Nicola Gobbo was suspected informer before Lawyer X reveal
Tony Mokbel is back in the Supreme Court witness box for a third day as he fights to walk from jail early. Here are the highlights.
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Underworld figure Tony Mokbel returns to the Supreme Court witness box for a third day as he fights for freedom on the Lawyer X rule.
Mokbel, whose barrister was supergrass police informer Nicola Gobbo, is detailing her crucial role in his battle against extradition back to Australia after he was arrested in Greece in 2007 following a global 15-month manhunt.
One of Australia’s most infamous criminals, the 58-year-old earlier this week claimed it was Gobbo who told him to go on the run in March 2006 while she was representing him in a cocaine smuggling trial, telling him police would continue charging him with murders until he was jailed for life.
Here’s what we learned in court before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton on Thursday.
Legal eagle stoush
Nicola Gobbo told her police handlers that drug kingpin Tony Mokbel heard she was an informer from high profile barrister Zarah Garde-Wilson back in 2007.
According to police excerpts from her informer file, Gobbo reported on October 3, 2007 that Mokbel, locked up in Greece, “told her you’ve been hearing Zarah Garde-Wilson has been spreading rumours about Ms Gobbo being a dog”.
“I can’t recall exactly if it was Zarah … (but there) was a rumour going around about her being an informer,” Mokbel told the court.
He’d earlier said killer and underworld figure Carl Williams had told him “don’t trust her” about Gobbo, and that while Mokbel was in Greece he’d heard his lawyer was sleeping with cops and doing drugs.
But he said he didn’t believe the rumours.
Before Gobbo’s identity as Lawyer X was revealed, Garde-Wilson was unfairly suspected.
The two lawyers worked together at the height of the gangland war.
Later, in April 2008, Gobbo asked Mokbel if it was true he’d spoken to lawyer Alastair Grigor and “called her a dog”.
“I said that’s impossible, why would I do that? … Have you done anything wrong against me?”
She said she hadn’t.
“That’s crazy,” he said he told her.
Broken hearts and car fires
Nicola Gobbo’s BMW was set on fire on a South Melbourne street in front of passers by on the evening of April 16, 2008.
Just one day later, Tony Mokbel, in jail in Greece, recalled a phone conversation he had with her.
“She was pretty upset about that?” the Office of Public Prosecutions David Glynn asked him of the car blaze.
“So was I for her, yeah,” he replied.
Mokbel confirmed that on April 17, he spoke to Ms Gobbo and told her he’d “heard her car had been burnt”.
At this time, unbeknown to him, she was registered police informer 3838, and passing on all their conversations to the cops.
“I said it seemed obvious she’d obviously broken someone’s heart deeply and asked who that could be,” Mokbel wrote in an affidavit.
‘Tell him this’
Gobbo’s police handlers gave her a two-page list of things to discuss with Mokbel after he returned from Greece.
The list showed Gobbo had been instructed to tell him that “people in your circle” had been sending threats her way, and had been accusing her of being a dog.
Handlers also wanted her to tell Mokbel she believed someone linked to him had set her car on fire.
On May 20, 2008, the duo had a one-hour chat from prison, where Mokbel was forced to call her back five times because prison calls only lasted 12-minutes long.
Mokbel recalled he told her he was “very disappointed by the way she had been treated and it’s not right”.
If you need me, call me
Mokbel said when he returned to Australia after his extradition in 2008, he spoke to Gobbo on the phone and she told him she couldn’t be his lawyer.
She had a “conflict” because she was representing witnesses in his matters, she said.
“She gave me an indication she was sick and she was struggling with some issues, we won’t go into detail of that stuff,” Mokbel said.
“She said she was conflicted.”
He said Gobbo told him “when the other two matters come up, when I’m feeling well I’m more than happy” to act for Mokbel.
The other two matters were the murder charges he faced over the deaths of kickboxer Michael Marshall and crime patriarch Lewis Moran — both charges were later dismissed or dropped.
“All I can remember is this a million per cent that she was sick, that she wouldn’t act for me in court, and she said to me in two or three months hopefully she’ll be much more better,” he said, noting she was having surgery.
“If she is healthy enough she’ll act for me in the two (murder) matters that were coming up.”
Mokbel said the barrister told him, “if you need any legal advice, call me on the phone”.
“It was really appreciated because when she told me about her health, I was in shock.”
Gobbo my friend
Mr Glynn said it simply didn’t match up that Mokbel knew Gobbo was “leaving me” as his lawyer because she was conflicted, and that she also offered to continue giving him legal advice.
“You don’t know Ms Gobbo,” Mokbel replied.
Justice Fullerton asked him, “what do you mean by that?”
“She was extremely kind to me, she was very friendly to me, we had a great relationship, Your Honour,” he said.
Her Honour asked if he thought “the friendship side of your dealings with her was over or did you think that friendship would continue?”
“The friendship would definitely continue,” he said.
Not long after she told him she couldn’t act for him, the court heard Mokbel called Gobbo twice to check on her ailing health.
Mr Glynn said Gobbo thought this was “nice because no-one else was inquiring about her health”, according to her informer logs.
Mokbel and Gobbo were neighbours who regularly went to dinner and even the gym together.
“We had a great relationship, yeah,” he said of his lawyer who was secretly informing on him to police.
It was put to him the pair would “socialise” before he was jailed for the past 17 years.
“We didn’t go clubbing or anything like that,” Mokbel said.
Mr Glynn corrected that they would have dinner together, she moved close to where he lived and they even went to the gym together.
“She wanted to lose some weight at the time and I helped out as much as I can, yes,” Mokbel said.
“In my opinion she was everything — she was in house counsel, she was a friend, everything.”
Records showed that Gobbo went to prison to visit the convicted drug trafficker on February 13, 2009, telling her handlers in the months beforehand that she wanted to see him “one last time and try to quit on good terms”.
“She came in, we discussed a few things ... then she left and she was half limping,” he said.
She never returned again, with Mokbel saying she was “always sick”, and was taking “morphine and all these tablets”.
Mystery of the secret phone
The secret mobile phone which Mokbel earlier claimed had been sourced for him by Carl Williams — hiding it in a boxing bag in early 2009 — was discovered by authorities in his cell in 2011.
Despite being seized, there were no reports by authorities that they’d found the burner Mokbel said he’d been using to call Gobbo and avoid police detection of his legal calls.
By this time, Williams was dead, bashed with a bike part by cellmate Matthew Johnson at Barwon Prison the year earlier.
Mr Glynn said “if your version is to be believed”, Corrections found the phone in their search for contraband and “deliberately concealed the finding of it”.
“You were given a phone by a dead guy and it was taken away by shadowy mysterious circumstances, so we only have your word that the phone ever existed,” Mr Glynn said.
The OPPs crown prosecutor said of Williams, “We can’t ask him about (the phone) can we? … Because he’s dead.”
“I wish you could but you can’t, no,” Mokbel replied.
Mokbel said he was “shocked I wasn’t charged” over the burner, but now believes the problem went away because the phone showed “there was contact with Ms Gobbo … that’s only my opinion.”
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