How hitman Rod Collins got a list of police informers

When former drug squad detective Paul Dale gave evidence to the Australian Crime Commission he did not expect it to land in the hands of a jailed hitman.

Witness testimony from a secretive federal inquiry that revealed police informers identities was accidentally given to a gangland hitman and spread through the underworld, Paul Dale says.

The former drug squad detective said his evidence to the Australian Crime Commission was inadvertently supplied to jailed hitman Rod Collins, “who subsequently spread them throughout the jail.”

Mr Dale’s witness statement to the Lawyer X Royal Commission says the ACC had admitted it had supplied his testimony to them to Collins as part of a brief of evidence for murder charges compiled against the two men.

“I was contacted by criminals I had named in these hearings asking me why I had declared them as police informers,” he said.

Former detective Paul Dale leaves the Lawyer X Royal Commission.

Mr Dale, as well as Collins, was charged with the murders of police informer Terry Hodson and his wife Christine.

Dale claims it was a legally privileged conversation he had with barrister Nicola Gobbo, which she taped an passed on to Victoria Police, that led to a murder charge being laid against him.

The Lawyer X Royal Commission has heard Gobbo, who was a police informer while working as a barrister for underworld figures, was tasked with gathering evidence against Dale.

Rod Collins.

Dale said it was Gobbo’s information that also led him to being charged with lying to the Australian Crime Commission. He was acquitted at trial of those charges.

The Hodsons’ murder charges against Dale and Collins were withdrawn when drug boss Carl Williams was killed in prison in 2010.

Williams was to have given evidence against both men.

Dale said Gobbo had ­provided him with legal advice in a semi-formal way throughout his multiple criminal charges and appearances before ­inquiries.

The Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants heard from Dale’s close friend Tim Argall yesterday, who said he had acted as an intermediary between the former officer and Gobbo.

Mr Argall said he had often joked with Dale about Gobbo’s tendency to exaggerate the importance of matters.

“We often would refer to things being a matter of national security; they were pumped up and when you got there it was a cat stuck in a tree.”

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Mr Argall, who is still a serving police detective, said he and Dale had got legal advice from Gobbo shortly after a burglary at a drug house that Dale was implicated in.

Dale was charged after Hodson had given a statement implicating him in the Dublin St burglary on Grand Final night 2003.

Mr Argall said he believed once Dale was arrested over the burglary he had instructed a new legal team and Gobbo stopped acting for him.

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