Police advised Lawyer X to watch ‘movies about informers and secret police agents’

Barrister turned police informer Nicola Gobbo has told a court that police officers assured her the intelligence she provided about her underworld clients would not come back ‘to haunt’ her.

Nicola Gobbo with her client Tony Mokbel in 2004. Picture: Bill Mcauley.

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Lawyer turned police informer Nicola Gobbo has told a court that her police handlers advised her to watch “movies about secret informers and secret police agents”.

In the second week of her civil trial against the state, Ms Gobbo told the Supreme Court in Melbourne that officers assured her the intelligence she provided about underworld clients would not come back to “haunt” her.

Ms Gobbo said she was assured of her safety in early meetings with Victoria Police’s newly formed source development unit when she was registered as a police informer in September 2005.

“I was assured this was a special, highly trained, dedicated unit that was doing things vastly differently to the way it had been done before and that I shouldn’t have any concerns about safety or about any information coming back to haunt me, or in other words, being found out,” she said.

Ms Gobbo, also known as Lawyer X, said the meetings would never occur in “police locations,” but rather at “seedy, broken-down motels or three-star hotels.”

She said a handler would direct her to drive in a “convoluted way” to the covert locations in order to ensure no one was following or watching her.

In the months that followed, Ms Gobbo said she became ­“increasingly paranoid” and “trapped” in her role as an ­informer.

In December 2005, after a welfare note on Ms Gobbo’s police file said she was feeling “depressed” and “guilty”, she said ­officers suggested she watch some “movies about secret informers and secret police agents”.

Ms Gobbo said officers had told her she was doing an “amazing job” as an informer and that as time went on, they began to treat her like she was “one of the team”.

“Frankly, it’s embarrassing,” she said.

“I was in circumstances where I could not see a way out and made to feel that what I was doing was so vital and important and the right thing to do.”

Ms Gobbo is suing the state of Victoria for compensation in connection with its alleged negligence in its use of her as a police informer.

Gangland boss Tony Mokbel and Nicola Gobbo.

The state is defending the claim.

Among other things, it denies officers induced Ms Gobbo to provide them with information and says she instead provided it voluntarily with full appreciation of the risks.

The state is also contending it should not be responsible for loss to the extent that Ms Gobbo engaged in illegal activity by providing Victoria Police with confidential information about her clients and information that was subject to legal professional privilege.

Ms Gobbo told the court that in 2005, she was feeding police information about her client Tony Mokbel, for whom she was acting in two upcoming trials.

She said officers gave her “some assurance” that she “didn’t need to worry” about legal professional privilege.

“My belief was that I’m sitting in a room with two police officers … and they’re telling me everything will be OK,” she said.

In the years that followed, Ms Gobbo said she started receiving threats from underworld figures, including one incident in which she alleged that Mokbel’s brother, Horty, “grabbed me around the throat and indicated that if he were to find out I was assisting police, that he would kill me”.

Ms Gobbo told the court that becoming a police informer was “an idiotic, stupid thing to do” but at the time it felt like Vic­toria Police was throwing her “a lifeline”.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I was an idiot and I shouldn’t have done it,” she said.