Deadline: Hammer set to fall on former education bureaucrat turned bodybuilder

It wasn’t his love of brothels or his penchant for topping up his testosterone that brought this former education department bureaucrat down, but a passion for “cooking”.

The former Education Department employee seems to have kicked on in the drug trade.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

Bigger than Donkey Kong

He’s the mystery Melbourne crime figure with the scholarly past, an abiding love of working girls and an unpublishable nickname.

Our man, a highly intelligent former Education Department employee, seems to have kicked on so well in the drug trade that he’s helping keep Melbourne’s high-end brothel industry in spas and nail polish.

He thinks nothing of forking out thousands in a night on the sex workers and, we’re reliably informed, his free spending extends to flying in ladies from Sydney to provide interstate-of-the-art entertainment.

Sources say he’s charismatic, good company and something of a rev-head. He’s also an enthusiastic bodybuilder who has spent some of his ill-gotten gains topping up his testosterone with major results.

In fact, the big fella’s reputation in Melbourne’s flesh trade has been enough to earn him a nickname which can’t be repeated because of Deadline’s strict adherence to standards of taste.

Unfortunately, he might find female company hard to come by soon, apart from a few no-nonsense types in prison officer uniforms.

Truth is, he’s looking at a spell in the big house because one of his other passions, “cooking,” has led to high-level drug manufacturing allegations.

Calling all perverts

Now, there’s a headline that makes plenty of readers look. That’s why there are so many thousands of emails being received every day opening with the unpleasant words “Hello Pervert.”

It gets people’s attention, which is why scammers use it to target the gullible.

And no matter how many times people are warned, it seems these dirtbags (scammers, that is) continue to find victims because variations of the same rip-off keep working.

A Deadline source has passed on the email which tells recipients that spyware has been installed in their computer and that it has videoed them many times, er, entertaining themselves — something a well-known radio commentator drolly dubs “owner operating.”

After the “warning” comes the bite: the inevitable directive to pay up or have the alleged unsavoury evidence sent to all and sundry.

In line with such a high-tech scam, victims are told they’ll have to meet the ransom using cryptocurrency.

The best advice, experts say, is don’t panic. And don’t pay.

Many avid adult entertainment fans are getting spooked by a cleverly crafted email scam.

Speaking of scams, Deadline (like everyone else) gets flooded with

text messages urging us to click and “redeem your lottery prize,” emails about investments with “guaranteed high returns” and random pitches from potential Romeos and Juliets.

Prevention is better than cure, which is why the NAB is running its Big Scam Education Conversation next Thursday, August 29.

Scam buster Chris Sheehan, who has spent 28 years fighting baddies with the Australian Federal Police, will talk about the “scamscape.”

Other stars of the show are scam and cyber education expert Laura Hartley and one of the bank’s anti-fraud team, Nikki Ruderman. They’ll dissect some common scams and point out specific red flags.

Muffins gone in 60 seconds

When Victorians think of aggravated burglary, their thoughts turn to marauding teenagers stealing German-made SUVs from family homes.

The thieves are in and out quickly and certainly don’t linger for a feed.

Not so with a sweet-toothed adult offender who struck early one morning this month at someone’s home in Pakington St, Kew.

He grabbed a few items then wolfed down two muffins which had been left on a kitchen bench.

Craving satisfied, he grabbed a set of car keys and took off in a 2018 Toyota Land Cruiser, registered ASI169, which is yet to be recovered.

Detectives from Boroondara CIU have arrested a 28-year-old man from no fixed address.

A disorderly line

There’s a Melbourne union boss with a notoriously short fuse, though he wouldn’t be Robinson Crusoe in his line of work.

Keen-eyed industrial observers have been pondering whether a love of what our Irish friends call “the devil’s dandruff” might be a factor in his sometimes heightened state.

Slim pickings for crooks and jocks

Cynics suggest that jockeys and jailbirds share certain characteristics, although Deadline has always held that jockeys are less inclined to “lag” on their colleagues in the stewards’ room than most crooks are in a police interview room. Just saying.

Certainly, one similarity between jockeys and prisoners is that the demands of their professions can lead to astonishing weight reductions.

It seems that crooks who live on pizzas and beer and bourbon and coke and Big Macs between jail sentences run to fat — but they lose it pretty quickly when they are back on the porridge inside. Jockeys can also blow out pretty quickly when they take a holiday from race riding.

Some examples.

One notorious long-term Melbourne prisoner was the size and shape (and possibly smell) of an elephant seal until he transformed himself, earning the excellent jailhouse nickname “Jenny Craig.”

Then there was Mick Gatto, one-time heavyweight fighter who gathered an extra 30 or 40kg because of the amount of time he spent refereeing “sit downs” in restaurants similar to the one in which he was forced to cancel flyweight gunman Andrew “Benji” Veniamin with a .38 pistol in 2004.

Gatto spent his 18 months on remand for the alleged murder perfecting the jailhouse diet: he would read his police statements and then shadow box around his cell.

And repeat. Many times.

Mick Gatto in 2022. Picture: Aaron Francis

A svelte Gatto leaves court after his acquittal in 2005. Picture: AAP

Acquitted by a jury that took his plea of self-defence to heart, Gatto walked out of court a shadow of his former self.

As for jockeys, all but the most naturally tiny of them half-starve themselves to stay in the saddle. But even in a game where people live on lettuce leaves and cigarettes there have been some remarkably dramatic “shreddings.”

One was the excellent Larry Olsen, who followed a brown rice diet for months before winning the 1987 Melbourne Cup on Kensei, getting down from 80kg to 51kg to make one of the greatest comebacks in professional sport.

Now there’s journeyman jock Alex Hearn, who’s not in the Melbourne Cup class, but who stripped off 32kg over several months before winning a race last week at Pinjarra at his comeback ride, his first race since 2015.

Alex Hearn, like Olsen, is a cleanskin in every way, of course. But some jockeys (and trainers) are scallywags and scoundrels who have seen the inside of a jail cell.

Banned jockey Danny Nikolic’s big brother John Nikolic is currently doing a long stretch in a Fijian jail after being sprung with enough cocaine to start his own cartel on a yacht he and his ever loving wife sailed to South America.

A much better bloke than either Nikolic is Steve Wood, the one-time Victorian jockey who did time for “ringing in” horses in rural NSW. And who later was accidentally recruited as a steward to police racing for wrongdoers, which is another story.

Former top jock and now successful trainer Chris Munce earned a new nickname when sentenced to 30 months in a Hong Kong jail over a misunderstanding about tipping to punters. He was instantly dubbed “Thirty” ... as in “thirty months.”