Spotlight on: Anthony Dowsley
“We are under increasing waves of suppression orders, and we find it incredibly difficult to write stories that people deserve to know,” says the 2019 Gold Walkley winner.
Winner of 2019 Gold Walkley
Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, Herald Sun, “Lawyer X Informer Scandal”
“Lawyer X Informer Scandal”, the 2019 Gold Walkley winning story by Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, is a powerhouse piece of investigative journalism with far-reaching impact on the police, the judiciary and politics. A deep and sustained investigation, years in the making, it was courageous and risky. The Herald Sun produced the definitive explanation of a scandal that recast Melbourne’s gangland wars: how lawyer Nicola Gobbo was recruited by Victoria Police to inform on clients.
Their exclusive reports exposed an unprecedented legal scandal that triggered an inquiry and continues to have serious implications. Gobbo’s alias, “Lawyer X”, is now a byword for the secret abuse of power. After a years-long legal fight to tell the truth about Lawyer X, Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon helped readers understand what happened and what it meant. The Walkley judges found their reporting was timely, gripping and illuminating. As well as the Gold Walkley, the story also won the categories for Investigative Journalism and Major Coverage of a News Event or Issue.
We spoke with Anthony Dowsley a few days after the Walkley Awards about what it was like to tell this story, why he became a journalist, and how special it was to have his mum there on the night.
How did you find this story?
I’ve been involved with all three sides of the law in a way. Police, lawyers and the odd crim. It was a mix of all these things that came together to spark my interest in what was occurring within the informer program. There had been the development of a new program in 2005 called the SDU (Source Development Unit). I didn’t know much about that but I certainly knew about covert surveillance within the force and covert information. Years earlier, before 2013, Nicola Gobbo had worn a wire. I had found that interesting… When I began hearing about the fact she might be a human source it didn’t hugely surprise me. That was what I had to chase up. Because I knew if it was true — and she had been defending some of the biggest criminals and many, many other cases in Victoria — that it was going to be problematic.
What did it take to get this story up?
The immediate period in early 2014 took weeks to amass quite a significant amount of information. I had the benefit of understanding what had gone on in the past, and where the tentacles may lead. They led to a trial involving Paul Dale, and a guy called Rod Collins, over a murder case involving the deaths of Terrence and Christine Hodson. It involved a trial with the Australian Crime Commission charges of Paul Dale. There had been other murders amidst that. Carl Williams was killed in jail. Basically there has been a long history of events involving Tony Mokbel and involving Carl Williams and everyone in their crews. I was aware of all of them, and I also knew there had been a lawyer involved, and who those lawyers were, and one of them was Nicola Gobbo.
Once you could figure out all the different people, and I had watched the gangland war unfold, I knew the history, basically. Once she had infiltrated as an informer, a lawyer, everything was turned on its head. It was about knowing what she had done in every single instance. Because she was an informer, and because there had been so much upheaval, I was able to unravel what had actually gone on.
There had been many unexplained things that had gone on over time. And I was able to explain them, at least to myself first and then try to get them out there. But the moment I tried to get ink on paper, I was suppressed immediately. We were still writing articles but were fighting suppression orders. The argument was that they were to protect her and the informer program, and also to stop us revealing something that would scandalise the courts. To scandalise the informer program, to be honest.
So a lot of this really grew out of your background because you’ve been a crime reporter for quite a long time. And you knew the key players, and you could start to see how these webs were forming…
Yeah, I had an understanding of my patch. Through a network of people I knew, I knew there had been taskforces fall over. They would collapse for one reason or another. There were big cases in Victoria that never reached a conclusion. Turned out she was part of those taskforces as a human source.
The chronology appeared in my head, what may have occurred when. We were able to track lawyers and different people that had been involved, even on the periphery. And then of course I did speak to her. She was obviously very cagey, but that was also a way of confirming that I wasn’t wrong.
What impact did the story have?
It shows that the medium has the power to make other institutions do their job. Back in 2014 when we were first writing the stories there was an initial hubbub and there was an IBAC investigation announced three days after we first wrote the stories. Meanwhile we were being taken through the courts ourselves. We weren’t being told that we were right, but there was some intimation that we were.
We knew it was a momentum thing. It was serious enough for an anti corruption body to take it on. What surprised me, for almost a year, was the silence. I couldn’t really make anyone talk about it and when I did, I couldn’t write about it a lot because I was suppressed.
What happened to me in the end, and to Patrick — we had this issue when they came up with what they called the mosaic theory. So I would write an article which didn’t breach the suppression order, try and get as much as we could in the paper, and then we’d get another letter saying “you’re really close, we’re warning you not to do this because you are putting pieces together so people will understand what you’re talking about”. We couldn’t even use the word “Lawyer X”, that was suppressed as well. And they were saying we were going to breach the suppression order because we were putting the jigsaw puzzle together that that will allow people to know who this is.
So obviously, lawyers were a big part of getting the story told.
The truth of the matter is that working on a daily newspaper I had to go off and do other stories. There were other stories in between, I almost this as a side project, every now and then I’d find a story about it and put it in the paper. I had enough interest from contacts and particularly lawyers that had a story to tell about the conduct of police and Nicola Gobbo and others around that time.
This is all about how the law works, how justice can work, and this really technical term called PII, public interest immunity. I worked out pretty quickly that public interest immunity is a big black hole where informers are quite rightly put in so they’re not discovered. But at times it’s used as a way to hide things they want to come out.
Can you tell me a bit about the working relationship between you and Patrick, how you collaborated on these pieces?
I had worked either alone or with reporters who gave the odd tip, for about a year. Then I was talking to Patrick, who I’ve known for a long, long time. We didn’t do anything about it for a long time, but we talked about it.
When it was heading to the supreme court and we suspected we’d get a result out of it, we wrote the eight part series together. So these chats evolved to the point where, in 2018 we went to another floor of the building to focus on the project. To flesh out how this had happened, put it into words, and create a series. So we wrote a 30,000 word series not knowing if it would ever see the public on the internet or in the paper. And we just waited for the result to come.
That must have been a bit nerve wracking?
No, it actually was comforting, we knew it was there. I have a bit of a bush lawyer brain. I knew the plaintiff had been defeated, the plaintiff was Victorian Police versus the DPP. Extraordinary events in themselves, they were fighting each other over disclosure. I knew we had a chance. It was an argument about the whole PII issue. Public interest versus public interest immunity. And public interest would win.
What made you want to be a journalist?
My father had worked as a sales rep at Leader newspapers. So I had been around community newspapers all my life. I’d seen the printing presses when I was really young, and the compositors when I was growing up, it intrigued me.
I was a late bloomer, I got into it when I was about 25 or 26, writing on a casual basis. Then when I was 27 I became a cadet, it just grew from there. I had a natural liking for crime journalism, it felt like a natural fit. I have a brother in the law as well, and I think that felt like second nature too.
What are you most proud of about the stories you’ve told — either over your career, or about this specific story?
I think with the stories you do, you have different feelings about the ones that have made an impact. You don’t really choose one above the other, they all take hard work. With this one, it was the depth of it. It was something that just kept unravelling. Once you got the first step there were thousands more along the way to understanding what had occurred, and it’s still occurring. It was almost a day by day scenario where events would occur over every day, every week, over a period from 1993 to today. I haven’t seen that much havoc in my career before.
This is an unprecedented event. We haven’t found anything documented like it anywhere in the world as far as we know. That’s an intriguing thing as well.
It feels like there should be a movie…
There are two series underway! We did a documentary not long after the story broke. We got that done as quickly as we could. We worked with Sky News, and Peter Stefanovic hosted that. We’ve written a book, which is being edited as we speak. That will take another six months to get on shelves.
We’re also doing a series for Foxtel, that’s involving some high profile people. We’re not the writers for it, but consulting with it and we’re and involved in other ways. That will start happening next year, there will be two miniseries. It’s a dramatisation, actors acting out roles, and obviously the Nicola Gobbo role is the biggest one! Because it’s such a complicated story.
It really is very complex because it’s about how the law was constructed. And the many relationships that she had, many scenarios that played out over many years. That’s what was difficult to find out. You have to understand all the relationships, and how it all worked, to tell that story. Complexity has been most critical thing.
At its very heart it’s quite simple, it’s a lawyer turned police informer. But the ways that it played out are very complex.
What’s your message to Australians about why quality journalism needs their support?
One of the interesting things to combat in this story is that people have asked why? Why would you do it, when you’re potentially handing people who are underworld figures some sort of legal right that they didn’t know they had? You’re giving them a way to appeal.
The reason to do it is because it’s a slippery slope if you don’t investigate stories like this. It’s the fundamental rights that we all have. All of those people who either went to jail or were prosecuted — it’s not a free pass. But it will make an impact on the law and how the law works. You can’t have a criminal justice system in which basically everyone in the room is on one side. That’s not how it works.
It’s an adversarial system, and it’s that way for a reason. It was bludgeoned in many ways during this process — potentially because it is an adversarial contest. People didn’t like the rules we were playing under. It’s really important because, as we were listening to on Walkleys night, democracy and upholding everything within it is what we’re here to do. Hopefully what we’re able to impart with this story is about how the justice system had been betrayed.
What’s the best thing about receiving this award?
I was really happy for the people who put so much time into it. We didn’t have a lot of resources going into it, we had myself and my editors and Patrick mainly.
It just really shows that if you work at something and think you’ve got a story, to persist. It showed what you can achieve if you fight. But it is an expensive process when you get involved with these kind of issues, you’re in court quite a bit fighting for your right to expose a form of corruption.
How’s your mum, did you take her to the after party?
I think she wanted to go! I only invited her a couple of weeks beforehand. It was good to have her there, I didn’t know what was going to happen. She’s become a bit of GIF, she was trending on Twitter, and she doesn’t even know what it is. I don’t really like the limelight so I was glad that she took it up for me. And Patrick! He doesn’t like it either.
Was it true what you said in your speech, you told her it was the Logies?
I did! She’s actually not 82, I did that to give her a bit of a rise. She’s 81. My mum loves entertainment and things like that so I just thought it was a funny line to be honest.
We had a great night, it’s a nerve wracking night but a good one! I loved listening to everyone speak. Kerry O’Brien was quite stunning in how he spoke.
You can’t help but think about the things you’ve been through. We went through a lot. The story itself was complex, but the things that happened to us — suppression orders, what it meant, how to get around them, the different courts. There were many courts and many things that happened on the other side of the story. All the legal matters and manoeuvring we were involved in — that was a lot to deal with over a long, long time.
Do you have any advice for other journalists who might be facing that kind of situation?
You have to go for it, and you have to become almost obsessive about it, but at the same time don’t lose yourself in it.
I don’t think I’ll ever get on the page exactly what happened, what we went through as a company and as journalists. It was a long time, a big part of our lives. I work on a tabloid newspaper, and was also covering day to day stories, that helped in a way. You put it aside and come back to it when you have to. I was lucky with timing.
At the end when it came through, we were able to spend the majority of our time working on this one story which is a luxury. And we had the backing of an editor and a team who always knew that there was a big story to be told and we have to tell it.
It fits with a lot of themes over the past year, with the raids, other suppression orders, and Pell and the suppression orders around that. The things that stop journalists being able to tell people the things they deserve to know.
Is that something you feel there should be reform on?
I am not too critical of the suppression orders that were placed on the newspaper to begin with. Because I understand them, I understand there was an argument to be had about the story that I wanted to publish. I was of the firm belief there was public interest and I think it’s been borne out. But I do understand that it was a difficult issue and it was weighing on my mind as I wrote it. Because we’re dealing with life and death.
Suppression orders have a place in society — sometimes they’re very necessary. But like anything like this, they can be used for purposes they’re not designed for. We are under increasing waves of suppression orders, and we find it incredibly difficult to write stories that people deserve to know.
Anthony Dowsley has been a crime reporter with the Herald Sun since 2004, specialising in crime and corruption issues. These are his first Walkley Awards.
Patrick Carlyon has been a senior features writer at the Herald Sun for a decade. He has previously won two Walkley Awards for feature writing.
Dowsley and Carlyon produced a documentary on the Lawyer X saga and are working on a book. As well as the 2019 Gold Walkley, the story also won the categories for Investigative Journalism and Coverage of a Major News Event or Issue.
