Nicole Gobbo’s first snitching target shuns royal commission ‘circus’

Brian Wilson was a young man when he became the first person Nicola Gobbo snitched on — but he was hardly the last.

Nicola Gobbo appears on ABC’s 7:30. Picture: ABC

Brian Wilson was a young man when he became the first person then-law student Nicola Gobbo snitched on a quarter of a century ago — but he was hardly the last, nor the most prominent.

Tracked down by The Australian in New Zealand, the 54-year-old moved on long ago from his dealings with Ms Gobbo, when she provided information about him to police and introduced him to an undercover officer.

Mr Wilson now runs his own business and lives in a large suburban house in Auckland with a ute parked just inside the gates to his driveway. He is a world away from the drug kingpins and killers and the royal commission hearings in Melbourne, where Ms Gobbo has detailed how she came to betray them all — including her one-time boyfriend.

Those large steel gates at his home remained closed when The Australian rang his intercom at the weekend. Nor did they open when he emerged from his house wearing shorts, a T-shirt and an annoyed expression after he ­realised questions about Lawyer X had followed him all the way to this quiet suburban street.

He declined to comment on the “circus” surrounding Ms Gobbo and did not understand why he’d be of interest to journalists or what good could come from any interview, decades after he last spoke to her.

Yet their relationship has become one of the more intriguing chapters of the Lawyer X story.

Ms Gobbo got a taste for providing information to police during that time, and she became a registered informer for the first time in 1995 on the back of that ­initial assistance.

Mr Wilson ended up with a suspended sentence for drug trafficking over the 1993 raid, for which Ms Gobbo was given a good behaviour bond for a drug use and possession charge.

“We started off as friends and then at some point there was … an intimate relationship,” Ms Gobbo told the royal commission into the management of police informants last week.

“Then we ended up quite separate, and quite acrimoniously.”

Several things happened in that intervening period. Police in September 1993 raided the house in Rathdowne Street they both owned and Ms Gobbo led them to a stash of amphetamine in their laundry. “I do remember in the days leading up to (the raid) the police coming to speak to me at Melbourne University … having a much better idea of the level of drug trafficking with which he was involved and being shocked about it, and being frightened,” she said.

Ms Gobbo, Mr Wilson and a third man were charged.

Within 18 months, the pair were again living with each other.

In April 1995, the house was raided a second time. “My recollection is that was on the basis of me contacting the police because I needed a way to get rid of him,” Ms Gobbo said.

Assistant police commissioner Neil Paterson told the royal commission that Ms Gobbo became a registered informer that year. “On 12 July, 1995, (officers Trevor) Ashton and (now Detective Senior Sergeant Tim) Argall took Ms Gobbo to the Special Response Squad so that she could provide information in relation to the involvement of Mr Wilson and an unknown man by the name of Gavin in firearms and drug trafficking,” he said in a statement to the commission.

“That event is recorded in Sergeant Ashton’s notebook.

“Throughout the remainder of July 1995, Ms Gobbo provided further information to Victoria Police about Mr Wilson and Gavin. No contact or information reports have been located in relation to such contact.

“Contact is recorded in diaries and daybooks.”

Mr Paterson also said an ­investigation codenamed Operation Scorn began into Mr Wilson’s activities, which saw the freshly graduated Ms Gobbo introduce her former housemate to an undercover ­officer.

Sergeant Argall said the investigation was soon abandoned.

“My understanding was that the target just couldn’t provide what we were after,” he told the commission last year.