How Nicola Gobbo tried to get Mick Gatto — on direct orders of police
The operation to ping Mick Gatto for the 2002 murder of Victor Pierce went for years, with confidential police reportsdetailing the extraordinary lengths that Nicola Gobbo took in pursuit of him — on the direct orders of police. But then the hunter became the haunted.
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Barrister and informer Nicola Gobbo once warned a journalist against linking Mick Gatto to criminal activities. Her tirade sounded a lot like a lawyer representing a client, even if their professional relationship lacked official status.
Back then, when Gobbo was described as a “high-flying legal eagle”, she and Gatto were often spotted together at Gobbo’s second office, Wheat, a restaurant downstairs from her chambers.
She says she knew Gatto well, as do court documents, which say that he threatened to kill her, a claim he has denied.
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Gatto wishes the Gobbo story would go away. Yet Gatto was the one who got away, she says. He was the mark in a Gobbo informer sting which didn’t come off.
The operation went for years. Confidential police information reports (IRs) detail the extraordinary lengths that Gobbo, basking in the role of covert operative, took in Gatto’s pursuit — on the direct orders of police.
She risked her career — and life — in an exercise reduced to a cover-up. She colluded with police to subvert justice. The scheme was doomed to fall down for all the reasons her use as a police informer was described by the High Court as “reprehensible behaviour”.
Gobbo and Victoria Police hoodwinked the courts by selling out client Faruk Orman, charged with the murder of Victor Peirce. They succeeded in jailing Orman, who remains in prison to this day, maintaining his innocence.
But the bigger scalp of Gatto — who police believed had ordered the Peirce hit — went unclaimed, in part because the elaborate subterfuge turned into a scramble to hide the truth from public scrutiny.
Gatto and Gobbo dined and spoke at great length in the months before and after the arrest of Orman for the 2002 murder of Victor Peirce.
Gobbo said that Gatto intimidated her. She would claim that he told her that Andrew “Benji” Veniamin, once Melbourne’s busiest hitman, was ordered by Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel to kill her outside her then Port Melbourne apartment.
Orman was alleged to have been at the Peirce killing, which did not go smoothly.
Veniamin called “Hello, mate” as Peirce sat in his car. Veniamin’s gun jammed. He produced another and fired two shots into Peirce, before being allegedly whisked away by Orman.
Police have long suspected — but never proven — that Veniamin shot Peirce on Gatto’s orders. They pursued a theory that Gatto was involved in the killing of fruiterer Frank Benvenuto in his Beaumaris driveway in 2000. Peirce had been Benvenuto’s bodyguard, and he is thought to have held a grudge against Gatto.
At first, in her informing capacity, Gobbo was enthusiastic, despite the dangers she has described elsewhere as a “bullet in the head”.
In March 2007, Gobbo expressed displeasure as she felt she was underused.
“3838 frustrated as SDU (Source Development Unit) and Purana investigators are not using 3838 to assist in the investigation of Orman,” an IR says.
By then, Orman had told Gobbo he was “very concerned” that an informer was working against him. Later in the same month, Gobbo told police that Orman believed he “is being set up by an informer”. He trusted his lawyer implicitly; how could he know that he was seeking advice about an informer from the informer herself.
On Orman’s arrest, Gobbo raged that she had not been notified first. “This frustrates her and make her angry,” an IR states. “Basically told her this is how we work and she will not be told about operational timing of investigations unless it directly affects her. This is an old argument. It will never change. She has to get used to it.”
The IRs show that Gobbo had warmed to Orman, even as she offered police suggestions on how to reduce his resistance to rolling on his boss.
“She says it is refreshing to speak to someone polite and nice on the phone who asks how she is,” an IR says. “As opposed to the Mokbel pieces of s---.” Remanded after his arrest, Orman’s first phone call was to Gobbo.
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She was, in response, telling police what he told her in confidence. Gobbo fed police insights into Orman’s nature, such as obsessive tidiness and a need for contact with people. She recommended isolation and later, no phone calls.
The Herald Sun has been told that dogs were run through his cell. While awaiting trial, Orman would endure three years in solitary confinement, which poses questions about the role of Corrections Victoria in this unprecedented Lawyer X scandal.
Almost 18 months after his arrest, Gobbo told her handlers that the “the ‘Purana tactics re Orman’ are working, re not seeing Gatto, making life as difficult as possible”.
An IR says: “HS reckons he is now at his lowest in terms of coping with being inside. HS suggests no phone calls at all as a possibility. Likelihood of him ever rolling is N/K (not known).”
By then, however, the sting had shifted focus. Self-preservation had emerged as the strongest motivation. The prize of getting Gatto was now clouded with problems.
Her “game-playing” was loaded with so many differing versions of the truth that Gobbo admitted that she had begun to confuse her stories. Who had she told what? And what if the wrong information fell into the wrong hands?
The IRs show that Detective Inspector Gavan Ryan, the Purana taskforce head, knew of Gobbo’s use as an informer.
They also depict the deepening ethical morass of Gobbo’s conflicted interests.
The murder case against Orman hinged largely on the testimony of another of Gobbo’s clients, a convicted murderer, whose evidence she sought to cloak from her own defence team partners.
She warned police to fight the exposure of “30 to 40 lies and contradictions” by the killer, who cannot be named. If revealed, problems with his evidence would have torpedoed the case against Orman.
Orman’s hope of her representing him created ructions between Gobbo and officers. “She complains that … she is being put in a position where she is turning back work and money on account of what she is doing (informing to police),” an IR reads. She was also livid over a sloppy police brief aiming to shield her identity.
Her name was redacted in some places but not all. “They might as well have highlighted her up she says,” an IR reads.
By the time of Orman’s court appearances, Gobbo was fretting. Orman’s senior barrister, Robert Richter, could ask about the redactions and win legal approval to receive unredacted copies.
“Richter will know that RS (Registered Source Gobbo) lied to him but this will be irrelevant because RS will be dead,” an IR stated.
Days later, she worried her informing would be revealed in court: “Wants guarantee that RS (Gobbo) will be safe if compromised. Asks if handler will have someone in court.”
Gobbo became increasingly contemptuous of her handlers and the Purana taskforce, describing one officer as an “incompetent idiot” and another as Beaker from the Muppets. Her handlers, in turn, spoke of her “ranting (again)”. Gobbo was stressed.
She faced hostility from within Barwon Prison, where Carl Williams had labelled her a “double-dealing snake”.
She feared that Gatto would hear the rumours that she was in the anti-gangland taskforce Purana’s “back pocket”, as well as scuttlebutt that she was sleeping with a detective.
Gobbo’s omnipresence through the sting is plain.
As she put it herself, as quoted in an IR: “Purana would not have known half the stuff about Orman if she did not tell them.”
She spoke broadly about the episode years later in the Supreme Court.
“Regrettably, this was a work in progress,” she said, when she was deregistered as an informer.
This is telling.
Her existence had been jeopardised by a scandalous exercise in police informing that devolved into a tricky battle in damage control. She nearly lost everything. Yet Gobbo had not wanted to give up on getting Gatto.