Spotlight on: Patrick Carlyon
“The two great things you need for journalism are an ability to write and a hopeless curiosity,” 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” was the 2019 Gold Walkley-winning story by Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon. After our earlier interview with Anthony (read it here), we caught up with Patrick about knowing when a juggernaut of a story is actually over, the craft of feature writing, and the need for media outlets to keep investing time and resources into investigations.
How did you get to be involved with this story?
Anthony originally broke the story back in March 2014 that a lawyer was working as a police informer. Anthony and I were good friends, we’ve always had coffees together. He started telling me about it in about 2016. At that stage it was all locked up in the courts, he couldn’t write anything.
When he first told me I thought, wow, this is like a Hollywood movie on steroids.
You’ve got these betrayals, you’ve got gangland, you’ve got these drug traffickers, and you’ve got this woman in the middle of it all who was betraying everyone. The police, and the criminals. She was the unseen jigsaw piece to the whole gangland story which was such a big deal in Melbourne through the 2000s.
Trying to make sense of it was really the big issue. There were so many elements over such a long period of time. And there was a good chance the story could never be told, if Victoria Police had their way in keeping it in the courts.
In early 2018 our editor, Damon Johnston, gave us the blessing to spend three months trying to get to the bottom of this complicated story. So we went off and spoke to lots of criminals, lots of lawyers, and developed all these wonderful sources who started filling in the bigger story. Which is, to this day, incredibly complicated and layered with a lot of legal complexity. So that’s been a challenge as well, to try to tell it in a way that makes sense.
I imagine that as you worked with Anthony, with his experience on the crime round, your role was weaving the story into a compelling narrative and like you say, simplifying the complexity of it, and also tiptoeing around the legal requirements.
I can’t emphasise that point enough. When we actually set about doing this, it was unknown whether we would actually be ever able to legally publish it. My job primarily was to try to make sense of what Nicola Gobbo did, and why she did it.
She’s an infinitely fascinating character, larger than life, and full of contradiction.
To this day we’re still finding out what happened, with the Royal Commission, and trying to make sense of how it could have happened. How deep did the conspiracy go? Was it just two or three police officers, within Victoria Police, or did it go to the state cabinet? These are the questions that the Royal Commission is still trying to determine.
How did you find Nicola’s voice in the story?
That was very difficult, because to this day I haven’t met her. And a lot of the people we went to, to try and understand her a bit better, didn’t want to talk. Obviously, you go back to her early life, her family, her university days. It was very difficult to actually get a sense of her, and to understand what made her tick. I worked out early on, through talking to a lot of people, she was actually an informer before she was a lawyer. And as soon as she was a lawyer she continued to inform, unofficially and officially, pretty much throughout her entire career.
For me it was a bit of a conceptual breakthrough that she was actually lawyering to disguise her work as a police agent, as opposed to being a lawyer who gets dragged into being a police agent. We were in the Royal Commission last week and she was talking about her fascination with police informing back in her university days, how she was going to do a doctorate based on police informing. The irony is that she was actually informing herself by that point.
It just defies all the ethical tenets of her profession. And it goes against the instinctive and professional need for defence barristers to do the best by their clients. The premise just doesn’t make sense. Why would someone do that? Why wouldn’t you walk away? Understanding that she became quite dependent on these relationships, with her police handlers, and that they didn’t want to let her go even though what she’s doing was jeopardising her life. For years and years. If any of those criminals had found out… And she lived in terror, quite rightly, of getting a bullet in the back of the head, as she puts it.
And she did have outs all the way through. She had a stroke in 2004, which is a pretty good reason for anyone to back away from their job. But she kept throwing herself back in. Again and again and again, even after she was officially deregistered as an informer in 2009.
Obviously the story’s had a lot of impact, you’re seeing a Royal Commission now. What do you think has been the biggest impact?
There’s two or three threads to that. Obviously the big impact has been the Royal Commission, and we don’t know what it will find when it ends around the middle of this year. It’s eminently possible that both Nicola Gobbo and very senior police may face charges, for attempting to pervert the course of justice.
The second thread is the criminals who are banging on the bars trying to get out of jail. And they have a pretty good point. We had one case last year, a bloke called Faruk Orman, who was released and whose conviction was overturned as a direct consequence of Nicola Gobbo being his lawyer. And a lot of people see that as the start of floodgates for other criminals to either get released from jail or seek massive compensation.
On a more human level, you’ve got the story of the Hodsons, Terry and Christine Hodson. They were murdered in 2004. To this day, their murders are still officially unsolved, and Nicola Gobbo is wrapped up with the suspects, the criminals and the victims in that story. For me and Anthony it’s the grief and unresolved anger for the Hodson children — Nikki, Mandy and Andrew — who to this day are still suffering. In part because Nicola Gobbo plonked herself in the middle of it.
You’re no stranger to the Walkley stage, having won two before this for your feature writing. What would you say is the most important aspect of the craft that aspiring feature writers need to learn?
I think the idea is to take the reader by the hand and tell them a story. There’s lots of different ways to do that. The bigger the story, the better the story, the easier it is to do. You try to tell it in a way that’s engaging, entertaining and informative.
The challenge is to actually get someone to want to read a story to the end because it’s so engrossing. And do it as simply as possible, in a way that leaves an impression on the reader. I think that’s true of all feature writing. It’s about inviting the reader to observe and take part in a story that they hadn’t heard before, in a way that moves them. That’s the eternal challenge for feature writers.
What made you want to be a journalist in the first place — was that what you set out to do?
My father was a journalist, Les. I grew up in a household where the currency was the news of the day and books, and writing. I’ve always been curious about people.
The two great things you need for journalism, I think, are an ability to write and a hopeless curiosity. And they were two things that were drilled into me, unwittingly, as I grew up. So it seemed like a very obvious and logical thing to do. Not that I knew I was going to become a journalist when I was doing an arts degree. But looking back it was sort of inevitable.
How does it feel to follow in the footsteps of your dad, who was a legendary journalist himself?
He was my best friend really, in terms of work. We were very close, he was very encouraging. I was never going to try to emulate him, that would be a bit silly. But he filled me with enthusiasm for the craft, almost by osmosis.
The goal for me was writing good stories, and at the same time meeting lots of interesting people, to see where it would lead. I never thought it would lead to Nicola Gobbo! It really is the story of a career. In the sense that there’s not going to be anything that’s as big, as complicated and as enduring that I will ever do again as a journalist. So really I’ve been fortunate that Anthony Dowsley and I are good mates, and that he chose to share the story with me.
You are working on a book, right? And there’s a film and TV project too?
Yes, we’re still working on a book with Harper Collins, we’re looking to publish that mid this year. We also signed up with Foxtel to do a drama relating to Nicola Gobbo.
I guess everyone’s waiting to see how the Royal Commission turns out to know what the ending is.
Well that’s the thing. There’s a lot of speculation about where all this will end. And there’s many different ends. You’ve got the Royal Commission ending in the middle of this year. But then you’ve got the consequences of the royal commission. You’ve got the possibility of the likes of Tony Mokbel being released from jail at some point. And you’ve got the possibility of criminal charges against these sworn officers who are supposed to uphold the law. We often talk about it, when is this going to end? And we really don’t know the answer. It could be going for a few more years yet.
What are you most proud of about the stories you’ve told — either over your career, or about this specific story?
This is obviously the biggest story and it came with so many challenges in terms of telling it. From legal challenges to inability to get relevant information because it was a subject that nobody wanted to talk about.
It’s a juggernaut. There is no end in sight and we don’t really know what it all means, at what point we can draw a line in the sand and say, well, that story’s come to a natural end.
I covered Black Saturday in 2009 and that was a real privilege to be up close to something so important and so tragic. I still look back on my work with that and think wow, that actually matters. That counted.
So Black Saturday and Nicola Gobbo, they’re two big issues that needed to be told, and needed to be told well. If I contributed in any way to making sense of things, that makes me feel good.
What’s your message to Australians about why quality journalism needs their support?
We live in a fragmented age in terms of technology, all the mainstays have been challenged. Getting the funding and getting the resources for quality journalism or investigative journalism is more of a challenge than ever before. Media investigations cost a lot of money, and they don’t always end up in a result. But the need to reveal secret abuses of power has never been greater. Because there are more and more ways for people, whether they’re politicians or public offices or whoever, to get away with things. So this need to explore those really dark areas has never been higher.
In terms of resources and time, quality journalism needs resources and it needs time. And we can only hope that there will continue to be employers out there, as the Herald Sun has looked after us with Nicola Gobbo, who continue to invest in telling the truth. And telling hard truths, as well.
What’s the best thing about receiving this award?
I was particularly pleased for Anthony because it has been almost six years since he started this story, by himself. And he discovered the story by himself. Every Gold Walkley-winner earns that award, but Anthony especially. He spent six years in the dark, really, fighting to tell the truth, and I can’t think of a more worthy recipient.
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. He and Anthony Dowsley 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.
