Carl Williams ‘warned Tony Mokbel about Nicola Gobbo’

Baby-faced killer Carl Williams ‘hated’ lawyer-turned-police snitch Nicola Gobbo and tried to warn underworld figure Tony Mokbel against her, a court has heard.

Tony Mokbel.

Baby-faced killer Carl Williams “hated” lawyer-turned-police snitch Nicola Gobbo and tried to warn underworld figure Tony Mokbel against her, a court has heard.

Mokbel revealed how the two crime kingpins and gangland allies were serving time in Barwon Prison when they spoke about Lawyer X and Williams told him, “Don’t trust her”.

The major drug trafficker took the witness box for a second day in the Supreme Court on Wednesday as he fights for his convictions to be overturned because his barrister Gobbo was informing against him.

Mokbel, who was arrested in Greece after a 15-month global manhunt in mid-2007, recalled how he phoned Gobbo from his Athens prison cell and asked her to visit Williams to help prove his innocence on two murders.

In the first half of 2007, he’d been charged with the murders of kickboxer Michael Marshall and crime patriarch Lewis Moran – crimes he was later acquitted of, or had dropped.

He recalled asking Gobbo to get a statement from Williams that Mokbel had “nothing to do with the murders”, but she refused, saying they had bad blood.

“She didn’t explain (why) exactly, (she said) ‘I’ve got issues going to see Carl, me and him don’t get along’.” He said Gobbo “didn’t like what he was saying about her”.

Mokbel said at the time he had “no idea” Williams “hated” Gobbo, and confirmed that when he returned to Australia in 2008, Williams warned him off his barrister. “He said to me, ‘Don’t trust her’ … he said other things but I’ll leave that aside.”

Around the same time, Office of Public Prosecution’s barrister David Glynn asked Mokbel if he’d heard allegations Gobbo was “sleeping with coppers and using drugs (and that you) told her you didn’t believe it”.

Asked by Mr Glynn whether he was being fed those rumours by people he trusted, he confirmed he was, but said, “I trusted her a million per cent Mr Glynn, I had no issue with Ms Gobbo.”

The court heard how Mokbel called Gobbo within days of his arrest in Greece asking for her help to fight his extradition back to Australia, and that she was feeding information on all their calls to her police handlers.

Earlier this week, Mokbel made the sensational claim that Gobbo told him to flee because police were planning to charge him with three murders.

On Wednesday, hr gave more details to these claims. “At the end … what she said … (was that police would) continue charging me with other murders until they find you guilty and they’ll give you life with life. I took off.”

Mokbel said Gobbo “didn’t stop” making these comments while she represented him in court on cocaine smuggling charges.

“On a daily basis, ‘You’re still around?’ She just wouldn’t stop.”

Asked by Mr Glynn if he took that as a warning to abscond, he said “anyone with a brain would have done that” and he believed Gobbo was “100 per cent” trying to help him.

His evidence, before Justice Elizabeth Fullerton, is expected to continue until Friday.

Herald Sun