Mokbel: The last chapter is yet to be written

Tony Mokbel is (or was) a drug trafficker. You know who said that? Tony Mokbel.

Now that he is a free bird rather than a jailbird, granted bail by the Court of Appeal, the question is whether the drug trafficker was fairly found in court to be a drug trafficker.

Tony Mokbel leaves the Court of Appeal on Friday.Credit: Daniel Pockett

The answer is yes.

The judicial process around Mokbel makes the Suburban Rail Loop look like a frugal investment and the CFMEU a benevolent organisation.

When he was arrested on the run in 2007 in Athens, having jumped bail, bought a yacht and sailed to Greece, he was slapped with multiple drug charges, each given a code name. They were Kayak, Spake, Orbital, Quills, Landslip, Matchless and Magnum.

After a five-year legal battle, Mokbel pleaded guilty to Magnum, Orbital and Quills. In return, the prosecution dropped the remaining charges. In 2012, he was sentenced to 30 years with a minimum of 22 years. He has served 18 years, had $55 million in assets seized, suffered a heart attack and was bashed in jail.

Justice Simon Whelan said he would have sentenced Mokbel to life if he had not pleaded guilty. Having used every legal trick to try to beat the charges, Mokbel pleaded guilty only when he had reached a legal dead end.

At the hearing, Mokbel admitted to the error of his ways. “You would like to apologise to the community and to the courts and that you recognise that dealing in drugs was wrong and that it caused damage to a lot of people.”

Whelan didn’t buy it. He knew Tony was doing what was best for Tony.

Flash forward. After an agonising legal battle, it was finally revealed that one of the Purana taskforce’s secret informers was barrister Nicola Gobbo, who betrayed Mokbel to police.

In 2017, the High Court found the police tactic was reprehensible. Instead of letting the legal process take its course, which would have allowed Mokbel to appeal on the basis the evidence that led him to plead guilty was tainted, we decided to have a judicial inquiry into the use of Gobbo as an informer. It ran two years, cost $200 million and didn’t recommend charges. It found police should not have used Gobbo as an informer, which the High Court had already established.

So we established a special examiner, a former High Court judge who recommended charges against some former police, but the Director of Public Prosecutions said there wasn’t enough evidence and the special examiner quit in a huff.

Did Mokbel then appeal? Of course not.

We then called in an interstate judge to have another inquiry – this time a royal commission. She found the police shouldn’t have used Gobbo as an informer, as surprising as finding that the Loch Ness monster probably doesn’t exist and the world is not flat.

Then we established new rules on how police should use informers, and guess what. You can use barristers after all.

Meanwhile, Mokbel was still in prison while his legitimate grounds for appeal were stuck in legal quicksand that saw high-powered and highly paid lawyers say the same things the same way to different judges.

It is estimated Mokbel’s drug enterprise, known as the Company, turned over $400 million. It is a fair bet the legal expenses, including the extradition from Greece, the private jet to bring him back, the Supreme and High Court battles and the multiple external inquiries, will have cost around the same.

One of the reasons Mokbel was granted bail is his appeal decision may not be made until next year – that is eight years after the High Court said using Gobbo as a secret informer was an abuse of process. What is an abuse of process has been a judicial process that has done nothing except pay the land tax on the clifftop holiday houses of top-end lawyers.

The way forward is blindingly simple. Mokbel pleaded guilty to three sets of charges – Orbital, Quills and Magnum. Was Gobbo’s involvement crucial to these operations? If so, the cases are compromised and should be thrown out.

The yacht Edwena, which Mokbel bought as part of his plan to escape to Greece, after it was impounded by police.

Orbital and Quills are as dead as Julius Caesar. That leaves Magnum, which looked into Mokbel’s drug trafficking after he jumped bail in 2006 until his arrest in 2007. Unless Gobbo was secretly working undercover in an Athens souvlaki shop, she had nothing to do with Magnum.

The only way Magnum could be threatened is if the courts find Gobbo’s manicured fingers are all over the Greek extradition proceedings and decide he should not have been returned to Australia, which is, frankly, ridiculous.

He jumped bail, bought the yacht Edwena for $340,000 and sailed to the other side of the world.

In the Magnum case there was a secret informer, but it wasn’t Gobbo. For many years deputy police commissioner Ross Guenther moonlighted as a professional musician, and a fellow musician was connected with the Mokbels. That musician became informer 3030 and managed to suck material from the Company’s computer that proved a pattern of illicit drug production.

Informer 3030 turned out to be a star. Magnum ended up getting bugged phones on all of Tony’s drug mates and 10 were convicted. At one stage police learnt that Tony had about $500,000 stocked in a storage facility in Collingwood.

When one of the Company’s men collected it, the Purana taskforce put a marked police car right behind him. He was so spooked he drove through a red light and when pulled over, police found the cash wrapped in gift paper.

When Mokbel was told of the shrinkage, he was remarkably calm, then ordered all their phones be binned and replaced. It was 3030 who had provided them, all bugged by Purana. (It was 3030 who received the million-dollar reward, not Gobbo.)

Credit: Matt Golding

During the time he was on the run, Mokbel oversaw production of 41 kilograms of speed and trousered $4 million, which made it the ultimate working holiday.

Justice Whelan said Mokbel was sunk on Magnum through five separate and compelling strains of evidence, which included the computer records and phone taps.

Whelan said: “The telephone intercepts reveal two noteworthy matters in this regard. First, you conducted yourself as a manager. You delegated. You gave advice. You encouraged co-operation.

“You sought to maintain morale. Ultimately, you determined what was to be done, in particular about payments and the distribution of money. Second, only certain of the participants dealt directly with you.

“You gave instructions to them, and they carried them out themselves or passed them on to others. Those who did deal directly with you displayed respect for you, and loyalty to you.

“They looked to you to solve the problems which arose. It was your capacity to manage and co-ordinate, and to command respect and loyalty, which enabled these criminal activities to succeed, for a time.

“Your offences and the Magnum telephone intercepts reveal to me that drug trafficking was your business. It was your area of expertise. It was your career. Things have not turned out as you planned, and no doubt you now regret that, but to describe such feelings of regret as remorse is, I think, misconceived.”

Mokbel was sentenced to 20 years over Magnum. The most logical action on appeal would be to quash Orbital and Quills, uphold Magnum and release Mokbel on time served. Then he is free and remains a convicted drug dealer.

After a bail application heard on April Fool’s Day, Mokbel was released on Friday. The last time he was bailed he ended up getting bashed in Lygon Street by a Perth bikie and transported to hospital by the hitman Andrew Veniamin, who was later shot dead in a restaurant just up the road.

When on Friday the court asked Mokbel to rise and make assurance he wouldn’t do a runner, he assured the judges he would be a model bailee, then thanked them for their wise decision.

That is the funny thing about Mokbel. For a drug dealer, he’s not a bad bloke: polite, generous and a born dealmaker.

He once tried to broker a peace deal with the Purana taskforce to stop the Underbelly war, claiming he would get certain gangland figures to plead guilty so everyone could get back to business.

“I’ll get Con [his barrister Con Heliotis, QC] to talk to Paul [DPP Paul Coghlan, QC] to work out the details,” he said.

I was in court the day Mokbel was acquitted of murder. Before the verdict he turned, smiled and gave me a little nod of recognition as if we had just been on a caravan holiday together. He later referred to me as the bald-headed alien, which is harsh but fair.

His mates were less good-humoured, and as we descended in the court lift one spoke to the back of my neck: “Someone should write a f---ing book about this.”

This was surprising as these Mokbel enthusiasts, all of whom looked as if they did not appear to have necks, didn’t strike me as members of a book club and the titles that would attract them are likely to be Steroids for Fun and Profit and the classic Bench Pressing for Beginners.

Nonetheless, it was sage advice and I did write a book about it.

Like the saga of Tony Mokbel, the last chapter is yet to be written.

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