Gobbo needs to set record straight on so many issues
Nicola Gobbo has told the Lawyer X royal commission she never stayed at Tony Mokbel’s house or used illicit drugs but there is one tawdry hook-up that’s a tale for which she has no good answers.
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Nicola Gobbo wants to set the record straight. She never stayed at Tony Mokbel’s house, she tells the royal commission. He never stayed at hers.
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Nor does she use illicit drugs. As for her reported “promiscuity”? “My privacy has been invaded comprehensively, but the picture that has been painted of me is far from the truth in many respects,” she writes in a statement.
Yet a tawdry hook-up stamps the enigma of the Gobbo conundrum. It is a tale for which Gobbo has no good answers.
On Wednesday, Gobbo put aside her occasional spurts of belligerence in talking about events in 2003 and 2004. She boasts a sharp memory (despite health issues), yet she sounds uncertain about her choices leading up the murders of Terry and Christine Hodson.
Instead, she agrees with counsel assisting Chris Winneke QC. That she did not act like a lawyer at the time. That she “accumulated information” and tried to impress the people around her.
Gobbo was wrapped up with virtually every player, from the burglary investigators to the investigated, during those bizarre months. She was the self-appointed meddler who balanced competing interests of the police (good and suspect), her clients and Dale, who would become the chief suspect in the Hodson killings.
Gobbo presents a sorry picture in naivete.
“In retrospect …” has become a tagline in her first two days of commission evidence, given over the phone from an undisclosed location. Of course she would do it differently, her mantra goes. Hers is an if-I-only-knew-then-what-I-know-now kind of lament.
Winneke produces alternative adjectives to what Gobbo described as being “out of my depth” and that events were “out of control”. Such as “untenable” and “improper”.
One strand of Gobbo’s descent traces to the night of the 2003 grand final, when a drug house in Oakleigh was burgled. She received a call from an associate of Tony Mokbel the same night. It was Mokbel’s drug-house, it emerged, and her client had been robbed of drugs and cash worth seven figures.
The next morning she received a call from Detective Sergeant Paul Dale, whose drug squad unit had been observing the Dublin St address. He had arrested suspects from the drug-house, and they wanted legal advice from Gobbo.
Yet Dale’s colleague, David Miechel, had committed the burglary, along with the police informer the pair handled, Terry Hodson. Within three days, Inspector Peter De Santo, of the ethical standards department, urged Gobbo to represent Terry Hodson. Hodson, De Santo suspected, could implicate Dale in the burglary conspiracy.
Soon enough, Gobbo was representing the burglars and the burgled. Conflicts be damned.
Then, she conjured extra dollops of crazy. Within two weeks she caught up with Dale for drinks.
She printed off conspiracy court cases — even used a yellow highlighter — so that Dale could grasp the charges he might face.
The pair fell in to bed that night, blind drunk.
Gobbo became Dale’s lawyer, briefly, when he was arrested a few months later and she visited him in the custody centre. The pair talked on burner phones for months. When her array of clients received police briefs of evidence to be used against them in court, she arranged an exchange of the documents between Dale and the suspects he had originally arrested.
She continued to represent Hodson, who had rolled on Dale, and to communicate with De Santo, Dale’s looming nemesis who had been unofficially using Gobbo as an informer for the previous couple of years.
Gobbo’s reasoning for plonking herself in this twisted tragedy? She wanted to “live up to” De Santo’s expectations, she says. Her client Mokbel “pushed” her in the background, while her new friend Paul Dale fretted that Mokbel planned to kill him over the burglary.
She sounds better at describing her choices than the reasons behind them.
“Pathetic,” she ventures.
In May, 2004, the Hodsons were executed in front of their TV in East Kew. The same night, the drug house manager Adam Ahmed dined with his lawyer, Nicola Gobbo, in Chinatown. Another of the drug-house occupants, Abbey Haynes, later told police that Ahmed had warned her about the planned hit on Terry Hodson. Gobbo fumed when Ahmed used their dinner date as an alibi.
Gobbo received an unexpected out when she suffered a stroke in July, 2004. Winneke calls her hospital recovery a “perfect opportunity” to walk away from her unethical attempts at lawyering.
It wasn’t that simple, she explains. She had massive loans. She had no one to turn to for advice. Her doctor told her that he could not measure the brain damage from her stroke unless she pursued the same intensity lifestyle she had beforehand.
“I want to make it clear that I’m not offering this as … a cop out excuse,” Gobbo says, in what sounds like a cop out excuse.
It seems Gobbo’s inexplicable choices in 2003 and 2004 only triggered her inexplicable role of secret agent in the years ahead.
Over the next two days of evidence, she gets a chance to set that record straight.
SHANE CHARTRES-ABBOTT MURDER
WHEN: JUNE 4, 2003
WHAT HAPPENED
Shane Chartres-Abbott, a gigolo who claimed he was a 200-year-old vampire, was gunned down on the nature strip outside his Reservoir home on his way to court.
His murder and its link to suspected police corruption triggered one of Victoria’s most expensive investigations
A jailed killer confessed to the murder about three years later, telling investigators police were involved. In 2013 police arrested another man, Mark Perry, alleging he ordered the murder. He was acquitted in 2014.
GOBBO’S ALLEGED INVOLVEMENT
The barrister had links to the jailed triggerman and was a drinking buddy and lawyer to a former cop suspected of being involved.
WHAT GOBBO HAS TOLD THE ROYAL COMMISSION
She says she never told police Perry had confessed to murdering Chartres-Abbott to her.
Further, she states she had never met Perry and believes the confession was added by Detective Inspector Steve Waddell, a senior investigator on the case.
JASON MORAN HIT
WHEN: JUNE 21, 2003
WHAT HAPPENED
Jason Moran had piled his kids and their friends in his van after an Auskick clinic when he and minder Pasquale Barbaro were shot dead.
Carl Williams and three of his crew were convicted of conspiring to take Moran out.
GOBBO’S ALLEGED INVOLVEMENT
The lawyer was on the phone to the gun supplier in the early hours of the day Moran was executed. Gobbo’s phone records also reveal she spoke to the same man, as he and Carl Williams travelled on CityLink to get their blood tested in South Yarra as part of a weight loss regime. Those blood tests provided them alibis. Gobbo was suspected of helping them with the alibis.
WHAT SHE HAS TOLD THE ROYAL COMMISSION
Gobbo says she found out about the murders after being dropped at the airport by Tony Mokbel ahead of a family holiday.
“I can remember being stuck at the airport … and receiving a phone call,” she said.
“(The man) rings to tell me have I heard the news that there’s been a murder … Jason Moran’s been killed,” she said.
Gobbo says she didn’t realise the significance of the phone calls at the time but they soon made her a person of interest for gangland detectives probing the hit.
THE HODSON MURDERS
WHEN: MAY 15, 2004
WHAT HAPPENED
Terence Hodson and his wife Christine were executed in their Kew home eight months after a burglary at a Mokbel-linked drug house involving corrupt police.
Terence Hodson and drug squad detective David Miechel were nabbed fleeing the Oakleigh house, which was being surveilled by his police unit.
Soon after, Hodson snitched on Miechel and then-Sergeant Paul Dale, claiming they organised the burglary. A secret police file exposing Terry as a police informer on the underworld was then leaked — months before the hit.
GOBBO’S ALLEGED INVOLVEMENT
She was called by Dale to act for criminals running the drug house. After that, she was asked by ethical standards police officer Peter De Santo to convince client Terence Hodson to dob in Dale.
She acted as a conduit between Hodson and Dale and it was alleged she later passed a phone number for Carl Williams to call Dale.
Police suspect Gobbo was also involved in leaking Hodson’s informer file to another client, Tony Mokbel.
GOBBO’S SHOCK VAMPIRE KILLER CLAIM
GOBBO ‘COULDN’T SAY NO’ TO BEING A SNITCH
WHAT SHE HAS TOLD THE ROYAL COMMISSION
Asked by the commission if she leaked the stolen Hodson file, Gobbo stated: “I did not”.
She says she felt pressured to “please” officer De Santo while also being pushed by Mokbel to find out what police knew about the probe into the drug house burglary.
Gobbo says she began an affair with Dale 13 days after the burglary while “blind drunk to the point of literally blacking out”.
During this period the pair also used burner phones to communicate but she stopped using hers after the double murder was committed, believing it had “run out of credit”.