Lawyer X inquiry: Tony Mokbel has some redeeming features, says Nicola Gobbo

Nicola Gobbo has defended her formerly close relationship with then client, drug kingpin Tony Mokbel.

Nicola Gobbo. Picture: ABC News

Nicola Gobbo has defended her formerly close relationship with then client Tony Mokbel, claiming the drug kingpin “does have some redeeming features”.

The former lawyer-cum-supergrass said her low self-­esteem and ambition dragged her into Melbourne’s criminal underworld and saw her fraternising with gangsters, crooks and bikies.

“There were periods of time where it was in my interests in terms of my self-esteem and achieving more and what I thought was important to cultivate relationships with these ­people,” she said on Tuesday.

The lawyer for Victoria Police, Saul Holt QC, then asked Ms Gobbo: “Why’d you ever have wanted to be friends with Tony Mokbel?”

Drug kingpin Tony Mokbel.

She replied: “I wouldn’t say friends, but … like every person, he [Mokbel] does have some redeeming features.”

The royal commission into the management of police informants has previously heard Ms Gobbo became an informer to escape the thrall of Mokbel.

On her last scheduled day of evidence, Ms Gobbo admitted she gave false information under oath to Supreme Court justice Timothy Ginnane. Under cross-examination by Geoff Chettle, who is representing her former handlers from Victoria Police’s covert Source Development Unit, Ms Gobbo admitted she edited a statement made by a former ­client, who cannot be identified.

Mr Chettle then asked Ms Gobbo: “And so when you said ‘I didn’t know the content of his statement at that time’, that's clearly on oath to Justice Gin­nane, can we agree?”

Ms Gobbo replied: “Yeah, it ­appears that way.”

She told the commission Victoria Police had a “target list” of criminals they wanted to take down, which included underworld figure Mick Gatto.

The commission previously heard Ms Gobbo’s former handler Sandy White asked her to “take one for the team” by sleeping with Gatto but on Tuesday the former lawyer said it was just a joke. “I can’t recall specifically who said it … but there was a joke about [sleeping with Gatto],” she said.

The commission heard Ms Gobbo texted a Victoria Police contact on October 25, 2009, over news reports that a $1m reward was offered for information on Mark Perry, suspected of murdering self-proclaimed vampire gigolo Shane Chartres-Abbott.

“Good to see that VicPol have finally broken the story on Mark Perry, the murderer I told Briars all about,” Ms Gobbo said in the text message.

“How f..king funny it is to be so instrumental yet treated with, at least, indifference. Circus.”

The commission has previously heard that an alleged confession to the murder by Mark Perry was inserted into a draft statement by Ms Gobbo taken by Briars Taskforce detectives Stephen Waddell and Ron Iddles.

In her seven-page statement to the royal commission, Ms Gobbo said she had no knowledge of the statement, saying “it must have been added by DI Waddell.”

On Tuesday when pressed by Mr Holt on the text message, Ms Gobbo conceded it was likely she had in fact supplied detectives with the confession.