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Welcome to Leo land

Does the argumentative, divisive ‘walking headline’ Leo Molloy genuinely want to be Auckland’s mayor? Steve Kilgallon finds out.

THE man who would be mayor is feigning outrage. We’re outside the Headquarters bar and restaurant in Auckland’s Viaduct, capital of the curious nation state of ‘‘Leo Land’’, and owner Leo Molloy is explaining how he’s the mayoral candidate for the entire Queen City, not some reactionary rightwinger.

‘‘The Guardian,’’ he says contemptuously, ‘‘wrote a story which said ‘he even has hair like Trump’. How the f... do I have hair like Trump? All my hair is my own, and it’s not even dyed orange. It’s au naturel, and it grows in about a week. The only thing I have in common with Trump is there is plenty of it, though he doesn’t have as much body as mine.’’

Molloy once spent $8000 installing a bust of Trump in the men’s urinals at a bar he owned in Queenstown.

It formed a trough triptych with rugby referee Wayne Barnes and rugby writer Stephen Jones. Jones discovered this unwelcome tribute, and phoned up with abuse. In a typical conclusion to a Molloy anecdote, Leo offered a fight, and Jones didn’t turn up.

The most famous name in Auckland’s hospitality scene, Molloy has been picking battles for two decades, dating from his 2002 police diversion for assault in a Parnell pub up to a recently secured defamation settlement from an online critic.

Mostly, though, his fights are verbal. He’s a talker, and often his answers to a question divert into unrelated, unprovoked assaults. Right now, because he’s exercised about the Government’s ‘‘chaotic, schizophrenic’’ handling of Covid (he’s strongly pro-vax, but also strongly against restrictions), this means savaging, in turn, Michael Baker, Siouxsie Wiles, Shaun Hendy, Andrew Little, Phil Twyford, Kris Fa’afoi, Phil Goff, and, repeatedly, the prime minister.

They join a long list of those gnawed on by Molloy over the years, including Michael Laws, Bernie Monk, astrologer Don Murray, publican Luke Dallow, leaguies (‘‘mongrel scum’’), people with tattoos (‘‘scribbles’’), the gay community, Soul Bar and a New Order roadie.

When the attempted Pike River mine rescue is mentioned (by him, not me), he recalls Winston Peters grandstanding on the topic, and declares: ‘‘Be the first one down, you old c... and take a Rothman’s with you. And spark one up halfway down, come out the back of the f ...... tunnel at the speed of a .303 bullet and disappear into oblivion where you belong, you old bastard.’’ Later, Molloy contacts me to say he respects Peters’ longevity and tenacity. ‘‘We all have our faults,’’ he adds.

He’s been saying this stuff for 20 years, and we’ve been writing it down, because Molloy is atypical. In a nation of the humble and the mock humble, he’s an unabashed egotist.

Fellow hospitality titan Mark Keddell observes: ‘‘When he puts the boot into people, it looks like his customers buy more champagne. He’s a great marketer.’’

Molloy hopes the same rule applies to the voters. ‘‘I have no doubt,’’ he says. ‘‘I know I rant a bit, but I am an extraordinary wealth of information, and I’m a great debater. I have a lacerating style . . . there will be nobody who beats me in a debate . . I won’t be a mayor who says nothing, like Goff.’’

However, he’s long believed that the media have offered up an unfair portrait of him.

He’s pained when I say I’ve mentioned this story to several friends who said they loathed him. He thinks on it, and later suggests I bring them unannounced to Headquarters for a drink so he can convert them. ‘‘I think people who know me like me. People who meet me say ‘you’re not the picture the media paint of you’.’’

He can be thick-skinned: An infamous 2019 portrait of him for The

Spinoff in which Duncan Greive called him a ‘‘gaping a..hole’’ is quite fondly referred to on several occasions. But he can also fire up over trivialities: When The Project came up with a story about some confetti falling in the harbour from a group celebrating at his outdoor tables it led to Molloy – holidaying in Bali at the time – issuing all sorts of threats, egged into it by texts from presenter Kanoa Lloyd, who referred to an ‘‘imaginary girlfriend’’.

‘‘She was,’’ Molloy says, ‘‘actually a glamour.’’

Despite his stated loathing for the media, he knows the real reason why he can generate a headline, and he revels in it. ‘‘An answer from me can take 10 to 15 minutes, and somewhere in there is a sequence of words which can be used as clickbait. I shouldn’t engage or answer, and I wouldn’t get myself into s..., but life is not like that in Leo Land. I don’t work like that.’’

In total, we speak for almost four hours, and Molloy sends several clarifying text messages and makes a follow-up phone call to ensure I’ve got everything. Everything? It’s hard to constrain it to 2800 words.

LUCK OF THE IRISH

To Molloy, the word Irish is an explanatory adjective for all sorts of character traits, from quick temper to generosity. He’s deeply bound to a Gaelic heritage he understands dates to Irish peasants dispatched to Australia in the mid-19th century before somehow arriving on New Zealand’s West Coast.

His mother worked in the Roa coalmine office; his father was a soldier posted to North Africa and Italy during World War II. Kevin Molloy fell ill when Leo, the second of seven children, was aged seven. He took to calling Leo his ‘‘right-hand man’’. He died when Molloy was 11. The children weren’t allowed to see him in hospital, or attend the funeral.

‘‘It’s a bit young, isn’t it?’’ says Molloy, tears forming. ‘‘It was pretty rough, because in those days, you had to deal with s ... . . Like everyone else in this world, you can make out you are as hard as you like, but you have a softer side, and I often wrestle with not knowing what happened when Dad died. I struggle with it. For a long time, I lived in hope that he would come back. I used to really believe he would.’’

Later, on the phone, he says he’s never reconciled himself to his father’s passing.

Molloy turned for paternal guidance to a local racing trainer, Peter Pinnock, and fell in love with the ‘‘feral’’ nature of racing, working as a jockey, in stables, and eventually qualifying as a vet.

In between, he drove a bulldozer, then worked in stables in England where the Queen kept her horses. He met her several times, he says: ‘‘If I had wanted to, I could’ve put my hands around her scrawny little neck and throttled her.’’

Molloy is now all but excommunicated from the sport, thanks to a series of disputes, including admitting defaming racing official Greg Purcell and a year’s ban for calling a racing investigator a ‘‘callous, racist c...’’. He still loves horses, he says, but says racing is on a ‘‘divergent pattern from society’’. This is linked to his visceral hatred of the pokie machines on which the sport so depends.

Molloy moved into hospitality when the liquor-licensing laws liberalised in 1999, launching a pub chain called The Fat Lady’s Arms with his first wife. ‘‘He was the godfather of modern bars, really,’’ says Keddell.

Molloy has always reached for an analogy about diamonds – ‘‘the more pressure you put on me, the more I sparkle and shine’’ – to explain his

career trajectory, and he considers the pivotal events to be the end of his two marriages, both of which lasted 15 years. ‘‘Fifteen years in Leo Land is quite taxing,’’ he says.

Peace has been restored with the first former Mrs Molloy. A court described the breakup with his second wife, Ingrid, with whom he has five children aged between 13 and 21, as ‘‘acrimonious’’. It ended with a copyright court case which Ingrid won against Molloy’s famous sister, television executive Julie Christie.

We have cryptic exchanges about the existence of a current girlfriend

(it seems one exists, but Molloy is unusually shy on the topic). Would he marry again? ‘‘Based on my historical track record, would anyone marry me? I almost certainly will. I like companionship. I’ve probably moved on from the feral ‘rooting like a rabbit’ stage.’’

Anyway. In 1998, his first wife left after he cheated on her. In 1999, he opened the iconic Auckland waterfront restaurant Euro. An infamous Irish pub, Danny Doolan’s, followed in a prime Viaduct spot. Then he spent about $2.5 million opening a giant nightclub called Cardiac.

It went under and took Molloy with it into bankruptcy.

‘‘It was a good lesson for me,’’ he says, in a rare moment of humility. The lesson was that nightclubs were fuelled by drugs, not booze, and there was no money in drugs.

‘‘There were parties all over town when Cardiac went bust,’’ says one publican. ‘‘He was such an a...hole and did things to f... people off. But he does know how to make a bar work.’’

Molloy says: ‘‘Not many people use the word humble and Leo Molloy in the same sentence, but for a few years I was humbled. I was humbled in a multitude of ways. When you go out and people are talking about you, and you can tell they are talking about you, and I was humbled by the fact my phone didn’t ring for three years . . I don’t think I got invited to a dinner party for three years. I f ...... hid.’’

He was turned down for a vet’s job at the zoo. He drove an $8000 Toyota Ipsum, and he waited. Then one day he bumped into Viaduct Harbour boss Mark Wyborn, who asked what he needed to get started again. Wyborn helped a still-bankrupt Molloy into opening a bar called Cowboys and, shortly after, one next door called Indians. Then at a veterinary conference in Queenstown came an ‘‘epiphany’’, and he opened another Cowboys there.

That went in the breakup of his second marriage, marking another downturn in the Leo story, with a Parnell bar named after his eldest son, Harry, enduring a short lifespan. And then Wyborn intervened again, offering up an old fish factory on a site overlooking the super-yachts moored in the Viaduct. It would become probably New Zealand’s most successful bar.

A SLICE OF LIFE

Molloy sees Headquarters as a slice of society, encompassing private schoolgirls to gangsters via VIPs, Destiny Church deities, Nga¯ ti Wha¯ tua dignitaries and tradies.

Opened in a rush for the 2017 Lions tour, the entire building – designed by a friend of Molloy’s to look like an old Queenslander – weighs just 80 tonnes and rests, without foundations, on the ground.

On busy nights, they queue down the block and Molloy says in normal times it turns over $18m a year (I’ve checked that figure out, and it’s genuine), employs 80 staff at peak season and sells more champagne than anywhere in Auckland.

While Molloy expects a third to a half of all hospitality establishments to fail post-lockdown – ‘‘it will be a blood-letting exercise’’ – he reckons he’ll be fine.

HQ is closing next May anyway, with the entire setup shifting to a new site in Pakuranga, east Auckland, while Molloy kicks the longstanding O’Hagan’s Irish bar out of a nextdoor building he owns and launches something new. Despite living across the road and owning another bar in the precinct, Little HQ, he refers to Market Place’s windswept concrete vista as ‘‘Chernobyl’’.

Many of his staff have been with him for years, and he pays well. One brings him a coffee, and he jokes: ‘‘Who’s the best boss you’ve ever had?’’ She smiles, and says: ‘‘Same answer as every time, Leo.’’

But one former employee tells me: ‘‘There are very few people I absolutely cannot stand, but he’s one of them. I’ve never seen an ego like it. He’s got zero respect for his staff. He’s a little Napoleon.

‘‘There’s a certain personality type that stays, and loves him and says he’s a great boss, but he clashes with anyone with an alpha personality. He’s the worst guy I’ve ever worked for.’’

Others do love him, like the boxing promoter David Higgins. When the Covid downturn left Higgins without a title sponsor for his heavyweight fight between Joseph Parker and Junior Fa’a, Molloy stepped in. ‘‘He’s definitely offended some people, and he’s definitely gone too far at times . . He’s a walking headline,’’ says Higgins. ‘‘His heart, though, is definitely in the right place, and one or two silly comments don’t outweigh the good he has done.’’

When Molloy breached a name suppression order hiding the identity of Grace Millane’s murderer, Jesse Kempson, while Kempson faced trial on unrelated charges, he was ordered to serve 350 hours of community service (and pay a $15,000 fine). He is, of course, entirely unrepentant, but is serving his time working for former boxer Dave Letele’s Butterbean Foundation preparing foodpacks for the needy.

Letele wants to make it clear Molloy was helping him long before his court-ordered duties. They were introduced when Letele first set up the charity. On the strength of a single meeting, Molloy put Letele on Headquarters’ payroll so he could concentrate on his charitable work. He also provided a financial guarantee on a community kitchen project, and organised a fundraiser at HQ which raised $200,000.

‘‘When I first started hanging out with him, people would see him on my social [media], and say ‘what are you doing with this guy?’ ’’ Letele says. ‘‘I would explain to people what a good heart Leo has. I judge him on his actions when no-one is watching, not what he is posting on Facebook. If you rang him up and were doing it tough and needed help, if he had it, he would do it.’’

Molloy also donates several hundred meals a day to charitable organisations, including transitional housing provider the Grace Foundation. And, he says, he’s dropped off meals to All Blacks and Black Caps in MIQ. ‘‘You shouldn’t probably even put that in, I am namedropping now.’’

‘THIS IS NOT VANITY’

So is Leo Molloy really fair dinkum about being mayor of Auckland? It’s the only time he pauses for breath. ‘‘What sort of question is that? Of course I am. Do you think I’ve spent all this money [for no reason]? . . . This is not vanity.’’

He mentions a personal investment of $1m, polling from David Farrar, advice from Michelle Boag and, improbably, Matt McCarten (McCarten is cagey, saying only ‘‘A lot of my advice is what not to do’’).

And he has the energy. About to turn 65 (‘‘You’d say I look good for 65, and you’d be right’’), Molloy has the restlessness of a man who sleeps barely three hours a night, unless medicated.

He clearly consumes a fair bit of coffee, but says he hardly drinks alcohol, doesn’t do drugs (although in vet school he grew dope in gorse by a West Coast beach), and enjoys sparring a couple of times a week at a boxing gym.

He dresses young: Lawrence, the photographer, asks him to recline on a couch. Molloy finds it deeply uncomfortable, but Lawrence has spotted his box-fresh-yellow Converse trainers. Molloy owns four pairs of them. He loves wearing yellow.

He has an enthusiasm for policy. He wants to rein in Auckland’s muchloathed ‘‘council-controlled organisations’’ (the semi-independent bodies that run much of the council’s business, including water, events, the city waterfront, the port and major development). He thinks they are wasteful and incompetent, and should open up their accounts to public scrutiny. He wants a congestion charge. A downtown stadium. Action on homelessness. He spends quite some time explaining how a hydroelectric power scheme in the Kaipara Harbour could renewably fuel Auckland’s bus fleet and if ‘‘the odd dolphin decides to swim through a turbine’’ then that’s the circle of life.

And, of course, I suspect because they’ve built one which runs right between his apartment and his pub, he loathes cycleways.

Both left and right have called, some (such as National MP Mark Mitchell) imploring him not to stand. But with Mitchell and Paula Bennett both ruling themselves out, the right has yet to front a credible candidate.

A political insider says Molloy cannot be a genuine contender unless he secures the formal backing of the right, bringing with it investment and volunteers. ‘‘This is a huge town. Everyone who gets elected here are grownups. They are players with institutionalised support, and you need that institutionalised support – either from [the right-wing] C and R, or the Labour/Greens bloc. If you don’t get that, you’ve got no show.’’

But Molloy believes he can float across both right and left, citing a social conscience, a platform of action on homelessness, and a better deal for Ma¯ ori and South Auckland. He describes a city grinding to a halt, deep in debt, with a silent, incompetent mayor.

The next mayor, he believes, needs to be a ‘‘leader of men, forceful and able to mobilise people behind you. And those are all traits I’ve got.’’ He adds: ‘‘Who’s the one person who can reach across the spectrum?’’

You know his answer. Could Auckland really become Leo Land?

‘I know I rant a bit, but I am an extraordinary wealth of information ... I won’t be a mayor who says nothing, like Goff.’ LEO MOLLOY

FEATURE

en-nz

2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-10-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282119229745948

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