Such luxe is par for the course in Point Piper, which has long been a magnet for the rich and powerful. The businessman and philanthropist David Gonski, dubbed "Mr Networks", lives here, as does shopping centre magnate Frank Lowy, whose fortune was estimated at $8.26 billion on this year's Australian Financial ReviewRich List. McWilliam's best friend, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, lives a couple of doors down the road; the two go kayaking together in front of their houses. For McWilliam, who grew up in working-class Dapto, Point Piper is "the greatest suburb on Earth".

Though few members of the general public would have heard of him, McWilliam has for almost 40 years worked at the centre of Australia's cutthroat media industry, having served as a close adviser and confidant to a succession of Australia's most powerful men, including Kerry Packer in the 1980s, Rupert Murdoch in the 1990s and Kerry Stokes in the 2000s. Former Nine Network boss Sam Chisholm describes him as a "consigliere", a catch-all term which nonetheless fails to convey the full scope of McWilliam's remit. 

Over the years, he has done everything for his bosses save bear their children: he has cut their deals and run their errands; he has policed their interests and defended their reputations; he has, in a very real sense, helped them make their billions. On occasion, he has even organised their social calendar. (When Rupert Murdoch married Wendi Deng in 1999, McWilliam found them a villa in Tuscany for the honeymoon. Murdoch then invited him to visit.) Peerlessly well connected and unwaveringly discreet, McWilliam is a consummate keeper of secrets whose arsenal includes irresistible charm, legal thuggery and much in between.

"Bruce is probably the most aggressive corporate lawyer we have ever seen," says James Warburton, who worked with McWilliam as Seven's sales boss in the late 2000s and is now CEO of Supercars. "Bruce is paid to make problems go away," another former Seven executive says. "He's like Mr Wolfe in Pulp Fiction, that calm, dapper guy who gets rid of the dead body from the back of the car and hoses it out."

McWilliam has been at Seven since 2003, and is one of Kerry's Stokes' longest-serving executives. As such, he is thought to have had an outsize influence on the network's culture, the uglier aspects of which surfaced during the infamous Amber Harrison case. Harrison is a former Seven executive assistant who late last year revealed that she'd had an inappropriate consensual sexual relationship with the network's CEO, married father-of-four Tim Worner, which began when she was 35 and he 51. Harrison claimed that between 2012 and 2014, she and Worner had had frequent bouts of cocaine-fuelled sex. (Worner denied using drugs in a work setting.) She claimed Worner had used his company credit card to pay for transport to her home in Balmain, and that he continued texting her for sex, even after the relationship ended. 

Harrison said that shortly after ending the affair, she was accused of rorting her credit card. She denied the allegations, sparking 18 months of complex and ultimately fruitless negotiations. When relations broke down in late 2016, Harrison went public, releasing Worner's explicit text messages, plus documents detailing what she described as her victimisation by the network.

Seven's handling of the case has been roundly criticised. In return for not talking about the affair and destroying all material relating to it, Harrison was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, a deal described by the media as "hush money". Seven's subsequent conduct has not played any better. Shortly after Worner was cleared by a Seven internal investigation, the network filed for and was awarded an extraordinarily strict gag order on Harrison, preventing her from talking about the case in any way, shape or form, directly or indirectly, to any medium or media on pain of "sequestration of property and … imprisonment".

In April this year, The Australian published a 3000-word front-page article called Amber Harrison's London Past. The story concerned allegations that Harrison had stolen thousands of pounds from a bathroom company in London while working there as an administrative assistant for four months in 2001. (Harrison denies the allegations.) The timing of the story, coming amid Harrison's legal battle with Seven, as well as its extraordinary level of detail, fuelled speculation that The Australian had been assisted by Seven West Media, or even that the network had paid a private investigator to dig dirt on Harrison. (McWilliam denies this; The Australian did not reply to questions.)

Harrison's barrister, Julian Burnside, says Seven is "one of the country's biggest boys' clubs", but McWilliam denies this. "All the best lawyers who do work for me are women," he tells me, sitting in his airy, renovated kitchen. He also insists the network's treatment of Harrison has been generous and sympathetic. 

Nevertheless, most media players I talk to describe the case as a disaster. "McWilliam's lawfare strategy has turned into a fiasco," says shareholder activist and blogger Stephen Mayne. "Any other executive would be sacked in the same circumstances for mishandling the Amber Harrison matter, but Stokes is blindly loyal to McWilliam, who himself is too far in to beat a dignified retreat."

McWilliam is 62, tall, with floppy, ash-coloured hair and pale skin; one person described him to me as "the ghost who walks". His suits are made by an English tailor whom he has used for years. He wears Hermès ties and Gucci shoes. "They last for 25 years at least!" he tells me. He drives a black Mercedes S series with cream-leather interiors; in the Channel Seven car park, it sits next to Ryan Stokes's Porsche convertible, which sits right next to Kerry Stokes's Mercedes.

Among corporate circles, McWilliam is known for his legal acuity and grandmaster strategising. He is an aesthete and a raconteur – he does an excellent Gough Whitlam impersonation – a natural-born Machiavel with an unslakeable appetite for intrigue. "Bruce has always been comfortable being the courtier rather than the king," says lawyer Justin Shmith, who has known him for 40 years. "He figured out that he could succeed by not being the loudest guy in the room but being the guy offering the advice to the loudest guy in the room."

He is, by all accounts, besotted with his three adult children and a devoted son to his elderly parents. He also gives generously to charities. "He is always helping out with my work with [Sydney] Children's Hospital," says Skye Leckie, wife of former Seven Network CEO David Leckie, with whom McWilliam regularly breakfasts. McWilliam has also given hundreds of thousands to the University of Sydney's law school, which he attended, and raised funds for the Sydney Cancer Centre Foundation, of which he was the founding director.

His loyalty to friends is likewise unstinting. When then Seven news chief and long-time friend Peter Meakin was sentenced to six months for drink driving in 2007, McWilliam declared he was "100 per cent behind him". Meakin, whose punishment was reduced to community service on appeal, says, "Bruce would back me out of loyalty before I'd even told him the whole story." 

A former media executive, who considers McWilliam a friend, paints a more complex picture. "Bruce is always very welcoming and great company, but you never really get the feeling you have penetrated who he is," he says. When they meet, McWilliam often conducts simultaneous business on his BlackBerry. "That's just Bruce; he doesn't mean badly. You can take it or leave it."

In an industry famed for its tantrums and egos, McWilliam is prized for his unflappability, a composure that verges at times on bloodlessness. He is fearsomely litigious, with what one former Seven news director describes as "a legendary capacity for retribution". (McWilliam disputes this.) "I remember one time when another network was trying to poach someone from us, Bruce's eyes went dead, and he said, 'They're roadkill.' And it wasn't a throw-away line. He can go into predator mode, which is frightening to behold."

McWilliam is known for deploying his employers' virtually unlimited resources to bury opponents in legal process, while using strategic leaks to shape the narrative. Nor is he averse to veiled threats. In 2014, veteran Seven programmer John Stephens signed a deal to move to Network Ten. Not long after, he withdrew his resignation and decided to stay at Seven, but not before McWilliam and CEO Tim Worner subjected Stephens, who was recovering from a hip operation and on heavy painkillers, to what the Supreme Court later describedas "pressure, procuration and persuasion". 

At one stage, McWilliam emailed Stephens, accusing him of stealing confidential documents from his previous employer: "I remember when you left Nine you were caught copying documents etc, and we really don't want a repeat of that … Don't take that the wrong way – you are a lot older now and will understand that your obligations have to be honoured totally." (Stephens emailed back, denying the allegation.) In the next sentence, McWilliam encouraged Stephens to use his medical state as leverage in his negotiations with Ten. "If you feel you were taken advantage of when you were under medication then make that clear!"

McWilliam is famous for his emails, which can veer, as one former network chief describes it, from "the quite mad to the plainly insulting". He once suggested to a business reporter at The Australian Financial Review that he take advantage of Fairfax's redundancy program. A Sydney Morning Herald journalist who wrote about a senior Seven executive received a volley of venomous emails denigrating her work. (McWilliam had apparently also CC'd the company's board members.) When another Fairfax reporter covered some of McWilliam's real-estate dealings, he emailed her, calling her work "crap" and "ignorant".

"I am suing you for defamation," he wrote, before adding, "By the way, no one I ask at Fairfax has heard of you." The emails continued for days, she says. "After a while I went to the editor and told him it was worrying me, and that I was thinking of going to the police." She says the emails abruptly stopped.

In an unrelated matter in 2016, a Supreme Court judge described similarly heated emails as "pugnacious" and inflammatory. McWilliam calls them "forthright": "If you have a strong position you can be forthright. If you have a weak position you should be polite."

For McWilliam, offence is usually the best defence. When he got wind that Good Weekend was preparing this story, his lawyers sent a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald's editor, Lisa Davies, advising her of his willingness to sue. His reputation acts as a kind of force field, insulating him from scrutiny. Many of the people I speak to decline to be quoted, saying that they would be targeted. 

When I ring a senior Seven journalist and ask her for comment on McWilliam, her first words are "No f...en' way". She tells me Seven management will go through phone records after the story comes out to discover who has spoken to me: "That's what they do here." (McWilliam denies this.) Another former Seven news presenter says she couldn't get out of the building quick enough. "Bruce is passive-aggressive. He'll smile at you, but when he smiles it's really creepy. You think, 'What have you done, or what are you planning to do?' "

McWilliam grew up, the eldest of four kids, in Dapto. His father was a dentist, his mother took care of the home. He attended Wollongong High, where he was dux ("Not that that means much!"). In 1974, he began a law degree at the University of Sydney, where he met, on his first day, a second-year law student named Malcolm Turnbull. 

"Malcolm was extremely articulate and very funny," McWilliam says. "We were on the university debating committee."

McWilliam roomed at the all-male St Paul's College, where students dined at mess tables in their academic gowns. "It was very Harry Potter," he says. He was, to begin with, a fish out of water: he hadn't gone to a private school, and didn't know anyone. It was also his first time in the city, and he felt homesick. "Other guys partied, but Bruce was the most disciplined and hardworking," university friend Steve McMillan says. "He never missed a lecture." His politics were conservative. "One day there was a political get-together on the front lawn," McMillan says, "and Bruce got up and tore shreds off the lefties and mocked them in an amusing way."

McWilliam soon gravitated toward the establishment: the well-born, old-money eastern suburbs set. "Bruce was a nerd," says the barrister Charles Waterstreet, who befriended him at St Paul's. "But he was such an abundance of good will and intelligence that he could sit comfortably as a servant of the rich and also an adviser and friend … For a shy Dapto boy, this was an achievement. It meant a lot to him."

McWilliam was particularly popular with the girls; he was fun and gossipy, and he wasn't an alpha male, so he didn't threaten them. The girls confided in him; they told him their secrets and sought his counsel. Before long, Waterstreet says, "Bruce was an all-seeing eye on everything that was going on."

McWilliam graduated with honours in 1979. In 1980, he got a job with prestige firm Allen Allen and Hemsley, which had Kerry Packer's Consolidated Press Holdings as one of its biggest clients. Soon he was working in its offices in Park Street with Packer's other legal advisor, Malcolm Turnbull. "Bruce was a brilliant lawyer, much better than Malcolm," says Ed Day, who worked at CPH as a registration clerk. "The executives liked Bruce's advice, because it was practical and commercial, and he gave it quickly."

By 1983, Packer had become embroiled in the Royal Commission into the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union. In the course of its inquiries, the commission, led by QC Frank Costigan, uncovered myriad tax minimisation schemes. Costigan was especially interested in a mysterious $920,000 loan that Packer and property developer Brian Ray had received via a Singapore company called Progress Credits. Suspecting that Progress Credits and Packer were involved in a tax dodge, Costigan asked to see the loan documents, but was told they had, perhaps not coincidentally, been sent to Allens' Singapore office. 

Together with two investigators and a Victorian police officer, Costigan jetted off to Singapore, where he discovered that the documents had already been taken to Hong Kong by a young Allens lawyer named Bruce McWilliam. Costigan and his team then flew to Hong Kong, where they intercepted McWilliam at the airport, about to board a plane back to Sydney. Costigan accused him of hiding the files, perhaps even destroying them; he later told journalists he was convinced that McWilliam had staged an orchestrated bid to block the inquiry. McWilliam has always denied this. Nevertheless, upon his return to Sydney, Packer gave him a pay rise.

In 1985, McWilliam left Allens to form a law firm with his friend Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull McWilliam, as it became known, continued to advise Packer, as well as ad man John Singleton and stockbroker Rene Rivkin. "Bruce and Malcolm were a one-two act," says lawyer Justin Shmith, who also worked at the firm. "Malcolm was ambitious and keen to make money. Bruce was more interested in problem solving. He was there to clean up Malcolm's mess."

Deborah Huber worked at the firm as a litigator. "We all had a sense that Malcolm was going to be important, and Bruce was always supportive of him," she says. According to someone close to McWilliam at the time, however, this support was not always reciprocated. "Malcolm was awful [to Bruce]. He'd say, 'You're bleeding off me, I'm bringing in all the business, and you're hopeless.' [But] Bruce loved Malcolm. He used to say, 'Malcolm will be prime minister one day, and so I'm sticking with him, through thick and thin.' "

After just 18 months, Turnbull announced his intention to leave the law firm and start an investment bank with businessman Nick Whitlam. "Malcolm totally dropped Bruce," says the contemporary. "Bruce was devastated. He scrambled back to Allens, and kept being Malcolm's friend."

Nick Whitlam also remembers Turnbull "being rude behind Bruce's back" and mocking his public school education. "I don't think Bruce is a friend of Malcolm's in a genuine sense," Whitlam says. "They would both say they are, of course."

Turnbull strongly refutes the suggestion that he acted badly towards McWilliam. He calls him "the best commercial lawyer I have ever worked with", adding: "He is family. Our children call him Uncle Bruce." For his part, McWilliam says Turnbull wanted him to join the bank, but "I went a different route. There were no hard feelings. It was an amicable separation and Malcolm and I have always been very good friends."

McWilliam is a formidable negotiator – by turns obdurate and conciliatory – and, when the occasion calls for it, a virtuoso troll. "He's the biggest bottom feeder you've ever known!" says friend and AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, who has sat opposite McWilliam in several rights deals. "Bruce always comes in so far below market price, and then he holds the line." McLachlan says McWilliam "will also have a bit of sport during a deal, if he can. If he knows he is annoying someone, he'll double down on it … I have seen him push buttons. It's a combination of getting at the other person, but also it's fun for him."

If negotiating doesn't work, chutzpah just might. When, on the Saturday morning of his wedding to Nicky, a neighbour's garden work threatened to disrupt the event, McWilliam paid a call on a judge who happened to live nearby, and got an injunction to have the work stopped. "It was easy," he says.

In 1991, McWilliam was in London, working for Allens, which was attempting to establish a foothold in Europe. One of the firm's biggest clients was Rupert Murdoch's fledgling satellite TV outfit BSkyB, then headed by Sam Chisholm. "When I arrived at Sky there were huge problems in terms of the deals that had been done with the Hollywood studios," Chisholm recalls. "All the deals were in the studios' favour, which was sending the company broke."

BSkyB was losing £1.6 million a week by the summer of 1991. "It was so broke we had to sell one of our satellite systems," McWilliam says. "[Sam] had devised a way of foiling bailiffs by not letting them through the boom gate."

McWilliam and Chisholm spent the next two years travelling back and forth to Los Angeles, restructuring the content deals with the studios. So as to not appear desperate, they stayed at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. "We racked up hundreds of days there," McWilliam says. "Sam always travelled, ate and stayed in style."

According to Chisholm, McWilliam was instrumental in saving BSkyB. "I'm a once-over-lightly merchant, but Bruce comes in and picks up the pieces and sees if it all works."

After BSkyB took off, Murdoch showered McWilliam with largesse: generous bonuses, invitations to dinner at his New York apartment. He also began taking McWilliam on acquisition trips through Europe, including to Italy, where Murdoch hoped to buy Silvio Berlusconi's television assets. According to McWilliam, Berlusconi was a gracious host; business was conducted at his villa in Milan. "Berlusconi always leaked our meetings to the press and the stock price went up each time."

They also met with the German media magnate Leo Kirch and the Russian TV mogul Boris Berezovsky. McWilliam joined Murdoch's inner circle: he attended the Murdoch children's weddings; in 1999, he went to Rupert's and Wendi Deng's nuptials aboard his boss's yacht Morning Glory in New York harbour. Whenever Wendi and Rupert visited Sydney, McWilliam and Nicky would meet them for lunch, or have dinner with them at Murdoch's house in Palm Beach. McWilliam says he considers Murdoch to be one of the greatest living Australians ("I take a liberal view of citizenship"), along with Turnbull, Frank Lowy, John Howard and Kerry Stokes.

Together with his wife, McWilliam owns by his calculation more than $100 million in residential property, most of it in Sydney's eastern suburbs. He also has many millions more in commercial real estate, some of which he showed me on a recent drive. "I own that," he says, tooling past a strip of terrace-offices in Surry Hills. "And that," he adds, pointing across the road to a large renovated corner block.

He maintains a full-time, four-man building team to renovate his properties. He describes it as a "hobby, and a sanity check". Other people describe it to me, variously, as an "infatuation" or "a status thing". Property has been central to his building of wealth, helped in part by an early windfall when he was working for Packer, who paid off his home loan as part of a bonus "at the behest of Malcolm".

McWilliam's connections now spread so wide that he is all but tripping over them. In April, for instance, it was disclosed that the judge hearing the Amber Harrison case in the Supreme Court, Justice John Sackar, had known McWilliam for years and done academic research with McWilliam's wife, a mediation lawyer. When, in 2015, the government was looking to appoint Michelle Guthrie as ABC managing director, one of the first people Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called was McWilliam, an old friend and one-time mentor to Guthrie, with whom he'd worked at Allens and BSkyB.

McWilliam's friendship with the prime minister has indeed on occasion proved problematic. In 2014, officers from the Australian Federal Police raided Seven's offices searching for evidence of a suspected seven-figure deal with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby. It emerged that McWilliam had rung then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had in turn phoned Attorney-General George Brandis and Justice Minister Michael Keenan, leading to suggestions that Turnbull had interfered in an AFP investigation on behalf of his friend. Turnbull denied this. When News Corp journalist Jennifer Sexton rang to discuss the matter with McWilliam, he hung up on her.

McWilliam has always been an individualist; he's never had much time for rules, especially as they apply to his renovations. In 2005, wanting to demolish the interior walls at his $5.15 million Woollahra mansion, he simply went ahead and did it. When the council became aware, it initiated legal action. McWilliam fought the action, eventually obtaining retrospective approval for the works, and paying the council's costs.

But his most recent crusade has been against the Broderick review into college culture at the University of Sydney. Institutionalised hazing and sexual harassment has been a recurrent feature of college life, with the all-male St Paul's long recognised as the worst offender. In 2009, news emerged of a pro-rape Facebook page set up by past and present St Paul's students, who described themselves as "anti-consent". More recently, in an online post, a student compared sex with large women to "harpooning a whale" and referred to sex as "slaying". In May, University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence described the college as "having a deep contempt for women".

Last year, Spence announced a review into its six colleges under the leadership of former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick. St Paul's, however, declined to take part, claiming it would instead hold an internal investigation called The Good Lad. (Under sustained media pressure, the college has reversed its position.) McWilliam, who served on the St Paul's council until March, describes Broderick's review as "a complete overreaction". He says that Spence's real motivation is "to get control of the colleges". As for the pro-rape Facebook page, McWilliam calls it a "nothing issue": "It wasn't a college site, and all the comments were left by ex-students."

St Paul's, he adds, has a "good culture. They are very well behaved. If anything, they are better behaved now than when I went there."

After showing me his commercial real-estate holdings, McWilliam and I arrive at his Point Piper home, where he lights the fire and makes us a cup of tea. Nicky apologises for the mess but, in fact, the house is almost spookily tidy. The walls are covered in paintings by blue chip Australian artists including Blackmans, Nolans and Boyds; a large Flemish tapestry decorates the central staircase. McWilliam walks me through the house, past the 1850s French dining table and a mini Steinway; Nicky pulls out a portable record player from the 1960s, but can't seem to get it to work. 

At one point I note a lovely-looking Chippendale chair, with intricately carved armrests and an embroidered seat. "Oh that," McWilliam says. "That's not actually antique. It was off the set of [the 1993 film] Remains of the Day." 

For a moment, we stand around the chair, admiring it. "Wonderful, isn't it," McWilliam says. "Looks just like the real thing."  

smh.com.au