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The Charismatic Crooked Cop

Think of crooked cops and it’s all but impossible not to think of Roger ‘the Dodger’ Rogerson. It seems that Rogerson has been in the headlines for one thing or another over the past 30 years and as recently as February 2005 he was sent back to prison. It all seems such a terrible end for a man who really was one of New South Wales’ finest and bravest police officers.

Roger Caleb Rogerson joined the New South Wales police as a cadet in 1958 and from the very beginning showed signs of having the dedication and qualities to make an excellent investigator. Rogerson joined the force in an era when police officers were held in high profile by the media and the likes of Fred ‘Froggy’ Krahe and the Ray ‘the Gunner’ Kelly – who had shot and killed two men in course of apprehending them – were like folk heroes.

But Rogerson was going to be much more than a cop who claimed fame through killing villains in the streets of Sydney. He had much more to offer than that. He was handsome, charismatic, a proficient touch typist, took excellent shorthand, was a prolific joke teller and orator and played a good piano. To top it off he was as tough as nails and fearless in leading his troops into battle. Roger Rogerson was the perfect all-round cop the media was looking for to lift the New South Wales police out of the terrible reputation it had gathered through the Akin Liberal government’s years of corruption at the highest levels.

Under the wing of Fred Krahe and colourful superintendent Don Ferguson, Rogerson learned all the tricks in the book – some of them certainly not in the police manual – and by 1974 he was moved to the armed hold-up squad. He witnessed his first killing two years later when his squad shot dead armed robber Phillip Western at Avoca Beach.

In 1977 Rogerson gained celebrity status from the press when he shot and killed an armed man who was trying to rob a courier of $60,000. In 1979 Rogerson was one of the police officers present when armed robber Gordon Thomas was shot dead in Rose Bay. In 1980 Rogerson was awarded the prestigious Peter Mitchell Award for the most outstanding performance of 1980 when, armed with a pump-action shotgun, he had taken on a car load of bank robbers and shot out the tyres of their vehicle at close range as they tried to make their getaway.

The image of Rogerson in his bulletproof vest blazing away with his shotgun at the villains was the image that the press needed to make him the new face of the allegedly incorruptible New South Wales police. They gave Rogerson as much press as he wanted and made him the police hero the public was looking for. Sadly, they were very much mistaken. The force was rotten and Rogerson was going to make the most of it.

By the early 1980s Rogerson was seen more and more associating with the likes of hit man Christopher Dale ‘Mr Rentakill’ Flannery and the head of the street gangsters, the most notorious gangster of his time, Neddy Smith. Rogerson claimed on TV that he hung out with the criminal milieu because they kept him informed about underworld events and so he could keep them under his control. But it was really for much more sinister reasons. They were his business partners.

The public beginning of Roger Rogerson’s fall from grace was when he shot heroin dealer Warren Lanfranchi twice at point-blank range in a lane in suburban Sydney, killing him instantly. The gangster Neddy Smith had driven Lanfranchi to the meeting allegedly to give Rogerson a $10,000 bribe to get him (Lanfranchi) off charges of shooting at a police officer. Instead Rogerson killed Lanfranchi, allegedly took the money, planted a 90-year-old faulty gun in Lanfranchi’s hand and claimed he shot the drug dealer in self-defence.

While a coroner’s jury found that Rogerson had shot Lanfranchi while endeavouring to make an arrest, they refused to find that it was in self-defence or in the course of duty. The whole thing stunk of corruption and, for the first time, the public could see another side of Roger Rogerson.

At the same time rumours were rampant that Neddy Smith had been granted a ‘green light’ by corrupt New South Wales detectives led by Roger Rogerson, which gave Smith the right to commit armed robberies, sell heroin and kill whoever he wished, as long as it wasn’t a police officer. Naturally the police got their cut. According to the rumours they even set up some of the armed robberies carried out by Smith.

In 1985 Rogerson was implicated in, although eventually found not to have had any involvement with, the 1983 attempted murder of undercover police officer Michael Drury. Drury was shot in his Chatswood home by the hit man Chris Flannery. In 1987 Rogerson was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice when he was caught on camera closing a bank account and receiving cheques to the value of $111,000. The cheques were in turn paid to an associate in return for a false contract to justify the money.

Rogerson was found guilty on the conspiracy charges, sentenced to eight years in jail and booted out of the police force. He was released in December 1990 after a successful appeal against his conviction, but the Crown successfully appealed to the High Court and in 1992 Rogerson was sent back to jail where he served three years and nine months.

But that was not the end of it. In February 2005 Roger Rogerson, 64, was jailed for two-and-a-half-years for giving one count of false evidence to the New South Wales Police Integrity Commission in May 1999, when he was called to give evidence to a commission whose objective was to weed out corruption. Rogerson faced a maximum of five years’ jail for the offence, but judge Peter Berman took into account Rogerson’s guilty plea, his age, evidence of good character in recent years and the mental hardship Rogerson would suffer in custody. Judge Berman ordered that he serve just one year of his sentence.

Roger Rogerson was released on 17 February 2006 and within days was doing the pub circuit with a highly successful on-stage comedy act comprising himself, author and self-confessed murderer Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, and ex-Aussie rules bad boy Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson. From last reports it was bringing the house down.

It also inspired the joke: What’s got four teeth and seven thongs? The front row at a Chopper, Dodger and Jacko gig.