Unprecedented Lawyer X jigsaw puzzle keeps acquiring new pieces as scandal thickens
The Lawyer X revelations had already exploded as the biggest scandal in Australia’s legal history. Each shift in this ever-changing jigsaw puzzle — which has no known legal precedent in Australian or British history — keeps acquiring new and unexpected corner pieces.
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The Lawyer X revelations, before Wednesday, had already exploded as the biggest scandal in Australia’s legal history.
Dozens — if not hundreds — of convictions stood exposed to claims of being “unsafe”.
Now we know that Lawyer X was informing a long time before her unethical conduct may have helped convict major underworld figures, including Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel.
There was more on Wednesday.
LAWYER X SERIES: THE SCORPION’S STING
The informer secret, concealed for so long, did not involve one rogue lawyer, but six people with an obligation of confidentiality.
Lawyer X — the coverall tag for a Victoria Police exercise described by the High Court as “reprehensible behaviour” — was on Wednesday being labelled as Lawyers X, Y and Z.
Each shift in this ever-changing story — which has no known legal precedent in Australian or British history — sheds a layer in the orchestrated hoodwinking of the judicial system and the administration of justice. The Lawyer X jigsaw puzzle keeps acquiring new and unexpected corner pieces.
New details expose more and more police officers, former and serving, to claims that they may have committed crimes — as well as Victoria Police itself to accusations of sloppiness — given Wednesday’s 1995 informer date emerged only when the police discovered “shortcomings” in record keeping.
This oversight occurred despite police reviewing Lawyer X’s use as an informer six or more years ago. And Victoria Police’s fight in many court battles in which they stated she was a registered informer from 2005-09.
We now know that Lawyer X was officially registered as a Victoria Police informer in 1995. Her career in informing preceded her career in law.
Lawyer X was still studying at the time, and would have learnt Rule 1.1 of the Law Institute of Victoria: “A practitioner must, in the course of engaging in legal practice, act honestly and fairly in clients’ best interests and maintain clients’ confidences.”
The accepted narrative had placed her as an official informer from September, 2005, soon after the grisly heights of the gangland war.
LEADING BARRISTER TO SPEARHEAD LAWYER X INQUIRY
NOTORIOUS GANGLAND HITMAN MENACED LAWYER X
TOP COPS TO FACE LAWYER X ROYAL COMMISSION GRILLING
During this four-year period Lawyer X, according to the Director of Public Prosecutions, appeared in 304 separate hearings for 143 individuals charged with crimes.
One proffered story went that Lawyer X was acting out of “altruism” for breaking fundamental tenets of her profession. She told the Supreme Court in 2017 that she had not been motivated because she needed a “get out of jail card”.
This line gelled with a notion that she had been recruited by the Drug Squad in the late 1990s because she was repulsed by her representation of “scumbags”.
Yet a police source has since confirmed that a drug operation identified Lawyer X and another solicitor as being involved in recorded conversations about drug trafficking in the early 2000s. Charges were to be laid, according to the source, but never eventuated.
The timing of a 1993 drug arrest for trafficking, combined with a 1995 informer date, also links Lawyer X to suggestions that she was compelled to inform at that time. In preceding years, she had expressed hopes of being prime minister.
Instead, after her first known contact with police, she was a law student with a good behaviour bond for drug use and possession. She fared better than her housemate, who was sent to jail for four months.
Not long before the drug trafficking charges in 1993, she told the Herald Sun she embraced extra-curricular activities. “It can be very boring if you only focus on your studies,” Lawyer X said. “You become boring and insular and are not forced to extend yourself and meet new people. You just study and go home.”
By 1998, she was a qualified barrister, among the youngest females to be admitted to the bar in Victoria. Her behaviour was already raising suspicions.
One of the arresting officers in the 1993 drug raid had since seen her at the pub, flanked by detectives.
Her employer, Alex Lewenberg, fretted that his junior barrister was “crossing lines”. Her loud criticisms of police became a hallmark of her brassiness, coupled with odd fears she expressed that her microwave oven was bugged.
Police launched an internal review of Lawyer X in about 2012, headed by Victoria’s former police chief, Neil Comrie.
Comrie analysed police handling of her when she was officially registered from 2005 to 2009. He found that some of her client convictions may be “open to claims of being unsafe”. His review prompted further internal investigations. They revealed Lawyer X’s informing had produced more than 5000 contact reports. She herself has claimed direct credit for the arrest and charging of 386 people.
HOW LAWYER X’S INFORMING BEGAN WITH DRUG ARREST
SHOCK TWIST IN LAWYER X INFORMER SCANDAL
Questions within Victoria Police were being informally asked before the Comrie Review.
Her informer role created a divide between Simon Overland, as chief commissioner, and deputy Sir Ken Jones, who later warned of the “abuse of the criminal court process”. One senior policeman believes officers would have had to perjure themselves to protect her secret use.
In 2015, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission released brief findings of an inquiry headed by Murray Kellam QC. Prompted by the Herald Sun’s exposure of the lawyer’s long-term use by police, the secret probe did not find that any unlawful behaviour had occurred.
Issues of legality — like the bigger Lawyer X scandal itself — continue to swell and distort. They are to be explored in a coming royal commission.
As she said in 2009: “I’ve been working for police for a very long time.”
WHY ROBERTA WILLIAMS DID NOT TRUST LAWYER X
CAREER OF INFORMANT 3838
OCTOBER 7, 1991: Lawyer X, then a Melbourne University law student, is at Tunnel Nightclub on the night Collingwood footballer Darren Millane dies while driving home drunk. She later tells coroner he was usually “the life of any party”, but this night he didn’t seem to know what he was doing.
SEPTEMBER 1993: Still studying law, she is arrested in raids on a Carlton house which uncovered 1.4kg of methamphetamine with a street value (then) of $82,000 and $3000 worth of cannabis, stolen property and weapons. Trafficking charges against her are later dropped and she escapes without conviction.
1995: Not yet practising, she is registered as a police informer.
1996: She wades into a federal election scandal, publicly claiming a Liberal staffer forged letters purported to be from Jeff Kennett, which were critical of Liberal leader John Howard and were made public by ALP treasurer Ralph Willis in the last week of the campaign.
APRIL 7, 1997: Is admitted to the Victorian Bar. Becomes a defence solicitor.
NOVEMBER 19, 1998: Becomes a barrister.
1999-2001: Among her contacts are drug squad detectives and emerging drug criminals. Lawyer X expresses a willingness to inform on criminal activity in this period.
2002: Lawyer X approaches high profile drug dealer Tony Mokbel in jail and persuades him to allow her act for him as his defence barrister.
2003: AFP agent Simon Overland joins Victoria Police as Assistant Commissioner (Crime). Establishes the Purana Taskforce to investigate organised crime and end the gangland war. Personally oversees Lawyer X’s elevation as a key informer to the taskforce.
Lawyer X establishes close bond with client Carl Williams. Is MC at his daughter’s christening at Crown Casino.
MAY 15, 2004: Lawyer X client Terence Hodson and wife Christine Hodson are murdered in their Kew home, after it was alleged that Lawyer X handed a file revealing his informer status to Mokbel, which was circulated through the underworld.
2005: Lawyer X is officially registered for the second time as a confidential “human source’’ and given a number — 3838.
MARCH 2006: Is a junior barrister in an infamous cocaine trial from which Mokbel absconds (escaping to Bonnie Doon and then Greece). Mokbel has claimed Lawyer X warned him he was about to be charged with the murders of hot dog vendor Michael Marshall and crime patriarch Lewis Moran.
JUNE 5, 2007: Tony Mokbel is captured in Athens.
AUGUST 8, 2008: Mafia syndicate members, including her clients Pat Barbaro and Rob Karam, are arrested over the importation of tomato tins filled with 15 million ecstasy pills. She is later alleged to have helped police snare them.
DECEMBER 7, 2008: Lawyer X covertly records confidant, lover and police officer Paul Dale as part of an investigation into whether he organised the murder of Terence Hodson.
JANUARY 1, 2009: Lawyer X agrees to make a police statement against Dale and become a key witness for the Crown case with gangland boss Carl Williams.
MARCH, 2009: She exits Crockett Chambers, where she leased an office on a floor with Victoria’s top criminal barristers. Victoria Police pay her $1000 a week until December 2009.
MARCH 28, 2009: She makes another statement, this time to detectives investigating the murder of “vampire’’ gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott, about her knowledge of the relationship between police, former police and a crime figure. The statement is not signed amid concerns it would expose her as an informer.
MAY 8, 2009: A hand-up brief is given to Dale revealing Lawyer X’s co-operation with police, prompting her to be put under ‘’24 hour a day’’ protection after threat is made.
APRIL 19, 2010: Carl Williams is bludgeoned to death in Barwon Prison, prompting Hodson murder case against Dale to collapse.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2010: Victoria Police pays Lawyer X $3 million in a confidential settlement, also agreeing she will never be called to testify in future.
2013: Paul Dale is found not guilty of lying the Australian Crime Commission. During the committal proceedings Lawyer X is withdrawn as a witness because of threats made against her life.
MARCH 31, 2014: The Herald Sun publishes reveals that a barrister, who the paper dubbed Lawyer X, was used by police to inform on her clients.
APRIL 3, 2014: The newly formed Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission launches probe into the Lawyer X police informer scandal, ultimately finding she was registered as an informer from 2005 and the arrangement had the potential to “adversely affect the administration of justice”.
JULY 2016: Karam is the first to fight his drug conviction on the “Lawyer X’’ principle.
NOVEMBER 2016: IBAC confirms it investigated a complaint that not all relevant documents were handed over by Victoria Police on the Lawyer X matter. The complaint is dismissed by the anti-corruption body.
NOVEMBER 2016: Victoria Police launches unprecedented secret fight in the courts stop the Director of Public Prosecutions from sending out letters to her clients alerting them that their cases might have been tainted due to her informing.
DECEMBER 2017: Tony Mokbel appeals his case on the ”Lawyer X’’ principle.
NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018: DPP is green-lighted by the High Court to send letters to Lawyer X clients revealing cases could have been tainted, prompting suppressions around the case to be lifted, allowing the Herald Sun to reveal the extent of the scandal for the first time. The Andrews Government launches a Royal Commission.
FEBRUARY 6, 2019: Government reveals scope of the Royal Commission is being expanded, revealing it had established other lawyers had been registered as informers and Lawyer X’s informing dated back to 1995, not 2005 as previously acknowledged by police.
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