The Daniel Tarvij of August 2016 was an angry, aggressive man sitting on a significant debt owed to some not-very-nice people.
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In those days he hardly slept and couldn’t sit still. Addicted to drugs, he didn’t think twice about throwing his association with bikies into conversations that started and ended with foul-mouthed threats designed to intimidate.
It sits in stark contrast to the teary, blubbering 22-year-old who sat in the dock of Wollongong District Court on Friday listening to his beloved mother say, despite his shameful past, she was proud to call him her son.
“He’s not a bad person,” Irene Tapu said as she too fought back tears.
“He knows what he’s done is wrong. He knows he’s stuffed up and he’s so sorry. I’m a proud mum.”
Mrs Tapu has visited her son every week in jail since he was arrested last September while carrying a concealed gun down his pants in the middle of Crown Street.
She plans to continue visiting him for the remainder of the two year sentence he received in court on Thursday. The family will then move away from the area.
The 22-year-old carpenter’s involvement in serious crime came to the fore last year when he was unable to repay a $76,000 drug debt owed to the Lone Wolf outlaw motorcycle gang.
Tarvij turned to sourcing illegal guns for the club as a way to reduce how much he owed.
He had managed to get a 303 rifle, a 223 Remington rifle and a sawn-off .22 calibre rifle before he was arrested.
Tarvij was also charged with intimidation charges after police secretly recorded him threatening customers who owed him money for their own fixes.
“I swear to God I will chop you up into little pieces you f—king c—t,” Tarvij told one client, eliciting a laugh from the man and a few retaliatory threats.
In another exchange, Tarvij told a second client he knew “every single Lone Wolf” near where the person lived and to watch his back because he was “gonna get got”.
Tarvij will be released from jail in September 2018.
