Underbelly (27 page)

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.

He might be slumming it a bit now, but the air of steely resolve is still close to the surface. The sense of self. When he turns up at the hotels to do the show, he is wearing neatly pressed slacks and button-up shirt, and his conservative black shoes have a parade ground shine. To look at him, he could be a recently retired inspector heading off to chair a Neighbourhood Watch meeting.

On one hand he is holding a mask of respectability to the world, sticking to his script that he is a wronged man sacrificed for political expediency in a war between old guard and new. But as the respectable world gradually turns its
back, his old networks decay, and age and physical injuries curb his ability to work, he also exploits the myth that's grown around him. He doesn't have much choice.

Like old gunfighters, old boxers and old singers down on their luck, he has to play the only card left to him – turning a dollar from people's curiosity about the famous. Or, in his case, the infamous.

Buffalo Bill became a circus act, Joe Louis a ‘greeter' at a Las Vegas casino, Leo Sayer played cheap clubs for 20 years. And Rogerson does the ‘sportsmen's night' circuit, mining the myth that, in his heart, he knows is a fair stretch from the reality of a grandfather with a crook shoulder and a limp.

He's too smart to believe his own bullshit. Still, the work ethic beats strongly in him, and he has never dodged a quick ‘earn'. And sometimes he gets a surprise at who turns up to see him.

Before a show at a pub in Sydney's west, a middle-aged man approached him in the car park and shook hands. His name was Brian Harland. Back in Novermber, 1980, Rogerson had arrested an armed jail escapee who shot dead Brian's young brother, Rick Harland.

Rick, a 21-year-old apprentice, was awarded a posthumous bravery medal for chasing the escapees after they robbed the hotel where he worked part-time. Hours later Rogerson cornered the armed killer, Gary Purdey, in a backyard garage. Rogerson could have shot him, but didn't. Brian Harland often wishes he had.

Every year until she died Rick and Brian Harland's mother sent Rogerson a Christmas card thanking him for treating her family so kindly during the murder trial.

Brian Harland is still grateful. ‘Roger was the only one in court to say that Rick was a brave young fella. The others just called him “the body” and “the deceased” but he could see what it meant to Mum. He was at the top of the tree then and now he's doing it tough. I went to see him as a show of support.'

The police force awarded Rogerson its highest award in 1980 for arresting Purdey. Michael Drury won it the next year. Which proves the adage that it's a small world: just three years later, one police hero stood accused of taking blood money to have the other police hero shot.

Rogerson is a man of his word … but he killed men in the line of duty, was very vicious and wouldn't hesitate to lock you up and flog you badly – with the help of other police, of course.
– Arthur ‘Neddy' Smith, criminal

MABEL Rogerson was 90 at the time of writing but her mind, her voice and her personality were strong. After 81 years, she still had traces of her native Wales in her voice. The first thing she tells a stranger is about her family's ‘pirate ancestor' – the privateer Sir Henry Morgan, knighted by Charles II for plundering Spanish ships and settlements in the Caribbean in the mid-17th century.

‘Sir Henry was very clever. As long as he brought back booty for the monarch all was forgiven,' she says. ‘He didn't end on a noose. He ended up a gentleman farmer and died a natural death.

‘My mother's grandfather had his own sailing ships and worked from the Cardiff docks. He was descended from the Morgans. Our family moved to Pontypridd when my
mother was a teenager. That's where Tom Jones comes from,' she adds helpfully.

Rogerson jokes that the old lady's story of the pirate relative is her oblique way of explaining – or even justifying – her rogue son, but she would never be so disloyal as to hint such a thing. She is touchingly staunch to her first-born despite the heartache he must have caused her for 20 years.

‘Roger has had a raw deal, you know,' she says. ‘He was taught the value of things and was determined to do the best at whatever he took on. He has always been straight in all his dealings and I don't think it's true the things they say about him. I think it's jealousy.'

Roger Caleb Rogerson was born in Sydney 3 January 1941, and spent his early childhood in Bondi before the family moved (with Mabel's parents) to a farmlet at Bankstown that they called, rather grandly, ‘Castlefield'. Because, the old lady explains, ‘our house was our castle and it was in the middle of a field'. They had a cow called Daisy, goats, hens and a horse – an old trotter – that Roger rode to Bankstown Central School, where he went with hundreds of other children whose parents were migrants. He learned piano and played the organ at the local Church of Christ. Later, when he married, he would buy a piano on time payment terms before he bought a television.

Roger was named after his father Owen's nickname, ‘Rodgie'. The middle name ‘Caleb' came from his maternal grandfather, Caleb Boxley, a former coalminer, who had migrated to Australia from Wales with his wife Gwendoline when Mabel was nine. The three generations lived happily together. ‘We had the most precious thing a family can have – a home filled with love,' Mabel recalls.

Mabel was, and is, highly respectable and proud of her mother Gwendoline's ship-owning, landed ancestors – and of the fact that a great uncle on the Boxley side of the family was a prosperous English manufacturer of steel chains who helped set up the Salvation Army.

There is a touch of frustrated ambition about Mabel Rogerson that might explain why her oldest son grew up to be keen to prove himself by doing well financially. As a teenager in the depression, Mabel made do with a poorlypaid job as a dressmaker and machinist and her dream of going on to university withered. ‘We'd not the means, dear' she sighs, all these years later.