Underbelly (28 page)

If young Rogerson got a sense of frustrated entitlement and middle-class ambition from his ambitious mother, then he might have got a little working class grit and humour from his father. In some ways Owen Rogerson came from a harder place and worked all his life with his hands.

Owen was a Yorkshireman, born in 1901. Adventurous, bold and practical, he did his time as a boilermaker in the Hull shipyards before migrating to Australia in 1920. He went broke with a partner attempting to establish a peanut farm in the Northern Territory and then the Depression brought him to Sydney to work on building the Harbour Bridge. He was on the crew that heated and hammered the last rivets to finish the bridge. After the war broke out in 1939 he worked on the docks fitting ships with gun emplacements, and after the war worked in the railway workshops. Compared with the girl he would marry, he was a bit of a knockabout.

Owen had met Mabel at a dance in 1939 and they married later the same year, on the eve of war. She was 23. He
was 38 but he looked young and had a silver tongue and told her he was 30. She did not uncover the deception for years and was not amused. According to Roger, ‘Mum didn't talk to him for a while but they must have made up because my little brother was born later'. All the loyal Mabel will say now is that her Owen was a ‘man's man' and a good talker.

The thing about Rogerson being descended from Sir Henry Morgan, pirate by royal appointment, is that in a sense history repeated itself.

Sir Henry, essentially a mercenary, was allowed rob Britain's Spanish enemies if he shared the loot with the king. This licensed piracy in the Caribbean was a forerunner of the system in Sydney before John Avery took over the police force in 1984. Police controlled crime on the tacit understanding some of them skimmed payment – for themselves and key politicians – from gambling, prostitution, abortion and drug rackets. Those who didn't like it kept quiet. It wasn't wise to buck a system that went right back to Sydney's corrupt and colourful origins under the ‘Rum Corps' of early settlement days.

This was the system that the then unsuspecting Rogerson joined when he became a police cadet just after his seventeenth birthday in 1958.

It was a turning point, perhaps. His mother had wanted him to go on to university and study to be an engineer, and Rogerson himself had considered joining the air force. In fact, he said he'd ‘try' the police first and could switch later if he felt like it. Had he done that, it could all have been so different. He succeeded at anything he took on. Had he gone into the services, he would have served during the Vietnam War period.

He had the brains, the ambition, the self-discipline and the cunning to play the game, the streak of ruthlessness shared by executives and sports coaches and successful officers. He could easily have ended up a senior officer. In which case, he would be likely to be in a reefer jacket with the other chaps at the Naval and Military Club instead of doing shows in beer barns with Jacko and Chopper and the rest.

As it happened, New South Wales had probably the best training for young police in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Rogerson and his young contemporaries were drilled in touch typing, shorthand and law and by the time they graduated three years later, the best of them were highly proficient in the practical skills of police work – writing reports, processing paper work and giving evidence in court. And Rogerson was one of the best and brightest of his year.

One of his classmates, Barry Leaney, was a high achiever and a good student. They shared the same birth date; they graduated four weeks apart and stayed in touch early in their careers. They both drove Volkswagens. When Leaney's broke down, the capable Rogerson fitted it with a new clutch for him. Later, they went on holiday to the Gold Coast together, where Leaney met the girl he would marry. Rogerson was best man at the wedding. The Leaneys went to Rogerson's first wedding in 1965 but they drifted apart later.

It wasn't until much later, Leaney says carefully, that he realised they had taken ‘separate roads' – and that he had been lucky not to be recruited by the crime squads. Leaney worked in Special Branch, which monitored fringe political
movements for potential threats – an important but relatively passive role. In contrast, Rogerson started with 21 Division, a ‘flying squad' used to clean up trouble spots, and later moved to the armed hold-up squad, where he would make his name.

Leaney thinks he was insulated from corruption because he was in a branch that crime squad detectives sneered at because it was intelligence gathering rather than ‘catching crooks'.

Once, late in the 1960s, the Leaneys visited the Rogersons at home. They noticed how many expensive electrical goods their hosts had. Leaney merely assumed Rogerson was getting more overtime than he did. His wife, however, doubted that. She was later proved right.

Two years ago Leaney was organising a 45th class reunion. He invited Rogerson but he said he wouldn't come. ‘Roger has thick enough skin but he didn't want to embarrass anyone else in case some of them left when he turned up,' Leaney says.

‘I feel sorry for the man. I would not turn my back on him if I saw him in the street. A lot has happened, but he still remains a good bloke.'

There was one prisoner telling everybody he'd been shot by me … I said to him ‘Look, mate, the people I've shot don't end up in the hospital, they go straight to the morgue,' and that quietened him down.
– Roger Rogerson, 1990

CALL any one of many of tough ex-Sydney cops – and some serving ones – and mention Rogerson's name and
men whose sharp memories for names, dates and descriptions are their tools of trade suddenly go vague and selective. They recall Rogerson's achievements – the arrests, the commendations – but the rest is a blur. They can't wait to hang up. They are not rude or abusive but would obviously rather go to the dentist to have teeth drilled than talk about the man they knew so well.

‘I'm nearly 81, you know' quavers Noel Morey, who led the feared armed hold-up squad when Rogerson was at his peak. ‘My memory isn't too good.' He is distracted because his wife has heard the R-word and urges him to be quiet and get off the phone. Mrs Morey, a highly respectable woman, was once called as a witness – about Rogerson's alibi on the night of the Drury shooting – and it could be that she heard enough to cure her of singing the praises of her husband's keen young offsider, as Rogerson once was.

Call another ex-policeman, a senior security executive with a big firm, and it's as if his telephone has turned into a tiger snake. No names, he says warily, parrying questions about Rogerson until he steps outside his office so that none of his colleagues hear him raking over old scores.

He is guarded but explains the mixed feelings he and many other former police colleagues have about Rogerson.

He remembers a time when a crew of detectives were sent up the north coast on a job. They could have spent a day lazing around while they waited for something to happen but Rogerson wouldn't hear of wasting time.

It turned out that he had a distant relative, a reclusive older man who had fallen on hard times and was living in
‘a pigsty' of a shack. Rogerson felt sorry for him, so he took the crew to the shack and they cleaned it up from top to bottom. Like painting his pensioner neighbour's house, it was beyond the call of duty, but that was typical of the good angels in his nature. He was officer material, a natural leader whose ‘dash' could make him a hero in some circumstances and a villain in others. It takes nerve to break the rules that most people obey, which is why the law-abiding majority are fascinated by true crime.

The former colleague says: ‘In ways he was fundamentally kind – and a pillar of courage and competence, with no reverse gear.'

He pauses. ‘But I am a friend of Michael Drury, which makes it hard. All I can tell you is that Roger was a complex character.'

I like reading Jeffrey Archer. I'm reading his prison diaries at the moment. He's an ex-cop and an ex-con like I am – but I don't think I'll be getting a Lordship.
– Roger Rogerson, 2006

THERE is ‘nobody more ex- than an ex-cop' the saying goes. When you get drummed out of the job and jailed that applies in spades. So what does the future hold for Rogerson?

If he ever did have black money stashed away – apart from the $110,000 over which he was first prosecuted in 1990 – there is no sign of it now. Four trials and a divorce will do that.

Mostly, he is determined to keep up a brave front. He talks of leaving Sydney one day, perhaps when his wife finishes work. They dream of buying a little place in Tasmania. The way he describes it, he yearns to set up a few acres to recapture the innocence of childhood when the family – all three generations – had their farmlet at Bankstown in the 1950s, complete with chooks and ducks and goats and a cow and their beloved terriers. Another ‘Castlefield', if not completely cut off from stares and whispers, then at least further away.

In hours of talking over several days, Rogerson is cheerful and friendly but it's clear he holds up a mask. He avoids any note of regret and pleads always that he's a good cop battered by forces beyond his control. That's his story and he's sticking to it. No-one does it better.

Despite the stoic shell, he sometimes sounds wistful about the family life wrecked by his fall. He says that after one of his daughters accidentally overheard a story about one of his transgressions, she said to him, ‘Mum had some good reasons to leave you, didn't she?' and he had answered, ‘She probably did.'

He jokes that he reads the death notices each day to see which of his enemies he has outlived – but the bitterness is real. He says he was made a scapegoat by senior officers currying favour with the new regime.

The question is not whether he was guilty but that others were, too – something he has never said, but which must bite deep. Especially when he was in jail and he knew that others – the ones that got away – were soaking up the
sunshine in their weekenders up the coast, or retired in Queensland on the proceeds of their ill-gotten gains.

Only once is he truly angry. ‘They want to see me in the gutter, a broken-down drunk,' he grates. ‘But I won't let it happen. I'm too proud.'

Then he recovers and makes a joke of infamy. ‘I've got broad shoulders,' he says, ‘even if one of them is stuffed.'

Doomed beauty: model and dancer Revelle Balmain before she vanished.
COURTESY BALMAIN FAMILY

Innocence: teenage Revelle with her father Ivor.

Happy family: Revelle with her mother Jan and sister Suellen.
COURTESY BALMAIN FAMILY