Outrageous Lawyer X cover-up helps police beat charges

Tony Mokbel leaves Melbourne Magistrates Court with his lawyer, Nicola Gobbo.

For five years, Victoria Police grabbed every legal weapon it could lay its hands on in an orchestrated campaign of bullying and intimidation to cover up the darkest chapter in its history.

Millions of dollars in public funds were blown by police on Supreme Court injunctions, suppression orders and a myriad other legal games to prevent Victorians finding out about Lawyer X.

After Wednesday’s extraordinary report to state parliament by special investigator Geoffrey Nettle – a former High Court judge with an impeccable understanding of criminal law – it’s difficult not to conclude that the cover-up has worked for police.

Reading the scathing report, and the letters exchanged between the OSI and DPP, it becomes clear one of the main excuses Victoria’s top prosecutor, Kerri Judd KC, relies on to not lay charges against police officers is what she refers to as ‘‘the passage of time’’.

‘‘As it stands, the passage of time will undoubtedly have a significant bearing on the prospects of conviction,’’ Judd told Nettle in a letter on May 26.

‘‘(Which) is also a matter I would have to take into account in determining whether it is the public interest to proceed with a prosecution ... particularly if there is a reasonable prospect that, at the conclusion of the protracted criminal proceeding, some years into the future, the ultimate disposition on a finding of guilt is not custodial.’’

Judd reminds Nettle that Nicola Gobbo was first registered as a police informer in 1995, and again between 1999 and 2009.

She then goes on to argue that any criminal trials would be unlikely to be held until late 2025. ‘‘Accordingly, that hypothetically trial would likely proceed some 15-25 years after the events concerned,’’ she states.

If Victoria Police had confessed in April 2014, when Herald Sun reporter Anthony Dowsley broke the story about police recruiting a gang-war lawyer to spy on her criminal clients, the ‘‘passage of time’’ might not have mattered so much. And those police who masterminded the Lawyer X situation would have been brought to account for undermining the justice system.

As outrageous as the original recruitment of Gobbo was, the cover-up is in many way even more outrageous. Between 2014 and 2019 when the High Court ordered the unmasking of Lawyer X, police unleashed lawyers on the Herald Sun, a newspaper I then edited, to prevent us telling Victorians about their dirty secret.

Police launched more than a dozen legal battles against the newspaper, threatening to prosecute us for breaching suppression orders and other legal rules. It was a tense game of legal and journalistic poker where we would thread a needle and find a way to publish another piece of the puzzle, only to have police command promptly drag us into court and shut us down.

Someone in authority – maybe someone in the Andrews government – between 2014 and 2019 should have ordered Victoria Police to surrender and tell the truth. But they didn’t. Police command was allowed to continue to blow millions of dollars to try to shut down the story of Lawyer X.