Nicola Gobbo had weightier concerns.

A third-year law student at the University of Melbourne, she lived in nearby Carlton with her housemate Brian Wilson. Wilson was a nightclub bouncer and drug trafficker, thought to have a sideline in guns. Authors Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon have been told he was close to underworld drug king Mark Moran. He was the first bad man on Gobbo’s lifelong list of bad men.

As Informer 3838, Gobbo was a somebody, a confidante to both villains and cops.

Gobbo put people in jail for decades and they never had a clue. She hoodwinked both the criminals and the judges by betraying those who trusted her most.

Gobbo was a person everyone knew of and no one knew.

She stung the good, the bad and the dastardly. She played life as though it were a chess game and she were the grandmaster.

Gobbo was, as one of her informer handlers admits, always two steps ahead. Her powers of persuasion topped those of any politician, even when she was playing to an audience of hotheads, speed freaks and goons.

She deceived Carl Williams, the bogan prince who killed over petty grudges. He sent his hitman to scare her in 2003. He wanted her blood, or at least her reputation, by 2006.

Yet she kept going. Despite the bullets in the mail and the firebombing of her car. Despite her alleged choking by Horty Mokbel and her eviction by her legal peers.

When her handlers warned her to slow down, Gobbo responded with more gifts of information, like a needy lover who fears rejection.

Gobbo was a woman in a boys’ world, where the female pioneers tended to favour muted tones and an air of entitlement — like the men.

But she wasn’t like any of the men or women of the bar.

Gobbo incriminated her clients so that they were criminally charged. She accepted their money, but secretly worked for the police prosecution on the opposite side of the courtroom. Her clients were worse than alone in the face of the law.

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No defence lawyer anywhere has had so little care for the rule of law. No lawyer except a Catholic girl with every advantage from Melbourne’s exclusive inner east.

It didn’t have to go like this. Nicola Gobbo was gifted status by virtue of her unusual surname. Her uncle, Sir James Gobbo, was a Supreme Court judge, human rights advocate and Victoria’s governor, an exemplar of diligence and dignity. “Gobbo” should have been a lifelong passport to respect.

But this Gobbo was drawn to notoriety. Something was missing. She wasn’t like the other Gobbos. The image she presented conflicted with her motives.

Gobbo had wanted to be a lawyer since childhood, she wrote in 1996, because she had “been instilled with a strong sense of social justice in a family with an established legal background”.

She is remembered at Genazzano College, a Catholic girls’ school in Melbourne’s leafy east, where she finished Year 12 in 1990. A school report, in which she was given an “A”, said Gobbo was “reliable” and “eager to please”.

Gobbo liked footy, and regularly attended games of her VFL (AFL) club Fitzroy with a schoolmate. Decades later, her schoolfriends do not want to be publicly associated with her.

She was always comfortable as the centre of attention. Take the time a fellow student drew a lewd reference on a classroom blackboard about Gobbo’s supposed sexual encounters with a celebrity. Gobbo rubbed the image out, but she seemed pleased about the tittering.

Gobbo was a polariser. You either played as her audience or you avoided her. “I don’t think she opened up to anyone about anything,” a fellow student would tell Carlyon.

By 2000, Nicola Gobbo’s freakiest clients were drawing journalists to the courtroom.

Gobbo defended a bird breeder who smuggled parrot eggs in his underpants.

For a drunk driver, Gobbo argued that her client thought he had been drinking light beer.

For a pensioner busted with 1100 marijuana plants in his backyard, she claimed the man had sprinkled seeds from a jar he’d found in the garage.

Gobbo came to be feared by police officers whom she cross-examined. She might have socialised with them outside the courtroom, but inside she projected contempt for them.

Renowned homicide detective Charlie Bezzina never questioned her ability. “She was good on her feet” was how Bezzina would describe her courtroom style to Dowsley and Carlyon in 2018.

Detective Sergeant Paul Dale of the Major Drug Investigation Division, soon to be a controversial figure, was similarly impressed by Gobbo’s outward professionalism. She was “Amazonian”, he would say in his 2013 book Disgraced?

“Long blonde hair, short skirts, short tops with plenty of breast showing … I think she loved the limelight that came with dealing with the major criminals and the detectives who caught them,” he wrote.

Yet her name in police and legal circles differed from her public profile as a thrusting female lawyer (and budding social commentator). Her path was already marked by unorthodoxy, and her reputation was suffering.

Melbourne may be a thriving metropolis of European-style elegance, but it can also be mistaken for a village of a few million gossips. As a former judge now puts it, Gobbo was dismissed (mistakenly) as a “gangster’s moll”.

Gobbo’s choices would be bathed in Shakespearean tragedy — in the timeless themes of ambition and greed. but she was abetted. she was a one-stop shop but no one-woman show.

Gobbo was manipulated by Victoria Police. Informer inducement is a niche of policing tethered to protocols, but in this case they ought to have known better — and many close observers think they did.

As if they were tossing the car keys to a child, Victoria Police wanted the world to look the other way while she swerved down the highway with an armed escort. They deliberately evaded the checks and balances of a system that serves to protect all from chicanery.

Of course, Gobbo manipulated the police too. She decided what should be shared and who should be punished. When the police eventually jettisoned their weapon, the weapon took aim at them.

This Iago did not submit, as did the Othello character, to torture and execution for her crimes. “I know our secret,” Gobbo implied, “and if I have to, I will use my knowledge to destroy careers and reputations.” Understandable, perhaps, given how she had suffered. Aspects of police behaviour are less so.

Within Gobbo’s first 15 months as Informer 3838, Victoria Police officers in the secretive loop of knowledge collectively came to believe she “suffered psychiatric or psychological and personality dysfunction”. She told her handlers in one discussion: “I’m a f--ked-up person, but you know that.”

Yet Victoria Police kept her on as an informer for 3½ years, when opening the letterbox or checking a text message might mean she was confronted by yet another death threat.

Testifying to a closed court in 2016, Gobbo’s long-term psychologist offered clues about the “void” in Gobbo’s life.

“So her father died when she was doing year 12, so she would have been 18,” the psychologist said. “Her mother had had two bouts of cancer prior to that, and her father was quite a bit older than her mother. And … there were two other children by the father’s former marriage, so she has two half- siblings. And her father died and that was relatively catastrophic for her, it was a very difficult event, and then her mother died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer, which is a very nasty condition.”

In the absence of a father figure, Gobbo sought to be validated by her handlers, and she would later feel that they took “advantage” of her need to change “the situation”.

“So one of the things we’ve worked on — and this is a common treatment with trauma — is to help her deconstruct, if you like, and speak about the matters that occurred some years ago in relation to her relationship with Victoria Police,” the psychologist said in 2016.

“And so we’ve spoken a lot about why she got involved with that and her sense of there being a void in her life and that some of the people she got involved with at Victoria Police really fulfilled a father-figure type of role. I think in that respect, she certainly would be a person … vulnerable to that kind of experience.”

As her psychologist testified, Gobbo relied on her and an unnamed loved one for the kind of trust that others ordinarily share with partners and multiple loved ones.

Yet Gobbo kept things from her counsellor, despite their many hours together, such as her odd desire to be the best informer in history. Her being is built on secrets and the keeping of them, and even those she trusted most were deprived of the fuller view.

About a month after Dowsley wrote the first “Lawyer X” story in 2014, he meets Gobbo at a South Melbourne wine bar. She’s in mother mode, fumbling with her toddler. She has put off previous scheduled catch-ups, citing clashes with her daughter’s doses of Peppa Pig.

Gobbo is quietly dressed. No drawing of attention to herself. The short skirts and low-cut tops belong to an earlier life. The master spy is now a dedicated mum.

As Gobbo’s little girl plays with the beads around her mother’s neck, Dowsley sips a white wine. Gobbo is pleasant, easy to talk to, even if she appears more eager to receive information than provide it.

Afterwards, though, he will be struck by a pattern to the chat. Gobbo switches to the default setting she’s used with killers who’ve asked similar questions over the years: she deflects them. She always responds to a line of inquiry by offering details on an unrelated subject.

She is complimentary of Dowsley’s first story. “You’ll win a Walkley for it,” she says.

“Not if it’s not true,” he replies.

He tries to ask questions about her informing. She listens to his insights, as if mentally building a dossier of what he knows and what he doesn’t, but she neither confirms nor denies them.

Instead, she asks questions of her own, probably because she is planning another civil claim against Victoria Police.

She knows lots of police, obviously, but denies knowing the officers whom Dowsley names as her handlers.

Dowsley asks her about her client Rob Karam and the famous “Tomato Tins” ecstasy importation case. He knows she handed the crucial bill of lading to police. “Rob is my friend,” Gobbo counters. “I spoke to him only yesterday.”

Dowsley again asks her if she was a police informer. She again avoids answering. Over two hours, Gobbo conceals the chaos set off by Dowsley’s story.

Off stage, police bemoan Gobbo’s recalcitrance, while she shrieks about their breaching of her trust. Victoria Police and Nicola Gobbo seethe with mutual resentment, like a broken couple post-divorce.

LAWYER X: INSIDE AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST GANGLAND SCANDAL

Explosive new revelations and exclusive extracts from gripping new book Lawyer X, by Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, only in your SUNDAY HERALD SUN this weekend.

Lawyer X, the story of how one woman played off police and criminals, is published by HarperCollins Australia on September 7.

Live online Q&A with authors Dowsley and Carlyon, hosted by Sky News’ Peter Stefanovic, on their battle to expose the truth. Send questions to ask.lawyerx@news.com.au and watch at facebook.com/TrueCrimeAustralia/ 6:30pm AEST, Sept 9.

Watch Peter Stefanovic’s compelling two-part documentary Lawyer X: The Untold Story on Sky News at 8pm AEST, Sept 12 & 19.

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