Mokbel payday
And now, to the courthouse steps in downtown Melbourne and one of the city’s more distinguished denizens.
ESTELLE GRIEPINK: Bailed and beaming, Melbourne’s most notorious gangland figure …
Tony, how does freedom feel?
Set free after eighteen years behind bars …
- Seven News (Melbourne), 4 April 2025
Yes, that pillar of the community, Antonios Mokbel after a little time away, floated from the Victorian Supreme Court into the soft embrace of the press.
LANA MURPHY: … his supporters cheered and clapped as he made his way through the media pack …
MAN: Let’s go, come on, boys, please …
- Nine News (Melbourne), 4 April 2025
Tony Mokbel, one of the few survivors of Melbourne’s deadly underworld war of the 2000s, whose life has been depicted in two separate television shows… but who was perhaps most famous for escaping police on a luxury yacht then assuming this rather cunning disguise, has long been a media darling. And this has been a good year for “Fat Tony” because the one-time mob boss sued the Victorian government for a wee touch-up he received in Barwon Prison, and last week won a handsome return.
Big $1M WAD FOR BIG WIG MOKBEL
EXCLUSIVE
Freed drug tsar Tony Mokbel has been awarded a $1m payout by the Allan government over his brutal bashing inside Barwon Prison in 2019.
- Herald Sun, 20 June 2025
It was a vicious, prison yard lashing that left Mokbel with a traumatic brain injury and what he claimed was a steep run of medical and legal bills.
Mokbel successfully sued Victoria’s prison system for failing to protect him from two members of a Pacific Islander gang who, turning away from a jailhouse birthday celebration, lined him up for a battering.
The “award money” was paid to Mokbel after he sued the state over a “frenzied” attack on him by two inmates who punched him unconscious, then stabbed him with a “shiv” and kicked him as he lay on the ground.
- Herald Sun, 20 June 2025
And what provoked this near-deadly attack? The Herald Sun explained it had come:
… just days after a media report that he had become an “enforcer” behind bars.
- Herald Sun, 20 June 2025
A media report? If only we knew who ran it.
TONY THE ENFORCER
Exclusive
Mokbel busts jail extortion racket, proving he’s a big-wig behind bars
- Sunday Herald Sun, 10 February 2019
Yes, a little detail escaped the notice of our friends at the Hun.
The so-called ‘media report’ which was published just 48 hours before the bashing was its own!
It was a serious story which also reported allegations that Mokbel had:
… recently intervened in a prison standover scheme – disrupting an extortion racket run by a group of Pacific Island inmates.
- Sunday Herald Sun, 10 February 2019
And which had Barwon Prison authorities in a panic.
Prison officers warned Tony Mokbel he was in danger before he was stabbed the day after a media article that “extolled Mr Mokbel as a feared prison big-wig and a top enforcer”.
- The Age, 29 August 2019
The Herald Sun has been described in its own pages as “The Bible” inside Victoria’s prisons.
So when it labelled Mokbel a jail yard heavyweight it was always going to make waves.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s the finding of the Victorian County Court:
I am satisfied that this offending was committed as a direct response to the Herald Sun article claim that Mr Mokbel held a top dog position in the gaol …
- DPP v Teuira & Anor [2020] VCC 737, County Court of Victoria, 3 June 2020
One of the gang members who savaged Mokbel had even used The Herald Sun’s own words:
'You think you are an enforcer, well you are f*****g not, you c***t.'
- DPP v Teuira & Anor [2020] VCC 737, County Court of Victoria, 3 June 2020
We asked the newspaper why it failed to identify its own little role in this rotten sequence of events but strangely we didn’t hear back.
In all matters crime, The Hun is a force of nature with a roster of sources scattered through the ranks of the police and prison system, and shows little hesitation in using these snitches to name and shame in a bid to hold the powerful to account.
But it seems there’s one big institution in Victoria that the tabloid hasn’t the intestinal fortitude to identify, itself. Which I reckon is pretty gutless.