The lawyer at the centre of a police informant scandal in Victoria was repeatedly courted and rejected by police before she began her four-year stint as a top informant on Melbourne’s gangland wars, a royal commission has heard.

Nicola Gobbo, 46, was unmasked as Lawyer X, or Informer 3838, last month. At the first hearings of the Victorian royal commission into the management of police informants this week, current and former police officers detailed their interactions with Gobbo in the 1990s, before she became a lawyer of choice for organised crime figures.

First contact with police

In 1993, Gobbo was a law student at Melbourne University who lived with her boyfriend, Brian Wilson, in a house she owned in Rathdowne Street, Carlton. She earned $100 a week at a part-time job at a concession stand at the MCG.

On 3 September 1993, police searched the house following an anonymous tip-off, which the royal commission heard was not made by Gobbo.

Inspector Trevor Ashton, who was then a sergeant, told the royal commission Gobbo told him where the drugs were hidden.

Wilson was convicted of drug trafficking and given an eight-month suspended jail sentence, while Gobbo pleaded guilty to possession and received no conviction and a good behaviour bond.

She had informal contact with police over the next 18 months, mainly through bumping into Ashton at the MCG. In 1995, she was registered as an informant for the first time.

Scorn and the ‘loose cannon’

In July 1995, Ashton registered Gobbo as a human source as part of an investigation of Wilson and another man on allegations of drug and firearms trafficking. In his application, Ashton said she was “quite reliable and seeking a career as a solicitor”.

That registration was not rediscovered by police until last June, despite a five-year legal battle over the use of Gobbo as a source. Ashton himself said he had forgotten it, and was “oblivious” both to lawyer X’s identity and the fact that he had first registered her until January this year.

By 1996 Gobbo had graduated in law. She introduced an undercover police officer to Wilson as part of an investigation called Operation Scorn, but it was aborted following a report from then detective sergeant Jack Blayney, who said Gobbo was a “loose cannon”.

Blayney rose to the rank of assistant commissioner before retiring last year.

In November 1997 Gobbo was working for a law firm representing three people charged with drug offences, and met a detective from the drug squad. Some months later she told him that her employer was committing fraud and he organised a meeting with two other detectives from the drug squad.

According to a statement made by assistant commissioner Neil Paterson, the main police witness this week, one of the detectives, senior constable Chris Lim thought Gobbo was “far too overt in her desire to provide information to police”. He was concerned about using her as a source because she was a solicitor, and thought her relationship with some officers was “inappropriate”.

Nevertheless, in 1999, Gobbo was introduced to then detective senior constable Jeff Pope and, in May that year, she was registered as an informantfor the second time. Detective sergeant Gavan Segrave signed off on Pope’s application to make Gobbo an informant, noting in documents shown in the commission that she was “both credible/reputable” and “has no known history of supplying info to law enforcement agencies.”

It did not say she was a lawyer.

Pope was appointed her handler until she was deregistered in January 2000. Later, as assistant commissioner in 2013, he oversaw the highly confidential Comrie review concerning the use of Gobbo as a source in the 2000s.

By late 1999 Gobbo was a barrister, one of the youngest women ever admitted to the bar. She started representing underworld figures, including Tony Mokbel and Carl Williams, in 2001.

Third registration as a source

Melbourne’s gangland wars were at their height between 2000 and 2004. In 2003, Gobbo received a death threat from one of Williams’s associates after representing his rival, Lewis Moran, in a bail application.

The Purana Taskforce was established in 2003 to investigate the gangland murders.

On 16 September 2005, nine months after returning to work following a stroke, Gobbo was introduced by Purana detectives to two handlers within the newly established Source Development Unit and again registered as a human source.

Between then and her deregistration in January 2009 she made more than 5,000 informer reports and spoke to her handlers on a near-daily basis. Much of the information relating to this period is restricted or yet to be heard.

She was deregistered as an informer because police had decided to use her as a witness in the murder case against disgraced former police officer Paul Dale, and tried unsuccessfully to get her to go into witness protection. The case against Dale was dropped after Gobbo withdrew as a witness.

Paterson told the royal commission that police continued to receive information from Gobbo until then chief commissioner Simon Overland issued a directive on 27 August 2010, that police were no longer to receive intelligence from her.

What’s at stake?

Paterson said police were yet to determine how many convictions were contaminated by the use of Gobbo as a source.

Uncovering that information is a key priority of the royal commisison, and Paterson told Chris Winneke, counsel assisting commissioner Margret McMurdo, that the commission’s frustrations about the delay in obtaining it had “well and truly been conveyed.”

Winneke said the commission had received submissions from 35 people alleging that they had been directly affected. Three legal actions have already begun and Mokbel is among those who said he would challenge his conviction.

The commission has received 33,000 documents, of which 13,000 came from police.

Paterson said he assumed that those working on Taskforce Petra, the murders for which Dale was charged, knew that Gobbo was practising as a barrister and expected that they would therefore be aware that some information she received would be subject to legal professional privilege.

He also agreed that junior officers raised those concerns “at the very highest echelons” in 2008 but were ignored.

Police did not seek legal advice on the matter until 2011, when Gobbo sued Overland and former chief commissioner Christine Nixon.

He said that all police ought to know that conversations between lawyers and their clients were confidential, but said: “It’s apparent to me that people didn’t understand or didn’t have this apprehension in this circumstance and I am not clear why that has happened in this case.”

Procedural fairness

Paterson’s 71-page statement, with redactions, was provided to the commission last Friday. Many of the attachments are redacted, and he referred often in evidence to four folders of supporting documentation, which has not been tabled.

The Comrie review, to which much of his evidence related, also remains confidential. Information reports, diary notes and other information collected by the SDU concerning Gobbo, as well as the electronic daily diaries maintained by SDU members, is kept in a secure database that can only be accessed with Paterson’s permission and cannot be printed.

Victoria Police provided the statements of other current and former officers who appeared at the commission the day before, or sometimes at the time of, their evidence.

Both Winneke and McMurdo have made pointed remarks about the willingness of police to cooperate with the commission.

Lawyers for those appearing before the commission, including counsel for Gobbo’s former handlers, Geoffrey Chettle QC, have raised issues of procedural fairness. Chettle said that in being unable to respond to the Comrie review, which was conducted “on the papers” and resulted in the SDU being shut down, his clients were denied natural justice.

The hearings continue on Monday.



