Lawyer X royal commission: Former drug squad detective Paul Dale gives evidence

A former detective once accused of murdering an underworld snitch has unloaded on Victoria Police.

Former detective Paul Dale leaves after giving evidence at the royal commission in Melbourne yesterday. Picture: David Caird

A former detective once accused of murdering an underworld snitch has unloaded on Victoria Police, telling a royal commission that “senior members” of the force had committed crimes in their use of “Lawyer X” as an informant.

Paul Dale told the commission he had been illegally set up by members of Victoria Police and “Lawyer X” Nicola Gobbo when she secretly recorded a conversation with him before he was charged over the 2004 murder of criminal informer Terrence Hodson.

“I believe senior police members conspired to pervert the course of justice through the unethical use of a practising criminal barrister against her clients,” Mr Dale told the Royal Commission into the Management of Police ­Informants yesterday.

“I truly believe that they’ve committed a criminal offence.”

He said the public could “finally see the corruption within the higher ranks of Victoria Police and the intention of them to totally disregard our law to achieve an outcome that they thought was right”.

Mr Dale also criticised the force’s subsequent response to the scandal, saying: “Ends justify the means, that’s the mentality of our current chief commissioner.”

Pointing to Ms Gobbo’s surreptitious recording of a 2008 conversation she had with him that led to him being charged with Hodson’s murder — a charge that was later dropped — Mr Dale said he believed a crime had been committed.

“That’s a significant one ­because as a result of that conversation I was charged with murder and spent eight months in solitary confinement on remand,” Mr Dale said, after telling the commission he believed the conversation should have been covered by legal professional privilege.    “In hindsight now, there were a lot of things that went on that I now realise — phone calls when I was in her presence with (gangland figure) Carl Williams and people like that — that I faced charges over, I now know that I was being set up. Because she was a police informer.”

Mr Dale said had he known that Ms Gobbo was a police informer we wouldn’t have gone near her “with a 40-foot pole”.

Ms Gobbo was sought to be called as a witness against Mr Dale in his murder trial over the death of Hodson. She refused to take the stand.

Mr Dale was charged with Hodson’s murder in 2009, and hitman Rodney Charles Collins was charged with the double murder of Hodson and his wife Christine.

However, the charges against both men were dropped in April 2010 after Williams was murdered by a fellow prison inmate.

Mr Dale said he “doesn’t ­believe a word” that has been said by Ms Gobbo, or those of the force that had her give information to them about her clients.

On another occasion, he told the commission, he was out on the town with Ms Gobbo when she handed him her phone.

“I was at the casino one night and she rang Carl Williams and put him on the phone to me,” he said.

“I look back on that now, and that was used against me quite ­significantly as a so-called relationship I had with Carl Williams. I never rang him, she rang him.

“I’ve got no doubt, because I dealt with informers for a long time, she was directed to do that sort of stuff.”

The commission heard that Mr Dale had contacted Ms Gobbo and met her at a South Melbourne pub in 2003, weeks after a drug house was burgled, but said he could not recall what legal advice he had sought from her at that time. Hodson was arrested over the burglary.

Mr Dale said he had heard that he was also a suspect in the burglary, and that Hodson was going to make a statement to police.

Mr Dale said he had once had sex with Ms Gobbo on a “drunken night”.

Ms Gobbo has previously ­denied this.