Lawyer for underworld bosses named as police supergrass
Former high-profile criminal barrister Nicola Gobbo has been identified as the lawyer who turned supergrass against her high-profile underworld clients.
Gobbo, also known as Lawyer X, has lost her legal fight to keep her identity suppressed during a royal commission into the use of police informers.
The 46-year-old is part of a Victorian legal dynasty that includes two other well-known barristers and her uncle Sir James Gobbo, a former Supreme Court justice and governor of Victoria.
The name of the criminal barrister turned supergrass was made public following a Court of Appeal decision last week to lift the order suppressing her identity on March 1.
Victoria Police and lawyers for Gobbo had been fighting to keep her name from being published despite opposition from the royal commission, the Victorian and Commonwealth directors of public prosecutions and the media.
Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton said that although the force lost every attempt to keep her secret, he had a duty to keep her safe.
‘‘All the assessments in relation to Lawyer X showed there were significant safety risks,’’ he told radio station 3AW.
‘‘This [her identity] will be broadcast very broadly. People will see her face in the paper or in electronic media and they’ll know what the person looks like so from the point of view of recognising people in the street . . . it becomes another layer we have to look at.’’
However, her name has been an open secret in the underworld.
Late last year, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to her former clients, some of whom are still serving jail time, to notify them their lawyer had also been a police informer. Among those to be notified was jailed drug lord Tony Mokbel, who is now recovering in a secure wing of St Vincent’s Hospital after being stabbed in Victoria’s maximum security Barwon prison last month.
Gobbo was one of the youngest women ever admitted to the bar when she became a barrister in 1998 at the age of 25.
She went on to make a name for herself by representing a rogue’s gallery of Melbourne’s underworld, including Carl Williams.
Gobbo, who became a solicitor in 1996, was first registered as a police informer in 1995 and again from 2005 to 2009 at the height of the gangland war.
She had mixed motivations for turning police informer, a previous Court of Appeal judgment concluded, including ‘‘ill health, feeling trapped in the criminal world of her clients . . . and [wanting] to be rid of Tony Mokbel and his associates’’.
Those that knew her said Gobbo, who mixed socially with both police and criminals, also ‘‘wanted to be wanted’’.
Her double life imploded in 2009 when police turned her into a witness in the most significant police corruption case in the state’s history: the executionstyle murders of another police informer, Terence Hodson, and his wife Christine.
Some of Gobbo’s clients began to suspect she’d turned informer. She received death threats before pulling an extraordinary handbrake turn and suing Victoria Police for failing in its duty to keep her safe.
The scandal has taken almost a decade to play out, but it unfolded largely in secret, shrouded in suppression orders until the Director of Public Prosecutions decided it had a duty to disclose to her former clients that she may have informed on them and breached her professional legal privilege.
The High Court found that Victoria Police’s decision to use her as a confidential informer was ‘‘reprehensible’’ and ‘‘debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system’’.
It left Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews with no choice but to call a royal commission into the police’s handling of Gobbo and other informers.
Ashton has said throughout the process that the use of Informer 3838 was pivotal in halting the city’s escalating and deadly gangland war.
Ashton has also maintained the risk to her safety would be extreme if her identity was published.
Underworld associates published photographs of her on social media late last year, along with her name. The posts attracted a number of veiled threats including: ‘‘Rats don’t last long’’ and ‘‘Every dog has their day.’’
Despite this, Gobbo has been seen on the streets of Melbourne in recent months.
The royal commission, in its first directions hearing last month, heard she would cooperate with the expansive inquiry.
Royal commissioner Margaret McMurdo, AC, supports Gobbo’s name being made public and has called for anyone who believes their case may have been affected by her actions to come forward.
‘‘The commission is now better placed to ascertain the full extent of Ms Gobbo’s conduct as a police informer between 1995 and 2009 and the identities of the persons potentially affected,’’ McMurdo said. ‘‘We are calling for submissions from individuals who were legally represented by Gobbo between 1995 and 2009 and who were found guilty or convicted, and sentenced.’’