No-one denies that Rogerson punched above his weight as a detective sergeant. Whatever his methods, he got results. He made many arrests, won more commendations for bravery and skill than his peers and, by the start of the 1980s, seemed set to crown a brilliant career by one day becoming a superintendent or even assistant commissioner. He certainly thought so, back when things were going well.
There was a precedent for this. In 1966 more than 800 well-wishers attended a farewell dinner for a legendary New South Wales detective, Ray ‘Gunner’ Kelly, at the Chevron Hotel.
It was an ecumenical gathering of criminals, racketeers, SP bookies, judges, politicians, doctors, publicans, horse trainers – and a handful of tame journalists who had puffed the Kelly legend. The then Premier, notorious ‘rusty knight’ Sir Robert Askin, addressed the crowd – calling Kelly his friend. Kelly, later awarded an MBE, had reputedly helped make Askin a wealthy man. The policeman and the premier retired with assets far outstripping their legitimate incomes. No-one thought to question it, at least publicly, until they died.
As young detectives, Rogerson and his mates worked with Kelly and other ‘well-connected’ police: Fred ‘Froggy’ Krahe, Don Fergusson, Bill Allen and more.
The story goes that Kelly would test young detectives by asking ‘Would you load a criminal?’. If one answered ‘Yes’ he would be transferred into Kelly’s squad, but if he said ‘No’ he would be sent elsewhere, out of harm’s way, and often into a career dead-end.
It was a self-selecting process that meant entire CIB squads followed Kelly’s methods of ‘loading’ people with incriminating evidence – usually weapons, but also drugs and any other evidence that might be useful in gaining a conviction against criminals who weren’t ‘on side’ with the sharp operators in law enforcement.
Rogerson says ‘friendly’ magistrates trusted police and went along with the system because it kept criminals off the streets. Some, of course, might have been friendly for reasons other than preserving law and order. Such as the disgraced former chief magistrate Murray Farquhar, exposed after years of systematic corruption that involved not just police but politicians, lawyers and, possibly, even judges. From avoiding parking tickets and speeding fines right up to serious perversions of justice, they all thought they were above the law.
But times changed and those who did not change risked being exposed. By late 1984 Rogerson was in disgrace and was ordered back into uniform for the first time in 22 years. Instead, he took extended leave. By then he faced accusations that will dog him all his life – the worst being the shocking allegation he had conspired to have an undercover detective, Michael Drury, shot to help a drug pusher facing court.
He would eventually be acquitted of this (and of attempting to bribe Drury) but as long as the Drury shooting remains officially unsolved, it hangs over Rogerson.
It was an horrific crime against an apparently honest policeman for doing his duty. Drury was shot twice through the kitchen window of his home, standing near his young daughter. The .38 calibre hollow-point bullets inflicted massive internal wounds.
Drury survived but thought he wouldn’t, making a ‘dying deposition’ in which he accused Rogerson of attempting to bribe him to ‘run dead’ in a big heroin-trafficking case against a then flourishing Melbourne drug dealer, Alan Williams.
Some thought he was delirious or affected by medication but Drury stuck to his guns despite pressure from at least one senior investigating policeman, the late Angus McDonald, who apparently could not or would not believe the monstrous allegation against one of their own.
But ‘Roger’ the golden boy was already a little tarnished. He had been under attack by sections of the media – notably well-known investigative reporter Wendy Bacon – and the family and friends of Warren Lanfranchi, a criminal Rogerson had shot dead in intriguing circumstances in 1981.
It is undisputed that Rogerson shot Lanfanchi twice, and that the shots were paced several seconds apart, for reasons that have never been fully determined to everyone’s satisfaction. The shooting was ostensibly while police were trying to arrest Lanfranchi at a meeting set up by Rogerson’s underworld contact ‘Neddy’ Smith.
Lanfranchi’s family and his girlfriend, an articulate, attractive and media-savvy prostitute called Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, went public – accusing Rogerson of killing Lanfranchi because he had robbed a heroin dealer friendly with bent police.
Huckstepp, too, would be killed – she was strangled and found floating in a pond in Centennial Park in early 1986. ‘Neddy’ Smith, who had set up the fatal meeting with Lanfranchi, was charged with her murder years later after boasting about it to a fellow prisoner.
Rogerson is not shy about the Lanfranchi shooting. He robustly defends it as a ‘clean kill’ of a violent gunman, sex offender and drug dealer wanted for several armed robberies – and attempting to shoot a traffic policeman. He says Lanfranchi was also the prime suspect for a murder in Wollongong: his fingerprints had been found on a baseball bat found near the body of a man who had been bashed to death.
None of this, of course, answers some lingering questions. Did Lanfranchi (as his girlfriend Huckstepp swore) have a $10,000 bribe on him ready to hand over? The police said he did not. Did Lanfranchi produce a handgun? The police said he did, and claimed that was why Rogerson was forced to shoot him – twice.
A coroner’s jury subsequently found that Rogerson had killed Lanfranchi while trying ‘to effect an arrest’ but declined to find it was in self-defence or in execution of his duty. It was an interesting and perhaps even understandable each-way bet by the jury, though not altogether logical. This can happen with juries which are not convinced of someone’s guilt or innocence and invent a middle path regardless of the evidence. It was the jury’s way of showing it would not swallow the police version of events.
Despite longstanding media and public disquiet over the Lanfranchi shooting, fuelled by the dead man’s family and by Sallie-Anne Huckstepp’s subsequent death, few police rank it as the blackest mark against Rogerson – mainly because Lanfranchi was considered a dangerous criminal who’d attempted to shoot a traffic policeman, an act considered suicidal by many. With good reason, judging from Lanfranchi’s fate.
One respected Victorian detective who worked in Sydney in the 1980s, and who has no connection with Rogerson or his supporters, says the consensus is ‘Lanfranchi had it coming – he goes in the stiff shit file.’
But the Drury case is different – although, astonishingly enough, it was not seen that way at first by some police. When Rogerson was initially acquitted, in separate trials, of attempting to bribe Drury, then of conspiring to kill him, other police congratulated him. Rogerson got a standing ovation at a CIB dinner after the acquittal, a show of unity and defiance by ‘the brotherhood’ that must have been disturbing for Drury and his family.
But when Rogerson was subsequently charged over holding $110,000 cash in bank accounts under false names, support for him withered – even among so-called ‘Black Knights’ in the force. When newspapers ran bank security photographs of an edgy Rogerson waiting to get the secret money, his former supporters knew he had lost the public relations war against Avery’s ‘God Squad.’ The long-running ‘joke’ was finished, at least for the time being.
Rogerson’s convoluted explanation of the cash’s origins strained credibility – and would, in fact, eventually land him in jail for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. It seemed to some police who had supported him that while they were passing around the hat to bankroll his defence, he had been stashing cash that publicly implicated him in sinister deals, almost certainly with drug dealers and gangsters – but possibly with would-be cop killers. It looked bad for everyone. For self-preservation, if not moral pangs about Drury being shot, many distanced themselves.
All of which might explain why Rogerson is now far more quiet about the Drury shooting than about the Lanfranchi case. In the 1980s he claimed in court he had never met a corrupt policeman ‘excep
t Michael Drury’, but that bravado later gave way to caution.
Now he calmly repeats his version of events. That on his way home on the night Drury was shot, 6 June 1984, he dropped in at the Arnecliffe Scots Club to meet the hit man Chris Flannery. Flannery, he says, had called him earlier in the day about a suspect car he had seen in his street. Flannery thought he was a target, too – correctly, as it turned out, given that he disappeared later.
Rogerson says he had drinks with Flannery and left around 6.30pm. But Flannery’s wife, Kathleen, later stated that Rogerson was still at the Scots Club when she turned up about 7.15pm. The time gap is crucial. Then again, the notorious Kath Flannery was not necessarily a reliable witness and might have her own motives for making life hard for Rogerson.
It was suggested, later, that the meeting was all too convenient because it smacked of an attempt to provide alibis. In his book about the shooting, Line of Fire, Darren Goodsir theorises Flannery had time to shoot Drury at 6.10pm and then hurry to meet Rogerson to build an alibi. Rogerson says he was with Flannery at the time of the shooting.
So if it wasn’t Flannery, who did shoot Drury?
Asked this question, Rogerson pauses and says he heard it might have been another Melbourne gunman, Laurie Prendergast. Then he changes the subject.
He did not become a rogue cop. He was never tempted from the path mapped out for him by his mentors and superiors … It was the path that moved.
– journalist Andrew Keenan, 1986
THE man behind the Rogerson myth is almost 70 now. He is a husband twice over, father of two, grandfather of seven, devoted oldest son (of three siblings) of a sweet old lady who went to church every Sunday on her electric scooter until she was in her 90s. He doesn’t wear jewellery and is partial to singlets and cardigans. He polishes his (plain black) shoes with military attention to detail before going out, as most older policeman do. He wouldn’t look out of place at a bowls club, an Anzac march or a Rotary meeting. You just know he cuts the lawn dead straight.
He is smaller than a lot of policemen of his era; age and injury have eroded the hard physical presence he once had, though not the infectiously cheerful manner. But he still has the sort of combative confidence shared by top sportsmen and others used to imposing their will on others, which reminds you of what he must have been like as a younger man with a badge and a gun and formidable forces on both sides of the law at his fingertips.
He mentions that (the well-known journalist) Evan Whitton likened him to the young Don Bradman in a piece called ‘Flight of Fear’ published in 1970.
Whitton, in fact, credits the Bradman comparison to a co-author, but agrees it was accurate. He recalls the occasion well. In 1970 he and Hanford accompanied the anti-corruption campaigner Bertram Wainer to a tense meeting with senior New South Wales police to discuss abortion rackets. The acting head of the CIB, the ill-fated Don Fergusson (mysteriously found shot dead at police headquarters some years later) chose the junior Rogerson and his ‘mentor’ Noel Morey to front the corruption-busting Wainer.
Whitton recalls that Rogerson, though only 29, ‘was the sharpest of the three’ and did indeed look like Bradman: compact, gimlet-eyed, cool under pressure, self-contained and not fussy about who got bruised for him to get his way.
The resemblance between the bagman and the batsman was not only physical. Someone once wrote that Bradman combined ‘poetry and murder’ at the crease; in business, too, ‘the Don’ had a ruthless streak that made him unpopular with the genteel Adelaide business establishment. Rogerson reputedly also did some of his best work with a bat, usually of the baseball variety. But that’s all a long time ago – he would consider it bad manners to bring it up.
He now lives in a neat house in a neat street in Padstow Heights, barely a postcode away from where he grew up in Bankstown in Sydney’s west. Enterprising reporters have been known to peek over his fence then write stories transforming the unremarkable brick veneer into a ‘mansion’ with pool and luxury ‘Daimler’ sedan in the garage.
The facts, he says, are a little duller: the car is a 1980 Jaguar that his wife bought for $9000 many years ago from a workmate. Mostly, he drives a geriatric station wagon to carry tools to do manual work. He says he and his second wife took out a mortgage to buy the house for $365,000 in 1998 and have been paying it off.
He still has the weekender on the northern coast that he bought in 1979, and the five-metre fishing runabout he bought second-hand in 1978.
The fibro house he bought in Condell Park in 1965 went to his first wife, Joy, when their marriage collapsed in the early 1990s. The strain of court hearings and allegations must have been shattering for the quiet, church-going woman he had known since they met at Sunday school. Rogerson’s two daughters – ‘they call me a silly old dick-head’ – are married with children. He has a sister from whom he is estranged and a much younger brother, Owen, who was also a policeman until Roger’s reputation caused problems for him, through no fault of Owen’s.
Like many men his age, Rogerson spends a lot of time in sheds – tinkering, building and repairing. He is a good mechanic and carpenter and can weld and turn metal. He works on cars and houses – and helps neighbours and friends with theirs. He once painted a house for a pensioner neighbour; an act of generosity that several people say is typical. Favours went both ways – a court was told a neighbour let the helpful detective keep a taped-up biscuit tin of ‘documents’ at his place. The prosecution suggested it was full of cash. Rogerson disagreed.
His work ethic is strong. When he was in jail the first time, 1993 to 1995, he made fine jarrah wall clocks and dining tables that sold for good money – the tables for up to $2500. It helped pay off his huge legal bills. Each piece had a Rogerson nameplate – apparently a good selling feature. Especially among police, even interstate, who fancied the notoriety of a Rogerson-made original.
Manual work has been hard for him since he wrecked his shoulder a few years ago. A roof collapsed under him while he was helping a friend demolish a shed. He fell four metres, fearing that flying corrugated iron might kill him.
His left side, including his hand, will never be the same again. He carries his right shoulder cocked in the air and he limps. He still works ‘on the tools’ but has to swing a hammer with two hands. Worse, his balance has been affected. In early 2006, he fell while re-building his garden fence and cut his legs.
It’s all a long way from the man portrayed in Blue Murder, a home-grown Dirty Harry with a taste for dirty money. But the reputation persists. He now plays along with it, propping up a maverick image born last century to turn an honest dollar out of the notoriety that dogs him. An irony not lost on him.
Well before ‘going away on my fact-finding mission’ – his description of jail – he started touring pubs and clubs with Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson and Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, among other attractions. The enterprising Jackson – former AFL full forward, actor, battery marketer and novelty heavyweight boxer – had tracked him down and asked him to join the troupe.
They advertised him as Roger ‘The Dodger’ and called the show The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Rogerson had been a regular speaker at friends’ weddings and birthdays but this was different: somewhere between after-dinner speaking, sport club ‘smoke nights’ and vaudeville – with a touch of the old circus freak show.
He admits he used to get ‘hot and bothered’ and defend himself every time someone had a crack at him on talkback radio. Now he doesn’t worry. Touring with a later version of the show, he flips the bird to the mainstream world that has all but turned its back on him. Besides, he needs the money.
He reckons his last court case cost him $200,000 and he is paying it off. There is nothing about his lifestyle to suggest otherwise. The fact that he would even go on the road like a sideshow act suggests he needs the money. It’s physically easier than labouring, though not always more rewarding financially.
He did his first show at a Bondi pub in late 2003. It was a packed house
– and more than half were police. Young constables that had been babies when he was in ‘the job’ lined up for his autograph. He could hardly believe it.
And they seemed happy to laugh at his tall tales and sarcastic digs at the modern police force that turned its back on him and some of his contemporaries.
‘I used to be in the best police force that money could buy,’ he begins, pausing for the laugh and then delivering the tag, ‘but these days they’re so bloody useless no-one wants to buy them.’ Boom boom. He’s been telling that one for a while. It’s one of the lines he uses in between a few anecdotes that skate around the more boggy spots in his C.V.
Not that Rogerson has any illusions about what he’s doing, or the crowd the travelling show attracts at clubs and pubs. Talking to a friend on the telephone before a ‘gig’ in Perth in early 2006, he said drily, ‘We attract an ecumenical crowd, mate – but we’re not keeping them from the ballet or the opera.’ It’s as funny as anything he said on stage later that night, and undoubtedly true.
His problem – not that he’d admit it – is that after two jail terms and two decades of being demonised as the most corrupt officer in what was arguably one of the most corrupt police forces in the western world, he is the odd man out in both mainstream society and its criminal underbelly.
Whereas an ordinary career criminal – thief, robber or drug dealer – would regard jail as an occupational hazard and feel no genuine shame, a policeman who has prosecuted and preyed on criminals is marooned between two worlds – and powerless – when convicted and stripped of his badge and gun. He loses respect in the reputable society he is part of, is an embarrassment to his family and friends, no longer has any power on the street and is unwelcome among most ‘real’ criminals. He is an embarrassment to the force – and a liability to corrupt associates who have avoided prosecution and are nervous of exposure. His contemporaries have nothing to gain by acknowledging him. For some, this could be suicide territory. But Rogerson is made of sterner stuff, it seems.
Underbelly Page 19
