KEY POINTS:
Australia is beginning to notice Zarah Garde-Wilson in the manner it becomes aware of most high-profile and celebrity lawyers: through a client base that is increasingly in the news and which fires the public imagination.
The big difference with Garde-Wilson, 27, is that her client base is almost
exclusively from Melbourne's violent underworld and that her professional and private lives have become impossibly intertwined.
Her late lover was a gangster and a victim of the city's bloody gang war that has claimed 27 lives so far.
Garde-Wilson was charged this year with possessing an unlicensed gun, and this week faced contempt charges for refusing to testify against her lover's alleged killers.
To add a bit of extra spice, Garde-Wilson was this week alleged to have been a part-time lover of another of her clients, property developer and drug tsar Antonios Mokbel, accused of masterminding the importation of 3kg of cocaine from Mexico.
Mokbel is seeking legal aid for his approaching trial because his A$20 million ($21.32 million) fortune has been impounded.
But wait. There's more. Garde-Wilson also caused something of a stir and more than a dollop of moral outrage by seeking to become impregnated with the sperm of her late lover, Lewis Caine, who, she has said in the rare interviews she has granted, is watching over her from the spirit world.
Not the usual career path for a Queensland farm girl and graduate of New England Girls' School and Fairholme Ladies' College. But it was a tough road. She was sent to boarding school in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, after her family was forced off its property by the relentless drought of the early 1990s.
Law studies took her further from hearth and home. She studied at the University of Western Australia in Perth, where she faced the great fork in her road: a choice between accepting a job with the state's Public Prosecutor, or a position as a law clerk with the local office of Melbourne solicitors Pryles and Defteros.
A key principal of that practice was George Defteros, a pub bouncer who became lawyer to Melbourne's criminal elite including notorious crime boss Alphonse Gangitano and high-profile criminals Domino "Mick" Gatto and Graham "The Munster" Kinniburgh.
Gangitano and Kinniburgh were both murdered. Gatto was charged with - but in June acquitted of - the murder of rival hitman Andrew Veniamin, and Defteros, with former lawyer Mario Condello, was accused of conspiring to kill father-and-son gangsters George and Carl Williams and an associate.
Condello had long been disbarred after being found guilty of a number of serious crimes.
Garde-Wilson is instructing solicitor for the Williams, who have been charged in connection with a multimillion-dollar amphetamine ring. Carl Williams, with associates Victor Brincat and Alfonso Traglia, were also charged with the murders of rival gangsters Jason Moran, Pasuale Barbaro and Michael Marshall.
In August police dropped charges against 49-year-old Defteros, allowing him to apply to the Law Institute of Victoria for the restoration of the practising certificate he surrendered after his arrest.
Garde-Wilson was still working for Defteros when she met Caine, whom she represented on a drink-driving charge. Caine was by then a hardened criminal, serving 10 years for beating a man to death outside a nightclub in 1989 and making a reputation and a living inside jail by protecting other inmates.
In 1997 he led a protest demanding better conditions that lasted three days and ended only after prison guards fired tear gas.
On the outside, Caine was well-connected and was friends with Gatto and Carl Williams, now one of Garde-Wilson's best-known clients. But Garde-Wilson saw a different Caine and had no problems with the relationship that blossomed from client to lover. "You don't choose who you love," she told the Age.
Garde-Wilson also cites Caine as an inspiration, telling the Bulletin: "I know it sounds a bit corny, but I became a lawyer to help people. Lewie always believed in standing up for the underdog and that's what I intend to do in this practice."
But Garde-Wilson, and others who knew him well, said Caine always believed he would die young.
Evidence presented to Melbourne Magistrates Court during committal proceedings against his alleged killers, Keith Faure and Evangelos Goussis, and quoted by the Age, portrayed him as a man waiting to be killed but determined to go down fighting.
Caine's former de facto wife, Denise Cubrilo, said the doomed man had increasingly talked about death and how he would die from lead poisoning. He was right. On May 8 last year Caine's bloodied body was found in the suburb of Brunswick, shot through the head.
He had been drinking earlier in the night with Faure and Goussis, who had at first denied all knowledge of the murder and expressed surprise when police told them of it.
Later, as the evidence piled up, Goussis admitted killing Caine, but said Caine had been reaching for a gun and was shot in self-defence. Both have pleaded not guilty, and it was during their trial this week that Garde-Wilson ran foul of the court and was charged with contempt.
It was not her first appearance on the wrong side of the bench. In May she was charged with possessing an unregistered gun and with four counts of presenting false evidence to the Australian Crime Commission, the federal agency set up to tackle organised crime.
The gun charge was just another string in the infinitely intricate web of the Melbourne underworld. It first came to light during the conspiracy hearings against Defteros and Condello, when an informer claimed to have been given the .25 Mauser pistol by Garde-Wilson after Caine's death.
The informer claimed to have first repaired and given the gun to Defteros last year but, on its return, had passed it on to Caine.
This week, Garde-Wilson was charged with contempt by Judge David Harper after she refused to give evidence in the Victorian Supreme Court trial of Faure and Goussis.
She said she had been warned to keep her mouth shut and, on being asked what would happen if she did give evidence, replied: "I would get my head blown off."
Faure, especially, gives every reason for fear. He is a third-generation gangster - his grandfather was a standover man gunned down in a 1920s drug deal and his father a notorious safebreaker - whose career in crime began before his teenage years.
He has been jailed twice for manslaughter, and was the violent leader of a prison gang that warred with rivals led by the equally notorious Mark "Chopper" Read, becoming the inspiration for a character in the movie Chopper.
Faure and Goussis, with Faure's brother Noel, have also been charged with the murder of crime patriarch Lewis Moran, shot dead by two masked men in a Melbourne club in March last year.
It was during Faure and Goussis' trial on the charge of killing Caine that Garde-Wilson's latest alleged indiscretion came to light. The court was told that after Caine died she had started a casual sexual relationship with Mokbel, long identified as a major member of Melbourne's underworld and one of her clients.
Mokbel was also before the court this week, seeking legal aid and an adjournment - much to the fury of Supreme Court justice Eugene Gillard, who questioned his cash shortage in light of bail variations granted to allow him a number of Queensland holidays, and who lambasted Garde-Wilson and his other lawyers for failing to adequately prepare for the case. Nonetheless, the case was adjourned until next year.
In the meantime, Garde-Wilson is preparing to face her own legal woes which, if proven, could see her behind bars and banned from practising. Some lines should never be crossed.
