Finks heavy loses fight for parole
A FORMER member of the notorious Finks Terror Team once labelled a “charming psychopath” will spend another year in jail after taking the parole board to court.
Tama Lewis, otherwise known as Darren Watson, hauled the board before the Supreme Court arguing it was wrong in rejecting his parole in May last year.
Lewis was a key player in the Finks’ grip on the Glitter Strip in 2012, helping the club go from minor criminal offences to one of the most feared gangs in the city, the Bulletin reported at the time.
The former nightclub bouncer, who boasted on social media he earned $250,000 a year as a stand-over man, used the slogan: “Don’t play games with the ref, remember I make the rules.’’
Lewis is in Borallon prison near Ipswich serving 10 years, six months and 22 days for multiple sentences.
The 36-year-old was last jailed on charges of assault occasioning bodily harm (domestic violence), threatening violence and a drug offence. He was able to apply for parole in November 2020.
In a judicial review of his parole decision, Lewis argued the board failed to take into account the pandemic’s impact on programs in jail, “took irrelevant considerations into account” and disregarded others, as well as imposing a view he was a risk without providing specifics.
But Lewis couldn’t charm the Supreme Court, which dismissed the application, ruling no error had been made. The one-time Terror Team member was ordered to pay costs.
Lewis summed up his case – and “at the same time discloses why his application should not be granted” – in one sentence, Justice Glenn Martin wrote in his judgment.
“He (Lewis) says: ‘I submit that I should have been granted parole and therefore ask the court to order that the board look at my application again with all of the relevant material I have provided that the board may have not been aware of and have my application reconsidered,” the judgment said.
“It is not an error for a decision maker to fail to take into account material which it did not have before it.
“There may be material upon which the board could reach a different view, but a review … is to determine whether or not an error has occurred in the reasoning of the decision maker and not to remake the decision.”
According to 2012 reports, Lewis was described in legal circles as the “charming psychopath”.
At the time he had the word “terror” tattooed on one arm, and “team” on the other, and once kicked a security door out of its frame during a home invasion in 2009.
In February 2012, he was jailed in the Supreme Court on serious drug charges after supplying an undercover cop with more than $90,000 worth of ecstasy and speed, and trafficking methamphetamines and MDMA.
He was arrested three years earlier after the covert Australian Crime Commission investigation Operation Creed into the Finks motorcycle and the drug trade.
Lewis’s antics were detailed in a dossier filed to the Supreme Court in 2012.
He bragged about offloading 10,000 ecstasy pills in the lead-up to New Year’s Eve celebrations but said he was getting “too hot” with police so other associates would be taking over his business.
Lewis will walk free from jail on August 26, 2022.