Seated on orange leather with bottles of Candy’s fluorescent blue alcopop, Gee Up, in hand, the two thirty-somethings – Portelli is 34, Candy is 33 – discuss their friendship and how they’ve made millions building business empires turbo-charged by fast cars and social media hype.

Portelli’s lottery business, LMCT+, turns over $60m a year (according to him).

Candy’s ventures – the alcopop, snorkel devices to skol them with and a business wrapping cars in plastic – have been enough to buy him a $3m mansion backing on to one of those same Gold Coast canals.

But today, this masthead can reveal some of the secrets behind the pair’s glossy social media feeds full of fast cars, scantily clad women and fancy houses.

Both Portelli and Candy were born in Melbourne in 1989 – Portelli hails from St Albans in Melbourne’s west.

Watch the video below to see how Portelli and Candy are connected.

Candy, whose real last name is Williams, comes from Langwarrin, a tiny suburb on the south-eastern outskirts of the city.

They’ve been known to police as hoons for years – pulled over for speeding, doing burnouts and driving while suspended – and still love to show off some burning rubber on their TikTok feeds.

And hoonfluencer Candy has had what could have been a much more serious brush with the law.

In 2020 he was fined $3000, but escaped conviction, on a charge of attempting to commit an indictable offence.

The charge was laid in 2019 after he was swept up by cops as part of Operation Contract, an investigation into insurance fraud.

Organisers of the scam staged fake accidents involving expensive vehicles in order to claim lucrative insurance payouts.

Tow-truck operator Ahmed Abou Eid received a two-year community corrections order in December 2021 for his part in masterminding 15 fake crashes between 2014 and 2017.

Sources say Candy wasn’t involved in organising the fraud ring but was one of the car owners in on the giggle, with the scammers staging an accident using his vehicle.

Mr Candy said this week that someone who planned to buy the car crashed it before he received the money for the vehicle. A dispute arose when he put in an insurance claim.

“I had a lot of bad media from a young age, I was hooning when I was 21,” he said.

But he added he had moved on. He was now a father, running a business supplying and modifying cars which he supplied to Mr Portelli’s LMCT+ business.

“I love what I do, I find a car, do it up and modify it,” he said.

“Adrian (Portelli) has good access to new cars but I find the HSVs because you can’t get them new. I look on Gumtree, marketplace, it’s getting hard to find clean Commodores, I had to get a car yesterday from WA.”

Candy and his wife, OnlyFans model Anita Cassin, escaped Melbourne for the Gold Coast in September 2020 – he blamed Victoria’s stiff lockdowns and harassment from cops for the move.

But trouble followed him north – even before he was released from Covid quarantine he was arrested by Queensland police on a warrant for doing a burnout at a Gold Coast car show in 2019.

Then, in May 2021, cops busted in the door of his Gold Coast mansion as part of a broader investigation and charged him with possession of Tramadol and CBD oil.

Both cases amounted to little at court – the hooning charges got him a $2000 fine, without conviction, in 2021 while police dropped the drugs allegations.

Portelli faces investigations in Victoria and South Australia into the legality of his lottery business, LMCT+, which gives away cars, luxury homes and cash.

LMCT+ is set up as a “buyers club”, where members get discounts on purchases from retailers in return for a monthly fee of up to $100.

The more you pay the bigger the discounts … and the more entries you get into Portelli’s regular prize draws.

This structure is enough to squeeze it into a lightly regulated category of gambling offerings called “trade promotions”.

LMCT+ is not alone – there are a number of competitors running similar businesses.

Sitting on that boat alongside Candy, Portelli says he came up with the idea after getting told off by a gambling regulator for trying to give away cars.

“We change everything, get rid of the word raffle from everywhere,” he says in a video.

“And it’s not a loophole but yeah, it’s a legal way to give away a car.

“And that’s how the whole industry started.”

The pair are tight and Candy says they work well together, although it took him years to get Portelli on board.

“So when we came together, it was literally like game over,” he says in the video.

In June, Portelli boasted he had bought Candy’s $3m waterfront mansion.

However, property records show that the home still belongs to Candy and Cassin.

It’s not the only property deal Portelli has been involved in that isn’t quite as advertised.

In April, Portelli splashed across Melbourne’s media by craning a McLaren sports car 57 floors up into a new $39m penthouse that he claimed to have bought.

But property records show the apartment in the Sapphire by the Gardens development was yet to reach settlement - that’s expected next year once a fitout was completed.

Relaxing on the back of the boat, Portelli says the purchase is not as it appears but “a big deal” related to a group he’s part of that holds the rights to run a Shangri-La luxury hotel in the other tower of the development.

“So what you see in the media isn’t entirely true, but we’ll just run with it to get the publicity,” he says in the video.

Mr Portelli spoke to this masthead over the phone this week, where he defended his business.

He said the company had received complaints before but none had been verified.

“It’s not the first of its kind. Simply, people don’t understand the business model,” he said.

Mr Portelli said “bring it on” when asked about regulators’ inquiries, saying he had hired a team of lawyers to ensure he was following the letter of the law.

He was reluctant to say how many people had signed up as members of his buyers’ club, which he insisted was not a raffle.

“It’s different, it’s a trade promotion, Maccas do the same thing with their Monopoly game and Woolies do it with ooshies, it’s to drive customers to the store,” he said.

Mr Portelli said he was still able to get that McLaren out of the apartment by crane, the same way it went in.

He said he had reluctantly become the face of his business to increase its reach through his 211,000 Instagram followers.

Mr Portelli posts pictures of luxury cars, jetskis and his travels across Europe.

“Australian culture is against anyone with wealth, in the United States its glorified,” he said.

“Cars are my passion, growing up, I always wanted fast, high end cars.”

Sources say he’s put down a deposit but doesn’t have to cough up the full lid until the megaflat is fitted out, some time next year.

Relaxing on the back of the yacht, Portelli says the purchase is not as it appears but “a big deal” related to a group he’s part of that holds the rights to run a Shangri La luxury hotel in the other tower of the development.

“So what you see in the media isn’t entirely true, but we’ll just run with it to get the publicity,” he says

If the deal falls through, he may struggle to get the car out again.

The crane he used to bring the car in was part of the building’s construction, and is long gone.