Victorian police officers received free tickets to boxing events with complimentary food and alcohol after alleged underworld figure Mick Gatto gifted the tickets to a senior detective, an anti-corruption commission hearing has heard.
Det Sgt Wayne Dean confirmed in his evidence before a public Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption (Ibac) hearing on Wednesday that on two occasions Gatto, who he had known since the mid-1990s, provided him free tickets to boxing events in Melbourne.
Dean, who is subject to a wide-ranging corruption investigation, said that Gatto provided him four tickets to a fight between Anthony Mundine and Charles Hatley at the Melbourne Convention Centre in 2015. He was not aware of the value of the tickets, but they included food and drinks served at the table.
Dean gave two of those tickets to a detective senior constable, who attended with his son. The officer was not named during the hearing.
On the second occasion, in December last year, Dean said Gatto provided him with a fully-catered table of 10 to a fight night at the Melbourne Pavilion.
When he received the tickets, Dean noticed they were valued at $440 each, he said, making the total gift worth $4,400.
Two other officers attended the second event, Dean said. They were also not named.
On both occasions, Dean said that he had not told the officers who had provided the tickets, but Gatto had visited them at their tables and spoken to them briefly.
“No one knew where [the tickets] came from … although in saying that, that fight was being promoted by Mr Gatto himself,” Dean said.
“I don’t know if it was obvious to them, but they probably would have known.”
Dean said he now knew “with 100% certainty that I should have number one declared it and number two shouldn’t have went” to the boxing events.
In February, only days before Dean was subject to raids and a private examination by Ibac, Gatto again texted him offering a table of 10 to a boxing event in March, but Dean responded that he could not attend because he would be at a wedding.
Dean earlier told the hearing that he believed he had been formally spoken to on three separate occasions by officers from the force’s professional standards or organised crime units because of his association with Gatto.
Dean said that early in his career, he would speak with Gatto perhaps once a week at a restaurant on Lygon Street.
The pair later communicated by text message and phone calls, Dean said. He had also attended a funeral and wedding with Gatto, visited him at Gatto’s Melbourne apartment, and had regularly been sent Christmas cards by him, the 37-year veteran of the force told the hearing.
Dean gave evidence as a crown witness in Gatto’s trial for the 2004 murder of Andrew “Benji” Veniamin. Gatto was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence, and counsel assisting the coroner, Catherine Boston, said Dean’s evidence had been favourable to Gatto.
Boston said that Dean told the jury the restaurant where the shooting occurred was regularly frequented by police, and was therefore not the sort of place that someone would decide to carry out a murder, and that he had not known Gatto to have had access to a gun in the restaurant.
Dean said he understood how the evidence may have helped Gatto, but it was also the truth.
Dean was later sanctioned by the force, he said, for having a conversation in the court with Gatto in the absence of the judge or jury, in which he said words to the effect of “gee you’ve lost some weight Mick”, and Gatto responded “gee you’ve put some on Wayne”.
Ibac started to investigate Dean after a migration agent complained to the Australian Border Force that she had paid him and another man, Basilios (Bill) Meletsis, to settle a financial dispute, but that they had not succeeded in having her money returned.
Dean is alleged to have used his position as a police officer and police resources to complete multiple jobs on behalf of Meletsis in return for cash payments.
He has admitted doing jobs for Meletsis, and that he received cash payments from him, but that they were not necessarily for the jobs. Meletsis has denied making any payments to Dean.
The hearing continues.
