Lawyer X Nicola Gobbo convinced gangland hitman to turn on Carl Williams

Nicola Gobbo was so close to Carl Williams that she hosted his daughter Dhakota’s lavish christening in 2003. But the ‘Queen of the bail application’ was secretly working to bring him down.

Carl Williams had allegedly threatened to kill a detective and “chop up” the officer’s girlfriend.

But the gangster cockily boasted that he had a barrister who would “do what we tell her”.

Nicola Gobbo — the “queen of the bail application” — had already secured his freedom once, and he was confident now that she was once again in his corner.

But what Williams didn’t then know — and what few others knew — was that Gobbo was an informer for that very same detective.

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He was Stuart Bateson, who would become the most celebrated member of the force’s feted anti-gangland taskforce Purana, and is now a commander in Victoria Police.

Though playing a secret role on behalf of police, Gobbo typically affected outrage in the courtroom on behalf of her clients.

Gobbo with Carl Williams’s father George.

Gobbo worked to turn Carl Williams’s hitman into an informer. Picture: Fiona Hamilton.

She sought to cross-examine Bateson’s girlfriend over Williams’s alleged threat to chop her up — a threat picked up by a telephone intercept — arguing the woman’s claim to be “extremely scared” by the threat did not necessarily mean she feared for her life.

Thanks to her double-dealing, Gobbo herself would come to endure threats from underworld goons in the years ahead. This is hardly surprising, given the breadth of her duplicity and the characters she crossed.

The gun used by ‘The Driver’ to kill Jason Moran.

Carl and Roberta’s wedding. Picture: Big Shots/Adam Shand/Penguin books.

Gobbo takes the credit for bringing Williams down. Her action, at the peak of the underworld war, in persuading the first gangland figure to “roll” was Purana’s masterstroke.

“(It) created a precedent for others to follow and was the crack in the dam wall of silence that led to a flood,’’ she wrote in a 2015 letter to police assistant commissioner (crime) Stephen Fontana.

The Williams henchman she persuaded to talk was known as “The Driver’’, a convicted rapist and armed robber.

The Driver was involved in the reckless execution of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro at an Auskick clinic as children sat in the back of his Mitsubishi van.

And he teamed up with the same hitman to murder hot dog vendor and drug dealer Michael Marshall, shot in front of his son in a residential South Yarra street.

In the letter to Mr Fontana, detailed in secret Supreme Court hearings, Gobbo said that before suffering a stroke in 2004 she coaxed The Driver into informing.

“In the lead-up to my illness, I played a pivotal role in convincing (him) to ‘roll over’ on Williams, (the shooter), and others, and (in helping him in) withstanding undue pressure from the Williams crew (and Tony Mokbel) to try to get him to stay silent,” Gobbo wrote.

Gobbo went on to detail how she convinced another Williams lackey to become an informer — after she had implicated him in murderous crimes. She boasted: “As a result of information provided by me, Purana were able to get him to a position where he was confronted with a mountain of evidence which led to him becoming a witness for police.”

Jason Moran was killed in 2003.

Stuart Bateson was threatened while working on the Purana taskforce. Picture Jay Town

All of these people were her clients.

Gobbo had been so close to Williams that in 2003 she hosted the gala christening of his daughter Dhakota at Crown casino.

His ex-wife Roberta says that Gobbo jokingly announced: “I would like to thank Victoria Police, ­especially Purana taskforce, for allowing this day to happen and letting Carl be here.”

Williams ultimately worked out Gobbo was an informer. He did so before most, but it was still too late.

The letter from Barwon prison.

Carl Williams letter page two

In a letter to a friend from Barwon Prison in 2006, he said: “I will let you know that Nicola DID … make statements, and ultimately, give evidence against me and others, to try and put us in prison for a long time if not forever. To put it bluntly, she is a DOG & I will show her up for what she is, I believe people have a right to know … I don’t declare people unless I am 100% sure … in this case, I am a million % sure.”