Lawyer X: We were legally banned from using this information, but that didn’t matter

Lawyer Nicola Gobbo.

It was our “holy shit” moment. The email lobbed at 11.40am, March 31, 2015.

Once printed, the five-page “originating motion between parties” would join hundreds of pages of affidavits, motions, injunctions and summons stacked in the corner of my office in the Herald Sun.

The motion emailed by our lawyer, JP Cashen, was part of the official legal record of another pounding we had copped a few weeks earlier in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

We had been losing in court for a year. Suppressed. Restrained. Silenced­. One night, we were ordered by a court to stop the presses. We were losing the fight to publish the story we called Lawyer X.

The Supreme Court even ruled that we could no longer use the pseudonym we created, declaring: “The Defendant is restrained from publishing or causing to be published the phrase ‘Lawyer X’.’’

That hurt.

Today, Lawyer X — Nicola Gobbo — is the most infamous lawyer in Australian history. Her double life as a gangland barrister and police informer is the subject of a royal commission, books, a television drama and countless newspaper and television stories.

Back then, it was very different. The Herald Sun — led by Anthony Dowsley, who broke the story, reporter­ Patrick Carlyon, deputy editor Chris Tinkler and our lawyers­ Cashen and Justin Quill — was beyond the wire and alone.

The rest of the media didn’t follow­ the story. Politicians did everything to avoid discussing it in public. Worst of all, it was smothered before it had the chance to capture the public’s imagination.

Victoria Police was the only other organisation interested in Lawyer X, and for very different reasons. They wanted to rebury the scandal Dowsley exhumed. By 2015, they were succeeding.

In the backwash of all the legal action, it would have been easy to question if the story broken by Dowsley on Monday, March 31, 2014 was worth all the grief.

Our legal fees were soaring. What if Gobbo sues us? Several years earlier, the Sunday Herald Sun, which I then edited, had written her a cheque for tens of thousands of dollars after she accused us of defaming her in a story she claimed implied — just implied — she was unethical.

Even knowing her own monster secret was lurking just skin deep, she gambled and sued. We caved. She won. Pure Gobbo.

Our newspaper had a proud reputation of campaigning to lock up criminals (for as long as possible). Do we want to be responsible for these gangland killers and drug dealers walking the streets? Is that something we want?

The answer to that was no. But we kept coming back to the central issue; the story of police hiring a criminal barrister to spy on her clients­ had to be told. If crooks were freed, that was on the police.

The police threats to have us prosecuted for criminal contempt were real and issued with all the menace and authority Victoria Police and its lawyers, the Victorian­ Government Solicitor’s Office, could muster with their badges and taxpayer-funded SCs.

During this time, we had an estimated­ 15 separate legal battles with Victoria Police, resulting in 28 hearings at which the Herald & Weekly Times, publisher of the Herald Sun, was represented or tried to be represented and was refused. (This does not include hearings since Gobbo was outed. There have been probably another six hearings in the Court of Appeal and 12 at the royal commission).

Victoria’s Independent, Broad-based, Anti-corruption Commission had launched an investig­ation off the back of Dowsley’s report. It was secretive, but was ultim­ately the stepping stone to the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal and High Court of Australia.

But on this day, March 31, 2015, the very legal document that smashed us, helped sustain us. The “originating motion between parties” opened in typical accusatory and taxpayer-funded SC fashion:

“TAKE NOTICE that this proceeding by originating motion has been brought against you by the Plaintiff (Vic Pol) for the relief of the remedy set out below …

“An order that the Defendant be permanently restrained from publishing or causing to be published­ any information that would identify or tend to identify an individual …

“There be no publication, in Victoria, or anywhere else in Australia­, of:

Any report of these proceedings;

Any information derived from these proceedings;

Any document filed, served or tendered in this proceeding. The terms of these orders.”

In other words, back off. Or you will be prosecuted. On page two, under the “relief of remedy sought” heading, points 1,2,3,4 and 5 rolled out in a blizzard of confidentiality and protected informer information.

But then came point 6: “The IBAC Report contained references to certain Protected Informer Information in the context of use of police informers by Victoria Police, specifically that:

“6.1 Information provided by a police informer or informers had been used in relation to the conviction of persons including Rob Karam;” (off the back of Lawyer X scandal, now appealing against a lengthy sentence for one of Australia’s biggest drug importation crimes).

“6.2 Information provided by a police informer or informers had been used in relation to investigation into criminal activity by Tony Mokbel and other persons;

“6.3 The use of information provided by a police informer or informers may have compromised the fair trial of criminals including­ Rob Karam.”

Bang. There it was. In Vic Pol’s own words: “The use of inform­ation provided by a police informer or informers may have compromised the fair trial of criminals …”

Holy Shit. We were right. The recruitment of Lawyer X — Gobbo — by police to betray her own clients was confirmed by the very police lawyers who were shutting us down.

We were legally banned from using this information. But that didn’t matter. The police were winning in the courts, but by their own admission they were covering up the greatest legal scandal in Australian history. And that motiv­ated us to keep going.

Over the coming years, we came back to that legal document regularly, to remind us that the story was real. But it didn’t deliver a quick scoop. In fact, we were heading into a long winter. Through the remainder of 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 we continued to be suppressed from publishing anything other than stories so redacted­ they would have made no sense to anyone other than Gobbo, police command and us.

One such report read: “Australia’s highest court is set to hear an extraordinary top secret case that will shake a significant Victorian government institution and could trigger a royal commission.

“Suppression orders imposed prevent the Herald Sun from identifying the institution, the organisation, and a third party, other than as AB, CD, and EF. Unless the appeal­ is successful, it is likely a series­ of dramatic developments will unfold, leaving the Andrews government with little choice but to order a royal commission.”

Towards the end of 2018, the High Court ruled against the police. A royal commission was ordered. The public was now able to read about the scandal of Nicola Gobbo, Lawyer X.

Damon Johnston was editor of the Herald Sun from 2012-19. He is now The Australian’s Victorian editor