I don't think I'm a bad person, says Mick gatto as he launches his memoirs

MICK Gatto is in control. Who else can park in a no-standing zone in Lygon St in peak hour for two hours - and not get a ticket?

Mick Gatto signs books for a crowd of guests. Picture: David Caird

MICK Gatto is in control. Who else can park in a no-standing zone in Lygon St in peak hour for two hours - and not get a ticket?

Who else can combine a lavender, fine-wool knit zipped to the chin under a charcoal pinstripe suit - and get away with it?

His tan suggests a lazy week on a beach.

His teeth sparkle in competition with the big rocks on the ring fingers of both paws.

Upstairs in a deserted restaurant, he puffs on a Cohiba cigar, his imposing bulk momentarily still.

He is removed from the flurry of kisses he always inspires in this part of town.

He explains that he is "travelling all right".

Forget the underworld reputation, he says: "It's all bull----.

"There's no violence ever and if there was, there would be charges, I promise you, because I'm under the microscope so much.

"I scratch my backside in the wrong place and it's on the front page of the newspapers."

He has a crane business that boasts blue-chip clients, a corporate mediation business that keeps growing. The odd misplaced pronoun aside, everything is in place, it seems.

Even the punt - a compulsion since childhood - has been kind of late.

"I don't think I'm a bad person," Gatto declares, pointing his cigar for emphasis. "It's not so much that I try to do the right thing. I do the right thing."

But Gatto, 54, concedes to a few demons.

Perhaps his new book I, Mick Gatto has prompted a confessional bent.

For one, Gatto still thinks about the body on the ground and the buzzing in his ears.

He sees the blood splatter.

He hears the gurgling that would slow to a death rattle - and then stop. The vision comes to him in bed sometimes.

Yes, Andrew "Benji" Veniamin's death in 2004 haunts Gatto.

Veniamin, he says, was "Australia's busiest hit man" who had popped his own friends.

He was "jealous", "aggressive" and "ambitious". But this isn't why Gatto shot him three times.

Gatto would beat the murder charge, claiming self-defence after Veniamin unexpectedly pulled a gun.

No time to even draw the gun he himself was carrying for protection, he argued.

Gatto dreaded the prospect of a jail stretch.

There were panic attacks. He woke up one night and could not breathe. For a moment, he thought Veniamin's ghost had materialised to throttle him.

Gatto's barrister advised him that a deal to plead to manslaughter had benefits.

DESPITE 11 months in jail - 23 hours a day in a cell - Gatto remained defiant.

He would celebrate the not guilty verdict by tattooing new designs on his chest.

It was a crossroads that would launch Gatto's new career as a famed commodity of the gangland fascination.

Somehow, he had survived when almost everyone of underworld influence had been tagged as a "dog" - and shot dead.

Gatto has stared down death threats since his days of teenage theft at the produce markets.

He believes a $400,000 contract was placed on his life in the rising paranoia of gangland killings in 2003.

One thing that saved him, he says, was that the suspected hitman was killed before he got to Gatto. Another, he says, was his distaste for the drug trade.

He speaks critically of notorious figures who used the drugs they killed each other for.

Gatto labels Jason Moran (killed in 2003) as a "red light".

He was too arrogant, too fiery.

Gatto says he doesn't know why Victor Peirce was killed in 2002, despite continuing police investigations trying to link Gatto to the murder.

He mourns the killings of two mates, Graham Kinniburgh and Mario Condello, whose deaths remain unsolved.

Yet he laments the survival of Carl Williams, whom Jason and Mark Moran tried and failed to kill in 1999.

If Williams had died then, Gatto argues, many of the casualties of the gangland wars, including Kinniburgh, would still be alive.

Gatto's insider view of Williams - a once "insignificant face", he says, who is dopier than his portrayal in the TV hit Underbelly - is that he became unhinged about his drug-related power.

Had Williams not been jailed for 35 years over four deaths, Gatto believes dozens more - including himself - would have been killed.

Kinniburgh's passing still hurts, he says. It was like losing a second father.

Gatto tried to gather evidence on the perpetrators.

He loomed as the next target, given he would be perceived to seek retribution.

Veniamin and Williams were involved, he says, but he has no proof. Asked what he might have done had he got the evidence, Gatto takes a cautious line.

Asked twice, he twice replies: "I don't know."

HAS he tried to have someone hurt, or worse? Such thoughts have crossed his mind, he admits.

But Gatto says the gangland killings were not his battles.

He was an observer rather than a player - until the killings stopped being about drugs and became motivated by loyalties.

"I've got no problem with anyone in the world but if anyone harms my family, I'd hate to think what I'd do," Gatto says.

"They'd turn a peaceful man into a lion."

Gatto's sometimes mate, Alphonse Gangitano (killed in 1998), was verging on psychotic in the end. He clobbered anyone - including a blonde woman - who said anything he didn't like. Gatto and Gangitano, drunk one night in the 1980s, both tried to shoot a cab driver outside a St Kilda nightclub. Luckily, Gatto says, he missed.

It's one ugly moment of many that Gatto admits to in a career spanning boxer, freelance burglar and illegal gambling host.

Now, oozing front, power and a million-watt smile, he straddles a smudged line between criminal associations and corporate aspirations.

His book might have been called The Gambler, given Gatto has won and lost millions betting. Or Last Man Standing, given his survival in a war that spilled into junior football clinics and restaurants.

Gatto maintains he is a reluctant celebrity. Some Victorian detectives privately rail at his underworld glamorisation.

Gatto can't see a problem.

If others can capitalise on his name, why shouldn't he? After decades as a nobody, he is now stopped for his autograph.

In 2002, he bristled at royal commission suggestions he was a standover man.

Yet he admits his reputation, fair or not, may help expedite resolutions to corporate disputes.

GATTO may be the only "arbitrator" in Australia whose home is shrouded by security cameras.

In the book, Gatto recounts running over an enemy ("I don't quite know what happened"), running over and killing a painter and docker by accident, and the terrorising of a rival crew.

There are more ordinary failings, such as the gambling and an affair that produced two children (which he won't talk about).

Gatto claims a code of ethics. He detests blokes who hit women, and he hates police informers.

He once dabbled with marijuana and has tried cocaine, which he didn't like.

"I'd be insulting people's intelligence to say I'm squeaky clean. I do go outside the boundaries, but it's nothing of real significance," he says.

"I think everyone stretches the legalities a little. But I've never been involved in drugs."

Gatto's early life dipped below the tag of cheeky kid.

Visitors to his parents' South Melbourne home had their purses stolen.

When a headmaster hit Gatto, he copped one back.

The son of Calabrian immigrants, Gatto left school at 13.

But he has always grasped numbers, and he will never give up the punt, even though it contributed to his bankruptcy in 1993 - long before he became famous beyond Lygon St.

"A leopard never changes his spots," he says.

I, Mick Gatto, by Mick Gatto with Tom Noble.
Published by Victory Books, RRP $29.99.
Available now.