‘There is no code of silence’: How a Perth sniper shattered the bikie myth

February 21, 2026 — 2:00am

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The feed flickered in the back of an unmarked police surveillance van sitting on an innocuous suburban street south of Perth.

For the detectives of Taskforce Ravello, the mission had become an obsession: find the ghost who pulled the trigger at the Kwinana Motorplex on December 12, 2020 and killing the tattooed patriarch of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang, Nick Martin.

They knew the shot was too clean, too professional for the average street thug. They were looking for a specialist.

Then, a figure appeared on the screen – lean, disciplined, moving with a calculated gait that didn’t match the heavy-set swagger of the bikies usually frequenting the property. As the man stepped toward the front door of David Pye’s home, the air in the van must have sharpened.

Inside the house, the walls were “bugged”, the very air saturated with invisible police ears.

The watchers saw a stranger; the listeners heard the rustle of a Woolworths bag. They didn’t know yet that the bag contained the blood money for an assassination – $150,000 in cold, hard cash.

They only knew that the man they were watching was the bridge between a sniper’s nest and the man they believed had ordered the hit.

It was the moment the hunt for a killer collided with the downfall of a kingpin.

And it was this man’s evidence, given to a packed Perth court last year from behind a thick layer of protective bullet-proof glass,........

© WA Today