Source : the age
When I receive an email that begins, “I am a practising lawyer,” it usually means the writer possesses an unshakeable belief that on graduation they were bestowed with both a legal qualification and the gift of omniscience.
What will follow will be a lecture on how I have got something wrong about the justice system even though the critic’s dealing with the criminal law is restricted to one unit at university, and the closest they have come to a trial is to pass the Supreme Court on the way to the Titles Office.
The best trial lawyers are remarkable – able to prove or disprove a case on minute details lost to most.
The committed defence lawyer is dedicated to the system. They believe everybody deserves a defence. One once told me that even though he was defending a despicable man charged with a despicable murder, he did his best, adding: “I was not unhappy when I lost, and I was not unhappy when after his release he was run over by a truck.”
One lawyer who understands the system better than most is Bernie “The Attorney” Balmer, who has known more rogues than Damon Runyon.
He lectures at the police detective training school, telling young investigators that a defence lawyer’s job is to pick a hole in any loose threads in a brief of evidence, or as he puts it more colourfully, “I don’t win cases; you f— them up.”
Getting a law degree proves you are clever, but that doesn’t make you wise, or even honest.
There are some who should never have been allowed to practise because their past showed they couldn’t be trusted, and there are others who for multiple reasons became sucked into the lifestyle of those they defend.
Some lawyers have laundered money for their clients, been paid with drug money and concealed evidence.
There is not a job without rogues. I have known journalists who have fabricated stories, accepted kickbacks, bought shares with inside information, traded confidential information with crooks, sold drugs, protected corrupt cops because they leaked stories and been implicated in murders. And even worse – left the pub just before their shout.
Most dishonesty is particularly stupid. There was a section editor who destroyed his career by stealing freebies delivered to other reporters.
He forgot there were security cameras in the office that captured him crawling under a desk to steal a twin pack of middle-of-the-road wine.
Here are a few examples of lawyers who went bad big time.
Mario Condello
Mario Condello was bright and ambitious with a slightly deluded concept of multiskilling. He aimed to become a barrister, judge and a crime boss. A successful solicitor, he tried to pull a $1.4 million art fraud, claiming the money after paintings were destroyed on a train in Italy.
Condello became the target of a police taskforce, Zulu, that investigated his links to drug trafficking, arson, fraud and an attempted murder. He was convicted, sentenced to six years and disbarred as a lawyer. This freed him up to enter the underworld fulltime.
He hired two underworld enforcers to break the legs of a business rival. Instead, they shot him with a double-barrelled shotgun while he was in bed. His doona absorbed the force leaving him with feathers in his wound.
He ordered the torture of a rival. One of the gang told me Condello arrived wearing gloves with no fingers and a mask that looked like he had bought it at a sex shop. “It was hard not to laugh.” The tough-guy image was not helped by his habit of fainting at the sight of blood.
The underworld is anything but a laughing matter and on February 6, 2006, Condello was shot dead in the driveway of his Brighton home. His trial for conspiracy to murder drug boss Carl Williams was set to start the next day.
Philip Peters
It is fair to think that if a lawyer is known as Mr Laundry it is not because he has a side hustle in dry-cleaning stores.
Philip Peters was a Crown solicitor before he was seduced by the dark side.
After he lost $600,000 of a drug trafficker’s money, the gangster took out a $30,000 contract on the lawyer. Peters responded by stealing the identity of an oil rig worker, Michael Joseph Smith, whose family had asked Peters’ legal firm to settle Smith’s affairs after his death.
Peters had a plan to have a crook, Peter Kypri, killed after their plot to carry out a $200,000 fraud collapsed. He hired a man to drug and abduct Kypri to a St Arnaud farmhouse, where he would be tortured (what is it with bent lawyers and torture?) until he paid up. Trouble was the man Peters employed was working for the police.
His having been charged, convicted and jailed, it was suspected by police (but not proved) that Peters still wanted revenge. The police theory went that using jail contacts it is alleged Peters hired a hit team to kill Kypri’s wife, Carmel, who lived in Muriel Street, Niddrie.
Another woman, Jane Thurgood-Dove lived in Muriel Street. Both lived three homes from a corner, had children, drove four-wheel drives and had similar hairstyles.
In November 1997, Thurgood-Dove was shot dead in the driveway of her home in a hit police say was a case of mistaken identity. But the mistaken-identity theory could not stand up in court. Peters has been interviewed twice and has not been charged. In the eyes of the law he remains an innocent man.
There is a $1 million reward to solve the murder.
Andrew Fraser
There was a lawyer (or an ex-lawyer) who benefited from a million-dollar murder reward.
Andrew Fraser was a high-flyer who flew too high due to an addiction to cocaine. He was hated by police because they believed he was too close to the crooks he represented, and they were delighted when he was convicted of drug use and possession.
Inside a protection unit in prison, he would garden with serial killer Peter Dupas.
Dupas was the only suspect in the November 1997 murder of Mersina Halvagis, who was stabbed to death in Fawkner Cemetery tending her grandmother’s grave.
When police approached Fraser to see if he could help in the Halvagis case, he said: “What took you so long?”
Fraser would go on to testify that Dupas had confessed to him. Dupas was convicted and Fraser received most of the $1 million reward on offer.
Nicola Gobbo
Probably the most notorious lawyer to flirt with the dark side is Nicola Gobbo, who has not been convicted (technically) of a crime but has helped to secretly convict others who trusted her.
As a barrister, she was first class, hard-working, dedicated with an eye for detail. She could read a brief of evidence and find flaws others would miss.
But for Gobbo, being respected by her peers was never enough. She wanted to be a headline act, as famous as her notorious clients. Her uncle was Sir James, barrister, judge and governor of Victoria.
Criminal clients and criminal lawyers should never be friends. The expression often used is always keep a desk between you and your clients.
One barrister, just appointed as a County Court judge, ran into an old client at the pedestrian crossing near the Supreme Court. The old crook congratulated the lawyer on his new appointment and offered to buy him a slap-up celebratory lunch. The new judge wisely declined.
Gobbo flew by her own rules, leaking social news tips to gossip columnists, making sure she was photographed with her notorious clients outside court and generally elbowing her way to centre stage.
But there was something more dangerous, and it was an open secret. Gobbo had crossed the line and was doing lines with her clients.
Judges, magistrates and senior lawyers tried to tell her to stop partying with the crooks, and each time she promised to change. What nobody did was report her to the ethics committee that could have threatened her with sanctions.
Gobbo first turned informer as a third-year law student in 1995 after her house was raided for drugs. The case against her was proved but no conviction recorded. This would have stopped her becoming a junior police constable but did not stop her becoming a barrister.
In 1999, she volunteered to be a secret source for the Australian Federal Police and the National Crime Authority. Rejected, she went to Victoria Police with information about colleagues laundering money. In 2005, she went to the Purana gangland taskforce volunteering to be a source, was unwisely registered as Informer 3838 and was on the books for five years.
Why she did it, no one knows, but a series of phone taps put her in the middle of the investigation into the 2004 murders of police informer Terence Hodson and his wife, Christine. Perhaps she decided to jump ship before it sank.
The decision by police to use her as an informer was a disaster, resulting in convictions quashed and a $200 million royal commission, new informer rules that have damaged the police’s ability to manage human sources and a large payout to Gobbo herself.
The one person who has failed to take responsibility for the sorry state is Gobbo herself. The smart, savvy lawyer says it really wasn’t her fault and that she was “emotionally manipulated and groomed by police and at the time was young and naive and desperately sought the approval of older male figures”.
Truth is she had the world at her feet, and she managed to kick it into the gutter.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.
