Rob Karam is an unlikely victim. In 2007 he beat charges of conspiracy to possess drugs — over five million ecstasy tablets. Five years earlier, he beat drug importation charges in relation to three tonnes of hashish that snagged his close pal, Tony Mokbel.
About the same time, Karam beat charges over 550kg of ephedrine.
Karam raced horses and was among Crown casino’s top 200 gamblers.
By 2008, when he was banned from racecourses and casinos, his luck was running short. The revolving door of capture and release was about to jam.
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Police scrutiny and frustration was growing, and authorities would embark on creative approaches to snare Karam, who publicly maintained his “innocence” despite keeping some really poor company.
His protestations seemed laughable when he was finally convicted. The numbers were staggering.
Convicted of trafficking more than 335,000 ecstasy tablets. Conspiring to possess 100kg of cocaine. There were recordings, too, that clearly depicted Karam’s intent to purchase chemicals for the production of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of ice.
“The cook is ready. The chemist is ready, the factory is ready,” he said.
“Everything is there waiting.”
Unfortunately for Karam, “everything” included the police.
Karam, 48, was sentenced to 22 years and a belated label of “drug lord”.
“Pizza”, as he was known, was doomed to porridge until he was 70.
What Karam didn’t know then was that his good fortune had begun to fade years earlier, when he had hired a lawyer who asked lots of questions.
The chemicals deal he had been arranging on tapes and phone texts was fictional.
He was negotiating with an undercover cop in an international sting — that he now says was orchestrated by Nicola Gobbo, his own defence lawyer, under police instructions.
Karam isn’t a household name like his Lebanese compatriot “Fat Tony” Mokbel.
He lacks the quirks of style and appearance that Mokbel and Carl Williams applied to their notoriety. In police headshots and outside court, Karam wore the receding hairline and harried expression of a suburban accountant at tax time.
Not without due cause. Drug importing is a stressful game.
Karam dealt with the Morans and the mafia, which can be a tricky business when you are said to be a bit tight with a dollar. He had his life threatened over debt demands.
Deals went sour and he never had a spare moment.
When he wasn’t importing drugs — sometimes to compensate for the last venture that went awry — he was in court fighting charges of importing drugs.
Karam now stands poised for his own unique niche in criminal folklore — the first of the breed of hardened criminal turned professional victim of Gobbo.
He is claiming he has suffered a miscarriage of justice because of the glitch that has been Gobbo, known as Lawyer X, and her conflicted place in Victoria’s legal system.
WHAT WAS THE GANGLAND WAR ALL ABOUT?
Karam is playing the dupe and the stalking horse.
His appeal case has spluttered in legal conniptions since 2016.
It is tangled and cloaked, as everything that pertains to Gobbo’s career now seems to be.
His hearing in the Supreme Court’s Court of Appeal has been so secretive that representatives have been barred from taking notes, lest information leak from the room.
Arguments have been bogged in questions of “public interest immunity” and informer safety, as well as the findings of the Kellam Report of 2015, which found gross negligence in the police’s handling of informers.
Karam’s case was explicitly noted in the report, which referred to the “potential to have adversely affected the administration of justice in Victoria”.
Other big-time criminals including Mokbel have already followed his lead.
It doesn’t matter that some of the characters have rap sheets longer and uglier than a Chopper Read monologue.
Some legal observers believe that Karam’s appeal bid — if successful — will slash jail terms and overturn convictions.
In one or two cases, baddies who had been sentenced to decades might be pondering release in only a few years — as well as compensation payouts of millions of dollars.
Their arguments will be simple.
Karam’s claim is grounded in basic legal ethics.
Karam argues that Gobbo could not be a defence lawyer and a police informer at the same time, for “the notion that a lawyer can also act as a police informer (both in respect of that person and probably other criminally concerned persons) is inherently contrary to the concept of a fair trial”.
Karam’s appeal argues that he was unfairly conned by Gobbo, whom he calls a lawyer, informer, friend and agent provocateur.
Of the 5500 information reports generated by her police informing, it is believed that 2300 relate to her client Karam.
It is these reports, in which she is known as informer 3838, that he seeks to access, ostensibly in relation to a clump of 2014 convictions for drug trafficking.
If Karam’s appeal on those convictions succeeds, his convictions for other offences, including The Tomato Tins Case, might be exposed to similar scrutiny.
Karam has already flagged concerns relating to the Tomato Tins in his appeal affidavit.
Gobbo’s duplicities tied to the convictions of untold others in an untold number of other serious crimes could also be scrutinised.
HITMAN TAKES HODSON SECRETS TO GRAVE
The hint of such wholesale exposure has provoked outbreaks of insomnia for police officers and prosecutors.
For Karam’s appeal is a test case to the question of an unprecedented manipulation — by police in their use of Gobbo — of the justice system.
Gobbo represented Karam from 2004 to 2013. She was his “go-to person” as he described the early years, in whom he placed his full confidence. Yet he says that he now knows — in large part because of Herald Sun revelations in 2014 that she had been working as an informer — that Gobbo induced him to commit crimes, ratted him out to the police, and provided legal advice that sought to protect her duplicity instead of furthering his defence.
The justice process was abused, his appeal affidavit argues, because “the prosecution improperly co-opted (Gobbo) to inform on (Karam), despite knowing (or because it knew) that (Gobbo) was a lawyer for (Karam)”.
Karam argues that Gobbo breached her professional privilege. But he claims far more than that. His stories are astounding. There were meetings, Karam says, when he declined his lawyer’s “various propositions” that “were not always lawful”.
He could make $200,000 by applying his docks expertise if he consigned illegal tobacco as “furniture”, he claims she had told him.
The affidavit also sets out an encounter in a city cafe in which a fellow importer expressed some bother.
He needed help to access the docks for 200kg of cocaine, Karam alleges.
“As (Gobbo) and I had become very familiar, I did not think too much of my lawyer being involved in such a discussion or recommending me to something like this,” Karam claims in the court document.
“However, although either one or both brought up the issue at a number of meetings, I maintained my position that I could not help. I just thought (Gobbo) was trying to help me.”
At another meeting, Karam says he feared for his life.
It was July, 2007, a week after the MV Monica arrived in Melbourne with about 15 million ecstasy tablets in tomato tins. This would become a celebrated tale in criminal audacity and law enforcement.
The size of the haul — and its stranding on the docks — would provoke mafia infighting and further drug imports in efforts to compensate the loss of the 4.4 tonnes of ecstasy. In all, more than 30 people would be sentenced to more than three centuries in jail.
Gobbo had a startling revelation as she and Karam stood outside the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, he claims.
“I have just run into an AFP officer in the County Court who says there is something big at the docks and I might not know about it but I will soon,’’ Karam alleges Gobbo told him.
Minutes later, Karam says he was lunching at Wheat restaurant with Gobbo and drug boss and Black Uhlans outlaw bikie gang founder John Higgs: “(Gobbo) then repeated the AFP comment to Higgs. In the course of that conversation, Higgs told me he wanted to speak with me at the request of Pasquale Barbaro, whom I had never previously met.’’
What Barbaro, Higgs and the Calabrian Mafia syndicate wanted was their 3000 tomato tins off the docks. They figured Karam, who had worked with a logistics operator “Smoky” (name changed), might know something about the paperwork.
“He said that, because I had worked for Smoky, Barbaro believed that I would know the location of the bill of lading for the importation (the document detailing goods locations on the docks) … as it had previously been provided to Smoky,’’ Karam states.
He describes a subsequent meeting with Barbaro at Curly Joe’s in Maribyrnong. “I was being unfairly drawn into a problem not of my making,” Karam says.
At the time, Karam was standing trial in relation to five million ecstasy tablets. He now believes that Smoky and Gobbo were acting as police informers. His affidavit implies that she set him together with Higgs and Barbaro — for a drugs importation for which he would be sentenced to 15 years in jail.
Karam was a busy man.
He visited Smoky, who was in jail on remand and who he says asked him to collect an $80,000 debt from a man in Asia, “China Eddie”.
Karam says he travelled to Malaysia and Singapore repeatedly to meet China Eddie, who tried to incite him into drug importation to cover the debts.
“I discussed all of what occurred with (Gobbo),” Karam says. “I sought her advice on my involvement. She gave me advice in that respect and advised me to continue, that being asked to participate in a crime was not a crime in itself, and that it would help her to get her money (allegedly owed by Smoky to Gobbo for legal services).”
China Eddie suggested he and Karam travel to Hong Kong to meet “Michael”, who would lend Karam $80,000 if a drug deal could be arranged. Karam met Michael at a Harbour Plaza Hotel and spoke about drugs.
FOLLOW EVERY TWIST IN THE LAWYER X SCANDAL
When Karam was later arrested at his Kew home, he was unaware that Michael and China Eddie were undercover police agents.
Parts of his chat with Michael were played at Karam’s trial, though other parts were not released to his defence, after the judge ruled public interest immunity (or informer safety).
The conversations led to a conviction for the selling of almost 11,000 ecstasy tablets to an undercover police officer in Melbourne. His plans for 26 tonnes of chemicals did not go to trial.
Karam says he was driven to his actions by Gobbo.
“I sought advice from (Gobbo) about my conduct and on the basis of that advice, continued in the way that I did,” he says.
“Everything that I heard or was told during this period, (Gobbo) knew about.”
Karam was also at one stage interviewed by police about an alleged conspiracy to kill mafia figure Michelli Barbaro. There had been fallout after the Tomato Tins drugs shipment went undelivered.
Karam says he was surprised when Gobbo told him to “tell them everything” in the interview.
ESKY MURDER CARL GOT AWAY WITH
He now thinks she was acting for the police.
At the time, however, “because it came from my lawyer, and a lawyer who clearly understood my circumstances and had been there for me time and time again, I accepted it”, he says.
When she later produced a typed statement for him to sign, he refused.
The case against Karam went nowhere.
Few observers suspected the depth of Gobbo’s conflicted status within legal circles, except Zarah Garde-Wilson.
It seems fitting that Garde-Wilson helped prepare Karam’s appeal.
Garde-Wilson attracted unkind headlines through the gangland years, in part for her romance with slain killer Lewis Caine.
On one occasion, Garde-Wilson says, Gobbo was ushered through by police to advise a suspect to co-operate with investigators.
Garde-Wilson, as she says in an affidavit, wondered then whether Gobbo — a self-proclaimed police hater — was “working with Victoria Police in breach of her legal obligations as a barrister”.
Karam was seeing Gobbo almost daily over the years until his trials began in 2011. He now believes that she vetted and manipulated his defence responses with a foremost desire to protect her position as a police informer.
Karam argues that Gobbo’s advice would prove to contradict his barrister’s (the highly-respected Chris Dane QC). He says she promised — then reneged — to give evidence on his behalf.
“When I confronted her about this, she said that her evidence was admissible but that either Mr Dane was incompetent or the court was biased,” Karam says.
Dane planned to file his own affidavit in Karam’s appeal. He tells the Herald Sun that police made a mistake by accepting Gobbo as an informer.
“She was working both sides,” he says. “It got out of control.”
Further evidence for such claims is found in the Kellam Report.
The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission inquiry headed by Murray Kellam QC was triggered by the Herald Sun’s revelation of Lawyer X as a police informer in March, 2014. It led to the High Court’s damning indictment of Victoria Police’s use of a lawyer as an informer.
The top secret document details police information reports of Gobbo’s use throughout the Tomato Tins sting. If the details do not neatly gel with Karam’s appeal affidavit, they are nevertheless stunning for the conclusions they invite.
Gobbo dined with Tomato Tins members and close observers say she slept with some of them, too. She seemed unafraid of betraying them, at least in the clipped phrasing of police reports at the time.
Her police handlers assigned her intelligence to provide, in the language of a teacher setting homework. She was an enthusiastic secret weapon; sometimes, the informer asked her handlers what she could do next.
“3838 (her police informer number) said it would be easy for (3838) to speak to Karam about the containers …” reads a police information report that then sets Gobbo a new job.
“3838 very confident (3838) could talk to Karam about it without bringing suspicion. TASKING: 3838 tasked to speak to Karam and find out who is involved, what phone numbers used and the name of the freight forwarder.”
The Kellam Report shows that Gobbo gave the police a copy of the bill of lading three weeks before the MV Monica, which shipped the drugs, docked in Melbourne.
The document, which acts as proof of ownership, denoted a shipping container known MEDU1250218.
According to protected police documents, Gobbo was provided the bill of lading by Karam, who asked her to mind it before he passed it on to the freight forwarder Smoky.
Gobbo’s passing of the bill of lading to police is considered the most crucial piece of evidence in a long chain of investigations. Yet the relevant police information report cited in the Kellam Report sounds routine: “Karam won’t be suspicious of (3838). He did not notice when (3838) went upstairs and copied them (documents).”
It appears that Gobbo relied upon Karam’s implicit trust in client/lawyer privilege: “3838 believes that Karam would think that 3838 simply couldn’t tell anybody about what he tells (3838).”
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