Mr Rent-a-Kill’s widow Kathleen Flannery says she was offered $50,000 from Roger Rogerson
The widow of Sydney hitman Christopher Dale Flannery claimed in an explosive police interview she was offered $50,000 by the country’s most infamous corrupt cop, Roger Rogerson, as restitution for her husband’s murder. The blood money offer came days after Flannery — known as Mr Rent-a-kill — vanished.
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Call it blood money. Days after her feared hitman husband Christopher Dale Flannery disappeared, Kathleen Flannery claimed she was offered $50,000 by the country’s most infamous corrupt cop, Roger Rogerson.
The bizarre offer, showing fresh links between now-jailed Rogerson and the murder of the country’s most notorious gun for hire, is revealed in secret police files and court documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph.
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The cash was to “atone for the loss of her husband”, Mrs Flannery told the detectives investigating Sydney’s deadly underworld wars of the mid-1980s.
She turned the money down.
After 34 years Flannery’s murder remains unsolved. The now-defunct National Crime Authority — then the country’s elite crime-fighting body — never investigated Rogerson in connection with it and he wasn’t even questioned about his relationship with Flannery for almost 10 years, the files reveal.
This is despite a meeting set up by Rogerson at the then Cricketers’ Club in Sydney, the day before Flannery went missing, between the two men and two Sydney detectives.
It was suspected that Rogerson arranged the meeting to he could secretly follow Flannery home and find out where he was hiding after an attempt on his life.
The NCA charged another man with Flannery’s murder but the charge was withdrawn for lack of evidence at the committal stage. Rogerson’s blood money offer was never made public — until now.
GANGLAND DEATHS
It is listed in police running sheets from the Murder Drug Task Force, which was set up to investigate the bloody gangland killings in 1984 and 1985 of heroin dealer Tony “Spaghetti” Eustace, 42, who had sold Flannery a pistol, Danny Chubb, 43, who controlled a heroin network, drug dealer Barry McCann, 44, and SP bookie and armed robber Mick Sayers, 38.
Rogerson was at the height of his police career when he arrested Flannery and two other men in 1974 in Sydney for an armed robbery on a David Jones store in Perth.
Flannery was extradited to Perth but acquitted.
Flannery moved to Sydney from Melbourne in 1980 with his wife and two children and became the muscle for crime lord George David Freeman, meeting him every Monday at the Eastern Bath House in Coogee, where Freeman passed on racing tips.
He was also recruited by Freeman’s associate, Lenny McPherson, dubbed Sydneyss “Mr Big” of organised crime, to kill the man McPherson believed had thrown his poker machines from an ethnic club and replaced them.
MR RENT-A-KILL
Known as Mr Rent-a-Kill, Christopher Flannery was 36 when at 8.15am on May 9, 1984 he tucked his loaded .38 calibre pistol — bought from Eustace — into the waistband of his tracksuit and walked out of apartment 1401 at the plus Connaught Building overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park carrying a passport in a false name and either $50 or $40,000, depending on who is telling the story.
There was evidence Flannery was heading to Freeman’s Yowie Bay house but after his car wouldn’t start he took a taxi to the airport and was never seen again.
Sources said the cocaine-snorting Flannery had become a time bomb and was as mad as a cut snake after a January attempt on his life.
MYSTERY OFFER
That evening, the feisty Kath Flannery reported his disappearance to police and maintained police officers were behind his murder. The city’s underworld breathed a sigh of relief that he was gone.
The task force running sheets show that on August 1985, Mrs Flannery “related that she had been offered $50,000 by a policeman on behalf of George Freeman to atone for the loss of her husband”.
She later told detectives the policeman was Rogerson and said she thought he would have been making the offer on behalf of McPherson.
“If Rogerson was offering $50,000, he must have been given $100,000. He had the shortest pockets in Sydney,” one source said.
Rogerson was dismissed from the police in April 1986 and was later acquitted of paying Flannery $50,000 to kill undercover drug squad detective Mick Drury in 1984, who Rogerson had been accused of bribing.
NCA INVESTIGATION
The Murder Drug Task Force never interviewed Rogerson, the inquest into Flannery’s death in 1997 was told. The NCA was handed the investigation
“It does not appear that the NCA investigated any possible link between Rogerson and Flannery with respect to Flannery’s disappearance,” counsel assisting the inquest Peter Johnson, who went on to become a Supreme Court judge, said. The reason for the lapse is not known.
The claims by Mrs Flannery of the $50,000 offer were denied by Rogerson, who was questioned for the first time at the inquest. Most of his testimony was “a claim of failed recollection”, Mr Johnson said in a submission.
State Coroner Greg Glass found Flannery had been betrayed by someone he trusted and the evidence was that Rogerson was involved or at least knew what happened.
In 2016 Rogerson was convicted with another ex-cop, Glen McNamara, of the murder of aspiring drug dealer Jamie Gao.
Originally published as Mr Rent-a-Kill’s widow Kathleen Flannery says she was offered $50,000 from Roger Rogerson
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