Editorial: Gangland Lawyer X story a four-and-a-half year fight for truth
It’s been a four-and-a-half year, high-stakes fight for the truth. Since the day the Herald Sun broke the story about Lawyer X, the newspaper and reporter Anthony Dowsley have been pursuing the biggest police corruption story in Victorian history.
Opinion
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It’s been a 4½-year, high-stakes fight for the truth.
Since March 31, 2014, the day the Herald Sun broke the story about Lawyer X, a barrister-turned-informant, the newspaper and reporter Anthony Dowsley have been pursuing the biggest police corruption story in Victorian history.
At the centre of the untold story of the bloody gang war is a web of detectives, police commanders, big- time drug dealers and Lawyer X, who became a secret source of information and intelligence for detectives.
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Lawyer X played both sides of the fence. She represented some of the biggest criminals in history — Tony Mokbel among them — while also working as a registered police source known as “informer 3838”.
Even now, legal action by the Herald Sun just on Monday has enabled further information to be published on Lawyer X, while her name remains suppressed until early next year.
On Monday morning, the High Court handed down a separate decision to allow the Director of Public Prosecutions to alert criminals over “systemic” misconduct involving Victoria Police and the lawyer which subverted the justice system and breached legal confidentiality requirements.
The written findings by the nation’s highest court were damning: “EF’s (the lawyer’s) actions in purporting to act as counsel for the convicted persons while covertly informing against them were fundamental and appalling breaches of EF’s obligations as counsel to her clients and of EF’s duties to the court,” the High Court said.
“Likewise, Victoria Police were guilty of reprehensible conduct in knowingly encouraging EF to do as she did and were involved in sanctioning atrocious breaches of the sworn duty of every police officer to discharge all duties imposed on them faithfully and according to law without favour or affection, malice or ill-will.
The prosecution of each convicted person was corrupted in a manner which debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system. The public interest favouring disclosure is compelling: the maintenance of the integrity of the criminal justice system demands that the information be disclosed and that the propriety of each convicted person’s conviction be re-examined in light of the information.
“The public interest in preserving EF’s (the lawyer’s) anonymity must be subordinated to the integrity of the criminal justice system.”
The High Court ruling left the Andrews Government with no option but to immediately establish a royal commission investigation into the scandal.
Victorians must be given a full account of what has occurred and how such a corruption of the justice system and police management was enabled.
Public confidence in the probity of criminal investigations and in the protection of client-lawyer privilege have been seriously damaged.
A royal commission is the only avenue for an extensive and transparent investigation into how the process has been corrupted.
It must be given whatever scope it needs to fully pursue the individuals involved in this scandal and the corrosive failures which led to it.
Commission hearings and evidence must be public wherever possible to address eroded community confidence in the justice system.
Senior police, desperate to settle the gang war, took the extraordinary step of recruiting Lawyer X as an agent.
For several years, she had regular contact with police hierarchy. Fifteen years later, it’s this double game that has plunged Victoria Police into its greatest crisis.
Now a raft of high-profile criminals — including Mokbel and Rob Karam — are launching bids for freedom on the basis their prosecutions were tainted by their lawyer who was, in fact, also working for the police.
In short, they claim Lawyer X lured them into the crimes and tipped police off.
This is the story that Victoria Police didn’t want Victorians to read.
For more than four years, Victoria Police has repeatedly dragged the Herald Sun into the Supreme Court.
First, police lawyers would get the court to slap us with draconian suppression orders. Second, they would issue legal warnings, accusing us of breaching those suppression orders. Third, they would threaten us with prosecution and criminal convictions unless we backed off. This journalistic and legal cat-and-mouse game developed its own expensive, exhausting and stressful rhythm.
We publish, the police use the courts to shut us down.
Police claimed the lawyer’s life was in danger (she was, in fact, still choosing to live a very public life at this time). Among the phalanx of suppression orders, one in particular stands out.
It was April 1, 2014. Police lawyers threatened us for the first time. It was about 8pm, after the first edition had gone to press. So it was a case of “stop the presses”.
Scrap the front page.
But we came up with a replacement, one that wouldn’t result in charges against us. We got our point across in just three words: FIGHT FOR TRUTH.
In our front page editorial that day, we wrote: “We wanted to tell our readers an important story on today’s front page. We can’t tell you what the story was about. But we will fight for your right to know the truth.”
Today, we can start to deliver on that right.
For more than four years, police had sought to strangle our ability to tell this story. Starving it of oxygen.
While the police may have been winning its struggle to restrain us from publishing, behind the scenes our stories triggered an IBAC probe and multiple secret court cases through the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal.
Remarkably, the police and Lawyer X teamed up to take the Office of Public Prosecutions to court to prevent it writing to hundreds of criminals warning them their convictions and cases may have been compromised by the double role of the lawyer. In the wake of the Herald Sun’s initial stories in 2014, the OPP believed it had a legal obligation to inform the criminals of this potential problem.
We believe more than 600 crooks may be involved.
After losses in the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal, the police took one last roll of the dice, and appealed to the High Court of Australia. The highest court in the nation has now also ruled against Victoria Police. Last month, it finally dawned on the police that the letters would have to be sent by the OPP.
The cover up was over.
As one senior police officer remarked: “The judges are smashing us, it’s over. The judges just can’t get over the fact that we recruited a lawyer as an informer.”
The Herald Sun is finally free to tell this story.
It is one Victorians deserve to read.
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