Will Nicola Gobbo’s moment of truth deliver?
It’s cost police millions to keep her out of the witness box, but finally the secret-keeper once known as Lawyer X will give evidence. But will she really answer the crucial questions?
Behind the Scenes
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Nicola Gobbo has been avoiding witness boxes since 2006.
She has used death threats, some say sent to her on her instructions, and sued Victoria Police to evade giving sworn evidence.
The force has since thrown millions of dollars in its misguided promise to her to keep her out of courtrooms.
Starting Tuesday, the woman known as Lawyer X will deliver her evidence via video-link from an unknown location.
Gobbo is the keeper of the secrets. It’s already clear her version of events will conflict with dozens of police officers, serving and former, who have already given evidence to the royal commission. But there is still doubt as to whether Gobbo will deliver her moment of truth.
In this, the Year of the Rat, the barrister turned informer is set to spend four half days answering exhaustive questions to a royal commission she once quipped would be established if she was murdered by the clients she so brazenly betrayed.
‘If this gets out, say nice things at my eulogy, because I will be gone — and enjoy the royal commission,’’ she told her police handler at the peak of her informing years between 2005 and 2009.
But no one has enjoyed this royal commission. Untangling Gobbo’s, and Victoria Police’s, web of deceit has unearthed a toxic police culture, a willingness at the top of police command to undermine the justice system, and tawdry sexual exploits.
It is said to have broken up one marriage so far.
Of greater significance, the force’s unethical alliance with the duplicitous lawyer has resulted in the quashing of one gangland murder conviction, that of Faruk Orman.
More convicted men may follow, amid a rush of planned lawsuits against the state of Victoria and its police force.
Commissioner Margaret McMurdo has been firm with Gobbo, unwilling to accept Gobbo’s medical and psychological reports used in an attempt to avoid giving evidence.
Gobbo acquiesced, to an extent, by holding three phone conversations with the royal commission – in March, April and June last year. She took medication for neuralgia every two hours of the chats to dull her chronic facial pain.
The unsworn evidence was littered with revelations. Gobbo spoke about her intimacy with then Sergeant Paul Dale in the months leading to the murder of his informer, Terry Hodson, for which Dale would later become the chief suspect.
She called former chief commissioner Simon Overland “evil” and “dishonest” and described her informing as her “voluntary second job”.
She also spoke of a succession of police officers with whom she shared secrets during periods when she was not registered as an informer.
“I take it you didn’t sleep with Mick Gatto?” she was asked by counsel assisting, Chris Winneke QC.
“No, no, but, um, no but (my chief police handler) ‘Sandy White’ was actively encouraging me, in his words, (to) take one for the team …” she replied.
Gobbo raised doubts about her lawyers’ claims of her unfitness to give evidence when she gave a television interview which aired last December.
Pain and mental anguish aside, her reluctance to give evidence in open court – while giving media interviews at the same time – is not new.
Gobbo put herself in front of a camera to play the victim in 2010, when she publicly blamed Victoria Police for ruining her career and putting her life at risk by turning her into a witness against Dale.
It was a bold ploy. Gobbo’s unspoken threat at the time was that she was prepared to expose the dirty secret they shared – that she was Victoria Police’s unholy registered informer.
She failed to mention she had a sordid history with Dale, who was later charged with murdering Terry Hodson in a case dropped after the prison murder of co-witness Carl Williams in 2010.
Dale and Gobbo became sexual partners at a very odd time.
Their affair began, Gobbo has now revealed, in October 2003, within two weeks of a burglary involving police corruption.
Hodson, caught near the burglary scene, had committed the crime with drug squad police officer David Miechel.
Hodson was not only a connected drug dealer, he was also Miechel’s most prolific informer. His other police handler was drug squad sergeant, Paul Dale, and Hodson said that Dale was involved in the burglary.
The sequence of events that followed the burglary, on September 27, 2003, are telling.
Dale went to see his police partner, Miechel, wounded and in hospital after he was bitten by a police dog during his capture at the Oakleigh crime scene.
The following morning he was involved in the arrests of those who ran the Oakleigh drug safe house.
Gobbo was contacted almost immediately that night by a criminal connected to the safe house.
She would be the lawyer for three people involved in protecting and trading the drugs in the safe house, which was the operation of her key client, Tony Mokbel.
Things then got more bizarre.
A police corruption buster, Peter De Santo, who had for years used Gobbo as a secret (and unofficial) source, phoned her with a request.
Inspector De Santo wanted her to ring her client Andrew Hodson in an attempt to get his father Terry to meet with her.
The idea was to get Terence Hodson to speak to internal police corruption investigators.
Gobbo duly rang Andrew to get him and his father to a meeting at the Celtic Club in Melbourne, ostensibly for Gobbo to act as Hodson’s lawyer.
It was October 1, 2003, five days after Terry Hodson was arrested and released over the burglary.
Hodson would eventually make three detailed statements to De Santo’s department –
Ethical Standards Division (ESD) – naming Miechel and Dale as the masterminds of the burglary.
What Hodson didn’t know, is that eight days after he met Gobbo, she agreed to meet Dale at O’Connell’s hotel in South Melbourne.
She now, all these years later, states they got blind drunk, talked about ‘’conspiracy law’’, and she slept with Dale, even though he joked he feared she was wearing a wire.
Gobbo told the royal commission Dale hated De Santo, and was paranoid Hodson was implicating him, which she knew at the time that Hodson almost certainly was doing.
After sleeping with Dale, Gobbo continued meeting with him until he was arrested along with Miechel and Hodson on December 5.
During this period, as she spoke with Dale on burner phones, she would sit down with Hodson in Domino’s cafe near her chambers in the CBD, and receive messages to pass on to Dale.
After their arrests, Gobbo visited Dale in jail, more than once, taking his notes and legal documents to another lawyer.
It didn’t seem to matter that Gobbo continued to act for those arrested by Dale and his police crew for running the drug house.
She even exchanged hand-up briefs of evidence between her paying clients and Dale, she now says.
All the while, she was meeting up with Hodson, not so much to give him legal advice, but to snoop.
Hodson was about to secure himself a deal as a prosecution witness.
But he would never make a witness stand.
Rob Stary, an accredited criminal law specialist, took over Hodson’s case after he was bailed and won him a deal that would almost certainly ensure the career criminal would not serve a day in prison in return for his testimony against Dale and Miechel.
Hodson didn’t trust Gobbo, and even wore a wire at one meeting with his lawyer on the instructions of the ESD.
He divulged to ESD investigators” “ (T)he blonde lady’s sleeping with the three-striper (sergeant)’’.
But for reasons that remain unclear, Hodson returned as a client to Gobbo just weeks before he was killed.
He didn’t know it, but his confidential informer files, contained in a blue folder and meant to be held in a secure area of Victoria Police drug squad offices, had been stolen and leaked to Tony Mokbel.
Police suspect Dale took the ‘’blue file’’ on the night of the burglary after visiting Miechel in hospital.
They also suspected he used Gobbo to get them to her biggest client, Mokbel.
She now says Dale was afraid of Mokbel, unaware the drugs in the safe-house belonged to him.
She also connected Dale with gangland boss Carl Williams during this period.
Drunken phone calls from a Richmond pub to Williams on one of Gobbo’s ‘’burner’’ phones have never been properly explained.
Williams alleged, before his 2010 murder, that Gobbo handed him Dale’s secret phone number.
He called that mobile number from a phone box, and says he met Dale in the outer northwest suburb of Hillside.
Dale has always denied he plotted to burgle the Oakleigh drug house with Hodson and his former mate, Miechel, or had anything to do with Hodson’s murder.
To this day, Gobbo looms large as an advisor, arbiter, enabler and possibly a conspirator in the killings of Terry Hodson and his wife Christine.
Shortly after the murder of Williams, who had made several statements against Dale, investigators were planning to interview Gobbo over her suspected active role in leaking Hodson’s ‘’blue file’’.
Instead, after Gobbo sued the police force, detectives were ordered by then Chief Commissioner Simon Overland to cease any contact with her.
Miechel spent 12 years in jail for burglary. The burglary case against Dale collapsed without Hodson’s evidence.
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Hodson had told his daughter he was a ‘’dead man walking’’ after he snitched on police. Gobbo’s handlers later speculated that her later informing was motivated by a “guilty conscience” over the Hodson killings.
Other questions that may be raised in Gobbo’s evidence include the suggestion, aired last year, that Gobbo claimed that Mark Perry confessed to her that he murdered the so-called vampire killer Shane Chartres-Abbott in 2003.
Unlike some witnesses, who have spent weeks in the royal commission witness box, Gobbo’s video-linked testimony will be limited to about 15 hours over the next four days.