EXCLUSIVE | The Prince of Preston: Ex-Mongols Bikie Joel Brown Charged as Part of Taskforce Hawk’s $424k CFMEU Fraud Bust

Additionally, a 38-year-old Preston man was charged with making a false document and bailed to Heidelberg Magistrates’ Court on the 4th of December. That man, is Joel Brown.

Brown isn't a new name in this world. He's a former Mongols member and a former CFMEU delegate. In evidence to Queensland’s CFMEU inquiry, Geoffrey Watson SC pointed to footage from the September 2021 clash outside the union’s Melbourne headquarters. Brown comes out of the building and goes at protesters. Watson called it ugly. Not long after that, according to the same evidence, Brown was given a health and safety delegate role. The Age previously reported he was an associate of Toby Mitchell and had been pushed onto Victorian building sites as a union delegate from 2020, including as recently as 2024.

This year Brown has been on the other side of the camera. The Herald Sun (eye-roll) ran him as an ex-bikie president and former CFMEU delegate who had teamed up with a former youth justice worker to “help” one of Melbourne’s worst youth offenders, a kid charged over a stack of home invasions and car thefts. Brown doesn't hide the history. He leans on it. The Prince of Preston, who grew up around boxing gyms. Street gangs at a young age. Then the club, construction. Then the clean-story version, talking about lived experience and giving young blokes something he never had.

Call it what it is. This is the pitch that starts the next cycle.

A patched president and union heavy doesn't become a youth worker by magic. He becomes a magnet. The kid already in the system doesn't hear a cautionary tale. He hears a status. He hears "the club". He hears the sites, the money, the people who still pick up the phone. He hears a man who got put on taxpayer jobs after coming out of a union office and going at protesters. That's not rehabilitation. That's a brochure for the life.

I've watched this shit for years. The redemption content. The “I’ve been there” sit-down. The mum saying these blokes just get it. Of course they get it, that's the problem. Young men in the north don't need another older crim with a camera and a soft headline standing in as a faux father figure. That's how grooming starts in this city. With access, with a lift. With a job on a site. With the feeling that the people who actually run things finally noticed you.

I'm not hanging today’s $424,000 allegation on Brown. Bell is the man the ABC named on the main fraud counts.

Taskforce Hawk was set up after Building Bad laid out how outlaw motorcycle figures were landing on the Big Build. Since then it's taken Joel Leavitt, Napoleon Brown, John Setka, raided Bell’s Dynamis consultancy in July, and last week walked into the CFMEU headquarters on Elizabeth Street. Five more men were pulled from houses across Melbourne. Now this. Same taskforce, same industry. The same names moving from patches to delegate jobs to consultancies and then into the dock.

They keep saying the bad apples were tipped out. Then the same names turn up again, sometimes with a youth program attached.