The Morning EditionExtraordinary scenes unfolded outside an Australian court last week when one of the last remaining figures from Melbourne's gangland war, Tony Mokbel, was released on bail.
And there watching it all unfold was crime writer Chris Vedelago, who has been following the Mokbel story for years.
Today, we delve into a legal scandal like no other, and one that could ultimately see the likes of Mokbel have their convictions overturned.
You tell us where. Chris, where are we?
We're standing outside the Victoria Court of Appeal in about 15 minutes and counting. Um, Tony Mokbel will appear here to find out whether or not he's getting bail after being in jail for 17 years and ten months. There's quite a sizeable press pack here. Um, lots of photographers and cameramen. Uh, it's a pretty unusual event. This what we're about to watch.
That was Melbourne crime writer Chris Vedelago outside a court in Melbourne last week, where he really did watch something unusual. Tony Mokbel, once one of Australia's most notorious drug traffickers, being released from prison.
You couldn't wipe the smile from Tony Mokbel's face.
One of the nation's most notorious back on the streets.
Tony, how does freedom feel?
Because Chris Vedelago has been following the Mokbel story for years.
Oh, are you recording? Yeah. So, um, he's gotten bail.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning Edition, and I'm your host, Samantha Selinger. Morris. Today we delve into a legal scandal like no other one that could see the likes of Tony Mokbel not only released on bail like he was last week, but ultimately have their convictions overturned. So, Chris, Tony Mokbel is a big name in Australia's criminal underworld, but I think it's safe to say he 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?
Tony Mokbel was probably the most well-known drug trafficker in Melbourne at that period. Publicly well known, notorious amongst police. I mean, his nickname was Fat Tony. Uh, he 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. And though he'd got in gotten charged. He'd been arrested. He was charged. He was facing trial. The trial was coming to its conclusion. And then, according to Tony, as he tells it many years later, he was also warned at that period by his barrister at the time that he was about to be charged with murder. More than one murder. And so, as the trial was coming to conclusion, he was out on bail. One day. He just doesn't show up. He disappears.
Okay, so let's get to 2006 then, just as you mentioned, you know, he was on bail. He disappears. And this disappearance had actually sparked a global manhunt, didn't it? So. So what happened? Where did he go?
Well, this is the amazing thing, right? Because Australia's a big country, but it's not exactly easy to hide in, right? But Tony managed to make it happen, so he disappears. He never turns up for court. And what we find out later is he smuggled up north into rural Victoria, where he hides out basically on a farm belonging to a friend of his. And then they pack him inside a caravan, and he basically drives from rural Victoria all the way across to Perth and then on the west coast of Australia, they put him inside effectively. I think it's a 17 metre yacht that had been kind of custom fitted with a hidey hole. So if anyone came on board they wouldn't find him. They stick him in the hidey hole and off they go. And they take this long looping journey, you know, through the oceans and back around and into the Mediterranean, where he ends up popping up in Greece.
While on bail. In 2006, he infamously fled the country on a yacht to Greece. Finally found in this wig, arrested, extradited, then jailed for 30 years for drug trafficking.
Okay, so he pops up in Greece. He's arrested. He is handed a 30 year prison sentence. And so that's expected where he'd be, right? He wasn't originally eligible for parole until June 2031. So what happened?
Well, you know, he goes down in 20 2012. He's sentenced in pretty much everybody thinks that's the end of it. We'll be talking about Tony in 2040 or 2050 whatever it is. But then 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.
It has taken us five years to be able to name Nicola Gobbo as the police informant, with the perfect disguise as defence barrister.
She was his long term lawyer. She'd been involved with him in a legal sense for years. She'd handled a lot of his cases and then all of a sudden, behind the scenes, this thing starts getting rolling. About whether or not she and Victoria Police together have corrupted these cases. And so instead of looking at a 30 year bit, Tony all of a sudden has an opportunity to make an appeal to say, hey, there's new evidence here that this person that I trusted has actually been telling police what I was doing, setting me up, giving them my defences, all this sort of stuff. And it opens this doorway where he can now think about trying to appeal a sentence and have them, his convictions quashed. And there's been a whole series of cases that this has gone on for, and the convictions for him have been quashed. And now there's one last one which is keeping him in prison, which is what the bail hearing was all about last week.
Okay, so we'll get into that a bit later. But first off, can you just tell me about Nicola Gobbo? I mean, who is she. And tell us a bit more about what she did.
Well, Nicola Gobbo was a extraordinarily bright and promising lawyer. She started out as a solicitor and became a barrister. Um, but somewhere around the 2000, she developed a bad habit of associating a little too closely with some of her clients. She got further and further and further in, and she felt her life was being threatened because she'd become effectively a gangland lawyer, and they expected her to be on call 24 hours a day. And they were asking her to do things that was was troubling her. So early 2000, she begins having these informal negotiations with Victoria Police about how she might extract herself from this and their suggestion and her willingness is to become an informer. And in 2005, she becomes a registered informer for Victoria Police. That's official on the books, with a four digit code number 3838. She was feeding information to the police, sometimes nine and ten times a day, in phone calls. She was handing over documents. She was giving mobile phone numbers, um, like she was right in the middle of all of these people's business. But the problem was, at a certain point, she crossed the line as well, because she began using her influence with clients in order to get them to effectively roll on other people or to become police cooperating witnesses. She wasn't necessarily looking at their best interests as their client, but what was in her interest and the interest of Victoria Police, which very recently a Supreme Court judge has basically said what she was doing when it came to to Tony Mokbel with another two officers who were not allowed to name, was effectively engaging in a criminal conspiracy.
And so, can you walk us through why this is so bad? Because obviously, the layperson who's listening, like myself, you know, intuitively, okay, 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, to say the least. But it's more than that, isn't it? It actually rigs the system, the legal system, and perverts the concept of a fair trial. Is that right?
That's right. I mean, it wasn't simply cutting corners or the ends justifies the means. I mean, they were systematically corrupting what the system has been designed to do. Right. Which is provide a fair trial to everybody. And they were stacking the deck. And it happened dozens and dozens and dozens of times. 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. That's kind of the attitude we get sometimes from readers who write in about, you know, these were bad people. And yes, some lines were crossed, but they were bad people who got what they deserved. Yet at the same time, like, everybody hates lawyers until they need one. And if you are in trouble or family member is in trouble and you you go to a lawyer or a lawyer you trust 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. Um, that's not what was going on here. Um, so for people, for people on the outside, they might struggle to see where the harm is if you're taking down bad guys in a bad way, but it's really about the integrity of the system and ensuring that the corruption doesn't set in.
And before we started recording you, you said that this is actually unprecedented on a global stage. So tell me, in what way?
Well, look, this really became public knowledge beginning in late 2018. And since then, which has been, what, seven years? I've never heard of something like this happening anywhere else in the world. The level and the scale of this of a of a, a lawyer systematically informing on their own clients. I've never heard of a police force anywhere in the world who's recruited somebody who's violated these tenets of confidentiality and legal professional privilege in the way that it was so systematically done with Nicola Gobbo. Like, it just it hasn't happened. And you mix those two things together with convictions going into doubt, major convictions for murder, drug trafficking, all sorts of stuff like this. It's just it hasn't been replicated in the UK or Canada or the United States. It's just it's never happened anywhere like this before.
We'll be right back. So, of course, Tony Mokbel is now before the courts again. He's appealing his last conviction. So tell us about this. I guess the current case, because you did highlight earlier that it seems like he's in with a good shot to to have his conviction quashed.
Yeah. I mean, basically what this last one is a major drug trafficking conviction as well. And what they're looking at is, was his interactions with Gobbo at the time that these alleged crimes occurred and afterwards preparing his defence. What was her involvement with his legal strategy, and how much of a handle did she have on that? What did she tell police? Did her involvement effectively change the outcome? And whether or not I mean, at the end of it, what this is about is whether or not the system could be trusted.
And so it has to be asked why did members of the Victorian police force actually use Nicola Gobbo as an informer, if it's so bad to do so?
This is interesting, and I have some sympathy for them here, because back in the early 2000, the Melbourne's gangland war was out of control. People were dying quite regularly and some of them were dying very publicly, like shot in front of their kids at a at a football session. Um, there was enormous pressure for them to break this case, to stop the violence. And what Nicola Gobbo helped them to do was to break that wall, to break the wall of silence, because she was able to tell clients, you should you should really roll on, Tony, or you should roll on this person. You should roll on that person. It cracked the wall of silence, and she she basically helped develop a bunch of long term informers and witnesses that put a lot of people in jail.
Okay. And what about Nicola Gobbo herself? Like, do we know why she went down this path and and where she is now?
Well, that's that is a whole psychological study that's still waiting to be done about why she did this. I mean, the easy answer is she found herself too far in with her criminal clients. Her her safety, her sanity was at threat. And she thought the best way to stop this was to get them to put in jail, to betray them, and to orchestrate the circumstances in which they could be arrested and charged and no longer in her life. That's the easy answer. The less easy answer is, and you can get this from reading her, her intelligence reports and her former reports. She quite clearly liked doing it as well. Like there was a kind of a sense of accomplishment. There was a rush to it. Um, she she developed some kind of psychological satisfaction from doing this stuff. Um, yeah. Like, we could talk about it all day about what was actually going through her head. And I don't know that anyone has an answer. And even when she got on the stand to testify at the royal commission, she was circumspect about what her motives were for doing it. It's really hard to know where she is now. That's a good question. Um. Nobody knows. Nobody's supposed to know. Off.
Okay. And so back to Tony Mokbel is the fact that the court released him on bail. Is that a sign of of strength that he has in this case?
Yeah. It's interesting. When they were making the application for bail and there was arguments for and against the Office of Public Prosecutions stressed the fact that it's very, very unusual for persons facing crimes like this with this amount of sentence left to be given bail. So for the Court of Appeal to make the decision to release him on bail when there's still like six years to go before he could qualify for parole, tens for court watchers to suggest that they feel he's got a strong case to quash his convictions. Now, what comes out of that? They could quash the convictions and completely set him free. They could quash the convictions and then say, well, it's up to the prosecutor to decide whether or not to retry him again using uncorrupted evidence. So something that wasn't involving Nicola Gobbo. Um, my colleague John Silvester has written extensively about the fact that this last set of charges, a lot of it had to do with wiretaps and, and, um, electronic evidence as well, beyond what Nicola Gobbo's alleged involvement might be. So there is a possibility they could try to retry him, but I don't see it as likely.
But what's actually stopping him from performing the same disappearing act that he did from nearly two decades ago?
Well, this is funny because on the on the day he went for bail. Right. So we're down in the court district on the original application day, and there's they bring him they bring him to the court and what looks like a tank like this, this basically an armoured personnel carrier, right. And there's I think there was eight, eight officers guarding him, guarding just the gate where he went through. And then there's another six guys inside the court. And I turned to someone and said, of all the days that Tony Mokbel would try to escape, today is not the day. He's you know, he's a hair away from from finding out if he's going to get bail. He's not going to run. Like, we got 14 guys here like it's crazy. Then again, maybe look, maybe his safety is under threat as well. I don't know, but, um, the reason he wouldn't run now is probably because he thinks, or he's been told by his legal representatives that he stands a very strong chance of walking out a very free, like a totally free man by the end of 2025, early 2026. Um, plus, I can't imagine after 18 years in jail that he's got much of a nest egg to do a runner like he did when he was running the company, which was making tens of millions of dollars in drug trafficking money.
Right. And I guess just to wrap up, Chris, I'm definitely left wondering why there have been no charges laid against Nicola Gobbo, against anyone in the Victorian police force. Can you sort of let us in on that? Because it seems puzzling.
Sure. And this is this is one of the things I found really bizarre and frustrating about this is having watched it since 2018. A royal commission has come back and basically said, these people have done wrong. They recommended that they be investigated. So a special office was set up called the office of the Special Investigator from a former judge who ran it. He basically said person X, Y, z. They all need to be charged. That decision, that recommendation was not picked up. And yet in Tony's appeal, we see a completely different judge basically say, well, they've engaged in a criminal conspiracy. So there's a disconnect here. When it comes down to the pointy end, the person who has the ability to charge them is chosen not to charge them because they don't believe there's enough evidence. It's a bad look because there's a lot of people in the system who are still here that were there when this was going on. Police officers, there's lawyers that have become judges. Lots of people were involved in all this. They either saw it or they didn't say anything or they they didn't say anything and they were ignored. There's people who did the wrong thing. There's people who did the right thing. The system itself. We're not talking about something that happened in the Second World War where everybody's dead. They're all still here, mostly. And yet there's no outcome. Right. We spent $200 million on a royal commission. There's been millions and millions and millions spent on lawyers. And we've got no outcome.
Thank you so much, Chris, for your time.
Oh thank you.
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Tammy Mills, with technical assistance by Josh towers. Tom Mackendrick is our head of audio. The Morning Edition is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. To support our journalism, subscribe to us by visiting The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe and sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a comprehensive summary of the day's most important news, analysis and insights in your inbox every day. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks for listening.
