Annette Sharp: Emergency services repeatedly called to check on Jock Zonfrillo

Emergency services conducted repeated welfare checks on celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo in the year before his death, according to a source.

Melbourne emergency services conducted repeated welfare checks on celebrity chef Jock Zonfrillo in the year before his death, a source has told this column.

A medical response unit had been called out on “a number of occasions” due to ongoing concerns for 46-year-old Zonfrillo’s wellbeing.

A recovering heroin addict, Zonfrillo was found dead in Melbourne’s “Little Italy” at Carlton’s Zagame’s House hotel at 2am on Monday, May 1.

Police attended the scene after being tipped off by an unidentified source.

Media later stated the tip-off had come from Zonfrillo’s concerned wife Lauren, who, or so it was reported, became concerned when her husband failed to follow a routine pattern of phone calls to his family. She and the couple’s two young children were in Italy’s capital, Rome, when the MasterChef star died.

Chef and MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo died last week.

An autopsy will now be conducted to determine the celebrity chef’s cause of death.

According to media reports, no drug paraphernalia was found at the scene.

Zagame House management last week repeatedly denied Zonfrillo — who had been forced to shut restaurants over the years and had a history of bankruptcy — died at the hotel.

The hotel is owned by wealthy brothers Bobby and Victor Zagame, the sons of hotelier Victor Zagame Sr, who died in 2017 leaving an impressive Victorian hotel dynasty to his entrepreneurial sons.

Zagame Sr made the family’s first fortune flogging liquor and poker machines, acquiring a bulging portfolio of pubs during an almost-five-decade career as a hotelier.

Among these were the Albion Charles Hotel in Northcote (Victor Sr’s first pub, bought 1971), the Matthew Flinders Hotel in Chadstone, Riversdale Hotel, Ballarat Hotel, Boronia Hotel, Caulfield Hotel (and associated MPD Steak Kitchen and Bar Rouge), Reservoir’s Edwardes Lake Hotel, the Berwick Springs Hotel and Skyways International Hotel Motel.

Jock Zonfrillo and wife Lauren. Picture: Facebook

Zonfrillo was staying at Zagame's House hotel in Carlton.

In 2018, the year after the family patriarch died, Zagame’s sons revealed plans to offload six hotels and divest themselves of the family’s gaming interests.

The Boronia and Edwardes Lake Hotel sold in 2021 for $24 million and $28 million apiece, while their Grand Hotel and Casino Resort in Vanuatu, which the family bought in 2001 with a consortium, is still on the market with an asking price of around $25 million.

Bobby and Victor Zagame also own luxury Melbourne car dealership Zagame Automotive, as well as commercial property interests and hospitality venues including Spice Market Bar.

They are longtime business associates of Melbourne property development family the Pellicanos, whose $4.5 billion empire was founded in 1967 by bricklaying brothers Frank and Nunzio.

Having co-owned a Gold Coast pub together, in 2019 the Zagames and Pellicanos bought Tewantin’s Poinciana Place Shopping Centre near Noosa for $17.3 million, buying it from former “Mean Machine” Olympic swimmer-turned-property developer Dean Stockwell.

The Zagames and Pellicanos were to have joined forces in a water theme park in Melbourne’s southeast, however the Zagames pulled out of the $100 million project, to have been called Zagame’s Wild Water Park, in 2020.

Prior to 2019 — when an $18 million makeover was unveiled — Zagame House was known less grandly as Carlton’s Downtowner.

Ownership of the Downtowner passed to the Zagames for around $10 million in 2004 after the hotel was forced into receiver’s hands when its previous owner, the financially embattled island of Nauru, went bust when the government, among other questionable investments, splurged on an overpriced Melbourne property portfolio.

Originally published as Annette Sharp: Emergency services repeatedly called to check on Jock Zonfrillo