One of Australia’s most famous gangsters walked free on Friday after prosecutors said they would drop a planned retrial on drug trafficking charges.
Sixty-year-old Tony Mokbel — a key figure in Melbourne’s years-long gangland war — was jailed for 30 years in 2012 after pleading guilty to masterminding an elaborate drug syndicate.
But his case fell apart after it was revealed that his high-profile lawyer at the time, Nicola Gobbo, was feeding information to police while supposedly defending her clients.
Mokbel spent about 18 years behind bars but was released on bail last April after a court ruled he had a strong chance of overturning the criminal convictions.
A court subsequently acquitted him of one charge and ordered a possible retrial over allegations he tried to import a commercial quantity of synthetic drug MDMA in 2005.
On Friday, prosecutors in the state of Victoria said they had decided not to pursue that planned retrial.
“This decision was reached after careful consideration of all aspects of the matter relevant to the prospects of conviction and the public interest in a retrial,” the Victoria Office of Public Prosecutions said in a statement.
Prosecutors said they took into account Mokbel’s age and health as well as time already spent behind bars.
“It feels really nice, and life goes on,” the ageing mobster told local media outside a Melbourne courthouse.
And he said he was keen to go abroad, something he said he had dreamed about while in prison.
“It’d be great to get on a nice plane,” he said.
Asked if he regretted drug trafficking, he answered: “I do not regret anything”.
– ‘The Company’ –
Violence linked to Mokbel’s group, known as “The Company”, claimed dozens of lives and was later immortalised in the hugely popular Australian TV series “Underbelly”.
Gobbo — also referred to as Lawyer X and Informer 3838 — claims that over 300 people were arrested and charged based on the information she provided.
A 2020 Royal Commission found Gobbo’s double life during a period of intense gang bloodletting in Australia’s second-biggest city were “fundamental and appalling breaches” of her obligations as counsel to her clients.
Gobbo was a key police source during the critical years of gangland prosecutions between 2005 and 2009, but was also registered as an informant as far back as 1999 — two years before she was admitted to practice law.
She was recruited as a police informer after being charged with drug offences in 1993.
Prosecutors informed 22 people that they could have grounds to appeal in 2019.
During his time in prison Mokbel was brutally attacked, with one man stabbing him “up to seven times” and another kicking him in the head, court documents show.
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