Every so often, there comes along a contest where you instinctively think, couldn’t they both lose? Sunak v Starmer, Morrison v Albanese, Melbourne Storm v Brisbane Broncos, Lisa Wilkinson v Channel Ten.
Well, right now we have a convicted drug cartel boss, known to his friends as “Fat Tony”, and Victoria Police, aka Ashton’s Circus. Except “circus” suggests fun and only a little creepy (clowns, etc). VicPol is anything but fun and more than a little creepy. VicPol is better defined by thuggery, embedded corruption, politicisation, minor crooking, major crooking, media leaks, deal-making, mowing down the innocent in the streets and general evil. And, of course, woke beyond belief.
I know, in the case of Antonios Sajih Mokbel v VicPol, it isn’t obvious for whom to barrack. VicBel? MokPol? In Victoria, it is often hard to distinguish one’s drug lord from one’s corrupt copper. It all just blends in.
Or perhaps it is obvious – barrack for Mokbel!
The great journalist, John Silvester (of The Age) has been on the case. (Yes, The Age does have them. One, at least). The headline reads:
Tony Mokbel was a major drug trafficker. But was it a fair cop?
Mokbel is in jail doing a thirty-year stretch, one potentially fatal stabbing and several heart attacks (in prison) after his pleading guilty to his crimes around a decade ago. The sentence has since been reduced to twenty-six years.
The issue about which Mokbel is currently back in court relates to the legendary double-dealer, Nicola Gobbo. Gobbo, more usually referred to as Lawyer X, was both a defence lawyer working for some of Victoria’s most notorious criminals – that is, its notorious criminals not employed by VicPol – and, as well, at the very same time, working as an informant for Victoria Police.
My book review of the definitive book on Lawyer X can be found here:
https://thefreedomsproject.com/item/615-lawyer-x
Mokbel said of his double agent lawyer:
During his evidence on Tuesday, Mokbel said he "fully trusted" Gobbo and told her everything about his cases.
"I thought she was the staunchest person on earth," he told the court.
A royal commission heard Gobbo, known as Lawyer X, was acting as a registered Victoria Police informant between 1995 and 2010.
Mokbel maintained he still couldn't believe she was a "dog" and informing to police.
"She was always against them (Victoria Police) ... she didn't trust any word that came out of their mouths," he told the court.
"You would never pick her to be on the other side of the fence."
Once back in Australia, Mokbel told the court he continued to seek legal advice from Gobbo while in custody at Barwon Prison.
He even enlisted fellow gangland figure Carl Williams to smuggle him a burner phone, which was left in a punching bag at his cell unit.
"(Carl and I) had a lot of discussions and he said how he had information that Victoria Police were listening directly to our legal phone calls," Mokbel told the court.
"He said if I wanted a mobile he could arrange one for me."
Mokbel was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2012 for the drug trafficking charges, as a result of police operations dubbed Quills, Orbital and Magnum.
He pleaded guilty to the offences on the eve of his first trial after his lawyer purportedly told him he no longer had a defence and he would need to represent himself if he wanted to fight.
"I had no choice," Mokbel told the court.
"I was shocked - me pleading guilty? You've got to be kidding."
Those interested in Mokbel might want to dip into the Underbelly series of books and television programs, or consult his biography, written in 2012. Here is a summary:
Finally the Tony Mokbel story can be told.
The inspiration for Channel Nine's FAT TONY & CO, the new crime series from the producers of UNDERBELLY. An epic tale of family, crime and betrayal set against the backdrop of Melbourne's bullet-riddled suburbs. The cradle-to-cage story of how milk-bar owner Tony Mokbel became the Mr Big of Melbourne's drug trade with tentacles reaching around Australia and the globe. Award-winning crime writer Liam Houlihan documents the extraordinary rise and fall of the man they call 'Fat tony', from his ascension through the drug trade to the decade-long and only-now-complete struggle to hold Mokbel to account for his crimes. Houlihan explores the criminal intrigue and political embarrassment arising from the daring and complex escape by public enemy number one - out from under the noses of the authorities - as well as the way wealthy criminals with access to smart lawyers are able to exploit the system and delay justice. Featuring exclusive interviews with top cops and Mokbel family members - and a cast of characters ranging from Zarah Garde-Wilson to Carl and Roberta Williams, Mick Gatto to Chopper Reed and Judy Moran - it's a stranger-than-fiction story of sex, pills, perfidy and pizza.
In their book, Underbelly: The Gangland War, Silvester and Andrew Rule described Fat Tony as “the drug dealer from central casting”. Not nice, then. But we in New South Wales are meant to forgive convicted drug dealers of their sins. We have one now running the NSW Treasury. Yes, drug dealers – Mokbel’s import substance of choice was cocaine, though he also dabbled in methamphetamine production – do cause death, indirectly, as a result of their metier. (A little like those who help in voluntary assisted dying). And, with Victorian gangland crims, they do only tend to kill one another, and to leave the rest of us alone. Mokbel was charged also with murders, not just drug dealing. Mokbel’s VicPol enemies, on the other hand, engage in all sort of criminal and inhumane activity, of far greater breadth and often both lethal and affecting the innocent directly. There is an argument for moral equivalence.
Another take on this period was the book by the widely despised and defamed former VicPol copper, Paul Dale. He was one of Lawyer X’s sexual conquests, and accused of murdering criminals. Nice place Victoria. As the old tourism commercial stated, “you’ll love every piece of Victoria”.
Tony Mokbel has already benefited from the overturning of an unfair trial thanks to Gobbo and VicPol.
Director concedes conviction was tainted by substantial miscarriage of justice.
This related to Gobbo’s involvement on both sides of the fence in relation to charges against Mokbel for drug offences in the 2000s.
Summary of charges:
Mr Tony Mokbel was charged with one count of being knowingly concerned in the importation into Australia of a prohibited import, a trafficable quantity of cocaine, contrary to the former section 233B(1)(d) of the Customs Act 1901 (Cth).
Synopsis:
Mr Mokbel had been charged with importing 1.9kg of cocaine into Australia. One of the barristers that represented Mr Mokbel was Ms Nicola Gobbo. The Commonwealth Director and Mr Mokbel at the time were unaware that Ms Gobbo was simultaneously registered as an informer with Victoria Police.
Shortly prior to the conclusion of the trial, Mr Mokbel absconded to Greece. He was found guilty in absentia by a jury and, on 31 March 2006, sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. Mr Mokbel appealed to the Victorian Court of Appeal and the High Court of Australia, with both appeals refused. He has already served his sentence for this charge.
On 19 August 2020, after being informed of Ms Gobbo’s status as a Victoria Police informer, Mr Mokbel instituted a fresh appeal against his conviction. On 15 December 2020, the Commonwealth Director conceded that there was a substantial miscarriage of justice in Mr Mokbel’s trial and conceded the appeal.
The Court of Appeal ordered a re-trial. The Commonwealth Director discontinued the re-trial on the basis that there was no public interest in prosecuting Mr Mokbel again for an offence for which he had already served his full sentence.
There you go! A substantial miscarriage of justice. Could not get a fair trial.
But south of the Murray, they just tough it out! It is almost as if Daniel Andrews had simply announced, as he did with Covid, that “the era of gangland exceptionalism is over”. Time to move on. Alas, there are hundreds of convictions tainted by VicPol corruption and, of course, Lawyer X.
December 2020 saw the release of the findings of the Margaret McMurdo Royal Commission into the use of Victorian police informants. As Aulich Lawyers pointed out at the time:
Yesterday saw the publishing of the final report from the Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants. Over the last 12 months, the Honourable Margaret McMurdo presided over more than 127 hearings and waded through many thousands of documents. If the outcome of the Commission had to be distilled into one sentence it would be – the end, in this instance securing criminal convictions, clearly, does not justify the means.
The scandal that gave rise to the Royal Commission was the shock revelation that criminal defence barrister, Nicola Gobbo, had been working as an informant with Victorian Police for between 1998 and 2013, whilst defending some of that state’s most high-profile accused criminals; often informing on her own clients and revealing confidential information, that would otherwise be subject to legal professional privilege.
It was foreshadowed that Ms Gobbo’s role as an informant with Victorian Police may have affected in excess of 1,000 criminal cases. Since the scandal came to light, many of those whose convictions may have been affected have already launched appeals. One has so far been successful and another walked free on bail. Victorian Police have been advised to make all reasonable attempts to contact 887 people whose cases may have been affected by Ms Gobbo’s conduct. These cases are a large portion of the 1,011 findings of guilty the Commission found was related to Gobbo’s role and an informer.
In delivering her findings, Royal Commissioner McMurdo said the actions of Ms Gobbo were “inexcusable… improper and duplicitous” and that she showed a “flippant disregard for her professional responsibilities” as a criminal defence barrister.
Ms McMurdo also noted the impact Ms Gobbo’s role as informant had on the legal system as a whole: “The ripple effects of this conduct will continue to emerge, and continue to be felt, over coming years”. In the years Gobbo acted as an informer, Ms McMurdo noted: “the magnitude and duration of her conduct” had corroded public confidence in the “legal processes at the heart of our democracy”.
Victorian police were not spared criticism, the final report noting: “Ms Gobbo could not inform on her clients without the assistance of the Victorian Police officers to whom she informed”.
“It is also important to acknowledge that the repercussions of Ms Gobbo’s conduct as a human source were not caused solely by what she did or failed to do, but also by the actions and inactions of Victoria Police officers, and by the institutional shortcomings within Victorian Police that allowed her improper and unethical conduct to commence, continue, escalate and flourish over many years”.
https://aulich.com.au/lawyer-x-findings/
887 very awkward conversations. What a joke. Unfunny, as it happens.
Later, the retired High Court Judge Geoffrey Nettle undertook a review if the dangers to the Victorian “justice” system posed by the revelations about Lawyer X’s moonlighting activities. (His review followed, and was recommended by, the McMurdo Royal Commission). Except that Nettle gave up due to the lack of cooperation from the most senior levels of the Victorian judicial system.
Special investigator probing Lawyer X case lashes Victoria's chief prosecutor for refusing to charge those involved.
This was in June 2023. Absolutely astonishing.
The chief prosecutor mentioned would be the same, notorious chief prosecutor (Kerri Judd, the first woman … blah blah blah) who absolutely bungled the (admittedly already threadbare) rebuttal of the appeal by George Pell against his embarrassing conviction on child sex abuse charges, in her appearance before the High Court in 2020. Judd was and is beyond hopeless, yet remained loyal to Team Anti-Pell, to the bitter end. Hence absolutely perfect for a senior position in Victoria’s judicial setup. Her useful idiot role in the context of the Nettle probe was to refuse to lay charges against any VicPol officer over the lawyer X affair. Not one charge.
(It is becoming all-too-convenient for DPPs to trot out the line “unlikely to get a conviction”. Nicholas Cowdery did this for years with the case of Chris Dawson’s now acknowledged murder in the 1980s of his wife Lyn. It is becoming a tedious yet convenient place-holder for prosecutors without the cojones to go after obvious crooks. At the same time, they are only-too-willing to bow low before the me-too movement and proceed to trial, as in the case of Brittany Higgins, Bruce Lehrmann and former DPP Shane Drumgold in the ACT, and in other cases so flimsy, risible and/or vexatious that they should never have gone to trial, as in Pell, and many, many others).
Justice Nettle simply backed his bags and walked. Justice averted yet again in the southernmost mainland State. He did say a few things on his way out, though:
The special investigator appointed to build criminal cases against disgraced barrister Nicola Gobbo and police officers who recruited her as a confidential source has attacked the director of public prosecutions (DPP) for refusing to approve criminal charges.
Former High Court judge Geoffrey Nettle has also recommended that his own investigative agency be disbanded due to the DPP's unwillingness to act on its recommendations over the so-called Lawyer X scandal.
In a combative — at times angry — report tabled in state parliament Wednesday, Justice Nettle revealed that the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) had submitted what it believed to be substantial evidence of criminal conduct by a number of people involved in the saga, but that DPP Kerri Judd had decided there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.
Names were redacted in the report, but there are repeated references to Ms Gobbo and a number of former police officers.
At various point in their correspondence, Justice Nettle describes DPP Kerri Judd's arguments against prosecution as "offensive", "displeasing" and "disappointing".
The Age noted:
Senior members of Victoria’s legal community say the Director of Public Prosecutions should prosecute Victoria Police officers implicated in the Nicola Gobbo scandal and let a jury decide their fate instead of refusing to take the matter to court.
Former Supreme Court judge Stephen Charles, along with a former top prosecutor and a veteran defence barrister, expressed dismay and confusion over the decision of DPP Kerri Judd, KC, not to bring charges.
Charles on Thursday said he was “appalled” that Judd had rejected Nettle’s recommendation to begin prosecutions against police, and that the matter should be for a jury to decide.
“One of the main purposes of our criminal law is to deter crime. Over more than a decade our police engaged in serious criminal behaviour which the High Court unanimously said should never be repeated,” Charles said.
“The failure to start the prosecutions recommended by Justice Nettle is an open invitation to the police to repeat their appalling misbehaviour.”
A former DPP weighed in:
Barrister Gavin Silbert, KC, a former chief crown prosecutor, said a jury should be backed to determine if Gobbo’s evidence was reliable.
“Gobbo offered to plead guilty and give evidence now. What more do you need than that?” Silbert said.
“I would have thought you could almost prosecute Gobbo without a brief of evidence … to suggest that there’d be no prospect of conviction against her, it just doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t understand it.
“I think there may need to be some sort of commission into the OPP and the DPP. It’s all very well having one in the ACT in relation to [Shane] Drumgold, but it seems to be that there are equally big problems here.”
Dismay? It is simply beyond comprehension, other than assuming it was just another Victorian judicial cover-up. There is nothing that this lot will not just “ride out”. 887 matters in Victoria, one matter (that we know of) in the ACT.
And, needless to say, we had this from the then Dear Leader:
Premier Daniel Andrews on Thursday refused to be drawn on the dispute and said it wasn’t a matter for the government.
Not a matter for the Government? Even by Andrews’ very, very low (barely existing) standards of accountability, this is beyond sad. Victorians have shrugged their shoulders at all this for the best part of two decades. You have got to question the moral rectitude of the whole damned electorate down there. Of course, a State which is giving over seventy per cent (no misprint) of its agricultural land to wind farms and solar panels is not likely able to do basic things like “justice”.
https://iceds.anu.edu.au/files/LCEPC_59-06_Renewable_energy_in_Vic-compressed_compressed.pdf
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation asked – what did the top cops (Simon Overland and Graham Ashton) know? Naturally, they avoided further scrutiny. As Silbert said, they were ALL perverting the course of justice. They absolutely knew what they were doing. And some people thought that Barnaby Joyce should resign in disgrace over a drunken fall-over in the gutter.
And so Fat Tony is back in court, seeking to appeal his conviction and sentence.
Anyone remotely familiar with Victoria’s alleged justice system over the past two decades will know of the depth and breadth of the intractable problems, the endemic corruption, the vicious public-hating culture, the willingness to tell endless lies, the double-dealing, the Covid tyranny. He or she will also know that the only way out, given the corruption of one major political party there and the utter clueless, spinelessness of the other, is for a revolution. One cannot rely on any moving part of the machine in Victoria, for every last institution is either tainted, bought or too powerless to fight back. The Ombudsman? Nah. The IBAC (Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission) tries on occasions, and gets nowhere.
It all goes back to an ideologue minister called Rob Hulls, in the early 2000s, who set about “reforming” Victoria’s then perfectly adequate, if imperfect, judicial system, before electoral defeat led him – inevitably – to an academic sinecure at RMIT University. (Hilariously, Hulls heads up RMIT’s “Centre for Innovative Justice”. You couldn’t make this up). The perfect retirement home for Hulls.
Hulls created a revolution. It is now time for a counter-revolution. And it might start with a few overturned convictions against Fat Tony and friends. That might shake the place up. And force someone in the system to recognise the need for root-and-branch change in (what should be stated on number plates) the State of Corruption.
Of course, the modern Labor Party is used to having criminals released onto the street. Just ask Airbus Albo.
Oh, and wisely, the Vics have imported a judge from New South Wales to hear the current Mokbel proceedings. Perhaps the powers-that-be there have finally realised that employing one of their own would only lead to further trouble, and may be seeing the light.
As Brooke Winter Solicitors say, this is justice itself on trial.
Justice, Victorian style. They note:
Mokbel’s startling claim that Lawyer X advised him to flee the country to evade murder charges has sent shockwaves through the legal community.
… Amid Mokbel’s accusations of corruption within the Victoria Police, his desire to gather evidence of police misconduct adds another dimension to the case. As he contends that his life was in danger and sought to prove that he couldn’t receive a fair trial in Australia, the courtroom becomes a battleground for the broader issue of systemic corruption within law enforcement.
As Tony Mokbel lays bare the intricacies of his relationship with Lawyer X, the courtroom becomes a theatre where trust is shattered, and the foundations of justice are tested. The case raises profound questions about the boundaries of legal representation, the role of informants, and the extent to which a quest for justice can sometimes lead down a treacherous path. The legal community and the public at large are left to grapple with the consequences of a justice system entangled in its own complexities.
That is putting it very, very politely. Another way of saying it is, Victoria is crooked from top to bottom. A failed state. The late George Pell, who should know, said as much in his profoundly important interview with Andrew Bolt just after his exoneration and release from prison.
There are those for whom the Lawyer X saga seems not to be a big deal, including, it seems, including the aforementioned John Silvester:
‘The Royal Commission final report ran to 1000 pages. We prefer to sum it up in 60 words:
There was an underworld war in Victoria. Then there was a taskforce called Purana.
The cops used informers. One was a defence lawyer called Gobbo.
She snitched on crooks. She wasn’t the only one.
The crooks got charged. Most pleaded guilty and went to jail.
No false evidence was presented to any jury.
The underworld war stopped.
Er, the end.’
All a bit of a yawn? When you have seen and written on as much as Silvester has, perhaps it is all just par for the criminal course. After all, as noted above, Silvester co-wrote the Underbelly books. After all, you might think, VicPol had for years made getting the drug barons’ underlings to change sides, bribed with reduced sentences, the core to its gangland strategy. Why not get double agent informants as well? And enough of the coppers – in the Drug Squad, for example – had long been shown to be on the take from the other side. All is, maybe, fair in love and (gangland) war.
Greg Barns of the Australian Lawyers Alliance takes a different view.
It is hard to think of a more outrageous abuse of power and undermining of the rule of law by a police force across Australia in recent times, or certainly since the exposure of police misconduct in Queensland and New South Wales in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As put by one lawyer, Ruth Parker, who acted for a victim of the Lawyer X scandal freed from prison after his conviction was quashed: ‘the corruption that occurred in our criminal justice system involving at least one criminal lawyer and a number of police is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the Western world’.
https://www.lawyersalliance.com.au/opinion/victoria-and-lawyer-x
Ruth Parker continues, referring in particular to the disbanding of the Nettle investigations:
Lawyers and former judges have condemned a decision to disband the office of a special investigator into Victoria's Lawyer X scandal, labelling it as cowardly and a sanctification of police corruption.
Criminal defence lawyer Ruth Parker led a 10-year battle to free Faruk Orman, who in July 2019 had his conviction for the murder of Victor Peirce quashed in the first successful Lawyer X appeal.
She condemned the decision to shut the office, which was established to bring criminal charges over the use of barrister Nicola Gobbo as a police source during Melbourne's gangland war.
The outcome reflected an astonishing lack of moral judgement, Ms Parker said.
Cowardice and a lack of moral judgement seems to be at the heart of so many of our third-world style judicial governance problems. Just witness the CEO of Channel Ten cheering on the Lisa Wilkinson Logies speech. They elites simply have no moral compass. They are incapable of moral reasoning. They just don’t get it. It shows especially in Victoria. Like I say, a failed state.
No, this is big. When you have The (unfortunately paywalled) Age demanding resolution to this, you know the system is in dire trouble. The jig is up.
Will the undoing of Mokbel’s earlier conviction referred to above be “the dam wall bursting for Victoria Police”, as Paul Dale believes? Will the swamp be drained? One lives in hope.
Paul Collits
16 February 2024
From what I have read about Gobbo I would say that she is psychotic. But I doubt that would fly as an excuse in front of a jury IF she goes to trial.
As for the police who availed themselves of her services, what is their excuse ?
No doubt Victoria is a basket case on multiple fronts but the rest of Australia, states, territories and federal, is not far behind.
Maybe there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe it is the headlight of a train.
This is soo third world
“the corruption that occurred in our criminal justice system involving at least one criminal lawyer and a number of police is, as far as I know, unprecedented in the Western world’.”!
Why would anyone go to Victoria???