A snapshot of a single day in the life of Ian Macdonald perfectly captures the extraordinary venality and corruption of the then cabinet minister.
It was the late afternoon of July 15, 2009, when Ian Macdonald arrived at the Tuscany restaurant in Leichhardt, in Sydney's inner west.
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Ian Macdonald found guilty
Ian Macdonald is a former NSW Labor resources minister who has been at the centre of one of the state's largest and most complex inquires into corruption.
He'd had a shocker of a day. That morning's Herald had cruelly referred to him as "Sir Lunchalot" and had detailed the $150,000 his wine advisory group had spent jetting around the state enjoying fancy lunches on the taxpayers' dime.
Chairing the wine group was fellow rorter from the old Labor days, Greg Jones.
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While waiting for the other guests to arrive, Macdonald ordered a $130 bottle of Tasmanian pinot noir, knowing that the two government officials he had requested to see would be forced to pick up the bill for his untrammelled gluttony.
Sticking the government officials with what turned out to be an $850 bill was just the tip of what would turn out to be a very corrupt day.
Sitting at a nearby table was a lazy Susan of Asian prostitutes provided for Macdonald's selection by a businessman figure who was hoping that Macdonald could persuade the officials to award him government contracts.
Two years later, the chosen call girl Tiffanie would complain to a corruption inquiry about her night with Macdonald at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel on Sydney Harbour.
Macdonald was a "rough kisser" who made her feel like "vomiting", she said.
Macdonald's version - that he had a stiff neck and he thought Tiffanie was a qualified masseuse - was not believed and the Independent Commission Against Corruption recommended criminal charges be considered against Macdonald for corruptly receiving a benefit and also misconduct in public office.
This was the first of three corruption findings against the former minister.
On Thursday, he and former CFMEU boss John Maitland were found to be guilty over a training mine at Doyles Creek that Macdonald gifted to his union mate.
The deal was sealed in December 2008 over a $300 magnum of pinot noir and suckling pig at upmarket eatery Catalina in Rose Bay.
As was his way, Macdonald contributed not a cent to the $1800 meal.
He and the now-jailed Eddie Obeid are set to face a committal hearing later this year after the ICAC found the pair to have acted corruptly over the granting of a coal exploration which covered Obeid's rural property in the Bylong Valley.
Macdonald had been rorting the system since the 1980s when he and Jones were staffers for minister Frank Walker.
Writing in The Monthly, Mark Aarons, a former Labor staffer, gave a first-hand account of Macdonald's petty corruption.
"In the mid-1980s he regularly convened long Friday lunches in expensive restaurants. Macdonald's practice, as I witnessed it, was to pocket his friends' cash - thrown onto the table to pay the bill - and put the entire lunch on a credit card."
Needless to say, it was a Department of Housing credit card, not his own, and, when the rort was eventually exposed, Macdonald, Jones and others were ordered to repay some of the $18,000 they'd spent on long boozy lunches.
Even ASIO had picked up Macdonald's potential for corruption years earlier. While he was a student politician, the security agency recorded the following.
"Macdonald enjoys his role as [union] president ... Although radical, he's an opportunist interested in what he can get out of this role for himself, travel in Australia and overseas, contacts with Labor MPs, and he will use this as a platform to advance himself for his benefit."
In 2010, the incredible rorting of the public purse by Macdonald finally came to an end when the Herald revealed that taxpayers had contributed $6000 worth of meals and airfares while Macdonald honeymooned with his third wife, Anita Gylseth, in 2008.
The prominent left-winger, who was reviled for doing deals with the party's Right and was disparagingly nicknamed "Della's [John Della Bosca] pet crocodile" and "Eddie Obeid's left testicle", was forced to resign from Parliament.
With Thursday's guilty verdict, Macdonald looks set to reunite with his once close political ally Eddie Obeid.
But this time it's more likely they'll be sharing porridge and water rather than suckling pig washed down by a magnum of pinot noir.