Lawyer X turned police informer after drug raid on Carlton student house

The woman who would become Lawyer X turned informer while still a student, after escaping conviction and the end of her law career before it even began. It was an arrangement that raised eyebrows at the time.

The woman who would become Lawyer X was turned informer while still a student, after she was busted in a drug raid in September 1993.

Police seized 1.4kg of amphetamines, with a street value at the time of $82,000, at her Carlton house, along with $3000 worth of cannabis and stolen property.

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Her housemates, Brian Wilson and Victor Vellios, were both sentenced to eight-month jail terms — with one fully-suspended.

Lawyer X, however, pleaded guilty to two charges of possessing and using a drug of dependence.

Amphetamines with a street value of $82,000 were seized at Lawyer X’s house. File image

In an arrangement that has raised eyebrows ever since, the then-Melbourne University law student and co-editor of campus newspaper Farrago, escaped conviction, which would have nobbled her law career before it began.

One justice source said that she would have been turned informer during negotiations over the plea deal.

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By 1995, Lawyer X had been officially registered as an informer for Victoria Police, it emerged on Tuesday.

An officer involved in the raid told the Herald Sun on Wednesday he was surprised to see her socialising in a Carlton pub with detectives in 1995.

“It seemed unusual to me at the time,” he said.

“There’s a difference between having a coffee in the morning and doing that.”

Around $3000 worth of cannabis was also found. Stock image: iStock

By 1997, she was practising law, despite having being placed on a good behaviour bond over the drug issue.

One of her co-offenders said his conviction had ruined his life.

The police operation, codenamed Yak, involved lengthy periods of surveillance and intelligence gathering.

When the Herald Sun first broke the story that police used Lawyer X to inform on clients, sources said the arrangement began in the late 1990s.

After the scandal erupted, police admitted she was registered as an informer in 2005, but yesterday it was revealed that a document had been unearthed detailing that she was first registered a decade earlier in 1995.

Sources have previously told the newspaper that she became an informer to the now-defunct drug squad, closed down because of police corruption.

STRANGE CASE OF FAKE ELECTION LETTERS

A year after she first began informing for Victoria Police, and while still a university student, Lawyer X inserted herself into one of the biggest political stories of the 1996 federal election campaign.

On the eve of that year’s March poll, which saw John Howard end 13 years of Labor government, the federal treasurer released letters purporting to be from the Victorian premier Jeff Kennett and Liberals’ Treasury spokesman Peter Costello.

The Herald Sun’s coverage led to a royal commission.

They were unmasked as forgeries within hours and printed on an outdated Victorian premier’s letterhead.

But they purported to show that the Coalition planned to cut commonwealth funding to the states.

Two months after the Keating government’s defeat, Fairfax Media reported Lawyer X had alleged to federal police officers before the election that she believed the letters had been forged by a member of the University of Melbourne Liberal Club.

In a statement to the AFP, Lawyer X said she had rung the student and attempted to coax him into admitting he had forged the letters.

The allegation, for which she offered no concrete evidence, was denied by the student.

In her statement she said: “I can only recall one occasion throughout the entire conversation concerning the letters when (the student) specifically denied his personal responsibility.

“In response to me suggesting again, as I did several times, that he had been responsible for a really clever scam, he said something like: ‘No, come on, it wasn’t me’,” added Lawyer X in her statement.

No one was ever charged over the forged letters.

— James Campbell

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