How we got Eddie Obeid, the Teflon Don Day in court looms: Eddie Obeid, pictured at his Hunters Hill mansion this week, remains defiant. With her dark hair in neat waves, and a crucifix at her neck, Judy Obeid emerged from her Hunters Hill mansion some years back demanding to know of waiting journalists: "What have we ever done to her?" She was complaining about yet another unflattering story I had written about the Obeid family. The Obeids didn't get it. It was never about them personally, it was about the things they did. Like most people in NSW, when someone first came to me in 1999 with information about the wheeling and dealing of an ALP upper house MP, I had to say, "Eddie who?." Little did I know that the pursuit of Edward Moses Obeid, OAM, was to last 15 years. It took its toll on him and on me. In 1999, the little-known businessman from Hunters Hill was appointed to Bob Carr's ministry. It was a modest portfolio, Minerals and Fisheries, or "Sods and Cods" as it was jokingly referred to. While Obeid was thrilled with his elevation, others on his own side of the political fence weren't so sure. "Within hours of his ascendancy, someone went so far as to distribute copies of unflattering newspaper articles with a cover sheet bearing the title The Obeid Dossier and a caricature of a cigar-chomping, limo-driving tycoon type," recorded the Herald at the time. It struck me that if some of his own colleagues had concerns about the richest man in parliament, maybe it was worth having a closer look. What I discovered amazed me. For instance, the very week he joined the NSW parliament, Obeid had bought a house in Clovelly on the Wednesday and on Thursday he had sold it to the Housing Department for a $300,000 profit. He also got the contract to build houses on the site. It was a pattern to be repeated with depressing regularity in the ensuing years. As well as his questionable business practices, there were problems with his pecuniary interest declarations, lawsuits with his business partners and his bad luck with fires. But driving everything was his determination that he and his family should get ahead. As he told the Herald in 1999: "I've got five sons and four daughters, so I was always on the lookout to make a buck." It seemed that under the ground, by the sea, even the state's water supply - everything was a potential means for the Obeid family to make a quick buck. The astonishing thing was that no one seemed to be able to hold him to account. He was the ultimate Teflon Don. In 2002, my colleague Anne Davies and I published a story suggesting Eddie Obeid had sought a million-dollar donation to the ALP in order for the controversial Oasis development at Liverpool to proceed. There were four sources, including a fellow Labor minister, to support the claim that Gary McIntyre, the head of the Bulldogs rugby league club, had complained about Obeid's donation request, which had been delivered by an intermediary. A subsequent ICAC inquiry cleared Obeid and he sued. "It was an absolutely disgraceful and dishonest piece of journalism, one of the worst of many in the Herald," Obeid's barrister Bruce McClintock, SC, told his defamation trial. We lost the case and Fairfax had to pay $162,000 to Obeid plus his court costs. It was devastating. I swore I would never write a contentious story, especially one about Eddie Obeid, ever again. But then I worried that Obeid would get away with it. Litigious politicians make media companies think carefully about taking them on. Obeid delivered to me a not-so-subtle warning when he told parliament: "How many more times must my sons and I take action in the courts to redress the damage this journalist has inflicted?." But then the Obeids shot themselves in the foot. In early 2012, when Moses Obeid told a Sydney court he didn't have the means to pay a $12 million judgment the City of Sydney council had obtained against him, financial records presented to the court painted a different picture. The Obeid empire was run by a series of trusts through which millions and millions of dollars flowed. The documents revealed the family's secret ownership of Circular Quay cafes as well as financial links to the people who had bought the farms next to the Obeids at the Bylong valley. Those documents produced a Walkley-award winning investigative series by Linton Besser and me. By now the stakes were incredibly high. The Herald posed an enormous threat to the viability of the Obeid empire. It was around this time they tried to hire someone to have me followed. As the private investigator later told me, Moses Obeid wanted to see if there was anything damaging in my private life which the Obeids could use as leverage to make me stop. The family sent more threatening legal letters and Eddie Obeid suggested, "I tell you what, you put one word out of place and I will take you on again. You are a lowlife. I will go for you, for the jugular. But it was the ICAC that went for the jugular. Having been on the receiving end of corruption findings over a crooked coal deal, a health care company, water licences and his family's secret interest in the Circular Quay café leases, in June Eddie Obeid had the effrontery to boast that he had a one per cent chance of ever being prosecuted. On Thursday, after hearing that he would face a criminal prosecution for misconduct in public office relating to his family's cafe leases at Circular Quay, he claimed the ICAC had conducted "sham inquiries" designed to "make ICAC look good." Obeid still doesn't get it. Killing the messenger doesn't help.