Andrew Rule: Why do smart women fall for crooks?

Why someone as intelligent and street-smart as Nicola Gobbo would get herself hooked up with so many crooks on both sides of the law is a mystery of the human condition. But as confusing as they are, “crook lovers” aren’t so rare writes Andrew Rule.

“What is it with wogs and cash?” goes one of the best-loved lines in the much-loved comedy The Castle.

Now that filmmakers are turning attention to the slow-motion car crash of the Lawyer X saga, they could cut their pitch to “What is it with women and crooks?”

By crooks, of course, we mean not just gunmen, robbers and drug dealers but the most dangerous sort of all: gunmen, robbers and drug dealers who happen to be police.

Both sorts attract those who should know better.

HOW GOBBO RISKED HER CAREER TO GET GATTO

LAWYER X: THE FULL STORY

WHY LAWYER X TURNED POLICE INFORMER

Why someone as intelligent, well-educated (and notionally as street-smart) as Nicola Gobbo would get herself hooked up with so many reptiles on both sides of the law is a mystery of the human condition.

But it isn’t rare.

Her disgrace is a glaring example of the dangerous liaisons that happen in the no man’s land between law breakers and law enforcement, the space where bent cops operate.

It’s hardly surprising these relationships mostly end in tears … or worse.

Among the millions of words oozing from the Lawyer X story is a sentence with the ring of raw truth: when she blurted her fear of getting “a bullet in the head”.

Lawyer Nicola Gobbo is suing Victoria Police.

Tony Mokbel (centre) with his legal team Nicola Gobbo (left) and Con Heliotis QC (right) outside court.

The firebombing of her BMW in 2008 highlighted the risks of the road she’d taken long before.

Words are weapons; choices can be fatal.

This is the message from the long-overdue inquest this month into the killing of a Perth brothel madam and mother of three, Shirley Finn.

Finn’s body was found in her Dodge Phoenix at Royal Perth Golf Club in June, 1975.

She had been shot four times in the head, apparently after implying she could expose a state minister’s dirty little secrets.

The murder weapon: a .22 rifle taken from a police custody store.

Top pick for the Finn hit is the recently deceased Bernie “The Bear” Johnson, longtime head of the WA Vice Squad and associate of other bent detectives such as Don “The Silver Fox” Hancock, who was killed in a targeted bombing years later for murdering a bikie.

To be fair to “The Bear”, others were also in the frame.

Such as Roger Rogerson, king of bent crooks and close associate of brothel king Abe “Mr Sin” Saffron, whose evil influence stretched from Sydney to Perth.

Rogerson and his crew of corrupt detectives did dirty deeds for organised crime.

Shirley Finn was murdered in 1975.

Rogerson masked his murderous streak with easy charm that came with the intelligence, confidence and absolute self-belief that a journalist once compared with the young Don Bradman’s.

His split personality, both chilling to charming, was caught by the actor Richard Roxburgh in the drama Blue Murder.

Rogerson appealed to some women. One of them was Shirley Bassey, the world-famous, Welsh-born performer who sang signature songs on several James Bond films.

Rogerson once told this reporter about his on-again, off-again connection with the great singer whenever she visited Sydney.

He said it began when he caught a street thief with Bassey’s stolen handbag, which he returned personally to her dressing room at the venue where she was performing.

He mentioned that his mother, too, was Welsh and descended from the family of the original dashing pirate of the Caribbean, Sir Henry Morgan.

Rogerson and his crew of corrupt detectives did dirty deeds for organised crime.

Rogerson appealed to some women. One of them was Shirley Bassey, the world-famous, Welsh-born performer who sang signature songs on several James Bond films.

These are the memories Rogerson has to cheer him in prison as he serves out the rest of his life for murdering a young drug dealer.

The belated inquest into Finn’s death shows how dangerous it is to tangle with ruthless people who have much to lose.

Finn must have thought she had enough “dirt” on then West Australian police minister (and later premier) Ray O’Connor to try to get him to “fix” a tax hearing that stood to cost her money.

She apparently overplayed her hand.

The “WA Inc.” era had begun and bent politicians, business identities and cops were running red hot. O’Connor, later jailed for corruption, had more clout with the feared Johnson than Finn had.

One of Johnson’s lovers, Carolyn Langan, years later confided to a scientist she worked with, Dr Craig Klauber, that Johnson had told her he had killed Finn.

Johnson’s boast was “pillow talk”, but that didn’t make it less threatening for Langan, says Klauber, who told the recent inquest he believes Langan told him the story in case something bad happened to her.

Langan’s complaint that Johnson once menaced her with a gun prompted Klauber and others to urge her to leave him.

All of which, intriguingly, Langan now denies.

Klauber’s evidence of Langan’s fear, combined with her public silence, suggests she is still afraid of the dark forces that killed Shirley Finn, 44 years later.

Gobbo is a front-page example of something that is obvious in any busy prison visits room: some women are drawn to bad men.

Such stories make bleak reading for Lawyer X, victim of her own character flaws and the predatory nature of crims and bent cops.

She is a front-page example of something that is obvious in any busy prison visits room: some women are drawn to bad men.

Perhaps they want “protectors” but mistake violence for strength.

It is, maybe, the same psychological quirk that makes otherwise sensible people seek dangerous dogs.

But whereas bad dogs might be loyal, bad men rarely are.

Investigators and criminal lawyers tend to sort “crook-lovers” into categories.

There are the Florence Nightingales who adopt the missionary position of rescuing strays then trying to change them for the better.

There are the “mob wives”, married off at a young age to men in their own ethnic and social group, who pretend not to know how their husbands make their money.

And then there are the Lady Macbeths, “players” who manipulate their sexual partners as much as they are themselves manipulated.

Hello Kath Pettingill, Judith Moran and Roberta Williams.

Roberta Williams, ex-wife of underworld figure Carl Williams.

Judy Moran, widow of murdered underworld figure, Lewis Moran.

On a good day, Lawyer X the gung-ho barrister played the Lady Macbeth part.

But lurking inside, maybe, was the spoiled, needy schoolgirl chasing love in the wrong places.

She was drawn to bad company at a young age.

It has been revealed while she was at university her boyfriend was suspected of serious drug dealing and police persuaded her to inform on him.

The seeds of a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship were sown then.

When she got to the Bar, not to mention bars, Lawyer X might not have seemed like someone who could make a Pope forget his vows. But looks can be deceiving.

The convent girl went all out for an X-rated reputation and got it in spades in a group that routinely took advantage of the gullible, the vulnerable and the reckless.

Her sexual misadventures were a staple of insider gossip in police circles long before it all became public.

One of a string of casual lovers is now an inspector who often addresses the media.

This is ironic.

Because during one ugly episode in the back of the lawyer’s sports car in the late 1990s, informers say, she suffered an injury that led the rogue detective to drop her at hospital.

Then he left her to face the treatment and humiliation alone.

No flowers. No calls. It was no wonder she might have wanted some sort of revenge.

There is one rather nervous inspector out there.

Originally published as Andrew Rule: Why do smart women fall for crooks?