Lawyer X: Police guilty of decade of denial
It’s almost 10 years since investigative reporter Anthony Dowsley rang me on a Sunday afternoon and said just four words – enough to ignite a chain reaction that exposed the greatest legal and policing scandal in the nation’s history.
It’s almost 10 years since investigative reporter Anthony Dowsley rang me on a Sunday afternoon and said matter of factly, “I’ve got a yarn.”
Just four words. But enough to ignite a chain reaction that exposed the greatest legal and policing scandal in the nation’s history. It reached the High Court, triggered a royal commission, freed men from prison, may yet see notorious drug dealers such as Tony Mokbel walk from jail early, cost Victorian taxpayers about $200m … and resulted in not a single person being prosecuted for their misconduct. Not one.
In many ways, the failure to hold anyone – Victoria Police top brass, detectives and Nicola Gobbo – accountable over Lawyer X is as big a scandal as the original police conspiracy to recruit the gangland lawyer to spy on her clients.
Listening to Mokbel in the Supreme Court this week, at the start of his Lawyer X-inspired bid for early release, reinforced the level of betrayal of Victoria’s criminal justice system by Gobbo and police.
A decade after Dowsley’s call, reflecting on the ballistic reaction from police that Sunday night after they learned the Herald Sun was about to expose their dirty secret, it’s clearer than ever the cops knew exactly what was at stake if the truth came out: criminal charges. And this time it wouldn’t be the gang war killers, drug crooks and kingpins in the dock.
This is how the evening of Sunday, March 30, 2014, and the following days unfolded: Dowsley’s call came in around late afternoon and we discussed how the cops – I was then the editor of the Herald Sun – wouldn’t like the story. We decided to bang it on Monday’s front page under the headline “Lawyer a secret police informer”.
At about 9pm, several hours after Dowsley’s call, we discovered just how much Victoria Police didn’t like the story we called Lawyer X. They were threatening to drag us into an emergency hearing in the Victorian Supreme Court unless we pulled the story.
After a hastily arranged phone call with our lawyers, we agreed to remove certain pieces of information from the report, the police backed off – at least for the moment – and the story ran on Monday’s front page.
We doubled down in Tuesday’s edition in a front-page story headlined “Murder probe compromised”, revealing a police taskforce into multiple murders was shut down to protect Lawyer X.
By Tuesday evening, as we were preparing another front-page story on Lawyer X, Victoria Police snapped and raced to the Supreme Court arguing for an injunction against the new story. The judge backed the police. We had no option but to scrap the front page.
We came up with an alternative that skated (just) within the orders of the court: “Fight for Truth” was the headline and the kicker read: “Herald Sun silenced in late-night court case from telling you more about Lawyer X”.
It was the opening salvo in five years of lawfare waged by Victoria Police as the force blew millions of dollars trying to cover up the scandal with injunctions and threats of contempt of court charges. During this time, we had an estimated 15 separate legal battles with the police, resulting in 28 hearings at which the newspaper was represented or tried to be represented and was refused.
But the police hardball tactics didn’t stop with the Herald Sun. In the five years since the High Court ordered the unmasking of Lawyer X, the force has adopted a shameless strategy of “frustrate, delay and obfuscate” against everyone from the royal commission, to the special investigator and the lawyers who have launched civil action on behalf of former clients of Gobbo.
The most egregious example was the blocking tactics against the (now abolished) Office of Special Investigator which, as recommended by the royal commission, was established to investigate potential criminal charges against police officers and Gobbo. Using its “frustrate, delay and obfuscate” playbook, Victoria Police forced the unit to exhaust valuable resources in legal battles to access vital information about Lawyer X in police files.
Why police refused to co-operate fully with the OSI is explained when you revisit Victorian Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes’s comments in June 2021 when she announced that former High Court judge Geoffrey Nettle KC would lead the unit.
Symes noted that the OSI would be “tasked with investigating potential criminal conduct of Nicola Gobbo and relevant current and former Victoria Police officers” and that doing this was about “getting on with the work of restoring the integrity of the justice system … ensuring our justice system has Victorians’ confidence and trust”. The police knew they had to wage a war on the process rather than the facts buried in their own files.
But the police had another advantage when going up against the OSI. Symes’s grandiose mission statement was not matched by the legislation, which failed to arm the OSI with the power to launch unilateral prosecutions. Instead, the OSI would have to get the green light from Director of Public Prosecutions Kerri Judd KC before it charged anyone. And as we saw, Judd repeatedly rejected detailed briefs of evidence against a number of current and former police officers.
“We are in a very, very strange situation where there is clearly evidence that came out of the royal commission that there was conduct to thwart disclosure to accused people, and that includes disclosure of Gobbo’s role and … really serious provable amount of police and prosecutorial misconduct,” one experienced criminal lawyer tells Inquirer.
“But what is surprising is that it’s a case of ‘no, no, no, nothing wrong happened. Nobody is to blame’.”
Remarkably, Gobbo even had told the OSI that she would be willing to plead guilty to serious criminal offences on the condition that she wouldn't serve any time behind bars.
“She offered to plead guilty, they just refused to charge her,” the lawyer said. “It’s a bizarre situation when a suspect, a person of interest, offers to plead guilty to serious offending but they refuse to charge them.”
Former chief crown prosecutor Gavin Silbert KC is scathing of the police, both in terms of the original decision to recruit Gobbo and the cover-up.
“This sorry episode could not better illustrate a corrupt legal system,” he tells Inquirer.
“Innocent people were convicted and imprisoned. Some have had their convictions set aside and have been freed. More appeals remain on foot. Gobbo, despite her willingness to plead guilty, was never charged. Senior members of the Victoria Police hierarchy have never been charged.
“Millions of dollars of taxpayer money has been wasted and nobody seems to care. The reputation of Victoria Police, once the nation’s finest, has been trashed.
“There is now an aura of corruption enveloping the whole of Victoria’s criminal justice system.”
A senior barrister tells Inquirer the Lawyer X scandal was still reverberating through Victoria’s criminal justice system on a daily basis.
“I think it makes the work of those people at the coalface of the criminal justice system a lot harder because defence lawyers now feel obligated to test every single aspect of the evidence,” the lawyer said.
“Previously, there was some level of trust that what was contained in a brief reflected the evidence. That trust doesn’t exist any more.
“So when you don’t have that trust you have people chasing every rabbit down every rabbit hole because you cannot believe what even the most senior (police) members say because the bottom has fallen out of the criminal justice system.”
Another lawyer familiar with police tactics in the wake of Lawyer X likened coming up against the cops to “trench warfare”.
“It’s very bitter. Very protracted. Ugly litigation,” the lawyer said.
“The police have made a strategic decision to frustrate, delay and obfuscate.
“Noble cause corruption, that’s exactly what they think it is. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong here. They hate these people. They hate Mokbel … they hate all of these guys, so they will not review this through an objective lens. They will just fight, fight and fight.”
Approaching the 10th anniversary of the Lawyer X story, it’s difficult not to conclude that Victoria Police has got away with it. No charges have been laid. The OSI is dead. But Lawyer X has always been a bit like a game of whack-a-mole. The OSI might be gone, but the worst nightmare for police may be just around the corner in the form of Tony Mokbel winning his appeal and walking free.
Taking the stand in the Supreme Court this week, the gangwar bigwig has been revealing everything he knows about Gobbo. It was Gobbo, he says, who tipped him off mid-drug trial that he was about to be charged with murder, and urged him to flee. He got to Greece where he was eventually arrested a year later, and has been in jail ever since.
Mokbel told the court he thought Gobbo, who was informing on him to police, was “the staunchest person on earth” and he “fully trusted her”.
“She told me that I’m going to be charged with three murders and I should seriously think about absconding,” he said.
Mokbel said Gobbo was “always against them” and “you’d never pick her to be on the other side of the fence”.
“But she was,” his barrister, Julie Condon KC, replied, “a human source.”
“Exactly … still shocked, to be quite honest,” Mokbel said.
Mokbel pleaded guilty to a series of drug offences in April 2011, claiming he felt “backed in a corner”, and got 30 years’ jail.
Asked if he would have pleaded up “knowing what you know now”, he said, “No hope in hell … I would have fought it all the way.”
Mokbel has already had one conviction quashed and his sentence reduced because of Lawyer X. He’s now due to be freed in 2031, but if his appeal is successful it could be much sooner.
Tony Mokbel walking out of prison early may well be what it takes before the current and former members of Victoria Police who masterminded Lawyer X admit they got it wrong.
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