Chapter 30

Ten months on the taxpayer

To this day, I don’t understand why Nicola Gobbo crossed to the side of the prosecution rather than the defence. I can only wonder if the police had something on her to make her do it. Once she was on board, they certainly sweetened the deal. By mid-March 2009, she was living the life of Riley on the Victorian taxpayer’s dollar.

In the police brief against me, Nicola Gobbo was listed as Witness F. Under subpoena, I obtained a list of her expenses from March till mid-December 2009. The list would leave average Victorian taxpayers shaking their heads.

To begin with, Nicola was given $1000 a week as an allowance; all up, she received $43,000 in allowances. Then Victoria Police paid for everything else. While some of the items are blocked out for her protection – such as the destination of the 38 flights she took in ten months – it is clear from the cost that wherever she flew, Victoria Police got her business-class tickets. And not only did she fly, but two extra tickets were purchased each time so that two police could accompany her. The 38 flights in ten months cost the taxpayer $27,332.

From mid-March 2009 till the end of December 2009, Victoria Police paid $22,300 for car hire for her, but also forked out $2157 for cabs and chauffeur-driven limos. So when she didn’t drive, there were cabs and chauffeurs at her fingertips; when she did drive, Victoria Police paid for all her parking, including a $113 parking fine. Not a bad lurk.

The list itemises Nicola’s expenditures. The taxpayer funded everything from her body corporate fees ($2177) to concert tickets ($344), and her Victoria Racing Club membership ($380). Her accommodation charges for this ten-month period were $76,363, which gives an idea of the lifestyle she was enjoying.

The taxpayer also paid for a laptop computer, her mail redirection, her petrol and a spa treatment. And just in case you were worried, Victoria Police didn’t forget Nicola’s birthday. They bought her a bunch of flowers that cost the taxpayer $89.95.

In ten months, she cost $194,769, and the flights and accommodation for two police members to be with her cost $109,872. The grand total was $304,642.39.

And this is just stuff that I know about. I tried to subpoena other documents, but Victoria Police fought tooth and nail to stop me. The stuff I got was damning enough, let alone whatever they’ve got that they won’t hand over. Many documents were totally blacked out, with not one piece of writing over many pages.

What were they trying to hide?

For simply making a statement against me – and in the end, never giving evidence, citing ill health and fear as her reasons – Nicola Gobbo was well compensated. But even had she given evidence, the public needs to ask how reliable any testimony she gave against me would have been.

During these ten months, Nicola’s health suffered. She spent a couple of weeks in hospital for ‘trigeminal neuralgia/thalamic pain syndrome’, was back again for two days in October for ‘surgery on an ulcerated cavity’, and again in December ‘for surgery on three further ulcerated cavities and treatment of a number of approximately fifteen other ulcerated cavities’.

The expenses report paid Nicola’s allowance up to early January, but then something went wrong.

On 4 January 2010, Nicola Gobbo’s medical condition was explained to representatives from the office of the Victorian Government Solicitor, and that was when the bottomless well of money suddenly dried up. The last allowance payment to her is dated 4 January, when Victoria Police paid her $3000.

Several January meetings and letters later, Nicola Gobbo’s lawyers made it clear that she would not be giving evidence due to ill health and stress brought on by the whole affair. Despite this, on 8 February, Nicola was served a witness summons to attend court to give evidence at my committal hearing, which was slated to begin on 9 March. By 11 March, she’d made an affidavit asking to be excused from court because she wasn’t ‘fit to, nor able to, attend court to give evidence’. Her affidavit cites a flurry of letters between her lawyers and the Office of Public Prosecutions throughout January and prior to her receiving her witness summons.

She stated that ‘the Crown and the Victoria Police are fully aware of my medical state and were aware of my inability, and the reasons for it, to attend court to give evidence in March 2010 prior to serving me the Witness Summons’.

And there was something rotten in the state of Denmark. Nicola stated that ‘the Crown has advised me that if I do not attend Court to give evidence on 23 March 2010 (or at such other time as directed) they will seek a bench warrant for my arrest’.

Nicola went on to say that she’d been informed by nine senior police officers that her life was in danger, and the risk was of the highest order. She said that despite this, she was now without any police protection, other than ringing 000 in an emergency.

‘The stress of having to engage solicitors to deal with this matter on my behalf together with the anxiety, stress and worry that has been created by the Crown’s threats to have me arrested have each severely aggravated my various medical conditions and compromised my ability to recover from numerous surgical procedures and/or rest before and prepare for my impending further procedures. These circumstances introduce uncertainty which precludes my doctors from presently giving a prognosis about when I may be well enough to answer the summons.’

When I read copies of the letters, it was clear that Nicola’s lawyers had started to threaten the Crown solicitors. When the Crown had told the court they were ready to proceed with the case, Nicola’s lawyers felt that since she wasn’t able to give evidence, the Crown wasn’t in fact ready and had misled the court.

In a letter dated 4 February 2010, Nicola’s lawyers discussed their intention to issue ‘a Writ against the Victoria Police prior to the scheduled commencement of the committal on 9 March 2010. As advised in our conference on 11 January 2010, that claim will also detail the various promises and representations made by Victoria Police to our client which the Director correctly observed would potentially be highly embarrassing to the prosecution of Mr Dale. Our client has been left with no option but to take this course due to the conduct of Victoria Police and its solicitors, VGSO [the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office].’

Considering that Nicola had had at least $304,642.39 spent on her and her protection in ten months, and the last payment was only a week before the 11 January meeting, you have to wonder what she was promised if she’s claiming that $304,642.39 wasn’t fulfilling the ‘promises and representations made by the Victoria Police’.

I guess this is always going to happen when witnesses are courted with money rather than coming forward with a desire to tell the truth. The letters between Nicola Gobbo’s lawyers and the Office of Public Prosecutions became increasingly hostile. The more the Office of Public Prosecutions badgered Nicola to testify, the more she said her health deteriorated.

The whole affair suggested that Victoria Police had wasted the money.

Without any obvious irony, just ten days after saying that Carl Williams was ‘a pathological lying serial killer as to me having knowledge of any plan to murder anyone’, Nicola then went on record on the front page of the Herald Sun, telling the hungry public that she did in fact pass messages from me to Williams.1

But by then, it didn’t matter what she was saying in the paper, because every article mentioned that her statement and her testimony couldn’t be used against me because she was refusing to testify on account of death threats. The implication was that the threats were coming from me, ignoring the fact that every crook Nicola had ever dealt with would have reason to be nervous about what she was saying.

It’s worth asking whether or not she was offered any kind of indemnity against charges. If she came out in the Herald Sun saying that she facilitated phone calls between Carl Williams and me, with a pretty clear inference that these phone calls were for me and Williams to conspire to kill the Hodsons, wouldn’t that make her a co-conspirator? Conspiracy to commit murder? Not a namby-pamby charge.

If this really had been the case, she’d have lost her practising certificate and her career and faced a lengthy jail sentence. If cops are held to a high standard, so are lawyers. Would she have copped a sentence like Dave Miechel’s?

Online, I found an interview that Nicola Gobbo did with Josie Taylor from the ABC on 30 April 2010. It would be easy to feel sorry for her if you didn’t know about the huge amounts of money and resources that Victoria Police had put into her protection.

Nicola Gobbo: Having had the courage and strength to agree to become a witness for Victoria Police, I was required to give up my home, my security, my sense of life as I knew it.

Josie Taylor: Until March last year, Nicola Gobbo was one of Melbourne’s best-known lawyers, representing the biggest names in Melbourne’s underworld. But she says police convinced her to become a witness in their case against former detective Paul Dale. He’s accused of murdering police informer Terrence Hodson. Ms Gobbo claims early this year police backed out of an agreement to compensate her for the loss of her career.

Nicola Gobbo: I was assured by Mr Overland that I would be compensated and that I would be left no worse off. It was very disappointing to me that Mr Overland didn’t even reply to my last correspondence in January this year, when I wrote to him imploring him to intervene and resolve these longstanding issues.2

A closer examination of this exchange poses questions. When she says that ‘police convinced her’ to become a witness against me, how did they do that? Did they have something on her that would end her career anyway? Why would one of Melbourne’s highest-profile lawyers agree to give up her practice forever, just to give a statement against me? Was her career over? Did she just use me as a superannuation policy? How could Simon Overland promise a lawyer that she’d be ‘no worse off’? If we took her statement as truth, how much money would that have entailed if she hadn’t gone back on her deal?

By June 2010, headlines screamed that Nicola was suing the state government and Victoria Police for ‘millions of dollars’ for backing out of their agreement to compensate her for the loss of her career after she agreed to testify against me.

About three months later, it was over. On 25 September 2010, the Herald Sun was headlined: ‘High-profile barrister Nicola Gobbo has settled her court case against Victoria Police and the State of Victoria’.3

Naturally, the case was settled out of court – who knows what would have come out if it had gone to trial? Nicola told reporters that she couldn’t comment because of a confidentiality agreement, and because of her health concerns.