Who to believe — the drug baron or double-agent lawyer?

Much of Tony Mokbel’s bid for freedom will depend on who the Supreme Court justice believes — a drug baron or a double-agent lawyer whose main survival skill was deception.

Tony Mokbel described a warm relationship with his lawyer, but Nicola Gobbo says she saw things differently.

Drug barons generally lack some of the softer character traits. Cuddliness, say, or sincerity.

Tony Mokbel must be different.

In the witness box this week, he described his relationship with Nicola Gobbo, his one-time lawyer who informed against him.

She was “extremely kind”, he said, and “very friendly” to him.

She gave him legal advice and represented him in court. But they were mates, too. He helped her lose weight at the gym.

And he was “shocked” when his friend spoke of serious health problems in 2008, and checked in with her long afterwards to see how she was faring.

Indeed, he is still shocked by her betrayal of him. Because, as Mokbel puts it, hands clasped before him, Gobbo was “everything” to him.

She, of course, remembers the relationship rather differently, as she told her police handlers at the time.

She and Mokbel spoke often, yes, and he presumably valued her counsel.

But she said he was menacing in the final years before he was imprisoned.

He was, she said, a driving reason for her seriously dangerous double life of a police informer masquerading as a defence barrister. She needed him excised from her life.

There was little of Mokbel’s old slippery charisma in his court appearances this week. Picture: Nine News

One of the problems here? Despite their respective claims of redemption, both Mokbel and Gobbo are spectacularly good professional liars.

Who to believe? The drug baron who pleaded guilty to massive importations of hard drugs? Or the double agent whose foremost survival skill was deception?

These questions will inform some of the judgments ahead for Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, who is presiding over a Supreme Court preliminary hearing to determine if Gobbo’s secret informing on Mokbel warrants a legal re-examination of some major drug convictions.

Mokbel, a headline magnet in Victoria’s highest courts, once would swagger into courtrooms with the smirk of someone who knows something which no one does.

He’s 58 now, and still prefers well-cut suits and striped ties.

Yes, there was some theatre this week in the witness box, such as his impersonation of a displeased prosecutor of yesteryear, which raised genuine laughs.

But there was little of the slippery charisma that once dredged up the mobile phone salesmen of the new millennium era. No free winks. Little swagger in his short walk back and forth to the witness box.

Mokbel bowed deeply when Fullerton entered or left the room. He was a victim, he seemed to project, here to show how he was wronged.

Gobbo said Mokbel was a menacing in the final years before he was imprisoned. Picture: ABC

He submitted to every question put to him by Crown prosecutor David Glynn about Gobbo.

Mokbel called the prosecutor “Mr Glynn”. He called his apparent nemesis “Miss Gobbo”.

His phrasing at times hinted of limited exposure to textbooks. But his poise spoke of smarts.

The most striking part of his evidence was his memory.

Mokbel was said to suffer cognitive setbacks in memory, planning and reasoning after an almost lethal prison yard attack in 2019. He spent 24 days in a coma.

Mokbel could this week remember which lawyers represented him in which cases – call it an occupational hazard, but there were lots of lawyers and cases.

He could also recall precise details from the time John Howard was prime minister, mentally sifting dozens of phone calls to declare what was said – and what was not said – in some of them.

What we do know is that Gobbo and Mokbel spoke a lot after he (and the wig) were cornered in an Athens restaurant in 2007.

They spoke when he was in Greece and when he was returned to Melbourne, to face an avalanche of heavy duty charges.

Tony Mokbel with his legal team Nicola Gobbo (left) and Con Heliotis QC (right) in November 2004.

The evidence for this lies in piles of Informer Contact Reports – made out by Gobbo’s police handlers – which depict her willingness to share details with the police seeking to imprison Mokbel for a very long time.

There were documented chats between, as recorded by prison phone records.

But Mokbel also spoke of a burner phone, supplied by fellow inmate Carl Williams. (He said he assumed that the prison phones, along with the prison visiting rooms, were bugged.)

Here, again, integrity issues beckoned. Mokbel said his prison cell was swept, and that the secret phone was removed.

But there was no sanction for its possession, which he puts down to Gobbo’s name in the phone history.

And there is no evidence, besides Mokbel’s claim, that the phone existed.

A computer upon which he says he documented Gobbo’s legal advice was similarly unknowable because, he says, it was taken away to be audited and its contents was erased.

Glynn wondered whether the Mokbel/Gobbo chats were mostly chatter between friends, as opposed to stricter definitions of legal advice and representation.

Mokbel calmly rejected the suggestions. Gobbo had the “master key” to “all my barristers”.

The hearing, set down for 12 weeks, follows a Mokbel legal win for one of his lesser drug convictions because, as Commonwealth prosecutors conceded, Gobbo’s duplicitous proximity to her client represented a serious miscarriage of justice.

The way Mokbel described it this week, he didn’t just lose his freedom because of Gobbo’s informing. He also lost a very dear friend.