Former drug kingpin Tony Mokbel might drag some of the Victorian criminal justice system’s most senior police and prosecutors, including former police commissioners Simon Overland and Graham Ashton, into providing evidence at his appeal.
In a witness list released by the Supreme Court on Monday, lawyers acting for Mokbel put on notice dozens of legal figures and police who rose to prominence during Melbourne’s bloody gangland war, most of whom faced intense questioning after supergrass barrister Nicola Gobbo was exposed.
Tony Mokbel leaves the County Court in a prison van earlier this month.Credit: Jason South
The list includes Overland and Ashton, both quizzed in the Gobbo royal commission, former Purana taskforce boss James ‘Jim’ O’Brien and detectives Gavan Ryan and Stuart Bateson, prominent homicide squad veteran Ron Iddles, and former assistant commissioner Jeff Pope.
Also on the list are former directors of public prosecutions, Justice John Champion and Jeremy Rapke, KC, as well as prominent barrister Geoffrey Horgan, KC.
Horgan, who ran many of the underworld prosecutions, was one of the few to provide no statement to the royal commission or appear as a witness.
Victoria Police legal division boss Findlay McRae is also on the list.
Gobbo is not on the list.
Ashton, who left the top police job in 2020, was the head of the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) for much of the underworld war.
Champion, now a Supreme Court judge, oversaw the protracted litigation as director of the Office of Public Prosecutions (OPP) which sought to disclose to members of Melbourne’s underworld convicted on evidence provided by Gobbo, or based on Gobbo’s legal advice, that their conviction might be contaminated.
O’Brien was originally recruited to run the Clandestine Laboratory Squad before ascending to head gangland taskforce Purana.
Bateson served in Victoria Police for more than 30 years, with stints in the homicide squad and the Purana taskforce, where he investigated the Melbourne gangland murders of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Mokbel, one of the most prominent and recognisable figures in the gangland war of the early to mid-2000s, is appealing his conviction for drug trafficking offences, arguing that by working for both sides, Gobbo contaminated his case.
With so many high-profile police on the witness list, the trial is poised to scratch at old wounds that had only just started to heal since the royal commission.
Earlier this month, Mokbel gave evidence for the first time in more than 10 years.
The court has heard that Gobbo encouraged Mokbel to flee the country to avoid prosecution over three murder charges.
Many of the people named on the witness list were depicted in the Underbelly television series broadcast in the mid-2000s.
The trial is expected to run for three months.
John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld. Subscribers can sign up to receive his Naked City newsletter every Thursday.