Tony Mokbel’s lips sealed on secret that could set him free
Drug baron Tony Mokbel has refused to help authorities or reveal who leaked him sensitive police documents before the murders of police informers Terence and Christine Hodson. Now that decision may keep him behind bars.
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Jailed drug baron Tony Mokbel is refusing to reveal how he got classified police documents before the murder of two informers, even though it could help his bid for freedom.
The Sunday Herald Sun can reveal Mokbel has rejected multiple approaches to reveal who leaked him the sensitive “Blue File” dossier.
It laid bare criminal Terence Hodson’s informing history just months before he and wife Christine were murdered.
It’s understood Mokbel has been approached on at least three occasions in recent years about revealing how he obtained the police file. He remains unwilling to help authorities.
Mokbel’s co-operation could help in his bid for an early release from prison. The druglord is the highest-profile figure mounting an appeal to be freed from jail as a result of the Nicola Gobbo “Lawyer X” scandal.
The Sunday Herald Sun has learned that when Victoria Police interviewed Mokbel in 2008, he was thought to be lying when he named a dead associate as having slipped him Hodson’s file.
It is suspected Mokbel’s silence regarding the circumstances in which he obtained the file is consistent with suspicions he was aware, or was implicated, in the Hodson murders.
Hodson and his wife, both registered police informers, were murdered in their Kew East home within 12 weeks of Mokbel disseminating the informer file to the underworld in May, 2004.
Police were stopped from interrogating Gobbo, once Mokbel’s barrister, as the conduit between corrupt police and him in leaking the file. She had also been Hodson’s lawyer.
The 31-page dossier exposed Hodson as a high-value police snitch, endangering his life.
At the time it was leaked he had been involved in burgling a Mokbel-linked drug safe house with his police handler, corrupt detective David Miechel.
Hodson also accused Sgt Paul Dale, his co-handler, with being involved in arranging the burglary.
Two of the Hodson children, Andrew and Mandy, have called for the State Coroner to reopen the 2014 inquest into their parents’ deaths.
Their lawyer, Jeremy King of Robinson Gill Lawyers, said the Lawyer X royal commission had unearthed evidence never put before a coroner.
“This significant evidence should be investigated by the coroner, including covert recordings and the evidence of Gobbo herself,’’ he said.
“The new evidence would almost undoubtedly change the coroner’s previous findings.’’
Among those not compelled to give evidence at the 2014 inquest were Mokbel, Gobbo and Dale.
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