Patrick Carlyon: Those who corrupted the justice system must be held to account

The Lawyer X scandal took a hammer to the core of our justice system, and yet not a single person has faced any consequences

Call it the $64m question.

What happens now to the police officers, as well as Nicola Gobbo, who corrupted the justice system and unfairly jailed people?

The royal commission findings this week were an end, of sorts, to an audacious cover-up that stretches 14 years.

Victoria Police officers knew they were tossing out the rules when they recruited Gobbo as an informer, for the third time in 2005, and asked: “Tell us everything you know about Tony Mokbel”.

Chief Commissioner Shane Patton’s broad apology this week should be welcomed. It conflicted with the rhetoric of his predecessors, who implied it was all right for police officers to ignore the law because the law tripped up their noble desire for results.

Patton spoke of police spending $64m in its ignoble fight to manage and attempt to hide the Gobbo scandal. The figure is misleading. It is a fraction of the real cost.

His estimate is thought to date from 2018, and the setting up of the royal commission.

It does not include the appeal cases before the royal commission or the compensation claims ahead.

Melbourne gangland barrister Nicola Gobbo.

Double the number, maybe triple it. Weigh it against the cost of a new hospital or freeway. Victoria Police will eventually spend hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly to try to cover their arses.

Patton conceded something else, too. Not a single police officer has been stood down over the scandal. This inconvenient fact jars with his apology. How does Patton marry responsibility to accountability? It remains to be proved, but Victoria police officers may have committed crimes.

On Commissioner Margaret McMurdo’s recommendation, a special investigator will explore charges that do not resonate with the starkness of a did he/didn’t he murder case.

They include perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office. There’s perjury, too, which ordinary people better understand.

Don’t underestimate their seriousness. Guilty findings could not only end careers, but also place the convicted in jail.

There was no one error in this secret abuse of power. The Lawyer X scandal was a systemic choice driven by a cowboy culture of contempt for the rules of engagement.

It started with a detective changing the statement of a murder suspect in 2004 with the help of the suspect’s lawyer. He and Gobbo hid their unethical deception from the court. They got away with it. The deception morphed into an example. It was OK to cheat — as long as no one found out.

The spectre explains the Victoria Police’s decade-long recalcitrance when confronted with demands for the truth.

=Chief Commissioner Shane Patton. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Paul Jeffers

Victoria Police acted like the local equivalent of China’s “wolf warriors”. Their officers often seemed forgetful in the witness box. The force’s campaign of denial was built on bombast, threats and the abiding need to bury truth and accountability.

Victoria Police have schemed with a deceit that dwarfs any other police scandal in this country. The public is owed a reckoning, or in the kinder language of the modern world, a “reset”.

Two former chief commissioners were named by Commissioner McMurdo for failing in their duty.

Simon Overland, a qualified lawyer, should have known to seek legal advice before commissioning a defence barrister to inform to police.

Graham Ashton should have investigated the propriety of Gobbo’s police use in his oversight role at the Office of Police Integrity.

Ashton later railed against a succession of adverse judicial findings by applying a kind of political spin lifted from the British TV show, The Thick Of It.

We have the official truth now.

The history has been rewritten. Solving the Gangland War blazes as a Shakespearean lament. Forget goodies versus baddies. Crime fighting was about ambition and hubris.

Gobbo boasted an abnormal sense of self; she had always played outside the rules, as if it was a birthright of her surname.

But she was abetted. She zigzagged down the highway, knocking over the fundamentals of the law and fairness, and she did it with a police escort.

Commissioner McMurdo’s findings underscored every other judicial review into the use of a defence barrister who informed against her own clients.

The Purana taskforce was once celebrated as a modern version of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables. It was righteous and unrelenting. As Nixon once wrote: “I think Purana helped create a new kind of detective hero — meticulous, methodical, fair, ruthless — and operating in the light of day.”

It’s easy to pity those Purana detectives who did not know about Gobbo’s secret use. Dozens of them embodied Nixon’s superlatives. Yet their dedication has been tainted. The Purana legacy is a cautionary tale of what happens when decent people accept indecent shortcuts.

Gobbo may avoid prosecution, given her unknown whereabouts and the limits of extradition powers. But the drivers of informer 3838, the law men and women who submitted that the right result justified the wrong approach, should be held to account.

To do so will take many more years and cost tens of millions of dollars more. Yet Victorians are owed nothing less.

Patrick Carlyon Is a Herald Sun columnist

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Lawyer X, by Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, published by HarperCollins, is available at booktopia.com.au and bookstores