Mokbel findings skewer senior officers, prosecutor

For nearly 20 years, it has been part of Victorian police folklore – the night Purana taskforce squad boss Jim O’Brien and his detectives convinced Tony Mokbel’s speed cook to rat on his boss and help take apart the drug manufacturing empire fuelling Melbourne’s gangland war.

The details, right down to the late-night pizza O’Brien had delivered to the 14th-floor boardroom of the St Kilda Road police headquarters to loosen the tongue of a potential witness, are the stuff of VicPol legend.

Tony Mokbel (left) arrives at the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne.Credit: AAPIMAGE

The speed cook, who pleaded guilty to serious drug offences and served a lengthy stint in jail, ultimately provided more than 40 sworn statements to police about Mokbel, his associates and other gangland figures to become one of the most prolific criminal witnesses in the history of the state.

In the Supreme Court on Monday, Justice Elizabeth Fullerton offered a very different descriptor for what took place that night on April 22, 2006. She called it “a joint criminal enterprise to attempt to pervert the course of justice”.

The judge wasn’t talking about Mokbel and his cronies. She was talking about the cops.

These are police who allegedly conspired with defence barrister Nicola Gobbo to convince one of her clients to turn informer against another of her clients without telling either she was working as a secretly registered agent of Victoria Police.

Former lawyer and police informer Nicola Gobbo.Credit: ABC

Fullerton found that four members of Victoria Police “participated with Ms Gobbo in that agreement to achieve that unlawful objective”.

The identity of the current or former officers named by Fullerton is not known. Her judgment will be published pending further legal submissions.

The findings of the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants provide a detailed account of who did what during the Purana pizza night, though it’s not clear how they may fit in the frame of Fullerton’s decision.

The royal commission findings name the two Purana detectives who put the drug cook in touch with Gobbo on the day of his arrest, the detectives who interviewed the drug cook armed with confidential information provided by Gobbo, and the senior officers who oversaw what commissioner Margaret McMurdo described as a “high point of Gobbo’s duplicity”.

The royal commission concluded that former top cop Simon Overland, O’Brien and Gobbo’s police handlers all knew she was informing on the drug cook while purporting to act for him.

Overland testified before Fullerton earlier this year, and the judge was not convinced by everything the former chief commissioner had to say. “I rejected significant aspects of Mr Overland’s evidence as unworthy of acceptance,” she said.

Justice Fullerton isn’t the first respected jurist to conclude that current or former members of Victoria Police have serious cases to answer about their roles in the Lawyer X scandal.

In 2018, seven judges of the High Court characterised the decision by Victoria Police to use a defence lawyer as a registered informant as reprehensible conduct that “debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system”.

In 2020, counsel assisting the subsequent royal commission, when making their submissions to McMurdo, urged her to find that police who facilitated and oversaw the use of Gobbo as an informant may have committed criminal offences.

Former police commissioner Simon Overland.Credit: Jason South

McMurdo redacted those submissions and made no findings of alleged criminal conduct so as not to unfairly prejudice any future trials. What, then, came of those trials?

This is where the Fullerton judgment breaks important new ground.

A little over a year ago, the prospect of any current or former police facing criminal charges relating to Gobbo’s double life as an informant came to an end following an exchange of legal letters between Kerri Judd, KC, and Geoffrey Nettle, KC.

Nettle, a former High Court judge, was the Victorian government’s special investigator appointed to prepare briefs of evidence against any current and former members of Victorian police who broke the law in their dealings with Gobbo. Judd, as the director of public prosecutions, had the final say on whether there was enough evidence to lay charges.

In June 2023, Nettle published correspondence showing that, while he was convinced sufficient evidence had been secured to charge current or former officers, Judd was not. Confronted with this impasse, Nettle quit and the government wound up his office.

Fullerton has now found – on balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt – that Judd’s immediate predecessor as DPP, John Champion, SC, knew from September 2012 that Victoria Police used Gobbo as an informer against Mokbel but took no steps to disclose this for another three years.

This is the first time a court has implicated the DPP in the cover-up that prevented Mokbel and Gobbo’s other clients from learning about her deceit until the High Court intervened. Fullerton described it as an error of judgment.

The finding will raise questions about whether the Office of Public Prosecutions should have had the final say on any charges relating to Lawyer X.

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