Deadline: The Melbourne brothel taking the Bunnings route

This inner-Melbourne knock shop has gone all in on the old adage “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”.

One Melbourne brothel appears to be embracing the sausage sizzle.

Mark Buttler and Andrew Rule with their weekly dose of scallywag scuttlebutt.

Eat up!

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

One Melbourne brothel appears to be taking the approach that it may also be the best available route to his, er, wallet.

A Deadline reader tells us of barbecues held at the knock-shop in her neighbourhood where the waft of hot sausages fills the air and beers are cracked open to take full advantage of these warmer summer evenings.

Our source has had a bit more of a look and found the venue’s madam and staff entertaining some male clients at the Bunnings-style get-together.

Of course, it all makes sound business sense when you’re operating in one of the city’s most competitive sex industry precincts.

Top cop fires up in crisis

Policing in this state has been under the pump of recent times so Deadline was happy to hear of some bread and butter off-duty heroism last week.

A high-ranking female officer was driving through her north-western suburbs neighbourhood when she saw smoke billowing from a house.

A woman was out the front clearly in distress.

“The baby’s inside, the baby’s inside,” she shouted as the officer arrived at the scene.

After being told what was going on, the superintendent ran inside.

She found the infant in a bedroom, picked him or her up and handed it to mum.

That officer wasn’t the first left holding the baby in recent weeks, of course. Meaning Chief Commissioner Shane Patton and Deputy Commissioner Neil Paterson were shown the door — arguably for the failings of others.

Toby a no show

Radio legend Philip Brady was farewelled by hundreds of fans, friends and family on Thursday.

Deadline is told one notable absentee at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Kew was Toby from Newport.

Toby went down in infamy after calling the Nightline talkback number many years ago and telling Brady and Bruce Mansfield what must surely be the most offensive joke to ever make it to air on Australian radio.

The late, great Philip Brady Picture: Josie Hayden

Vote 1 Hamad

There’s no doubt gangland kingpin and all-round rogue Kazem Hamad is a man of action, but is he Premier material?

The Herald Sun last week revealed there was cautious optimism about a ceasefire in Melbourne’s tobacco wars, news which had one reader contemplating Hamad’s reshaping of Victoria’s organised crime landscape.

“Maybe he should run for premier. Seems to get things done. A lot better than the JA (Jacinta Allan) gov,” was the opinion someone called Rex posted under the story.

This prompted us to do a shallow dive into the facts. It looks as if Hamad has achieved a lot more in the black market tobacco sphere than the State Government has in the past two years.

In that time, he and other players have gone on a Big Build of their own, setting up more than 1000 shops across Victoria, meanwhile coordinating massive overseas shipments to stock them.

Such is their success that the illicit market now outstrips established multinational giants like Phillip Morris and British American Tobacco.

Kazem Hamad (left) at the footy with Toby Mitchell. Picture: Instagram

Deadline would never condone violence but Hamad has proved himself to be aggressively competitive, torching scores of businesses and, it is suspected, putting some rivals out of business for good.

Runs on the board!

As for the premier’s side of the war, we are hearing suggestions that a licensing regime to curb tobacco organised crime could be as far off as 18 months away.

That would be four years after the government was handed a report on April, 2022, warning of the need to bring the sector under control.

Proof, as though it’s needed, that crime and corruption are so much more efficient than politics and bureaucracy.

No laughing matter

The Milano Verve apartments in Swanston St look like a lovely place to stay but, of late, there seem to be some significant issues with “nangs”.

The uninitiated may know “nangs” more by sight than by name.

They’re the little silvery canisters which are regularly seen discarded around our city by individuals who aren’t using them for their true purpose of aerating cream for cakes.

They’re after a burst of nitrous oxide, more commonly known as laughing gas.

It seems that people in or near the Milano Verve are either whipping up a lot of cakes or trying to reproduce the feeling of being in the dentist’s chair.

A Deadline spy noted a stern warning posted in the building to announce the party’s over.

“This practice poses serious safety risks to all residents and is strictly prohibited,” it says.

The Milano Verve's anti-nang policy.

Murky pony tales revisited

Never let it be said that Deadline has a glass jaw. But we concede our sources could do with better glasses so we don’t make spectacles of ourselves.

Last week, following an earlier item about gallopers named The Munster, Gangitano and suchlike, we noted a galloper called Merc, which is in fact trained in Canberra by the esteemed Barbara Joseph and Matt Jones.

While scanning race fields on a recent Sunday, our shortsighted Deadline correspondent noticed a horse running which he misidentified as being a brother to Merc.

The horse he noticed had a very similar name which he confused with Istolea Merc, another horse entirely. This confusion could be because our correspondent is a recidivist surfer who admits inhaling when he was young, and might well need a seeing-eye dog.

But we are in luck. We now know all the facts because keen reader and racing buff Geoff Hazeldine has politely pointed them out, as follows:

I write this as a part-owner of 2 racehorses that are full brother and sister to Istolea Merc. Your article says we may have noticed a smart Sydney horse named MERC. Merc has never raced in Sydney. Merc is not out of the same mare either. Istolea Merc’s dam is MERCEDES, and is not named from the mare “Mercury Lady”. The Bendigo fields have probably never included Istolea Merc either. It would be good to know the facts before putting your name to a story that is basically lies. Istolea Merc’s siblings are “Iowna Merc” and “Iowna Benz”.

Now that Geoff has got that off his chest, he’ll feel better.

For those who are interested, Istolea Merc is a 4yo bay gelding trained by Bjorn Baker at Warwick Farm. It is by the stallion Winning Rupert out of Mercedes and has won two races so far, including a $50,000 maiden. According to one punting website it “has proven a profitable horse for the punters over the journey. If you had backed Istolea Merc throughout its career you’d have achieved a 86 per cent return on investment.”