“You’re a f***ing show pony,” one man tells Mehajer in the home video.

Another chimes in: “You know the bikies might ring ya. When you hear threats, ‘I’m coming after ya’, why would you do such a silly thing?”

The film — which Mehajer claims he willingly took part in as a “stunt” — is one of two new recordings that offer a glimpse into the darker side of the sacked deputy mayor of Auburn’s world of fast cars, glamorous women and one long, seemingly carefree party.

After his lavish, if short-lived, wedding to his bride Aysha Learmonth closed whole streets in Lidcombe on August 15, 2015, rocketing him into the limelight, many were quick to dismiss Mehajer as nothing more than an incompetent wannabe.

However he has been dogged ever since by allegations of controversial business deals, mounting debts, demands for cash and a nasty temper, raising the question of whether there is more to 31-year-old Mehajer than meets the eye.

The latest video, filmed on an unknown date at an unknown location, is difficult to interpret.

But it captures one man questioning Mehajer about how he had spoken to a friend.

Mehajer is berated for pursuing the limelight before a man storms from the room. Another asks Mehajer why he would do such a thing: “You know how big you are, how much the media wants you.”

The second recording is a grovelling phone call from Mehajer apologising for a tirade of abuse he unleashed against an employee at Queen St Customs car repairs and hire in Revesby, in Sydney’s southwest, after a disagreement over Mehajer’s Ferrari.

In the original call, Salim told the employee: “You’re a Shia dog, you motherf***er. Watch if I don’t do it to ya, you son of a bitch. Your mum’s going to get f***ing raped today you f***ing dog.”

A few days later a subdued Mehajer was back on the phone, this time to the man’s boss, identified as Mohammed, making a softly spoken apology.

During the 12-minute call, Mohammed asks: “What’s wrong with ya?” Mehajer tells the man: “Call me mental, call me diseased, I wasn’t in my own mind state. I actually qualify with an illness.”

Mohammed tells him, “Stop taking what you’re taking bro”, to which Salim asks: “What am I taking?”

Mohammed tells him: “I don’t know, you just said you’re not in your right mind.”

In an apparent indication of just how much anger Mehajer has stirred up, Mohammed warns him “20 carloads” of men had gone out looking for him the night before.

He says: “We went to your f***ing office at 9pm last night. What has this come to? You’re not a kid. I am a businessman.”

Ahmed, the man Mehajer abused, is also put on the line. Mehajer tells him: “I said to Mohammed I sent you a message bro. I said ‘I’m in the wrong’ and I actually say that now, record this, I’ll send you a text, put it in writing, I am in the wrong, whatever.”

Ahmed then confronts Mehajer about swearing about his mother.

Mehajer replies: “Bro, let me finish all right, I shouldn’t have. I swear on my own mum then — slap me in the face, spit on me, no worries. Swear at me back.”

When asked to explain what was happening in the video, Mehajer claimed he and Queen St Customs were paid $70,000 to produce the video as a “stunt”.

He said he had a contract proving the payment, but was out of the office and could not provide it.

“For my association with bikies and alike, I cannot comment further,” he said in an email.

“I’m a successful businessman and let’s keep it at that.”

Before his wedding caused such a stir, any mention of Mehajer would have elicited little response outside Auburn or Lidcombe, in Sydney’s inner west, where he had cultivated a reputation as a successful property developer, councillor and respectable businessman.

So is Mehajer nothing but a “show pony”, as his cronies claim?

That is something police are looking into. For several months, the Financial Crimes Squad has been pulling apart Mehajer’s life, while other police teams are working on simultaneous investigations.

This includes scrutiny of funding for early property developments in southwest Sydney, where he started as a builder in his early 20s.

New police intelligence is understood to suggest Mehajer is now in debt to bikies, hardly conducive to the desired image of a man who once revealed aspirations to be prime minister.

So who is the real man behind the persona and how has he built his carefully sculpted reputation?

LOOKS

HIS teeth are blindingly white, forehead shiny and taut. His eyebrows are perfectly groomed (although for those eager to know, Mehajer announced on Instagram this month that his lavish brows are free from a beautician’s intervention).

While Mehajer may be fighting myriad legal battles and have creditors nipping at his heels, that is no reason to let standards slip.

He is rarely seen in public dressed in anything other than a slick suit or without every hair carefully gelled into place.

To Mehajer, appearance is everything. Even on November 8, as a dozen police prepared to turn his house upside down, he seemed more concerned about walking into the public eye looking his best.

Officers were on the doorstep of his sprawling suburban mansion, where the doorknobs are branded with crowns, holding a search warrant. They were investigating whether Mehajer had perverted the course of justice when he was involved in a car crash while on his way to Downing Centre Local Court to answer allegations of assaulting a taxi driver outside the Star Casino, both claims he denies.

As police filed through his home, taking away computers, hard drives and documents, they found Mehajer dressed only in a towel. Mehajer told bemused detectives he needed a suit.

He needed to tame his hair before stepping through his front door, where the media would be waiting.

FRIENDSHIPS

WHEN Mehajer first hit the headlines, it was easier to recognise faces in the crowd at his opulent wedding than it was to identify the now notorious groom.

After helicopters touched down in Lidcombe’s Phillips Park, several groomsmen strutted down a rolled-out red carpet.

Among them was former Brothers 4 Life gang member Tamim Chandab, who survived being shot in the back at the height of a gang war in 2013.

Also among the guests was standover man Waled “Wally” Elriche, coined Australia’s “main debt collector”.

In the weeks following, Elriche became Mehajer’s bodyguard, shadowing him around the streets of Auburn.

Mehajer was also seen getting into a car with B4L heavy hitter Omar Ajaj, who also survived being shot at in 2013.

Other photos surfaced of Mehajer with groomsman Ahmed Zaoud, a convicted criminal and former member of the now-defunct street gang the Muslim Brotherhood Movement, investigated for everything from cocaine supply to illegal fireworks.

Why was a publicly elected official mixing with underworld figures?

“He was a nobody,” one detective said of Mehajer’s pre-married life.

But after the wedding, he wasn’t only on the public’s radar. Police started to notice him too. The number of intelligence reports began to increase. He turned up in cars driven by men targeted by the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad.

A sign that some of his friendships were beginning to buckle under the intense media scrutiny came when MEOCS officers pulled over Elriche’s car and noticed he was sporting a black eye. They asked him how his mate Salim was. Elriche wasn’t amused, informing the officers the friendship had soured.

Elriche is currently in jail after police allegedly found a handgun at his Auburn home last year.

Most recently Salim has been associated with accused murderer Ahmed Jaghbir, appointed this year as a director of Mehajer’s new wedding planning business.

Jaghbir has been charged over the gangland murder of Kemel “Blackie” Barakat on March 10. An electrician by trade, he is accused of cutting a spare key to Barakat’s unit and handing it over to his enemies during a violent feud between two notorious crime families.

Mehajer was at Jaghbir’s wedding in September. The pair were also photographed on holidays in the US earlier this year. And, despite Mehajer’s long list of associates, it is difficult to find anyone willing to speak on the record about him.

Former classmates from Arthur Phillip High School remembered him as a “funny, smart guy who was always smiling”. Yet they also feared the repercussions of speaking publicly.

“I used to like him but he has changed a lot,” a former friend said.

“I don’t really want to associate with Salim any more, so I and some of my high school friends have even unfriended him on Facebook.”

One friend who has swung to his defence is Joe Rifai. In 2016, Mehajer was fighting allegations he did not declare his pecuniary interests properly and used his position on Auburn City Council to vote on decisions that would increase the value of his property significantly.

Mr Rifai said he had worked with Mehajer through his not-for-profit organisation the Australian Community Association.

He told the court: “Salim has attracted a lot of members into this organisation. Mainly targeting the youth that look up to him. Salim provides lectures on a monthly basis as he attempts to lead by example.”

When an attempt was made to call the phone numbers listed for the association, one was disconnected and another went unanswered. Its website is “under construction”.

Mehajer’s guilty convictions for breaching the local government act were overturned in February, 2016. However the entire council was sacked in the same year, ahead of an inquiry into the council’s development decisions.

FAMILY

BEFORE his lavish wedding, Mehajer sent out an informal email to his fellow councillors in November, 2013, inviting them to join him at a smaller Islamic ceremony.

Mehajer was about to marry small-town beautician April Amelia Learmonth, who had changed her name to Aysha. The modest ceremony would be a small affair, in the Islamic tradition.

The big wedding would be rolled out after Mehajer’s father Mohamed — the man in whose footsteps he followed — was freed from jail in mid-2015.

Mehajer Sr was a successful and highly regarded property developer. He and wife Amal moved to Australia from Lebanon and brought up eight children, instilling in them the importance of a good education.

“His children are all either at university, have graduated from university or, in the case of the youngest, at high school,” a judge remarked in 2013.

“He has led his family in a manner of which all of us would be proud.”

But in 2008, Mehajer Sr had slipped up. He had to pay out a large loan with Suncorp but needed another loan to do so. He used false documents that suggested he had developments planned when they weren’t to bolster a $3 million loan application to National Australia Bank. He then threw in a $2000 bribe to a bank employee to help get the loan through.

It didn’t work.

In 2013, he was sentenced to 3½ years in jail, reduced to 18 months on appeal.

In late-2016, he and his wife declared bankruptcy as the tax office chased them over a $10 million debt.

The fact Salim was willing to put his wedding on hold so his father could be by his side is testament to the value Mehajer places on family.

His sisters have steadily built their profiles as their brother courted controversy.

One was crowned Miss Lebanon Australia in 2016, another is studying law and a third is already admitted as a lawyer. Both have recently married. Aisha Mehajer to Sam Sayour, the nephew of nightclub baron John Ibrahim, younger sister Sanaa Mehajer to Nomads bikie boss Moudi Tajjour last weekend.

Salim Mehajer graduated with a bachelor of housing from Western Sydney University in 2010 and forged a career path in line with his father’s.

He has been a licensed builder since 2007, at the age of 21, when he started making inroads in Auburn’s construction industry.

Former Auburn councillor Irene Simms, who went on to become one of Mehajer’s most vocal critics, remembers crossing the developer in 2009. He was developing a townhouse site in Berala and neighbours had complained about construction being carried out on a Sunday.

Council turned up and the workmen left, only to return a short time later.

“It wasn’t an ignorance of the law, it was defiance of the law,” she said. Three years later, Ms Simms was sitting across from Mehajer in the Auburn City Council chamber. He was elected in 2012 after an unsuccessful bid at a state seat.

VIOLENT TEMPER

MEHAJER met his wife-to-be April Amelia Learmonth years earlier. As their relationship progressed, her appearance transformed. From a freckled, shy, young woman she became a Lebanese princess living in a suburban fortress under the name Aysha Mehajer.

When he gave a bizarre interview to Channel 9, declaring his dream to be prime minister one day, Aysha stood a metre behind him at his instruction.

Then suddenly she was nowhere to be seen. Before the marriage reached its one-year anniversary it had imploded.

After Aysha left the Lidcombe mansion, it was alleged Mehajer turned up at her relative’s house near Wollongong, banging on a window, demanding to see his then-wife. It emerged during an apprehended violence order hearing that Mehajer allegedly inundated Aysha with up to 70 calls a day and put a tracking device on her car.

“I’m looking over my shoulder constantly and do not know what he is capable of,” Aysha told the court, which granted the AVO.

Mehajer’s propensity for violence has been downplayed by underworld figures, who refer to him as a wannabe who talks the talk but avoids confrontation.

Then came an abusive video he sent to Aysha that was leaked. In it he threatened to rape her mother and her father.

“Aysha, I hope you die you slut,” he said in the video, aired on A Current Affair in August last year.

Suddenly the public had an insight into Mehajer’s explosive temper. It was difficult to see how he could play down the call. But in a bizarre YouTube video released on Christmas Eve, Mehajer did just that.

During the 14-minute video, in which former radio host and auctioneer Dale Walker interviews Mehajer, he dismisses the phone call as a one-off.

“The incident only ever occurred once and it was in the heat of the moment,” Mehajer tells Walker.

Mehajer, who is now living at a Vaucluse mansion that rents for $3000 a week, is not asked about his arrest on November 20 for allegedly stalking Aysha outside her Kingsgrove house in the middle of the night.

Just days earlier he sat in Sutherland Local Court and claimed his separation from Aysha was just a stunt for the media.

“She wants to get out of the media and she acts like she is not with me but she is with me,” he said.

This is despite him posting pictures of Constance Siaflas on Instagram and claiming to be “religiously married” to her.