Police relationship was disaster for Lawyer X, handler says
A police handler for Lawyer X said he needed her to maintain a relationship with Melbourne’s most notorious criminals, but had he been a priest he would’ve advised her differently: “I would have said run away.”
Law & Order
Don't miss out on the headlines from Law & Order. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A key handler said gangland barrister Nicola Gobbo’s informer “relationship with Victoria Police has been a disaster for her.”
The officer, who is giving evidence under the pseudonym Sandy White, told the Lawyer X Royal Commission when he was recruiting Gobbo to inform on Victoria’s most notorious gangland criminals he didn’t have the barrister’s best interests at heart.
Mr White said Gobbo — who he managed as a source for four years — was a useful informer because she socialised with a vast network of criminals who may have had knowledge of then-unsolved gangland murders.
Mr White said when Gobbo was recruited in 2005, she was terrified of her clients in Tony Mokbel’s drug manufacturing cartel and wanted to escape from their clutches.
But Mr White said while he had a duty of care to ensure Gobbo was not harmed, he was not her priest and it was in Victoria Police’s interest that she stayed in contact with criminals.
“I’m not her priest … I’m a policeman.
“I have a role as a policeman to see if she has access to information that could be useful … to stop the gangland killings.
“If I was her priest I would have said run away. Live in another place get away from it all.”
At their first meeting with Gobbo on September 16, 2005, Mr White and his colleague from the Source Development Unit, Peter Smith, asked the barrister to tell them “everything you know about Tony Mokbel.”
At the time Gobbo was representing Mokbel in an ongoing drug trial.
But she told her handlers she was speaking to them so she could get Mokbel out of her life, which she thought could be achieved by getting him “locked up.”
Mr White asked Gobbo what was “the easiest and best way to have him locked up” and Gobbo said send in an undercover.
Counsel assisting the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants Chris Winneke QC, said it was an extraordinary exchange where a police officer was asking a barrister the “best way to have their client locked up.”
Gobbo had also told her handlers she had a stroke due to the enormous stress and paranoia of helping a gangland hitman “roll on half the underworld.”
Gobbo said criminals like Mokbel and her other client, Carl Williams, had brought enormous pressure to bear on her to ensure the hitman stayed silent.
RELATED:
HOW GOBBO ENDED MOKBEL’S TIME ON RUN
JAILHOUSE KILLER’S BUNGLED HIT
But she said she helped him turn Crown witness to “prove a point” to the gangland-busting Purana Taskforce detectives that she wasn’t a “stooge” for Mokbel and Williams.
The supergrass implicated Carl Williams and others in a series of unsolved underworld murders.
Gobbo said she was paranoid a judge would allow Williams’ defence team to subpoena police diaries where her role in getting the hitman to flip would be revealed.
“I know the police protected me in the magistrates’ court with the first round of subpoenas. We are in the Supreme Court stage and a judge might rule differently to a magistrate and if that happen I’m f.....”.
— with Anthony Dowsley