Construction sector probe likely to put Mick Gatto back in the spotlight

Mick Gatto isn't worried about the upcoming royal commission into Victoria's building industry.

"A royal commission don't bother me," he confidently declared on Karl Stefanovic's podcast in late July, days before Ben Carroll announced the inquiry in his first move as Victoria's new premier.

"They'll spend another $100 million, it'll be a witch hunt … and they'll come up with nothing, like they have in the past," Mr Gatto casually predicted.

The upcoming royal commission will investigate serious allegations of wrongdoing on major public building sites.

They include accusations that bikies and organised crime figures infiltrated both the once-powerful construction union, the CFMEU, and building companies working on taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects under the Victorian government's Big Build.

The cost to taxpayers of all this alleged corruption has been reported at $15 billion, a figure disputed by the former premier Jacinta Allan.

Barrister Geoffrey Watson SC is the man behind that whopping estimate.

He investigated the industry for the CFMEU's administrator and wrote a report that also put Mr Gatto firmly in the spotlight.

In his report, Mr Watson said that Mr Gatto, who runs a mediation business in the construction industry, had previously been referred to during civil proceedings as a "standover man" and by the National Crime Authority as "the head of a criminal network" — allegations Mr Gatto has previously denied.

Mr Watson reported Mr Gatto had so much influence over the CFMEU in Victoria that he had the power to shut down building sites.

"Everybody knows what he has been doing," the barrister wrote, in his report tabled at a Queensland inquiry into the CFMEU.

"Yet he seems to survive."

An unfair target with a colourful past, Mr Gatto claims

However, he is again facing scrutiny.

In June, Mr Gatto and his wife were arrested at their Mount Martha home was searched by police investigating the building industry.

They seized computers and phones, and the couple was released without charge, with Gatto later characterising the raid as an information-gathering exercise that came up with zero.

This is the sort of pressure most people would find seriously stressful to face publicly.

But Mr Gatto, a former heavyweight boxer, appeared unfazed on a video recording of the former Today host's podcast.

Wearing a long gold chain and a black knitted jumper, the 71-year-old's voice was steady as he dismissed Mr Watson's investigation.

"Ninety-five per cent of that report, you can rip it up and throw it in the bin," he said.

"It's completely nonsense and in time, it'll all come out that it is nonsense."

He reckons he has been unfairly targeted because of his colourful past.

That past includes surviving Melbourne's gangland wars in the early 2000s — and being acquitted of a murder charge of his own — when a killing spree broke out in the city's underworld.

Mr Gatto describes himself as someone who was on the periphery of the gangland wars — someone who knew the key players but wasn't one himself.

He rose to national prominence when he was portrayed as a character in the hugely popular Underbelly TV series.

His wife Cheryl Gatto told a defamation trial against the ABC in 2020 that her husband had become so famous that he was routinely asked for selfies when they were out dining.

"I've mentioned to him a couple of times, 'I think you're more recognisable than the Prime Minister," she said in Victoria's Supreme Court.

Mr Gatto declined an interview request from the ABC and did not respond to written questions.

But he told Mr Stefanovic he knows that a high profile comes with scrutiny.

"Honestly mate, I don't do the wrong thing," he declared.

"I've been under the microscope all my life. I know that I'm looked at all the time.

"My phone is bugged. I know all that."

It's widely expected that this upcoming royal commission will probe, amongst other things, whether Mr Watson's allegations about Mr Gatto's work in the construction sector — or Mr Gatto's denials — are correct.

At this stage, neither man is blinking.

The 'Devil of South Melbourne'

Mick Gatto says he became a thief at a very young age.

In his book I, Mick Gatto, he explained that Turkish and Greek clubs near his childhood home in Cecil Street, South Melbourne, had pinball machines rigged for illegal gambling.

"Once I discovered those machines (I was probably six or seven) I was hooked," Mr Gatto remembered.

"I used to do anything to find money to play them: beg, borrow and steal."

The stealing he described was prolific.

He stole from his brother, from visitors to his family home and even from the firefighters at the station next door.

"We used to break fire alarms or call from a phone box, and when they responded to the alarm we'd go in and take the money from their mess hall," he recalled.

At school, Mr Gatto also found trouble.

He was expelled twice and left school at 13, but one former classmate told the ABC that while teachers found Mr Gatto a "handful", he was a "friendly" student who wasn't involved in fights.

Others didn't think so highly of him, with Mr Gatto saying old women in his neighbourhood took to calling him "the devil of South Melbourne".

Run-ins with the police were common.

As Mr Gatto grew older, he wrote that he became involved in more serious gambling and burglaries.

A job at a golf club led to seven months in prison from December 1982, with Mr Gatto missing the birth of his daughter.

That time inside, he said, turned him off robberies.

But his love of a punt and involvement in gambling remained.

In Melbourne's illegal gambling dens from the 1970s to early 1990s, Mr Gatto thrived.

Above gyms and restaurants, with code words and gamblers in the know, games were played through to the early hours of the morning, often with huge money on the table.

"Games would open and close, depending on money, police raids and different partnerships," Mr Gatto explained in his autobiography.

"I made millions — and gambled away just as much."

It was from this era that Mr Gatto said he made a wide network of contacts, including underworld figures who would later be key players in the gangland wars.

Mr Gatto survives a killing spree that shocked Melbourne

Many see the 1998 murder of standover man Alphonse Gangitano — who was also known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street — as the start of the gangland wars.

Over nearly a decade, more than 30 men were killed. Mr Gatto knew many of the victims. And the killers.

He blamed the gangland wars on the paranoia of drug dealers who he said were using too much of their own product.

"The main reason I lived was that I had had nothing whatsoever to do with drugs," Mr Gatto wrote in his autobiography.

Police and journalists at the time named Mr Gatto as a member of the so-called Carlton Crew, whose members included Gangitano, Lewis Moran and sons Jason and Mark, as well as Mario Condello and Graham Kinniburgh.

All but Mr Gatto would lose their lives.

Mr Gatto denied such a group existed.

"This group and the term were invented by a journalist or the police to try to show there were two factions fighting each other, that just wasn't the case," Mr Gatto wrote in 2009.

But he acknowledges he did have friendships and connections with all these men.

Condello — who was charged with conspiracy to murder Carl Williams and was named in court by police as a man with connections to the Italian mafia — was a business partner of Mr Gatto's in an illegal bookmaking operation in the 90s.

Gangitano was a childhood friend who Mr Gatto said he partied with as a young man.

"Towards the end Alphonse was went off the rails a bit — he was just mad," Mr Gatto remembered.

Kinniburgh and Lewis Moran, he said, he'd known since his teenage years — he was so close to Kinniburgh he called him "pa".

Another key player Mr Gatto said he met through illegal gambling was Carl Williams.

"He used to come in, have a couple of bets, do his money and we'd give him a cab fare to get home," Mr Gatto recalled.

Williams became a major drug dealer who was eventually convicted of four murders before he was bashed to death inside Barwon Prison in 2010.

Mr Gatto was also friends with the hitman Andrew Veniamin, an ally of Williams, before the pair had a dispute and Mr Gatto shot Veniamin dead in 2004.

He was charged with murder but gave evidence in his trial that Veniamin was shot in self-defence when they wrestled over a gun that Veniamin produced.

Mr Gatto was acquitted.

He revealed after the trial that the jury had not been told he had a body bag in his car at the time of the shooting, along with some bullets.

"I realise not every bloke has a body bag in his boot, but it was no big deal to me," he wrote in his book.

He said Condello was involved in a funeral parlour and gave him the bag on a whim and it sat in his boot for months.

He said the bullets had fallen out of a friend's gun many weeks before.

These details, he said, had been ruled inadmissible in his trial "for some reason".

Mr Gatto has been asked about his connections to gangland figures in the years since.

He was questioned about his friendship with Veniamin during the defamation case he lost against the ABC, telling the court he had all sorts of friends.

"It is always handy to know people around Australia, which I do," he said.

Mediation work labelled an extortion model

It's this history that likely weighs on people in the construction industry when they receive a call from Mick Gatto.

"Oh, look, there's no doubt about that, you know, the reputation helps. Of course it does," he told the ABC's 7.30 program in 2014 when discussing his mediation work.

However, he insisted he didn't use threats.

"I don't believe in standing over anyone. I don't believe in being aggressive with anyone."

It was a position he reiterated in an interview with Jaqui Felgate on 3AW earlier this year.

Most of his work, he said, was sorting out disputes between construction companies and the militant CFMEU, ranging from issues on sites to superannuation not being paid.

"A lot of builders are intimidated by the unions," Mr Gatto told Felgate.

"They pay me a retainer. Any union issues they refer it to me, they don't lose productivity, their jobs don't stop."

One construction business owner who was paying Mr Gatto and spoke to the ABC anonymously in order to be frank, said Mr Gatto was a pure professional when he mediated several disputes his company had with the CFMEU.

"He's genuinely done a lot of work and he does it through his contacts in the industry," they said.

But Mr Watson disagrees.

In one phone call referenced in his report and aired by Channel Nine, Mr Gatto was heard telling a developer, "We can cause you grief".

"I know you've got enough grief in your life already," Mr Gatto went on to say.

Mr Gatto later said he called the developer on behalf of a builder because subcontractors weren't being paid, and it wasn't a threat.

CFMEU investigator Geoffrey Watson alleges along with threats, Mr Gatto has been colluding with the CFMEU to create disputes and "extort" builders.

The "Gatto extortion model", Watson wrote, involved "demanding money from contractors under the threat that, unless a payment was made, the CFMEU would raise an industrial issue and close a building site".

Given closing a site could cost builders up to $1 million a day or send them into bankruptcy, they often paid up.

In recent years, Mr Watson estimates Mr Gatto has been making at least $5 million a year from more than a dozen builders on his books.

Some of the builders on Mr Gatto's payroll include those who've done work on Big Build projects.

It's likely the upcoming royal commission will probe whether taxpayer money has been flowing to Mr Gatto as a result.

The close relationships the royal commission is expected to probe

Mick Gatto has always said relationships are at the heart of his mediation business.

One source told the ABC they would go to see Mr Gatto at the restaurant Villa Romana on Lygon Street, where Mr Gatto w