The house that Mick Gatto built
The underworld's favourite industrial mediator has a sideline in private credit.
The Dux, an apartment building in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, seems much like any other mid-rise development in the hipster haven. It has 30-odd apartments, an adjacent park, proximity to a train station and a troubled construction history where the developer ran out of money. So far, so normal.
But what's unusual about the building is the identity of the lender to whom developer Paul Thorneycroft turned to finish it off: underworld identity and CFMEU go-between Mick Gatto. How's that for private credit?
Gatto has variously been described as an industrial mediator, a standover man (which he denies), a killer (true – it was self-defence) and one of the last survivors of the Carlton Crew, a bunch of jovial fellas who hung out at Italian restaurants on Lygon Street during the gangland war of the early 2000s.
Since then, Gatto has reinvented himself as a sort of kindly uncle figure, complete with an autism charity he runs with wife Cheryl, and made heaps of money.
