In 2005, eight years after the murder of the underworld figure Alphonse Gangitano kicked off a long and bloody gangland war on the streets of Melbourne, a prominent criminal barrister agreed to become a registered police informant in exchange for a promise that her identity would be kept secret.
The woman – known variously as Lawyer X, EF, and informer 3838 – had represented some of the gangland war’s most infamous figures, including Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel.
Thirteen years later, a royal commission has been announced into what has become one of the biggest legal scandals and most appalling cases of police misconduct in Australian history.
Lawyer X is still alive but has refused to go into witness protection, her trust in police so shaken by leaks to the media and the attempt to use her as a witness in the murder trial of a disgraced ex-police officer that she says she no longer believes the force could keep her and her children safe.
At 9am on Monday, suppression orders concealing the extent of her involvement in the prosecutions that ended the gangland war were lifted. Within hours state and commonwealth prosecutors had written to 22 people, including a number of her former clients, informing them that they may have grounds to challenge their convictions.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, called a royal commission to calculate the number of criminal convictions affected and urgently review the management of police informants.
And the state’s police minister, Lisa Neville, has already been forced to defend the chief commissioner of police, Graham Ashton, against allegations that he knew or ought to have known about the use of Lawyer X as an informant.
