Cop still took tips off despite danger to Gobbo

Victoria Police took more than 200 pieces of information from Nicola Gobbo even after the gangland barrister was at “extreme risk of serious injury or death”.

The force found Nicola Gobbo’s life was in extreme danger after she went from a secret informer to a public police witness in 2009.

Victoria Police took more than 200 pieces of information from Nicola Gobbo even after the gangland barrister was at “extreme risk of serious injury or death,” it was revealed yesterday.

The Lawyer X royal commission progress report revealed the force found Gobbo’s life was in extreme danger after she went from a secret informer to a public police witness in 2009.

But from 2009, when she was deregistered as a source, to 2010 there were 207 police reports created from information Gobbo gave them — mostly on Melbourne’s underworld.

It came as a senior detective yesterday told the commission he did not tell Gobbo to stop being a lawyer for dangerous drug criminals because it was not running a “daycare centre for barristers who had lost their way”.

Detective Senior Sergeant Paul Rowe, who recruited Gobbo in 2005, said she had been desperate to rid herself of Mokbel and resurrect her reputation in the legal world.

Paul Rowe leaves the Lawyer X Commission in Melbourne. Picture: Mark Stewart

Sen-Sgt Rowe said while officers knew the information Gobbo was providing could be subject to legal professional privilege, it was so important it could not be ignored.

Asked if Victoria Police should have told her to stop acting for gangland figures such as Carl Williams and Mokbel, he said Gobbo was not a “delicate flower” and was able to make her own ­decisions.

“It is not our role to advise someone on their personal circumstances, it is not my job to suggest to her to leave her practice and give up everything she has worked for,” Sen-Sgt Rowe said.

But he denied it was in police’s interests for Gobbo to continue to act for drug dealers and organised crime figures.

“That is a view that is convenient to the process that you are undertaking here,” he said.

“If she had’ve walked out … and disappeared into the sunset that would have been a win for, certainly, the Purana taskforce and the majority of Victoria Police.

“Nothing but grief was caused, nothing but grief.”

One of the first pieces of information Gobbo told Sen-Sgt Rowe and officers of the specialist source development unit, who handled her from 2005-09, was a plan by to bribe police officers to destroy evidence tapes.

After the September 2005 meeting, police hatched a plan to run a sting to get Mokbel to bribe an undercover officer.

After the September 2005 meeting, police hatched a plan to run a sting to get Mokbel to bribe an undercover officer.

They also established a taskforce that would investigate Mokbel’s money laundering operation on the back of Gobbo’s recommendation.

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In a transcript of the 2005 meeting, read to the commission, Gobbo told her new handlers that an underworld barrister turning informer would be a “good story” if it was ever revealed.

“That is a book we are never going to write,” her handler ­replied.

Gobbo gave more than 5000 pieces of information to the source development unit, with much of it about clients she represented during Melbourne’s gangland wars.