Nettle comes out stinging, but Gobbo is a case of no case

Justice Geoffrey Arthur Akeroyd Nettle, KC, was a brilliant commercial barrister and a respected judge of the Victorian Supreme Court, Court of Appeal and the High Court.

He was also the wrong person to be selected as the Special Investigator assigned to recommend whether charges should be laid against police who used disgraced barrister Nicola Gobbo as an informer.

This is not about professionalism but perceptions. Nettle was one of the High Court judges who filleted Victoria Police for using Gobbo as a snitch in the first place.

In 2018, the full High Court found “Victoria Police were guilty of reprehensible conduct in knowingly encouraging [Gobbo] to do as she did and were involved in sanctioning atrocious breaches of the sworn duty of every police officer”.

And they used the C-word: corruption.

Former High Court justice Geoffrey Nettle, appointed as the special investigator.

Which means that when Nettle was appointed Special Investigator, his well-reasoned views on police using Gobbo as an informer were in the public domain.

When in 2019 the state government established a judicial inquiry into the Gobbo affair, they appointed someone with no prior involvement in former president of the Queensland Court of Appeal Margaret McMurdo.

The Royal Commission and the subsequent Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) have taken more than four years and cost over $125 million.

The Royal Commission final report ran to 1000 pages. We prefer to sum it up in 60 words:

There was an underworld war in Victoria. Then there was a taskforce called Purana.

The cops used informers. One was a defence lawyer called Gobbo.

She snitched on crooks. She wasn’t the only one.

The crooks got charged. Most pleaded guilty and went to jail.

No false evidence was presented to any jury.

The underworld war stopped.

Er, the end.

On Wednesday documents tabled in state parliament from Nettle said his job was a spectacular waste of time as his recommended charges had been rejected by the DPP, Kerri Judd, KC, who found “there was no reasonable prospect of conviction”.

Director of Public Prosecutions Kerri Judd, KC.Credit: Paul Jeffers

It was an impasse between two impressive legal heavyweights, each convinced they had the law on their side and each used to having the last word in any legal argument - one who believes a group of police should be charged and the other who doesn’t.

The $125 million question had changed from the ethical one: Was using Gobbo as a source fair? To a legal one: Was using Gobbo criminal?

Clearly Nettle was filthy Judd questioned his judgement. He wrote to the DPP: “When I was appointed to the position of Special Investigator, I believed that I knew sufficient of the law properly to discharge the task. The analysis of the law relating to misconduct in public office included in your letter ... implies that you take leave to doubt it. This is as disappointing as it is displeasing.”

Nettle told the government that as the DPP had knocked back his recommended charges and would likely do so in future cases, “I consider that there is no longer any point in OSI persisting with investigating and determining whether there is sufficient evidence to establish the commission of relevant offences”.

The date the documents were tabled was June 21, 2023 - 20 years to the day from when a brazen double murder forced police to set up the Purana taskforce.

On that day in 2003, a gunman ran up to a van parked at the Auskick in Essendon North and shot dead two men, Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro, in front of 10 kids sitting in the back.

Until then, a series of gangland killings were being investigated separately until Detective Senior Sergeant Phil Swindells realised there was a common denominator: hitman Andrew Veniamin.

Police examine the van in which Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro were murdered.Credit: Paul Harris

Veniamin worked for drug boss Carl Williams, who was determined to wipe out the Moran clan after being shot in the belly in Gladstone Park in 1999 by Jason and his half-brother Mark.

The taskforce was set up with little expectation it would succeed, because the underworld code of silence was rarely broken.

It had no intelligence, no inside sources and was dealing with crime syndicates that thought they were above the law. In 2004, when Terence Hodson made a statement to police about corruption, he and his wife Christine were murdered in their Kew home by a hitman recruited by Williams.

The taskforce knew that to make inroads, it needed a network of informers. When Purana arrested drug boss Tony Mokbel’s speed cook and his brother, they thought they were close to turning him.

But a lawyer - tipped off from inside Victoria Police that the cook’s brother was about to flip - turned up at the Purana office and persuaded him to stay loyal to Mokbel. It was Nicola Gobbo.

Andrew Veniamin (left) and Carl WIlliams leave court. Both were on borrowed time.Credit: Ten News

The irony is that later, when she was a police informer, she urged the cook to talk to police. He became a star insider, wearing a bug while delivering drugs to the Mokbel clan.

Purana cultivated underworld insiders including two paid hitmen, a getaway driver, a speed cook, Carl Williams’ trusted adviser, a relative of Williams and a Mokbel insider who downloaded key information from the syndicate’s computer.

Purana solved 11 murders, thwarted six, seized nearly $90 million (including unpaid taxes) and stopped the underworld war.

After Williams pleaded guilty to multiple murders when faced with overwhelming evidence, then DPP and later Supreme Court judge Paul Coghlan declared the gangland code of silence broken.

“The culture in the underworld has changed. We have, for at least the foreseeable future, broken the model that there is honour among thieves. This week has been the biggest week there has been for law enforcement in the state of Victoria.”

Then there was Gobbo, a barrister who ran with the crooks - until she didn’t.

Carl Williams is arrested by Purana and goes guts up.Credit: Angela Wylie

As a law student in 1995 she turned informer on her boyfriend to avoid a conviction on drug charges. In July 1998, she offered to provide information for a major drug squad investigation. She was knocked back. In 1999, she became a Victoria Police registered informer, dobbing in colleagues allegedly laundering money.

In 2005, she went to Purana as a human source. Truth is she has sung more often than Nellie Melba.

As a Purana source, she was a disaster. She wasn’t good at it and when it was exposed, it resulted in convictions being quashed, with others under review. The line between what she learned when she socialised with crooks and what she learned as their legal adviser became impossibly blurred.

After years of Gobbo outrage, there was a review on police secret sources. Legislation was introduced earlier this year allowing police (under approved guidelines) to use privileged information from priests, journalists, doctors, politicians and lawyers.

The police commissioner decides if the information concerns a threat to national security, the community or a person and whether the information can’t be obtained by other means.

Which means that in a gangland war, a Gobbo-like lawyer could be registered.

With typical audacity, Gobbo wanted an indemnity to give evidence against the Purana cops she described as “alpha males calling the shots” leaving her “emotionally manipulated and groomed by police and at the time was young and naive and desperately sought the approval of older male figures”.

She played the gender, victim and mental health cards and, with none left, she was prepared to plead guilty to perverting the course of justice (in exchange for a recommendation she wouldn’t do jail time) and testify against police over a “joint criminal enterprise”.

In any trial, the judge warns the jury of the unreliable nature of the testimony of someone involved in the crime. There was another concern in using Gobbo as a witness, with Judd finding the former barrister’s actions were “far worse than the individual police officers’.”

Judd says if the police were charged, their defence would be they did nothing criminal but acted in good faith to solve serious crimes. In other words, they were doing their jobs.

In response to Nettle’s stinging criticism, Judd said: “My decisions in relation to these matters should be interpreted as nothing other than the results of careful and realistic assessments of the evidence.” She found this was a case where there was no case.

It would have been easier for Judd to avoid criticism by authorising the charges and pushing them out of her office into court. The weak sort of decisions made too often in recent high-profile cases around Australia, with disastrous results.

Instead, Judd - whose independent office has the status of a Supreme Court judge - followed her statutory duty in not authorising prosecutions she believed had no reasonable prospect of convictions. She did her job.

The DPP routinely makes these decisions when police want to lay charges. The difference here is the investigator is a former High Court judge with encyclopaedic knowledge of the law. But make no mistake, it was Judd’s decision to make.

Most of the Purana detectives who investigated the gangland war have retired. Many were profoundly affected by the years they have lived with accusations that they had betrayed their sworn duty and could face serious criminal charges.

Some suffer serious physical and mental health issues they blame on the stress of the unresolved Gobbo saga. One in particular would have been delighted to hear there will be no charges.

But she didn’t hear. She died a few days ago.