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.
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 c
adet 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
Missing, believed dead: the studio shot released by police a week after Revelle disappeared. COURTESY BALMAIN FAMILY
A creep – but is he a killer? Gavin Owen Samer pawned his girlfriend’s clarinet to pay a pimp but insists he did not harm Revelle Balmain. COURTESY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Mr Big Mouth: Lennie McPherson in the frame, talking. BRENDAN ESPOSITO: FAIRFAX
Mr Fixit and Mr Big: George Freeman and Lennie McPherson at Paddles Anderson’s funeral. JACKIE HAYNES: FAIRFAX
Crocodile smile: charming, cunning and treacherous, Freeman knew bent cops who reputedly gave Christopher Dale Flannery his last lift. DAVID TROOD: FAIRFAX
Locked and loaded: a pregnant Deb Locke set to tip a bucket on fellow cops. ANDREW TAYLOR: FAIRFAX
Violent night: Barry Michael paid twice for his title win over Lester Ellis. Once in the ring, later in a nightclub brawl.
COURTESY BARRY MICHAEL
Alphonse Gangitano: his goons held down Barry Michael while he bit and bashed him. SLY INK ARCHIVES
Blood brothers: the veteran Michael consoles his young opponent Ellis after taking his world title. Ellis forgave him. Gangitano didn’t. COURTESY BARRY MICHAEL
Wrong way: ‘Big Bill’ Waterhouse with trouble-prone son Robbie and loyal daughter Louise at the height of the Fine Cotton debacle. ANDREW TAYLOR: FAIRFAX
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