Lawyer X: the underbelly exposed

Barrister Nicola Gobbo leaves court in Melbourne.

It was the most expensive investigation conducted in Victoria and a case that cleaved the police force in two: a shemozzle of epic proportions that failed to secure a conviction despite the police command’s obsession with making something stick.

And it all began with a jailhouse visit by Nicola Gobbo, the ­defence barrister and registered police informant known as Lawyer X.

The year was 2006 and Melbourne’s gangland war was at a bloody end, the key protagonists dead, on the run, or in jail. Among the cockroach-like survivors was a homicidal drunk known as Jack Price, a third-generation career criminal more used to life behind bars than on the outside. Unlike Gobbo, his true identity remains protected by court orders.

Price was in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of two gangland identities, when Gobbo, having signed in to see another client, paid him a visit. What she told him triggered a sequence of events that ended careers, exposed rancid police rivalries and denied justice to the family of a male prostitute shot dead on his front lawn.

Price was already talking to police, angling for a way to deal himself into the heavily discounted sentences being offered to turncoat killers. When he next met the police, he said nothing about Gobbo. Instead, he wrote a single word on his hand and showed it to two intrigued detectives from the gangland-busting Purana taskforce: “Vampire.’’

Within months, Price had confessed to the murder of Shane Chartres-Abbott, known as the vampire gigolo. He also promised to deliver something far more valuable: “A truckload of corrupt police.’’

Nearly eight years later, Price appeared on a TV screen inside the Victorian Supreme Court. He was being held in an undisclosed ­location, the supergrass witness in the trial of three men accused of the murder of Chartres-Abbott.

Nicola Gobbo and Carl Williams at his daughter Dhakota's glitzy Christening party at Melbourne's Crown Casino in 2003.

Also on trial, although not in the dock on formal charges, were former police detectives Peter Lalor and David Waters, each publicly accused of being involved in the 2003 murder.

Near the end of Price’s evidence, prosecutor Andrew Tinney turned to an obvious question. Why did you implicate yourself in a murder that, at the time, you were not suspected of committing? Due to suppression orders in place until yesterday, Price’s answer went unreported. It can now be revealed: “I’d had a visit off a lawyer, Nicola Gobbo, who told me things were being said in relation to this case.’’

Why was Gobbo, the lawyer of Tony Mokbel, Carl Williams and a supporting cast of killers, drug dealers and speed cooks, providing information to Jack Price about an unsolved homicide with no apparent ties to Melbourne’s gangland war or any of her clients? This is a question Waters wants answered at the royal commission established in response to the Lawyer X scandal.

Waters and Lalor were the prime targets of Briars, a joint Victoria Police/Office of Police Integrity taskforce established in 2007 to investigate Price’s claims about the killing of Chartres-Abbott.

Then deputy commissioner Simon Overland described it as a “showstopper’’, a case that would implicate cops in a gangland killing and demonstrate to everyone that Victoria Police could clean its stables without a royal commission mucking in. Instead, it became a wrecking ball.

Lalor, a respected detective with an unblemished record, was forced to quit the force. He was followed by Bob Hodgkin, an investigator whose chief sin was to be friends with Waters. As Briars became more desperate, the case bled into the Australian Taxation Office in Albury, where former police detectives Peter Spence and Bob Hynninen were wrongly accused of accessing an ATO file about Chartres-­Abbott two months before he was murdered.

At the height of its folly, Briars spawned Operation Diana, a parallel OPI investigation into who was leaking information from Briars. That culminated in an excruciating public examination of former police association secretary Paul Mullett and assistant commissioner Noel Ashby. All charges against both men were dropped but their careers never recovered. They, too, want the royal commission to examine how Briars, on the word of an inveterate liar and through the unethical actions of a defence lawyer and, ­potentially, her police handlers, was allowed to run and run.

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Waters, a retired police detective sergeant who left the force after being acquitted of drugs charges, was summonsed in September 2007 to the now disbanded OPI and questioned about his relationship with Price and the murder of Chartres-Abbott. Within days, details of the investigation were leaked to The Age newspaper. It was about then, out of the blue, that Gobbo called Waters.

As Waters writes in a submission to the royal commission obtained by The Weekend Australian, it was the start of a treacherous relationship in which Gobbo, under a ruse of providing Waters legal advice, fed information back to police that, in turn, allowed Price to change his story and reshape his statements to implicate Waters.

Waters is certain he was betrayed by Gobbo. He also suspects Price was able to use information provided by Gobbo to alter his sworn evidence and alleges that Overland, a former Victoria Police chief commissioner, sanctioned and encouraged this arrangement.

“Overland was desperate to substantiate a claim that legitimately never could be true,’’ ­Waters writes in his submission. He says Overland oversaw “a course of action involving the perversion of justice and perjury by police members which cost the Victorian taxpayer in excess of $30 million. In doing so he compromised the successful prosecution of a murder suspect and personally supervised the use of Nicola Gobbo as an undercover operative.’’

Waters’ claims, if examined by the royal commission, will be fiercely contested.

The Briars investigation was led by Ron Iddles, an experienced homicide detective who clashed with Overland over how best to manage the investigation.

He refused to charge Waters and Lalor when Overland demanded it in 2007, believing there was insufficient evidence. Two years later, he refused to take a sworn statement from Gobbo about her involvement in Briars, warning that to do so would expose her history as a police informant and the police force to a royal commission.

Pasquale Barbaro and Nicola Gobbo arriving at court. Picture: ABC News

Iddles tells The Weekend Australian Gobbo had no influence on any statements sworn by Price. “Nothing ever came from that informer,’’ he says. “What is in his statement came from him. It never came from somewhere else.’’

Iddles also denies any suggestion he used information provided by Gobbo to strengthen Price’s evidence.

“The assertion I was provided with information from Lawyer X and that was adopted by a witness is totally false. I would never do that,’’ he says. Overland did not respond to questions from The Weekend Australian.

The Waters submission, if accurate, provides a detailed insight into how Gobbo plied her secret trade as a police snitch.

At first, she asked Waters broad questions. What evidence could they have against you? Where could they find corroboration for these allegations? Waters thought the questions odd but trusted her to maintain client privilege.

As they continued to meet, the questions became more specific. He revealed his whereabouts on key dates and alibis he had for certain allegations; she discussed possible defence strategies.

They met regularly for three years. By the end, Gobbo was in bitter dispute with Overland and her relationship with Victoria Police had collapsed.

She refused to appear as a witness against Paul Dale, a former detective charged with murdering informant Terrence Hodson and his wife Christine.

Gobbo receives a Victorian Premier's Volunteer Champions Awards in 2018 at Government House. Picture: Ian Currie

Victoria Police deregistered her as a source. She turned again, this time from police informant to civil plaintiff, and slapped the state of Victoria and Overland with a $3m damages claim for failing in their duty to protect her.

In the meantime, the damage to Waters was already done. He just didn’t know it yet.

In August 2012, Warren Shea and Ange Goussis were charged with the murder of Chartres-Abbott. Mark Perry, a drug dealer who went into hiding in 2007 just as news of the Briars investigation was breaking, was discovered in Perth living under an assumed identity and was also charged.

Once Shea, Goussis and Perry were charged, the evidence collected by police was provided to their defence teams. It was a brief of staggering volume, running to nearly 4000 pages and containing statements from 127 witnesses. Yet it was the six separate statements of Price, and the way his evidence had changed over the years, that caused Waters to replay the candid, and supposedly confidential, discussions he’d had with Gobbo.

In his submission to the royal commission, Waters recalls a conversation with Gobbo in 2010 in which she told him of a new statement by Price in which he alleges that he met Waters shortly after the murder and gave him the .357 revolver Price claimed he used to kill Chartres-Abbott.

“I told her that was a complete fabrication of evidence and ­untrue,’’ he writes in his submission. “I denied seeing Price that morning and informed her that I was elsewhere.’’

Waters says he told her that on the morning in question he was meeting a council worker at a busy Moonee Ponds nursery.

This created a problem for police. Price at first told police he kept the murder weapon. Then he changed his story, saying he gave it to Goussis, his alleged accomplice on the day. Then, in a meeting with Briars investigators in 2009, he claimed he gave the murder weapon to Waters in Flemington.

Police were sceptical. When they challenged Price on this detail, he recanted and told them he was making things up. Yet in his final statement, sworn in May 2012, Price reprises the allegation against Waters. Only this time he mysteriously accounts for the discrepancy in locations.

As he was preparing his sixth and final statement, Price was pressed by Iddles about the sequence of events after the murder. He suddenly recalled, some nine years after the killing and six years after his first statement, that he dropped off Goussis at the Moonee Ponds junction. Was this added to cruel Waters’ alibi? If it was, how did Price know about Waters being in Moonee Ponds that day?

“The final statement from Price details new events which completely contradict his previous five statements,’’ Waters writes to the royal commission. “There is constant prompting … in an ­attempt to fit the evidence around my movements on the morning of the shooting and the following day.

“This clearly displays that Nicola Gobbo has been intricately involved in the case, either of her own volition or under the guidance of the Briars taskforce. She has influenced the evidence by providing material to Price to assist with the making of his statements and particularly the last statement, which she knew about two years before it existed.’’

There is no question that Gobbo was used as an informant in the Briars investigation. Whether information provided by her prompted Price to change his statement is a matter for the royal commission. It is believed Price may have had access to telephone records showing Waters’ movements on the day.

Shane Chartres-Abbott, outside court in 2003, was murdered the day after this photo was taken.

Goussis, Shea and Perry were acquitted of the murder of Chartres-Abbott in July 2014. On the day of their acquittal, Shea’s father Tom demanded a royal commission into the entire debacle. That was before he knew anything about Gobbo’s involvement.

Waters says the Royal Commission into Management of Police Informants, in addition to examining the conduct of Gobbo and the police responsible for her, must also examine why gangland snitches such as Price were given such leeway to manipulate the justice system.

Chartres-Abbott, usually portrayed in cartoonish terms, has never attracted much sympathy as a victim of violent crime. He worked as a prostitute.

On the day he was killed, he was due to face court on charges of raping a client in gruesome circumstances. His murder meant those rape allegations were never tested. A more troubling outcome of Briars is that whoever killed Chartres-Abbott is still walking free.

The jury that acquitted Goussis, Shea and Perry made it clear, in a question to the trial judge during their deliberations, that they doubted whether Price had anything to do with the murder of Chartres-Abbott. Under the extraordinary terms of a plea agreement struck between Price and prosecutors, he was not required to serve an additional day in prison for his purported crime.

Waters says that, in their willingness to accept Price’s fabricated account, the Briars taskforce butchered what should have been a simple murder investigation.