By Tammy Mills
Standing outside Melbourne’s court precinct last week, the irony was inescapable.
Here was Tony Mokbel, one of the original gangland bosses, walking down the steps of the Court of Appeal before a sizeable press pack and cheers from his supporters. No handcuffs were on his wrist, and he was whisked away in an expensive Mercedes.
After almost 18 years in prison he was – kind of – a free man.
This was where he was supposed to show up – or across the road at the County Court, to be precise – the last time he was on bail, almost 20 years ago.
Instead, he went on the run before his arrest, in a bad wig, in Greece about a year later.
So, why was Mokbel bailed? And why is his drug trafficking conviction now looking shaky?
Crime writer Chris Vedelago explains the colourful case of Tony Mokbel in the latest episode of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s podcast The Morning Edition with Samantha Selinger-Morris.
To listen, click the player below, or read on for an edited extract.
Selinger-Morris: Chris, Tony Mokbel is a big name in Australia’s criminal underworld, but I think it’s safe to say he really did shoot to prominence as a result of something that happened when he was last on bail many years ago. So, please, can you set the scene? Take us back to 2006. Who was Tony Mokbel at that time, and what happened?
Vedelago: Tony Mokbel was probably the most well-known drug trafficker in Melbourne at that period, publicly well-known, notorious among police. I mean, his nickname was Fat Tony. He was the guy who kind of professionalised drug trafficking in Melbourne and turned it into a real business. His syndicate was actually called The Company, and he ran it like a company.
At the time, he was facing trial, and he was on bail. The trial was coming to its conclusion, and then, according to Tony, as he tells it many years later, he was warned by his barrister that he was about to be charged with more than one murder. And so as the trial was coming to conclusion, one day, he just doesn’t show up, he disappears.
Selinger-Morris: Okay, so he pops up in Greece. He’s arrested, he is handed a 30-year prison sentence, and jail was where he was expected to stay, right? What happened?
Vedelago: What happens is this story starts to break that there’s a gangland barrister who might have been informing to Victoria Police on her own clients. And that was Nicola Gobbo. She was his long-term lawyer, she handled a lot of his cases and, behind the scenes, there’s this question [about] whether she and Victoria Police have corrupted these cases.
Selinger-Morris: Why was this so bad? The lay person listening might know intuitively that OK, if she’s representing her clients in court while at the same time informing on them to police, obviously that’s a conflict of interest. Is it more than that?
Vedelago: It wasn’t simply cutting corners, or the ends justify the means. They were, allegedly, systematically corrupting what the system has been designed to do, which is provide a fair trial to everybody.
One of the interesting things about this story is, to most members of the public, they don’t really have a problem with it, like the bad guys got what they deserved. But, at the same time, like, everybody hates lawyers until they need one. And if you are in trouble, or a family member is in trouble, and you go to a lawyer who’s going to try to help you or your family member in the situation that they’re in, you expect they’re going to do the best that they can. And they’re going to adhere to the rules that are set down to keep the system fair. That’s not what was going on here.