On October 5, underworld figure Mick Gatto offered an unsolicited proposition to veteran Melbourne architect Joseph Toscano.
Toscano was told he could sit down with the underworld figure to resolve the architect’s commercial dispute with building company Cobolt Constructions, which Gatto claimed to be representing.
But if Toscano wasn’t interested in this meeting, he could face trouble caused by the man infamously caught up in Melbourne’s gangland wars.
“We can cause you grief,” Gatto told Toscano. “And I know you have enough grief in your life already.”
Gatto hinted he was capable of preventing other building companies from completing Toscano’s Melbourne inner-city apartment block development.
“I can stop anyone doing anything, mate. And I say that respectfully, I don’t want to be a smarty,” he says in a record of the conversation.
It is often reported that Gatto is the last man standing from Melbourne’s bloody gangland wars, but it is less well known he is still going strong in the face of repeated attempts from various authorities to curb his ubiquitous role in the construction industry.
Gatto has long cast a shadow over Melbourne’s construction industry as a self-styled “mediator and arbitrator”, making the occasional entry into the NSW sector as well.
The fact he is still operating, along with the rare glimpse of how he plies his trade, illustrates how certain construction industry power structures have not only withstood repeated attempts at reform but continue to...
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