Face of Nation : On the night one of his gangland associates was charged with murder, Mick Gatto summoned a group to get to the bottom of who was dishing dirt to police. Over a steak dinner, he allegedly confessed to a murder he’d been acquitted of two years earlier. Or so underworld barrister, informer and dinner guest, ‘Lawyer X’ Nicola Gobbo, told police at the time.
Mr Gatto wanted to know the identity of the police witness who identified Mr Orman, Ms Gobbo told her police handlers who subsequently told the boss of the gangland-busting Purana taskforce Jim O’Brien.
Mr Orman has since been acquitted of the crime. It’s believed Mr Gatto had no idea it was Ms Gobbo who was encouraging her clients to roll on major crime figures, including other clients.Mr Gatto was acquitted of murder in 2005 after arguing he acted in self-defence in the fatal shooting of hitman Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin at Carlton’s La Porcella restaurant in 2004.
The notes were revealed during a royal commission into police use of informers, where the force is under scrutiny for its use of criminal barrister Ms Gobbo as a double-agent against many of her own clients.
The veracity of Ms Gobbo’s tips to police has been questioned. Barrister Geoff Chettle, representing a number of police handlers in the inquiry, pointed to multiple degrees of separation between the source and end-point of information provided by Ms Gobbo.
She gave police hundreds of pieces of intelligence over three periods as a registered informer, the longest between 2005 and 2009. Drug kingpin Tony Mokbel was the centre of a significant amount of those reports, including a claim he was “continually crying” in jail after his arrest in Greece in mid-2007.
Mokbel went on the run for more than a year after fleeing Melbourne in the final days of a 2006 trafficking trial. “Mokbel not handling jail well, continually crying,” her handlers noted in a diary after a conversation with Ms Gobbo. She too claimed to be emotional after a 40-minute phone conversation with him in June 2007.
