Jeff Pope on policing scandals, elections and his alleged affair with Nicola Gobbo

Jeff Pope was 28, sweating under heavy tactical body armour, and about to kick in the door of the suspect, when he realised he couldn’t lift his leg properly.

It was 2000 and the future assistant police commissioner had already been a cop for nearly a decade – seizing the flash cars and mansions of mobsters, running undercover drug busts, and now serving as the tip of the spear in Victoria Police’s SWAT-style special response squad.

“But I’d started noticing, under all that gear, I was losing strength in my feet, in my legs,” says Pope.

Weeks later, he sat in the doctor’s office with his then 18-month-old daughter on his lap, listening to his test results. They weren’t good.

The rare genetic condition he had watched plague his father in later life – a degenerative nerve disease called Charcot-Marie-Tooth – had already emerged in Pope. The weakness in his legs would spread to his hands and arms. Eventually, he’d find it difficult to walk at all.

“I remember the doctor said to me, I had to avoid stress,” Pope laughs.

We both know the rest of the story. Not only would Pope go on to become assistant commissioner at Victoria Police, serving for another 14 years, but he would also find himself embroiled in the most turbulent chapter in its history; the Lawyer X scandal – thanks to the lawyer-turned-informer Nicola Gobbo.

It was Pope who once registered Gobbo as a source himself and the rogue police informant unit that turned her on the gangland. (He would eventually shut down the unit.)

Outside an excoriating grilling at a royal commission into the affair, Pope had never spoken about any of it. Until now.

These days, though, how’s he feeling about stress?

He’s only “safeguarding democracy”, as the new acting Australian Electoral Commissioner, waiting with the white-knuckled anticipation of a journalist for this year’s federal election to be called so he can mobilise more than 100,000 people and 7000 polling booths required for the big day.

“There’s no bat phone [when it’s called],” he grins. “You’ll probably find out before me. But we basically, stand up a Fortune 500 company for election day. It’s huge.”

Today, lunch is at the AEC’s headquarters in Melbourne. After some hand-wringing from Pope’s minders, it’s decided that a modest public servant barbecue is safer than the usual Lunch With tradition of enjoying a meal on The Age’s dime. So Pope is grilling me some “democracy sausages”.

The stakes are high. “We [the AEC] aren’t actually in charge of the barbecues,” smiles Pope, as he serves up the spread. “But people are always asking us about them. We understand it’s important.”

Yet, there’s another undercurrent of anticipation today, too. Pope, I am told, is finally ready to talk about Gobbo.

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After all, their alleged affair is still the main hit that comes up when you Google his name, and the topic of many lines of inquiry at the 2019 Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants, where Pope and Gobbo traded differing accounts of their relationship to increasingly uncomfortable lawyers.

“He’s a liar,” Gobbo said bluntly, when questioned why Pope denied the affair she claimed took place about two decades earlier. “If he lied about this, what else did he lie about?”

Pope fired back that since Gobbo, under cross-examination, could not remember any exact night they were together, she’d likely confused him with another federal police officer she had dealings with at the time.

None of this is particularly flattering to either of them.

But when Pope talks of his wife of 30 years, (“the most wonderful person I’ve ever met”), and their three daughters, you can see just how excruciating it would have been to sit in that chair.

“Still, as hard as it was, I think the royal commission was right,” he says. “It corrected the record.”

He stops. “I’m conscious I’m a bit defensive, a bit guarded.” He’s apologising. Or perhaps he’s nervous.

Pope might have fronted the media plenty of times for Victoria Police and then the public service (where the language can be almost as impenetrable). But he’s never really talked about himself.

There’s Pope, the tall, polite kid from Ringwood who grew up “living and breathing” tennis – coaching, competing, even chasing a young Peter Hitchener around the court, before giving it all up to join the police force at 19. (“Honestly now I can’t stand tennis. I still think Hitchy’s a great guy though.”) And there’s Pope the rising star of the undercover drug squad, prowling the streets in jeans and running operations out of a decidedly unglamorous carpark on Russell Street.

He was there for the founding of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, a secretive agency with its own source development unit known for its coercive hearings. And, since leaving the force with a medal in 2013, he’s been guarding Australia’s elections against fraud, interference, and incompetence, all while fielding a torrent of letters from conspiracy theorists certain he is corrupt, illegitimate, or, at least, slacking off.

But, sitting down to tuck into our democracy sausages (BBQ sauce and onions for Pope, tomato sauce and mustard for me), it’s as if Gobbo is the third person at the table, the blonde elephant in the room. For Pope, though, it depends on the room. “No one asks about that here. It’s a different world.”

Pope was introduced to Gobbo by the drug squad in 1999. She claimed to have explosive evidence that a barrister was laundering money. Pope filed the paperwork registering Gobbo as an informer, but he says now: “We didn’t find anything. She was an up-and-coming barrister trying to find her own path, like I was. She was into everything, all over the place. Taking on every case she possibly could.”

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Did he think it strange that a lawyer wanted to turn spy? Not then, he says. “She wasn’t informing on her clients [yet], I didn’t think anything of it, to be honest.” He was used to characters, working with dozens of informants. “But they were usually criminals.”

It’s difficult to recruit a source, says Pope. “And it doesn’t always go well. You lose a lot of them along the way. Trust is hard to earn and easily lost.”

Those days coincided with the shock of Pope’s diagnosis. He didn’t tell his colleagues, fearing he might be forced off the force, but he switched from kicking in doors to chasing the loot of organised crime, even quietly studying law on the side, knowing he’d “eventually need to do something other than policing” when the condition worsened.

Gobbo sent Pope her old law studies notes. They’d talk about footy and mutual contacts, grabbing coffee near the courthouse.

“I don’t feel I got to know her all that well,” he says. “She’d talk about so many things, personal things.” He clears his throat. Guarded. “I mean, she could talk the leg off a table. She could never stay focused. Sometimes, I’d zone out.”

They lost touch. Pope dropped Gobbo as an informant and, on his telling, she later made a pass at him (rebuffed with his trademark politeness).

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But she went on to become “Informer 3838”, the most controversial supergrass on police books, breaking her code as a lawyer to rat out her clients, including drug kingpins Tony Mokbel and Carl Williams.

Years later, when the secret of how officers had used Gobbo to end the gangland war could no longer be contained, Pope was assistant commissioner, in charge of covert intelligence (and the source development unit).

When he realised what had happened, he helmed a review that recommended the unit be shut down. “It’d been so long since I’d known her, I didn’t feel I needed to [recuse myself],” says Pope.

None of the cops involved have ever faced criminal prosecution. And there are still some in the force who think the whole affair should have stayed buried, those who speak of the madness of the gangland wars, when people were dying every day, and cops increasingly desperate to get the kingpins off the streets. Pope remembers that desperation well, and he insists the officers involved “were always trying to do the right thing”.

But, he adds: “It had to come to light”.

Later, testimony before the commission accused Pope himself of being the leak to the press, blowing the whistle on the use of Gobbo as an informer and kick-starting a years-long campaign against police efforts to cover it up. Pope denies being the leak. But was the gossip about Gobbo and Pope payback, for his decision to escalate the Gobbo scandal?

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He shrugs. “I don’t think I left [Victoria Police] particularly well-liked. I made some pretty difficult decisions. And, people will disagree, but I stand by it.“

Victoria Police is still bruised from the fall-out, the revelations about Gobbo putting countless convictions in jeopardy and dampening the use of human sources.

Now it is spiralling into a fresh crisis over pay and resources that has already swallowed a commissioner and his deputy.

These days, though, Pope is on a very different beat with a very different challenge – how to hold a federal election in a time of rabid misinformation, AI tricks and unrest.

At the last federal election, a loud, angry crowd turned up with megaphones outside AEC headquarters – the first time protesters have come to their door, Pope says. They were demanding the AEC stop using Dominion vote counting machines, which Donald Trump and his supporters falsely accused of rigging the 2020 US election.

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“We’ve never used those machines,” he says. “That was straight from the US.” (Votes for the House of Representatives are still counted by hand in Australia.)

“Whatever happens there, comes up here.”

He considers recent protests in Melbourne and Sydney, including the violence that broke out at a weapons expo in September, and the endless cyberattacks against the AEC itself.

“No [major attack] has gotten through,” he says, and the commission’s sprawling network stands ready to track each ballot the moment they roll off secret locked-down presses, through to counting.

“Everything just feels more contested,” he says.

Rising to offer sausages to the rest of the office, Pope says his nerve condition has now progressed from his legs to his hands and arms. He thinks he walks with “such an obvious gait” as his muscles waste, though it’s initially difficult to spot.

“Walking is like being on a boat in the St Kilda marina. I say to staff ‘if I’m walking with my head down, it’s not because I don’t want to talk’. Every step I have to be careful. Every day I get home without falling over is a great day.”

I steal one last sausage, considering him. Pope the ex-cop might be a little guarded, but here’s Pope speaking openly of the disability he spent more than a decade hiding in the force, the condition he now hopes his daughters are spared.

Perhaps being branded a liar by one of Melbourne’s most notorious liars, Nicola Gobbo, is a sign of honesty, after all.

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