$50,000 in an envelope: Bribe allegedly offered to withdraw intimidation claim

Sydney crime figures are suspected to be behind an audacious bribe plot allegedly aimed at silencing a victim of an ongoing NSW construction industry standover racket linked to major state and federal government sites.

According to the claims reported to detectives, the victim was offered $50,000 cash in an envelope in return for retracting allegations that NSW construction industry figures were responsible for a months-long effort to intimidate and target families of building industry workers.

The standover campaign is ultimately aimed at construction and union insiders accused of backing efforts by the CFMEU administration to confront entrenched crime and corruption in the building industry.

The victim allegedly refused the $50,000 offer, returning the purportedly cash-filled envelope to the suspected sender this month. Associates of the victim also reported the bribery approach to NSW Police, who are assessing the complaint.

This masthead is not detailing key aspects of the standover and bribery allegations to protect the safety of those being targeted, but industry sources confirmed that the allegations had been passed to local detectives and NSW CFMEU boss Michael Crosby.

The federal police have been advised of the allegations, sources said. The suspected bribe payer is part of a network of organised crime and construction industry figures across NSW that built strong ties to recently jailed former union boss Darren Greenfield.

Greenfield was last year sent to prison for taking bribes from a Chinese plasterer, but intelligence gathered by a now-defunct federal and NSW Police taskforce suggested the corrupt union boss may have received vastly greater pay-offs from building companies than was ever aired or proven in court.

“We had plenty of other indications he [Greenfield] had been given bribes from bosses,” a law enforcement source said on condition of anonymity.

The response from authorities to the recent $50,000 bribery plot allegations in NSW stands in stark contrast to that by state and federal police in Victoria.

In the southern state, Victoria Police’s Taskforce Hawk has resulted in multiple arrests of organised crime figures, ex-union officials and company owners suspected of corrupting the building industry. It is also proactively targeting building industry figures suspected of wrongdoing.

In NSW, state and federal authorities have launched no taskforce or funded any significant police-led building industry counter-organised crime attack despite repeated calls for action from CFMEU administrator Mark Irving, KC.

One agency probing the NSW building industry is the secretive NSW Crime Commission, although the nature of its investigations are unclear.

“We are miles ahead of NSW in fighting this problem,” one Victorian official said.

The official, who requested anonymity because they are not authorised to speak publicly, also said the failure of authorities in Sydney to ramp up their efforts might be partly because the media coverage of crime and corruption in the NSW building industry had been more sporadic than that in Victoria.

The federal police have also been reluctant to assign multiple investigators to the building industry in Victoria or NSW, with resources diverted to the agency’s expanding focus on tackling extremism.

The nation’s union and employer body watchdog, the Fair Work Commission, has also urged law enforcement agencies to increase their focus on crime and corruption across Australia’s building sector.

According to commission documents released to this masthead, the agency has collected several complaints about unlawful behaviour on NSW government sites.

One example cited in the FWC documents involves a complaint from late 2024 involving a NSW government building project at St Mary’s Metro Station and “a CFMEU member [who allegedly] has made threats against another worker’s life, reportedly boasting gang affiliations”.

“Workers have raised safety concerns, with some resigning due to intimidation and bullying involving this individual and the site superintendent,” the FWC complaint states.

A second complaint gathered by the FWC involves alleged “threats by a CFMEU delegate to cause physical harm if a site contractor did not take action against subcontractors without a union Enterprise Agreement on government funded new airport/Parramatta rail link projects.”

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