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The gangland infiltration of Labor’s Big Build has now spread to the infrastructure scheme’s prison expansion program and a social housing project opened by Premier Jacinta Allan in her Bendigo seat.
A CFMEU-backed plastering company run by two underworld and bikie gang-linked brothers secured a lucrative subcontract on the $94 million 94-bed expansion of the Hopkins Correctional Centre in Ararat.
The plastering operation website claims it also worked on the $44 million 73-apartment St Andrews social housing project Allan officially opened in March as part of Labor’s $5.3 billion Big Housing Build.
The two men running the plastering operation are gangland-linked businessman Zack Boyer and his brother, ex-Comanchero Jake Boyer. The duo are also behind Australia’s largest mixed martial arts competition, the Hex Fight Series, which has also become a networking and sponsorship hub for companies earning millions on the Big Build.
The rise of the Boyers’ plastering business follows a familiar model that Labor’s supposed construction industry clean-up has failed to combat and which an increasing number of experts say needs to be scrutinised by a royal commission.
The Boyers not only have criminal underworld links, but have allegedly enjoyed favourable treatment from CFMEU officials: a crucial step in gaining access to major Victorian projects and which is at the heart of the Building Bad scandal revealed by The Age two years ago and still dogging the Allan government.
Jake Boyer pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and intentionally causing injury, and was jailed for 18 months in 2015 for his role as the get-away driver for a shotgun-armed Comanchero bikie crew that tortured a Werribee man by burning him with boiling water and demanding he hand over drugs and money.
In 2022, Zack Boyer was convicted of recklessly causing injury and fined. A year earlier, he received a 12-month adjourned undertaking after detectives raided his Docklands apartment and found cocaine, cannabis, human growth hormone, knuckledusters and two mobile phones. In 2021, Boyer was also charged with failing to provide detectives access to his mobile phones.
The Boyer brothers are also involved in managing Australia’s fastest growing MMA competition, the Hex Fight Series, which was originally founded by convicted drug trafficker Trent James. Zack Boyer is also the founder of Addikted To Ink – one of Australia’s largest tattoo parlour chains.
Corporate records and company promotional material show the Boyer brothers’ involvement in the plastering sector began about 2023, when the pair’s company, BB Construction Investments, became part-owners of Multitude Plaster Commercial.
A month later, the firm gained hard-to-get and potentially lucrative support from the CFMEU via a union endorsed Enterprise Bargaining Agreement and the backing of one CFMEU organiser in particular: Rhett Campbell.
Campbell, an attendee of the Boyer brothers’ Hex Fight Series nights, is employed by the CFMEU administration as an organiser and is claimed to have used his influence on major construction sites to promote the Boyer’s plastering enterprises.
The Boyers have also lobbied building companies, including Big Build firms, to use their plastering firm or to sponsor the Hex Fighting Series in return for the promise of favourable CFMEU treatment.
Four sources whose organisations have had direct dealings with either the Boyer brothers or Campbell confirmed the union official was promoting the plastering firm, while the Boyers were separately claiming to have deep support from Campbell they could access for other firms.
“The Boyers said they would get the CFMEU to help us if we sponsored Hex,” one company insider said.
The sponsors of the Hex Fight Series have included the owner of gangland affiliated Big Build labour hire company, Women in Construction, which The Age recently revealed had Mick Gatto on its payroll before being recently booted off government projects after media revelations.
Hex’s current sponsors include three Big Build companies with gangland links, including a firm whose owner also makes regular payments to Gatto and two heavy machinery companies with deep outlaw bikie gang connections.
The overlap between the CFMEU and Melbourne’s underworld became entrenched after the Labor government gave the union huge power over the taxpayer-funded Big Build, leading to dozens of gangland linked firms obtaining work on government projects.
On Tuesday, The Age revealed a now former senior public servant, Stephen King, accused the state government of improperly pressuring a major public hospital project cave-in to CFMEU demands.
It was also revealed that two CFMEU aligned plastering companies accused by authorities of giving secret inducements to allegedly corrupt ex-union bosses John Perkovic and Derek Christopher had won large taxpayer-funded contracts on the Footscray and Frankston hospital redevelopments.
The Boyer brother’s plastering operation’s involvement in the Hopkins Correctional Centre expansion and the St Andrews social housing projects raises fresh questions about how gangland-linked firms have extended their tentacles across the Big Build.
The Hopkins Ararat prison expansion is part of a troubled $810 million Big Build program to add 616 new beds across five prisons via prefabricated modular cells.
The Ararat project’s principal contractor, Kane Constructions, declined to comment about the involvement of the Boyers when contacted, referring The Age back to the state government.
The project has stalled along with several other large Victorian prison expansion projects due to major defects in new cells.
The Boyer brothers are no longer shareholders in Multitude Plaster Commercial and no longer involved in that company. Zack Boyer is listed as the director of another company, Metro Plaster.
He is also the majority shareholder, with a businessman who supplies Chinese plasterers to large projects holding a third of the company’s shares.
A government spokesperson said the appointment of subcontractors was a matter for a project’s head contractor.
The Boyers and Campbell could not be reached for comment.
The revelations about their plastering operations comes after The Age recently reported that over a dozen Big Build subcontractors have paid gangland veteran Gatto at the suggestion of the CFMEU in order to access or remain on state government projects.
Nick McKenzie is an Age investigative journalist who has three times been named the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. A winner of 20 Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, he investigates politics, business, foreign affairs and criminal justice.Connect via email.
Lachlan Abbott is a crime reporter at The Age. He was previously a city reporter and covered breaking news.Connect via email.From our partners
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