Bound for Hollywood? Nick Martin assassin wants identity revealed to claim fame and turn his life into a movie

The sniper who assassinated Rebels bikie chief Nick Martin wants to be immortalised on film. The mercenary-turned-assassin is keen for a suppression order guarding his identity to be lifted so his made-for-Hollywood story can be put on the screen. The 39-year-old jailbird has been talking to an Australian production house about a bio-pic that chronicles his time working as a mercenary in the Middle East and documents events leading up to Martin’s death in December 2020. The production has been hamstrung by a suppression order that has kept the killer’s identity secret ever since he was arrested in early 2021. Police applied for the order because they believed he would be the target of a retribution attack for Martin’s death. A judge agreed the risk was too great and ordered a ban on any publication of his name or likeness. Information that subsequently came to light about Martin’s standing in the underworld suggests the chance of an eye-for-an-eye attack is less likely than people thought in the months after the Perth Motorplex shooting. By the time Martin sat down to watch the drag races that evening he was despised by many in his own club because they believed he was stealing membership dues. Rebels who worked on the one-time State president’s home were furious at getting paid a fraction of what they were promised. Still more were angry that the hulking bikie had seized a Harley Davidson from a well-liked member who had decided to quit the club. The gang’s growing distrust of Martin was put on the public record last year when senior Rebel Karl Labrook claimed Martin had been asked to step down as president just weeks before he was killed. David Pye, who is accused of paying the sniper to kill Martin, claimed Labrook had once said “I wish someone killed the c. . . earlier”, according to evidence in the Supreme Court heard this week. The Pye trial was also told that Comanchero heavyweight Mark Buddle once placed a $500,000 bounty on Martin. That reward was allegedly put up when Martin referred to Buddle as a “dog”. Pye’s lawyer, David Hallowes, told the court that exiled WA Comanchero Raymond Cilli had hired two masked gunmen to conduct surveillance on Martin with the view to killing him. The blockbuster trial is coming to an abrupt end on Wednesday, when Justice Joe McGrath will hear closing submissions. The case was scheduled to last four weeks but was cut short when Pye elected not to testify. The gritty evidence tendered in court and the sniper’s devil-may-care testimony have stoked yet more interest in the killer’s back story and put fires in the bellies of screen executives. Prison sources told The West Australian that the sniper talks openly about the reason he was in jail and appeared to have no problem with other inmates knowing his history. That account tallies with what the assassin told a court in May 2024. He claimed “everyone knows my identity” and also which prison he was being held in. “The suppression order only serves to cut my name out of the media — so I don’t oppose any reporting,” he said. The killer, who is serving 20 years for firing the single bullet from 365m that ended Martin’s life, shared hair-raising moments in his life when testifying at the Pye trial over the past fortnight. The electrician-turned-barista detailed his time in Iraq working for mercenary group Shadows of Hope, which provides protection to doctors working in war zones. He said he had lost count of how many people he had killed. A prison diary kept by the killer will likely inform any script that is written and the production will benefit from hours of footage of him indulging his love of adventure sports. He was a regular skydiver and in 2017 was filmed base jumping from a CBD office building in Perth. As a fresh-faced blue-eyed teenager, the contract killer wrote in his high school year book that he would most likely become “Australias (sic) most wanted/in jail by the age of 20”.