Secret police files on Nicola Gobbo revealed: read informer reports on plot to ‘stitch up’ Gatto for murder
Secret police files on Niccola Gobbo obtained by the Herald Sun reveal how she conspired with detectives to “stitch up’’ Mick Gatto for murder. READ THE INFORMER REPORTS NOW.
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Nicola Gobbo conspired with detectives to “stitch up’’ Mick Gatto for murder, classified reports compiled by her police handlers reveal.
The Herald Sun has obtained 78 pages of the “informer contact reports’’ — the first to be released by Victoria Police in the Lawyer X scandal.
The reports detail how Gobbo manipulated client Faruk Orman — who was charged over the murder of Victor Peirce five years after the hit — to “roll’’ on Gatto. Orman, ultimately convicted as the getaway driver in the 2002 Port Melbourne execution, has claimed that Purana taskforce officers offered to let him “walk’’ if he helped them get Gatto over the murder.
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The dossier of 219 reports reveals that, on the day Orman was arrested for the murder, Gobbo was on the phone to her handlers forming a strategy on how to break her client’s will.
“HS (human source Gobbo) says that Orman will not cope in jail … Orman is an obsessive compulsive re cleanliness … He also needs people around him always. Therefore if he is isolated and left in messy conditions, HS is positive that he will not cope,” an entry on June 22, 2007 notes.
In another key information report from 2008, a police handler describes Gobbo saying one of Orman’s associates “cannot believe the way that Orman has been treated just to try and stitch up Mick Gatto”. Orman claims german shepherds were put inside his cell to tear it apart and he was kept in isolation for three years.
The explosive dossier is expected to be critical evidence in the royal commission into the Lawyer X scandal, which will resume on Wednesday, as well as in Orman’s petition for mercy now with Attorney-General Jill Hennessy.
The dossier — spanning March 2006 to December 2008 — further reveals:
GOBBO was “frustrated” at not being used enough to assist in the police investigation of client Orman;
AN “angry” Gobbo vented that police should have notified her that they were about to arrest him;
HANDLERS recognised Gobbo’s “conflict of interest” by informing on Orman while representing him, but told her “it is her choice”;
AS Gobbo continued to act for Orman, detectives conspired with her to invent lies to get her out of appearing at court, due to the conflict;
THE barrister was so concerned about a police blunder which threatened to out her as an informer that she demanded protection in court.
Orman is one of 20 convicted clients of Gobbo sent letters by the Office of Public Prosecutions warning that their cases could have been tainted because the police used Gobbo to inform on them in a corruption first revealed by the Herald Sun in 2014.
Gobbo’s stings on notorious clients — including drug lord Tony Mokbel, gangland boss Carl Williams and ecstasy trafficker Rob Karam — have been widely reported.
In a secret 2016 hearing before judge Timothy Ginnane, Gobbo also testified that Gatto had been one of her targets, saying he was “regrettably a work in progress when I was handed over to Petra (taskforce) as a witness”.
But the informer reports obtained by the Herald Sun expose for the first time how Gobbo schemed with detectives in a failed bid to force Orman to implicate Gatto in the Peirce murder.
An informer report made on Christmas Day 2007 states: “HS adds that bonus will be that HS can manipulate Orman into requesting that Gatto comes and sees him.”
In February 2008, a handler simply notes: “They charged and recruited/targeted Faruk Orman to get to Steve Kaya and Gatto.”
Kaya has been a long-time associate of Gatto, who Orman worked for. By August 2008, one of her handlers observed that Gobbo was “game playing with Orman”.
“Oct 6 date for Orman will be vacated, no committal this year pushed Orman into a difficult situation, wants Orman to roll to implicate Gatto and Steve Kaya,” the report says.
The dossier reveals that Gobbo was talking to handlers about Orman, and Gatto, often multiple times a day. In October 2007, Gobbo was eager to “cement her position” with Gatto’s Carlton Crew, according to reports. By the following month she was meeting him in favourite haunt Society, in Bourke St, she would tell her handlers. But as she became increasingly distressed that her colleagues and the underworld would realise she was an informer, the correspondence with her handlers descended into cover-up strategies.
After police accidentally left potentially damning references to her in documents that were released to Carl Williams, Gobbo was obsessed by covering her tracks, the reports show. At one stage, the handler says of a “worked up” Gobbo: “She is worried when Gatto will find out.”
Orman pleaded not guilty, but in 2009 was sentenced to a maximum 20-year jail term.
He was convicted largely on the evidence of a gangland killer. Gatto was never charged over the shooting, suspected to have been carried out by Andrew “Benji” Veniamin.
Orman, who has maintained his innocence, said in a statement yesterday: “I’m not asking for a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’m just asking for an independent court to decide my case.”