Tony Mokbel, who has survived a stabbing attack in Barwon Prison, is one of Melbourne's most notorious gangland figures.

Born Antonios Sajih Mokbel on August 11, 1965 in Kuwait, he has spent most of his life in Victoria, where he became the mastermind of The Company — the elaborate, multimillion-dollar drug syndicate that would become a key factor in Melbourne's gangland war.

He became the subject of an international manhunt when, in 2006, he famously fled to Greece while on bail during trial for cocaine-trafficking charges.

Fifteen months' later he was discovered in Athens — wearing a comically conspicuous black toupee — and arrested again.

Mokbel and his wig, which now resides in the Victoria Police Museum. ( ABC News )

After a lengthy extradition process, Mokbel eventually fronted a court in Melbourne and in 2012 was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a range of serious drug-trafficking charges.

Turning points and a troubled youth

Mokbel moved to Australia from Kuwait with his Lebanese Christian family in 1974, when he was just eight years old.

The family settled in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, where Mokbel — who initially spoke no English — would struggle through school, and take up junior football.

As a youngster, he would accompany his mother to her job at a local meat factory every morning, while his father worked for Ford.

Mokbel immigrated to Melbourne from Kuwait with his family in 1974. ( ABC TV )

But Mokbel's life would change drastically on his 15th birthday.

His 50-year-old father suffered a heart attack and died, leaving a grieving and suddenly rudderless family.

It was a blow Mokbel would say left him "dirty on the world", and one he arguably would not recover from.

Mokbel subsequently dropped out of school. Arrested for the first time at the age of 18 — for a street brawl that resulted only in a fine — he would find himself in trouble with local police for a number of fights in his teenage years.

Despite his seemingly troubled path, Mokbel was offered the opportunity to own and manage a local pizza shop alongside his brother when he was just 21. It was to be the first of a wide range of small businesses he would own — the ventures started as a way to make a life for himself and new partner Carmel, before eventually turning into a front for more questionable practices.

Fast cars, fast horses, and a taste for the high life

In 1992, Mokbel got his first, albeit brief, taste of prison. Sprung trying to bribe a judge into a reduced sentence for a friend on drug charges, he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Upon release, he would begin to delve more heavily in the drug trade. Police underestimated him at first, allowing him to spend the rest of the 1990s growing in stature and in reach. When a $78 million backyard drug lab exploded in 1997, it proved only to be a minor setback, such was the size of Mokbel's ever-expanding operation and wealth.

In the early years, Mokbel wasn't considered a big threat by police. That would change quickly. ( AAP: Julian Smith )

Mokbel avoided one serious conviction when, after police obtained audio of him speaking about his trade, he successfully argued he was only discussing the production — not the trafficking — of methamphetamines. The technicality kept him on the streets.

As the millennium drew to its close, Mokbel was firmly on the radar of police, but his lifestyle was becoming more and more lavish. He owned many racehorses — an effective form of money laundering, it would turn out — a Ferrari and a number of expensive properties.

A rapid but bumpy rise

For Mokbel, the stakes were only getting higher. An eye-watering drug shipment which arrived from Serbia in late 2000 reportedly brought enough ephedrine to make $2 billion worth of street-ready drugs, and came only days after another shipment of cocaine arrived.

Mokbel enjoyed some significant legal victories in 2002, but the joy was short lived. ( AAP: Julian Smith )

The sheer scale of the operation now had Victoria Police's full attention, and in 2001 a raid on Mokbel's properties threatened to bring the whole enterprise crashing down.

He would spend more than a year in prison, but as accusations and evidence of corruption within the police department ran wild, Mokbel was able to delay proceedings and eventually earn release on bail.

But, instead of laying low while awaiting trial, Mokbel soon found himself in even murkier waters.

He fell afoul of both a notorious Perth bikie gang and, seemingly, Mick Gatto, and was badly injured when a supposed peace-brokering dinner at a Melbourne restaurant ended with the bikies jumping and bashing Mokbel.

Mokbel enjoyed the spoils of his drug trade, but ran into numerous pitfalls too. ( AAP: Julian Smith )

Undeterred, the drugs kept heading out and the money kept coming in. MDMA soon became his stock in trade, with the spoils of the business becoming even greater.

But in early 2006, he was still awaiting trial on cocaine charges when a handy piece of information would bring things to a dramatic halt.

A $1 million price on his head

Purana Taskforce detectives had been told by a number of informers that Mokbel was involved with two ongoing murder cases. The suggestion was that he had paid and arranged for Carl Williams to kill Michael Marshall in 2003 and Lewis Moran in 2004.

It was a development that shook the usually unflappable Mokbel, and his reaction was swift — he ran.

Mokbel bought this yacht, Edwena, and sailed it to Athens.

He spent many months hidden at a friend's house at Bonnie Doon, where he was able to continue to traffic methamphetamines, before he purchased a 14.4-metre yacht and set sail.

The yacht sailed across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal and on to Greece.

The resulting manhunt started slowly but became more urgent in April 2007, when Victoria Police offered $1 million for information of his whereabouts. Two months later, wearing the famous wig and in the company of his girlfriend and daughter, Mokbel was arrested in an Athens cafe.

30 years in prison, the end of the line

The extradition process was arduous, deliberately so on Mokbel's behalf, as he told a court it was "impossible for [him] to receive a fair trial" back home, and told the judge approving extradition would be like "sending me to Hitler".

He was eventually forced to return to Australia and face some music — he was up for a number of serious drug charges, as well as the murders of Moran and Marshall.

Extradition was a long process, but Mokbel was eventually sent back to Australia. ( Reuters )

Mokbel's results were mixed. The Marshall case was dropped and he was acquitted of the Moran murder, but the evidence was too compelling in many of the drug cases.

In April 2011, he plead guilty to three drug charges and the following year was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Lawyer X scandal

Even inside Barwon Prison, Mokbel continued to make headlines.

In 2018 it was revealed his barrister, known as Informer 3838 or Lawyer X, was acting as a paid informant and was passing information to Victoria Police about her clients.

Victoria's Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to 20 criminals — including Mokbel — to tell them their convictions were in doubt.

Mokbel's story took another twist on Sunday when a Victorian newspaper reported he had stepped in to stop an extortion racket being run inside Barwon.

That could have been the trigger for an exercise-yard ambush which left him lying on the ground, shirtless, bleeding from three stab wounds.

As Mokbel was stretchered from the helicopter, which took him to the Royal Melbourne Hospital, cameras caught the 53-year-old apparently reaching out to shake a paramedic's hand.

It remains to be seen how his story will end.