Gobbo ‘intimate’ with client Mokbel

Lawyer X was involved with notorious crook Tony Mokbel, Royal Commission told.

Nicola Gobbo, who has been revealed as Lawyer X. Picture: ABC News

The sex life of Lawyer X has reclaimed centre stage in the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants with a suggestion that defence barrister turned gangland snitch Nicola Gobbo was intimately involved with one of Australia’s most notorious crooks, Tony Mokbel.

Victoria Police Inspector Martin Allison told the hearing it was known by police during the gangland war that Ms Gobbo’s relationship with Mokbel went beyond that of lawyer and client.

“Miss Gobbo seemed to have a relationship with Mokbel that was outside the normal lawyer client relationship,’’ Mr Allison told the hearing.

“I never observed it but I received information…that the relationship extended beyond business hours and they would regularly meet at various places in Melbourne, mostly in the early hours of the morning, late evening.’’

Tony Mokbel being lead into a prison van in 2011. Picture: Supplied

Mr Allison said the information he received indicated that little had changed from his first dealings with Ms Gobbo in 1995, when she was a university law student in a live-in relationship with a convicted drug dealer.

The suggestion follows revelations that Ms Gobbo had sex with the detective who first registered her as a police informant, Detective Senior Sergeant Tim Argall, and that she claimed to have had an on and off affair with another of her police handlers, former Assistant Commissioner Jeffrey Pope. Mr Pope denied the allegation.

The Royal Commission has been told that Mokbel’s principal drug cook, who cannot be identified, was also infatuated with Ms Gobbo.

Ms Gobbo has previously denied she had sex with Mokbel, who is currently seeking to overturn his serious drug convictions on the grounds that his own lawyer helped police build the case against him.

In March 2008, when Mokbel was in jail in Greece awaiting extradition to Melbourne to face drug and murder charges and Ms Gobbo was a registered informant, Ms Gobbo expressed concern to her police handlers that Mokbel would falsely claim they’d had a sexual relationship.

An information report tendered as evidence before the Victorian Supreme Court notes that when Gobbo was asked what Mokbel could say to damage her reputation, she replied: “He could lie about things such as, I slept with him, I took drugs with him, laundered money.’’

She also said he would accuse her of providing Mokbel with sensitive information about Terence Hodson, a police informant who was murdered after a break-in at one of Mokbel’s drug houses.

In a separate conversation with her police handlers, Ms Gobbo accused Mokbel of trying to blackmail her over sex tapes.

In May 2008, Ms Gobbo told Mokbel she would no longer represent him. She described their “breakup’’ call to her police handlers. “She left it with him saying do not ring me, don’t worry me, do not contact me,’’ the information report reads. “He said ‘so you really are leaving me?’’’

Mr Allison, a team leader on the Kayak taskforce investigation into Mokbel in 2000 and 2001, told the hearing Ms Gobbo had a practice of ingratiating herself with police and was rumoured to have a close relationship with former drug squad detective Paul Dale.

Ms Gobbo later used that relationship to implicate Mr Dale in the Hodson murder. He was charged and acquitted after Ms Gobbo refused to give evidence and Carl Williams, the other star witness, was murdered in jail. Mr Dale is co-operating with Royal Commission investigators and has offered to testify about his dealings with Ms Gobbo.

It emerged at today’s hearing that Wayne Strawhorn, a former drug squad detective jailed for drug trafficking, met with Ms Gobbo to discuss Operation Kayak eight months before Mokbel was charged.

Mr Strawhorn, the senior officer attached to the Kayak taskforce, offered no explanation for the meeting, which according to his police diary was sandwiched between other meetings with the Office of Public Prosecutions and Australian Federal Police to discuss the operation.

He denied that Ms Gobbo, a prominent defence barrister who led a secret life as a registered police informant, provided information to the Kayak taskforce.

Mr Allison told the hearing it was highly unusual for a senior member of the drug squad to meet with a lawyer representing the target of an investigation before charges were laid.