Underbelly (25 page)

 

THERE are a lot of stories about Roger Rogerson, some of them true. Depending on who's telling the tale, he is (or was) good or evil, charming or chilling, ace detective or baddest apple in the barrel.

The prosecution says he gunned down a robber as coldbloodedly as he once allegedly connived to get a fellow policeman shot. But the defence has witnesses that Rogerson once rescued several children from drowning – as fearlessly as the night he disarmed a vicious killer, winning another bravery award to add to his collection.

He was also chivalrous – maybe even sexy. There is the Shirley Bassey story, which goes like this: as a young detective, Rogerson was walking in downtown Sydney when a
man carrying a woman's handbag ran past. Quick on the uptake and on his feet, Rogerson chased and caught the thief and took the handbag from him. When he opened it, he realised it belonged to Bassey, who was appearing at a nearby theatre at the time.

After booking the thief, Rogerson took the handbag to the theatre and was shown to the singer's dressing room. In the ensuing conversation he mentioned he was half Welsh himself – related, in fact, to the famous privateer Sir Henry Morgan, the pirate who became Governor of Jamaica. The grateful Bassey took him for a drink – and the rest, as they say, is history. What happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room. Suffice to say that whenever she came to Sydney after that, the sultry songstress caught up with her favourite Aussie cop.

Rogerson is not only descended from the pirate Morgan but from an English family involved in establishing the Salvation Army, so he has links with both piracy and the pulpit – the good and bad angels of his nature.

A story he tells reveals the ambiguous moral code of a man who had the nerve to play both good cop and bad cop until the rules changed and he was left out of the game. Not that he would admit to any of that: he pleads good cop to every charge.

It happened in 1994, when he was half way through his three-year jail sentence for perverting the course of justice. One day, two neatly-dressed strangers turned up to see him at Berrima prison (‘a dogs' jail' as Rogerson calls it in prison slang, ‘full of paedophiles and ex-police').

Sombre and earnest in their dark suits and ties, the visitors looked a little like Mormons, he recalls mischievously.
They reminded him of Senator Bob Brown, whose father had been a tough old sergeant with Rogerson in happier days. They were on a mission, but it wasn't from God or the Greens; they were from the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales police force.

After introductions, they outlined the deal: if Rogerson would testify about the ‘police culture' of the previous 30 years, he could walk free the same day on a special licence. Helpfully, they just happened to have the form ready for him to fill in.

Rogerson asked exactly what they expected for the getout-of-jail card. They said they wanted him to tell the commission all about a group of ‘old school' senior police. They listed several names well-known to him, including one man he regarded as a mentor.

‘They told me I was a conduit between what they called old “corrupt detective sergeants” and younger officers,' snorts Rogerson, ridiculing the prim legalese of the men in suits.

‘The blokes they wanted me to tip a bucket of shit on, they were great Australians,' he says indignantly. ‘One fought on the Kokoda trail; another was a tail gunner in the war, for God's sake. But that didn't matter. If I was willing to bag them, all I had to do was sign up and I'd be straight out.'

One of the men slid the form across the table. Rogerson calmly picked it up, tore it into pieces and dropped them in the bin. It was his way of saying the interview was over. He went back to his cell to face another eighteen months behind bars.

Meanwhile, the men from the Royal Commission faced the trip back to Sydney with the interesting news that the most infamous bent cop in Australia couldn't be bought.

For Rogerson, that's where the story ends. But it poses questions: did his defiance that day show fierce loyalty, high principles and absence of guilt? Or was it a calculated ploy because he knew he stood a better chance of living a long and relatively peaceful life if he quietly did his time and didn't ‘roll over' on his old crew, some of them hard men with too much to lose. Maybe it was a bit of both.

When Rogerson reads this he will no doubt swear. ‘I had nothing to roll over about!' he has told the authors several times. That's his story and he's sticking to it. No-one does it better.

You have to watch Rogerson … if I was to ask him: ‘Why did you handcuff my client?' he would answer ‘Well, sir, I knew he was wanted interstate on three armed hold-ups and I was concerned for the public's safety'. The judge would direct the jury to ignore the remark, but the damage would be done.
– Sydney barrister, 1986

BEFORE Roger Rogerson went to jail again in early 2005 – after pleading guilty to lying to the Police Integrity Commission to protect a friend – he appeared to be in a bad way. So bad that two days before he was due to face the New South Wales District Court in December, his solicitor took him to his psychiatrist, one Thomas Clark, who said later he was shocked by the rapid change in the patient.

A few months before, Dr Clark had assessed Rogerson as ‘stoic' and with ‘a new resolve to shape his life' – but now
the former policeman seemed incoherent, depressed, and even suicidal. He could not instruct his solicitor sensibly because he could not follow logic. He showed signs of paranoia, possibly even ‘creeping dementia', according to the good doctor.

‘He has been neglecting himself. He's usually such a dapper sort of person. He was actually in tears. He broke out quite inappropriately,' Dr Clark told the court. The breakdown was such that Rogerson had been admitted voluntarily to a psychiatric hospital for ten days, which had prevented him from attending court.

Unmoved by expert evidence, the Crown prosecutor asked: ‘Could this all be an act by him, a ploy, to avoid being sentenced?'

‘It could be,' the ‘shrink' admitted – an answer that must have deepened Rogerson's depression symptoms immediately.

At least his solicitor, Paul Kenny, stayed on message. When Rogerson came out of hospital some weeks later to be sentenced to a minimum of one year's jail, Kenny sadly told reporters: ‘Roger used to be a tough guy – these days he's just a broken-down old man … a hard man completely broken by the system.'

Rogerson's physical courage, like his intelligence, has never been in doubt, even among his detractors. He must also be a fine actor. For, only weeks before his harrowing court hearing, he had put on a convincingly brave front to speak at the 50th birthday of retired standover man Mark ‘Chopper' Read in Melbourne. Ignoring his own troubles, he spoke warmly and well to what he calls ‘a small but
eclectic' group of well-wishers gathered at a pub in inner-suburban Collingwood.

He told funny stories, joked and had a few drinks with people he once would have taken pleasure in locking up. Had there been a piano in the place he might have knocked out a few tunes the way he used to at police functions. But, apparently, this was all a false front. Because when he returned to Sydney to face his demons, his cheery façade allegedly crumbled.

But it's amazing what a little quiet reflection in jail can do. Three months later, locked in Kirkconnell Correctional Centre in rural New South Wales, Rogerson pulled back from the brink of what his defence counsel had painted as imminent mental collapse.

During his first jail sentence, at Berrima Prison in the early 1990s, he had made clocks and dining tables to sell to an eager outside market. This time he concentrated more on matters of the mind during what he now chirpily calls ‘my 12-month sabbatical.'

As well as reading a bible sent by an anonymous well wisher – not his clergyman son-in-law, he says – he took on sudoku puzzles. He soon became the jail champion, a remarkable achievement for a 64-year-old man so recently threatened by mental decay. He even noted solutions in an exercise book so he could memorise winning patterns.

By the time he was paroled in February, Rogerson had recovered so well he seemed almost as sharp as a psychiatrist, barrister or journalist – probably sharper than some. In fact, when the authors of this book called him he recalled precise details of a conversation we'd had two years
earlier. It is amazing what twelve months of rehabilitation can do for a prisoner willing to put in the effort.

Either that or the prosecutor was right all along, and his ‘breakdown' wasn't an excusable lapse but a lapsed excuse.

Before Avery, they used to make heroes of people like Rogerson … His greatest mistake was being born 20 years too late.
– Andrew Keenan, journalist,1986

ROGERSON was a good shot – a bit too quick on the draw, some say – but drawing a bead on the man himself is not easy. He seems open and disarmingly friendly, with the knockabout Paul Hogan charm that served him so well as a policeman, partly because it contrasted with the ‘beige in colour, decamping in a northerly direction' style so many of his colleagues put on with the uniform. Mostly, it's a routine.

But, like Hogan the bridge rigger, Rogerson the colourful cop was smarter than he let on. At work he mastered guns, handcuffs, cars, typewriters, cameras and all the other tools of trade. After hours, he was a handy engineer and builder – his boilermaker father and others had taught him to weld and to make things.

But go into his home and the most striking thing you notice is the number of books there. Hundreds of them line the shelves – and many are biographies, memoirs and histories. This, in a way, is the most surprising thing about him – that he is an intelligent, self-taught man who has acted a part most of his adult life.

There are other surprises. Where a stranger might expect Rogerson to be careful about security, he is nonchalant
about it. He and his (second wife) Anne have dogs – but they are little friendly terriers, not savage guard dogs. One of the worst things about being jailed in 2005, he says in a revealing moment, was that one of the little dogs, Mitzi, died of a tumour while he was away. Anne was distraught and he was powerless to help or comfort her. That's when a note of bitterness creeps into his voice. It is never far away.

The trouble with being Roger Rogerson, he concedes, is that the man gets buried under the myth – beneath the stories, the jokes, the lies, the exaggerations, the colour and entertainment of it all.

He blames
Blue Murder
for this. People think they know all about him because they have seen the compelling 1995 television series based on events in the early 1980s Sydney underworld. A ‘docudrama' that became cult viewing, it blends the marketing appeal of perceived fact with the narrative drive of fiction. Young people who were barely born when Rogerson was a policeman take ‘Blue Murder' tours of the real-life pubs, restaurants and streets where the series was shot.

Rogerson thinks
Blue Murder
was brilliant entertainment. But he also thinks it was murder on any chance he had of salvaging his tattered reputation. He argues that to see it as a balanced study of police corruption in Sydney is like mistaking
Saving Private Ryan
for a history of World War 2, or Heath Ledger for the real Ned Kelly. Compression, dramatisation and the legal necessity to fictionalise, exaggerate or delete characters and events inevitably skews the story – in ways not always obvious to the audience.

The fact that the series was suppressed in New South Wales for several years because of ongoing trials gave it the
cachet of being ‘banned' – and a quasi-judicial credibility. If it might sway a jury in a real-life trial then it must be right, mustn't it?

Rogerson argues – unsurprisingly – that the charismatic but undeniably bent cop bearing his name in the series is nothing like him. ‘For a start they had him smoking – I've never smoked in my life,' he fumes. And? ‘They had him inviting Neddy Smith to barbecues at my house. I never let (Smith) near my house or told him where it was.'

Item by item, Rogerson picks holes in the treatment of ‘his' character, using the lawyer's tactic of finding specific flaws in the opposing case to persuade a jury that the whole thing is suspect. He knows a thing or two about lawyers' tricks: unlike most police, he was never nervous of submitting himself to cross-examination in trials of those he had arrested, and was a dangerous witness that mostly acquitted himself well, boosting his status among other cops.

One of his pet stories underlines the dilemma of being portrayed as a handsome villain by a fine actor (Richard Roxburgh) who uncannily resembles Rogerson when he was younger.

‘When
Blue Murder
came out I sat down to watch it with my wife Anne,' he says. ‘After watching for a while she turned to me and said: “I didn't realise you were so good looking when you were young”.'

It has become a stock joke, but he knows it is on him: behind the laughter is the fact the televised illusion will always outweigh what he says and does. He has been defamed and shamed and flattered at the same time and is powerless to stop it.

That
Blue Murder
is art rather than history gets lost in
the other media coverage of the last 25 years. What the film-makers did – for good legal and dramatic reasons – was put Rogerson (and his criminal associate and informer ‘Neddy' Smith) front and centre of a sinister but generally plausible account of police corruption and criminal behaviour.

Potential defamation action (funded by the deep pockets of the police association) meant it would have been too risky for film-makers or reporters to highlight – or even question – the shadowy conduct of particular police who had not been successfully prosecuted, or at least named in Parliament. The few with convictions carry the can for the many to have avoided prosecution.