Union hired convicted killer as health and safety rep
Andrew Stafford |
Michael Strike was 38 years old and on his way home when he found Trouble.
Trouble was a dog, tethered outside the home of the Bandidos motorcycle gang in Brunswick, Melbourne.
Strike made the fatal mistake of riling Trouble – but it wasn’t the dog that bit him.
Instead, the doors of the clubhouse swung open and Strike was set upon by two men: Luke Maybus and Johnny “Two Guns” Walker.
They dragged Strike inside and beat him to death, before rolling his body up in a rug and dumping him at East Keilor cemetery.
Maybus and Walker were sentenced to 10 and eight years in jail respectively for manslaughter – an outcome, barrister Geoffrey Watson told an inquiry Thursday, made them the two luckiest men in Victoria.
But “Two Guns” – named for his muscularity, not his armoury – was even luckier than Mr Watson thought.
Before he was even released, he had a job lined up as a “health and safety representative” by the CFMEU.
Mr Watson was giving evidence in Queensland’s Royal Commission into the CFMEU and broader misconduct in the construction industry.
But for the past two days, much of his evidence has focused on the Victorian division under the leadership of the since dethroned John Setka.
Mr Watson’s report, Rotting from the Top, sent shockwaves through Victorian politics after being tendered to the Inquiry on Wednesday.
It alleged the CFMEU had gained a monopoly over Victorian construction during the state’s $100 billion “Big Build” that started under former premier Daniel Andrews in 2015.
One of Mr Watson’s sources told him the scale of the infrastructure created the ideal conditions for corruption and criminality to flourish.
“All of a sudden there was too much government money and too many really big jobs,” the source said.
“There was a shortage of labour and the CFMEU had all the negotiating power.”
Apart from Setka, one name recurs in Mr Watson’s report no less than 165 times is his friend, underworld identity Mick Gatto.
In his report, and to the inquiry, Mr Watson described what he called Gatto’s extortion model, where he would ring contractors and tell them he could stop work at a site at a moment’s notice unless he was paid a fee.
The cost to the Victorian taxpayer was enormous – conservatively estimated by Mr Watson at up to $15 billion in cost blowouts and overruns.
In his report, he came to the conclusion that under Setka, “the CFMEU was no longer a trade union, it was a crime syndicate” before finally being placed into administration by the Albanese government in August 2024.
Since then, Mr Watson has reported on the Queensland division of the CFMEU, which he told the inquiry had been trying to import the business model of the Victorian branch.
It showed that after the Victorian branch had rotted from the top, the rot had since spread to the Sunshine State.
The inquiry will resume on March 10.
AAP
