Yet more of the chickens of corruption are coming home to roost in Victoria, with the first high-profile acquittal following from the “Lawyer X” scandal.
Jailed big wig Tony Mokbel has had his conviction quashed over a cocaine importation which led him to skip the country during his trial.
Mokbel was sentenced to nine years minimum jail after he was found guilty in absentia of importing almost 3kg of cocaine.
The drug lord skipped bail toward the end of the March, 2006, trial and was hiding out in Bonnie Doon en route to Greece when he was found guilty and sentenced.
Well, I guess he really will be feelin’ the serenity now, thanks to a crooked lawyer – and Victoria’s crooked cops.
Disgraced lawyer Nicola Gobbo was Mokbel’s junior barrister in the trial while also a police informer.
She fed police Mokbel’s legal strategies having been registered as informer 3838 in September the previous year.
Nicola Gobbo is not the only party disgraced by the Lawyer X scandal. The whole of Victoria Police, not to mention the state’s political and legal establishment have been cast under a cloud by the affair.
Nicola Gobbo is – or was – Victorian blue blood. She is the niece of a former governor and a scion of a family prominent in the state’s law and politics. But, as the late “Chopper” Read observed, “posh people love gangsters”. Gobbo made a name for herself in the early 2000s as the go-to lawyer for Melbourne’s worst criminals. She represented a rogue’s gallery of Melbourne’s underworld, including murdered gangster Carl Williams – and Tony Mokbel.
But Nicola Gobbo was also “Lawyer X” – a secret police informer. At the same time as she was representing gangsters, she was also feeding police all their client-in-confidence secrets. As Australia’s High Court ruled, when it was deciding whether to unmask the two-faced lawyer, prosecutions were “corrupted in a manner which debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system”.
As a result of Gobbo’s duplicity and the corruption of Victoria Police, thousands of convicted criminals stand to have the convictions set aside. Even when they’re obviously as guilty as sin.
The Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions conceded the convictions would have to be quashed despite an ‘‘overwhelming’’ case against the gangland figure.
Mokbel, however, has already served this portion of his sentence and a retrial will not be held[…]
Mokbel is serving 30 years jail, with a minimum of 22 years, after pleading guilty to numerous other drug trafficking offences.
The Australian
Not for long, it seems. And he’s surely just the first.
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