Plea to informer: shut your Gobbo

Victoria Police considered locking up Nicola Gobbo to stop her representing crooks she was informing against.

Police considered locking up Nicola Gobbo, a royal commission has heard.

Victoria Police considered locking up defence barrister Nicola Gobbo to stop her representing crooks she was informing against.

The extraordinary admission to the Lawyer X royal commission by one of Ms Gobbo’s police handlers reveals how Victoria Police lost control of their prized informant within months of her being registered as a snitch.

Ms Gobbo’s recruitment as an informant was endorsed by former top cop Simon Overland, Purana taskforce boss Jim O’Brien and other senior police determined to bring to justice those responsible for dozens of unsolved killings and key figures in the drug trade that fuelled Melbourne’s gangland war.

Yet within seven months of her registration as Human Source 3838, Ms Gobbo’s hand­lers grew concerned she was difficult to manage and at risk of being exposed as an informant and tried to put her on ice.

“She was put into what we call a babysitting mode,’’ said Sandy White, a pseudonym given to the first former member of the secretive Source Development Unit to testify before the royal commission. “She was told quite clearly that we didn’t want any further information and if she provided it, we would not act on it.”

Mr White told the hearing he also instructed Ms Gobbo to stop acting for a speed cook arrested on the basis of information she provided to police. He said when Ms Gobbo ignored the directive, he considered arresting her to keep her from her client.

Tapes played to the royal commission of an assessment Mr White conducted in 2005 of Ms Gobbo’s suitability to be a registered informant show their relationship began with a lie. Mr White is heard assuring Ms Gobbo that their conversation is not being taped. “Ms Gobbo at this stage of the recruitment process was being told an untruth by police,’’ commissioner Margaret McMurdo remarked.

“That is very important.”

Despite Ms Gobbo’s reser­vations about becoming an informant and the risk to her life if this became known in the criminal underworld, she became a prolific informer for the next four years.

Mr White said a challenge faced by her handlers wasn’t encouraging her to provide information, it was getting her to stop.

He said despite police telling Ms Gobbo in April 2006 that they didn’t want her to provide more information, she continued to meet them and eventually volunteered knowledge of a massive importation of ecstasy pills in tomato tins.

That information led to more than 30 arrests and one of the largest drug seizures in the history of Australian law enforcement: 4.4 tonnes of MDMA.

It also disrupted a major drug importation cartel with links to the Calabrian mafia. A member of the importation cartel serving a lengthy jail term, Rob Karam, is appealing against his conviction on the basis of Ms Gobbo’s involvement in the case.

Mr White defended the decision to use information provided by Ms Gobbo. He told the hearing he did not disseminate information subject to professional legal privilege but otherwise considered any conflict of interest between Ms Gobbo’s day job as a defence lawyer and secret life as a snitch was hers to manage, not that of police.

“Whether she was acting for them or not didn’t make any difference in terms of the material she provided,” he said.

Pressed on how he would feel if he discovered that a lawyer hired to represent his interest was secretly working against him, Mr White said legal professional privilege did not extend to information held by a lawyer about the future commissioning of serious crimes. “I don’t think somebody who is being represented by a barrister and then … tells that barrister about cooking amphetamine in clandestine labs or importing 4½ tonnes of MDMA is in much of a position to be too upset by that.’’

Mr White told the hearing the decision to register Ms Gobbo as an informant was discussed with Mr O’Brien, who was about to take charge of the gang-busting Purana taskforce, and Mr Overland, then assistant commissioner in charge of crime.

He said he was unaware that Ms Gobbo had already been used as an informant by Purana taskforce detective Stuart Bateson. The royal commission has previously heard how Ms Gobbo helped Mr Bateson secure a ­series of statements from one of her clients, a convicted murderer, that implicated Carl Williams in a spate of gangland hits.

Ms Gobbo also helped convince a client, a supergrass witness who cannot be identified for legal reasons, to swear a statement implicating Faruk Orman in the 2002 murder of Victor Peirce when she was nominally acting for Mr Orman.

The Victorian Court of Appeal last week quashed Mr Orman’s conviction and released him from jail, finding Ms Gobbo’s conduct subverted his right to a fair trial and “went to the very foundations of the system of criminal justice”.

The hearings continue.