Underworld killer Carl Williams was willing to "do a little bit of time" as part of a deal drug kingpin Tony Mokbel wanted to broker with police in 2004.
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It's been revealed Mokbel met with underworld investigators in an effort to allow the underworld to return to the "status quo".
Retired former top underworld investigator Jim O'Brien has revealed Mokbel, who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence, thought brokering a deal could stop the gangland killings that plagued Melbourne.
"Basically what he was saying is everybody was negotiable, but not the family, and that he controlled it," Mr O'Brien said on Tuesday.
The retired detective believed Mokbel himself requested the meeting because he wanted a deal.
"He wanted to get back to the status quo - we could all go back to doing what we do," he said.
"'You can be corrupt and we'll keep running the drug trade in Melbourne.' That's what it was about."
Mr O'Brien was head of the drug squad at the time, a position he now describes as being "babysitter to the executioner" because it came at a time when serious corruption was being exposed in the department.
He later went on to head the underworld-investigating Purana Taskforce when he took statements from Williams about the execution of police informer Terence Hodson and his wife Christine at their Kew home in 2004.
Mr O'Brien told a royal commission into police use of informers in Melbourne on Tuesday that he knew the way to Carl Williams was through his father George.
"I sat down with George Williams and virtually said to him, 'Do you want to go to your death knowing your kid's never going to see the light of day or do you want to tell him to talk to the police'," he said.
George Williams had been told after a series of heart attacks that he would not survive another.
Mr Williams replied that his son would only get five years off his sentence.
"I said, well, five years mightn't seem like much now but it's going to seem like a lot when he gets to our age," Mr O'Brien said.
Williams went on to make three statements implicating former drug squad detective Paul Dale in the Hodson killings.
Williams was murdered in jail three years later.
Murder charges were laid against Mr Dale, who was alleged to have been motivated by Mr Hodson informing against him over a 2003 drug stash house burglary. Charges were dropped when Williams was killed in 2010.
Charges against Mr Dale were dropped when the Hodsons were killed.
Australian Associated Press
