Lawyer X Royal Commission: Nicola Gobbo’s diaries may be key to inquiry
Nicola Gobbo’s secret journal entries have been laid bare in a royal commission today, revealing that detectives used her past to threaten her — unless she turned snitch on her boss.
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The secret diaries of Lawyer X reveal police threatened to ruin her career unless she turned snitch on her employer.
Two detectives from the now disbanded drug squad told Nicola Gobbo there was an investigation into her employer and that “mud sticks and she should get a raincoat soon”.
Gobbo’s diary records — read out at a royal commission examining her dual role as barrister and police informer — that at a meeting in 1998, when she was just a first-year lawyer, the officers used her 1993 drug conviction as leverage to get her to inform on her boss.
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“No one will believe I had no knowledge or could not have known.
“Indicated he was aware of my priors.”
In more than eight days of hearings of the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants, it is the first time it has been mentioned that Gobbo kept a diary. If she kept making entries throughout the 2000s when she was representing and informing on Melbourne’s criminal underworld it may prove vital to the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informant work in unravelling the impact of her conduct.
Gobbo’s diary records that the 1998 meeting between Det Senior Sergeant Mark Bowden and an officer who must be called “Kruger” was before Gobbo was registered as an informer in 1999 to assist a money laundering investigation against her boss.
Gobbo records that the officers told her that clients of her employer — who the inquiry calls solicitor 1 — had given evidence, there was an “ongoing investigation” and that her name was mentioned on tapes.
“Solicitor 1 is a crook should be in jail but if not at least not practicing law...
“Happy to protect me for my assistance re: particular files.”
Megan Tittensor, counsel assisting the royal commission, asked officer Kruger that such a meeting was “threatening conduct to a junior solicitor” and amounted to the officers threatening to “ruin her career unless she was assisting police to bring down her employer.”
Kruger said he could not recall the meeting.
“I was always of the opinion and my only knowledge of her employer’s suspect behaviour was what was volunteered by her,’’ he said.
The royal commission also showed Kruger a letter from Peter Reid — a client of Gobbo’s boss — that says he would only get a deal from the drug squad if he gave information about Gobbo’s employer.
The Victoria Police fraud squad took over the money-laundering investigation into her employer in 1999, which never led to charges.
Police officers involved in that investigation had said it was Gobbo who had volunteered the information about her employer.