Tony Mokbel’s relaxed reaction after his mixed result at Victoria’s Court of Appeal
Tony Mokbel was once a naughty boy, and even now the former gangland figure draws the eye, whether you know who he is or not. This is how he reacted to his mixed court result.
A gentleman, sharp in a navy suit, stands for the arrival of a female guest at a café in Lonsdale St, Melbourne.
His name is Antonios, or Tony, as the world knows him.
He looks relaxed, as if channelling that good cheer he once radiated when he was a drug baron.
In about 90 minutes, Tony Mokbel will find out if he is officially free.
He laughs heartily on a phone call.
He exudes a natural authority as he chats with his guests – two lawyers and his purported partner.
Here’s a bloke who draws the eye, whether you know who he is or not.
Mokbel smiles at a media videographer who wonders whether to start filming. He tips the staff when he orders yet another coffee. And he’s friendly when a journalist approaches (though not up for a chat).
Mokbel seems to believe that a pleasing day awaits. The media which gathers outside the cafe thinks that his apparent optimism is well placed, that Mokbel the punter is, once again, on to a sure thing.
Across the road, inside Victoria’s Court of Appeal, that certainty diminishes in the legalistic findings of the three judges.
Mokbel had appealed three convictions. In punting terms, he has a win – and a loss.
One of the convictions against him is tossed out (win). One of them stands (loss). And the other conviction is quashed, to be subject to a fresh trial in coming months (money back).
Here, Mokbel is calm, bowing low each time the judges come and go, hands clasped in front of him.
He holds the judgment rolled up in his right hand, It’s hard to know whether he’s pleased or otherwise – he may be easy to notice, but he’s harder to read.
It’s not bad news, but is it good?
Is Mokbel a step closer to unequivocal freedom after years of virtual solitary confinement?
A passing lawyer appears to think so. She taps the glass surrounding the dock at the hearing’s end, to say: “Congratulations, Tony.”
Yet the rulings are not the Melbourne gangland bookends that many observers expected. Instead, they’re updated instalments in a grand saga that dates back almost a generation.
Mokbel remains free. He can go to the northern suburbs TAB and bet on the ponies, in what has been his reported past-time, since being bailed in April.
But he has yet to be liberated of the daily police reporting, and the legal icebergs that have blotted his public being, since he first met a young lawyer, Nicola Gobbo, in 2002.
Their confusing relationship is why his appeals to his convictions, to which he pleaded guilty many years ago, were considered to have legal merit.
Mokbel was once a very naughty boy. No one disputes that.
Gobbo accepted his cheques, but she was not fighting for her client’s best interests.
Instead, she worked for the police force which wanted Mokbel jailed more than any other person.
Back in 2005, Mokbel was a remaining pillar of the gangland wars which had gripped Victoria from the turn of the millennium, and which would be later repackaged as Underbelly for prime time TV.
Hundreds of secret information reports, or IRs, would reveal the heavy extent of Gobbo’s involvement in police attempts to jail Mokbel, as well as offer some conflicting context about her relationship with him.
The IRs revealed little chatter between her and her handlers about the ethics of the informer enterprise. It was sometimes unclear who was running who.
But the IRs did show that Gobbo was officially enlisted as a police informer, 3838, in 2005, primarily to rid Mokbel from her life.
He was bad, certainly, but this evidence suggested that he was also wronged.
That was 20 years ago. For the past eight years, Mokbel has sought to be freed because of 3838. He has argued that the lawyer who was once “everything” to him was also everything to Victoria Police.
He grins as he leaves the court, stopping traffic as he crosses Lonsdale St, swarmed by the media pack, before heading out for lunch with his legal team at a William St steak house.
He isn’t swaggering as he did in April, chin jutted, like a cowboy in need of a horse, when he was freed after 18 years in prison.
Mokbel, 60, may never return to jail, given the time he has already served. But it’s no sure thing, not for now, anyway.
