SALAD DAYS FOR CAESAR

I’m not even sure I want to go here. But it is news and I have had a peripheral involvement. It concerns one Mick Gatto. A man they euphemistically call a ‘colourful underworld identity’. A man who modestly calls his ghost-written autobiography launched yesterday I, Mick Gatto – as in I, Caesar.  In a case of life imitating art, imitating life etcetera, Simon Westaway, the man who played Gatto in the TV series, launched the book and called Gatto ‘part of Australian folklore,Victorian history, and I am proud to be associated with Mick Gatto’.

Well, despite the gushing plaudits there are some who would still rather come to bury Caesar than to praise him.

I think I’ll rely on Patrick Carlyon’s fairly soft interview in today’s Herald Sun as a prompt for my thoughts. It appears under a headline that will make some people choke. It would make Andrew Veniamin gag –if he hadn’t been shot dead. By Gatto. In self-defence. Of course.

The headline ‘I don’t think I’m a bad person’. Gatto says you should ignore his underworld reputation. ‘It’s all bullshit’. He says ‘There was no violence -- ever’.

And yet in the same interview, this newly self-styled Carlton version of Mahatma Gandhi, jokes about how he and swaggering psychopath Alphonse Gangitano got drunk one night and both tried to shoot a cab driver outside a St. Kilda nightclub. Luckily, Gatto says, he missed. What a laugh-a-minute bloke.

Then there was the time this non-violent man ran over and killed a painter and docker by accident. He says in his book ‘I don’t quite know what happened’.

Gatto beat a murder charge over Veniamin –another human cockroach. A jury believed him when he claimed self-defence after Veniamin pulled  a gun in a Carlton restaurant passageway so quickly he didn’t even have time to pull his own. Like all non-violent men he was carrying it for self-protection.

Gatto does admit he’d be ‘insulting people’s intelligence to say I’m squeaky clean.’ Yep. Got that bit right. But, he says ‘Everybody stretches the legalities a little bit’.

On 3AW today I played an example of the peace-loving, non-threatening  Mick Gatto I experienced. On air he called me a maggot and said I’d be in my grave ‘ very soon’.  But maybe I should let his super loyal, I suspect, long-suffering wife, Cheryle, have the last word.

She said at the book launch: ‘The book humanises my husband. We all have a past (not like your husband’s madam) and what is really important in life is getting on with your future.’

She then makes an important point about Mick ‘ I am, not a standover man’ Gatto. She says: ‘He has every right to feel proud of his future’.

Does that mean even Mrs. Gatto doesn’t believe there’s much to be proud of in his past?

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009