforce.

The foiled hit was one of Purana’s last jobs. Mitchell says he was struck by the triangle between Assaad, Rachael and Issa, and how Assaad stewed for six years before attempting to organise the hit.

“Whilst I’d expect someone to move on after six years, [he] had very deep-seated beliefs and passion that wouldn’t allow him to move on.”

The court heard Assaad had initially conspired to have his son’s estranged wife killed, but later shifted his focus to Issa.

Coming to terms

Issa’s beliefs about God have changed.

“I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in divine love,” he says. “Even now, the word ‘God’, what does that mean? That’s just a word that’s been used and abused for thousands of years.”

Issa now works as an executive coach, training people and businesses in leadership, emotional intelligence, strategy and professional development.

The whole episode has damaged his business and his mental health, but he doesn’t regret intervening to help Rachael.

“I don’t regret anything I did. I don’t wish I didn’t help. I don’t wish that at all. I would do it again in a heartbeat … even though it came to me at a huge price.”

*Names have been changed for legal reasons.

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