Nicola Gobbo Explains Why She Became Lawyer X and Informed for Police”
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Networked Knowledge Law Reports Networked Knowledge Victoria Royal Commission Homepage This page set up by Dr Robert N Moles [Underlining, where it occurs, is for NetK editorial emphasis] On 9 September 2020 Josie Taylor and Rachael Brown for ABC’s Trace: The Informer podcast reported “Nicola Gobbo explains why she became Lawyer X and informed for police” As Nicola Gobbo made the frantic dash to a morning court appearance in August 2005, she had no idea she was about to upend her entire life and turn the justice system on its head. "I can vividly remember thinking I just can't keep going, I can't do this anymore," Ms Gobbo told the ABC. Even before she arrived at the courtroom, she had already crossed an ethical line. That morning she had called a Victoria Police detective and confessed that her infamous client, drug boss Tony Mokbel, was pressuring her to take on that morning's case. When she arrived at court, the case was postponed. Instead, Ms Gobbo found detectives standing outside the courtroom. She saw them as a safe haven. Amid tears, she unleashed her deepest fears and worries on the detectives. She told them her criminal clients were pressuring her to break the law. The police saw a rare opportunity to infiltrate the underworld but it would mean doing something that had never been done in Australian history: signing up a criminal defence lawyer as an informer. The events set in motion that day would eventually spark a royal commission into Victoria Police's use of informers and lead to Ms Gobbo living in hiding. Already, one former client of Ms Gobbo's has been released from prison because a judge ruled her informing constituted a miscarriage of justice. Eight more former clients have appeals pending. The royal commission heard that more than 1,000 people could be affected by her informing. It heard 124 cases may have been unfairly affected. The story has been told in TV dramas, tabloid front pages and statements of evidence but it has never been fully told by the woman herself. While in hiding, Ms Gobbo spent months talking to the ABC podcast Trace: The Informer, to explain for the first time why she fed the secrets of some of the most dangerous and violent criminals in the country to police, while acting as a defence barrister. More than that, she revealed why — after years of working with the police — she stopped and why the separation has been so acrimonious. Always an overachiever In media reports, Ms Gobbo has sometimes been dubbed a "blue blood", which has served the tabloid narrative of a posh, high-flying lawyer who fell from grace. It is true her uncle, Sir James Gobbo was a Supreme Court Judge and a Governor of Victoria but when Ms Gobbo's grandparents first arrived from Italy, they started out by opening a soup kitchen in Carlton. Her father took it over at 17 years old and provided for the family. "Sir James rose to where he did by reason of the hard work of my dad, but my dad never resented him for his success," Ms Gobbo said. Ms Gobbo jokingly refers to her famous uncle as "Sir Arsehole" because, she claims, he had little to do with his nieces, and was largely estranged from her family. Sir James declined to comment. When Ms Gobbo was in primary school, her mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Nicola recalls her mother vomiting and crying, juggling night shifts at a hospital with fears of leaving her two young daughters behind. Her mother survived cancer but her father would later develop the same condition and die while Ms Gobbo was in high school. Ms Gobbo's loss of her father at a pivotal age affected her deeply and she said this would leave her with a lifelong craving for a certain type of male attention and approval. She attended the prestigious Genazzano private girls high school and studied law at Melbourne University, but in Ms Gobbo's telling, these were the product of a fierce work ethic and a "type-A personality" rather than entitlement. "I do something 150 per cent or don't do it at all," she told the Royal Commission into Management of Police Informants (RCMPI) last year. Sharehouses, drug busts and Nicola Gobbo's first offer to assist police The first time Ms Gobbo found herself on the wrong side of the law, she was studying it at Melbourne University. She was charged with drug possession after a small amount of drugs were found in her room at her Carlton sharehouse. She had no conviction recorded. It is something her first mentor in the law, Alex Lewenberg, did not worry about when he hired her at the criminal law firm he managed, shortly after she was admitted to practice in 1997. Mr Lewenberg asked Ms Gobbo if she had told the Board of Examiners, when she applied to practice, which she had. She had also told the board that she had been the one who tipped off police five days before the raid, having become suspicious about her boyfriend's activities. "I thought no more about it," Mr Lewenberg later told the royal commission. What Ms Gobbo did not tell Mr Lewenberg was that $80,000 worth of speed belonging to her boyfriend was found in the raid on her Carlton home. Her boyfriend was charged over the haul. Later, after the relationship had broken down, she helped police organise an undercover sting to try to get her ex-boyfriend out of the house. The sting never went ahead as police saw the law student as an over-enthusiastic loose cannon. But by the time she began practising law, she felt like she had found herself a new home at Mr Lewenberg's firm. "[He] became like a second father to me," she told the ABC. "There's definitely always been a level of insecurity where I'm concerned because of not having a dad." Mr Lewenberg thought Ms Gobbo was highly intelligent and articulate but he also wasn't blind to his new charge's activities outside of work. "About six months into Ms Gobbo's employment, I became concerned that she was socialising with clients of the firm and police," he wrote in his statement to the royal commission. He warned her to stop and his young employee assured him she was behaving professionally. But whispers about Ms Gobbo's social life would follow her throughout her legal career. Around Melbourne, she became highly recognisable and began attracting attention. To Paul Dale, a detective who got close to Ms Gobbo, the lawyer was just plain good company. "She was extroverted; long blonde hair, low-cut top, big breasts, very short miniskirts, loud, centre of attention," he told the ABC. Meeting Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel After about a year, Ms Gobbo left Mr Lewenberg's firm and became one of the youngest women to pass the bar in Victoria. She started to attract big-name criminal clients like Melbourne gangland bosses Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel, representing them at bail hearings. "[I was] someone who was just good at unravelling police briefs and pointing out the weaknesses," she said. "Any high-profile or high-level drug trafficker they arrested either had my phone number in his phone at the time of the arrest or opted to ring me. "Getting Tony Mokbel bail after two failed attempts and exposing corrupt police assisted in building that reputation," she said. Others saw her reputation differently. Former crown prosecutor Geoff Horgan QC handled most of the big murder trials during Melbourne's gangland years and often crossed paths with Ms Gobbo. "She could be a bit annoying because she would be contesting (an application for) a DNA sample or something like that, you don't expect people seriously going to contest those sorts of applications," he said. "My impression is that she liked to big note herself; to be the centre of attention." Police investigating Ms Gobbo's gangland clients already believed she had started to cross ethical lines, according to Commander Stuart Bateson's evidence at the royal commission. "There was a small group of criminal lawyers we believed were part of a criminal enterprise," Commander Bateson told the inquiry. A gangland taskforce request for surveillance on Nicola Gobbo in 2003, tendered to the royal commission, revealed that police suspected at the time that the barrister was assisting her big-name clients in their drug trafficking activities and providing them with information about other criminals in relation to gangland murders. Ms Gobbo denies those allegations and told the ABC she did not break the law. "But a number of police over that period of time made disparaging remarks to my face and behind my back along the lines of, if they could eliminate me they would be happy to do so, presumably because I was so successful at getting people out of custody," she said. At the height of Melbourne's gangland war, Nicola Gobbo collapsed As Melbourne's gangland war of the 2000s intensified, the life of an underworld lawyer became a heavier weight to carry. People were being shot dead in broad daylight, mostly in a tit-for-tat feud to try to seize control over Melbourne's illicit drug trade. The murderous environment enveloped Ms Gobbo in 2004 after a hitman close to Carl Williams was charged with murder. She told the ABC that Williams' crew didn't want the hitman to turn on Williams but this meant the crew wanted her to find a psychiatrist to rule that the hitman was insane.