Gobbo’s interview invites more questions than answers
Nicola Gobbo has finally spoken, but the bigger answers still shimmer in hazes of doubt. These are the nine questions that can only be addressed when she talks – on terms not of her making.
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Nicola Gobbo has spoken. Not to the royal commission, where she would be confronted with criminal allegations, but to a news crew.
The defence barrister and police informer is healthy enough to talk down the barrel of a TV camera. Yet her lawyers, armed with medical reports, have argued she is too ill to even speak down the phone about her informing to the royal commission.
Nicola Gobbo has spoken — on her terms. And her choice invites more questions than answers.
By giving a TV interview, she has avoided those questions that have flummoxed senior officers of Victoria Police in the commission witness box.
She has instead perpetuated her victimhood line, unfettered by the inconvenient documents and statements that contradict her narrative.
Her circumstances are undoubtedly dire. Gobbo said she was extorted by the criminals, then extorted by the police, who are scarier than her former clients Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel, in part because they have threatened to remove her children from her.
“It’s not the first time that they (Victoria Police) threatened me in relation to toeing the line and doing things their way or they would take my children,” Gobbo told the ABC last night.
She has claimed such concerns since her children first became an issue in 2015.
“It remains their (her children’s) belief that they were chased out of their home by police that are trying to take their mummy away, and that, to any parent, is beyond devastating,” she said in the TV interview.
Gobbo’s life was hellish, according to her. Physical pain was compounded by threats to her safety. She was “stranded” and “stateless”, fed “to the wolves” by the police, who threatened to expose her if she did not keep informing.
In claims stridently rejected by the Police Association, Gobbo also said: “There’s always going to be a (safety) risk, but my greatest fear is the police themselves.”
After his second day of evidence to the royal commission, police chief commissioner Graham Ashton said Gobbo need not fear police. He said the force was doing “everything they can” to keep Gobbo safe.
It was reported on 3AW that immigration officials would notify police if Gobbo tried to return from her exile overseas, presumably so they could ensure her children are kept safe.
But despite her expressed desire to return to Australia, protracted scenarios for Gobbo’s extradition were being touted if she were to face criminal charges.
It is believed a number of criminals will seek to sue her for betraying them as an agent of police should she return.
Meanwhile, drug trafficker and father of her children, Richard Barkho, was recently released from jail and it’s understood he is keen to see them. “F —k off,” he told the Herald Sun. “I’m not saying anything.”
So how much of Gobbo’s take on events in her TV interview was believable?
In the commission, Gobbo would be under oath and led through mountains of evidence that conflict with her account. In effect she would be disarmed of her most powerful weapon.
As Informer 3838, Gobbo was a professional snitch whose welfare relied upon the deception of drug barons and speed freaks. Her gift for lying — what she called “plausible deniability” — is why she is still alive today.
On TV, she deflected questions that intruded on her victimised projection.
She denied, for example, that she burgled the office of a colleague in 2007. Yet she was not confronted with the documents suggesting that she bragged about the break-in to her police handlers.
We can compare Gobbo’s statements on the ABC to chats with our reporter Anthony Dowsley in 2014.
Dowsley was revealing her informing at the time, yet Gobbo denied she was an informer. She also denied sleeping with former drug squad detective Paul Dale (she tells the ABC they were romantically intimate, once).
Back in 2014, Gobbo offered to assist Dowsley in his pursuit of the truth, while at the same time secretly demanding that Victoria Police suppress the Herald Sun from telling the truth.
Back then, Gobbo planned to sue police for “tens of millions” of dollars over our exposure of her informing.
Legal experts now say such an exercise would be fruitless.
Yet Gobbo again spoke to the ABC of suing the police for personal injury against herself and her two children.
In alluding to the psychological impact on her kids, she overlooked her starring part in the greatest legal scandal in Australian history. She sought to reframe the prevailing evidence and avoided the threat of legal censure.
Call it an act of self-preservation. Or, as the Herald Sun labelled her behaviour last year, a “scorpion’s sting”.
Gobbo portrayed herself as misused and manipulated, while police testimony has cast her as an informer and a suspect, most notably for her proximity to two gangland hits and four deaths.
We know Gobbo kept offering up information, even after she was officially jettisoned by Victoria Police in 2009 and again in 2010.
Yet she claimed she had to continue informing amid police threats that her secret would be revealed.
She told the ABC: “I had Victoria Police on my back every day, saying to me ‘don’t filter anything, you tell us everything and let us work out what’s relevant and what’s not relevant. And if you lie to us or don’t tell us things, we will know you’re lying to us’.”
It’s only one example in which her TV statements contradict the documents and the succession of police officers (and criminals) in royal commission evidence.
Police information reports from 2005 to 2009 repeatedly spoke of Gobbo’s insistence on continued contact with police, despite overtures from her handlers to take a rest or cease informing at all.
She claimed altruistic motives. How could she ignore the moral and ethical imperatives to report planned killings of her clients and acquaintances, she argued.
But her unethical behaviour, described by the High Court as “appalling” and “reprehensible”, logically led to the hardships now imposed on her children. She is in danger because of what she has done.
Still, she seemed unwilling, perhaps unable, to link the two. As if she cared about the effect, never mind the cause.
On the ABC, Gobbo batted away the questions she didn’t want to answer, ironically by deferring to the commission she does not want to appear at. She did not have the time or concentration to prepare for such a grilling, she said.
As the commission pointed out, however, Gobbo has had lots of time. It has waited for her statement since March, and offstage seethed about her interview.
The commission has offered to afford her “short bursts” on the phone to give evidence.
“Ms Gobbo has been represented at community expense and continues to be represented throughout the life of this commission at virtually all its hearings by solicitors and by both junior and senior counsel,” a spokeswoman said.
“Whilst Ms Gobbo’s lawyers commenced preparing a statement on her behalf, it was not completed.”
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Gobbo has spoken, but the bigger answers still shimmer in hazes of doubt.
Why did she inform to police for three separate periods between 1995 and 2009, starting with a sting on her boyfriend?
Why did she offer to inform to the Australian Federal Police within months of qualifying as a lawyer?
How does she defend the mounting raft of criminal claims — from fraud to worse — that she now stands accused of? These questions can only be addressed when Gobbo talks — on terms not of her making.