Roger Rogerson: Duncan McNab on decorated cop turned criminal

Roger Rogerson was not only charismatic and evil, but a woefully inept criminal, says a former police colleague.

Rogerson being taken away from the Supreme Court to prison.

Roger Rogerson: From Decorated Policeman to Convicted Criminal — The Inside Story, by Duncan McNab (Hachette, 329pp, $32.99)

The epithet old-school is applied approvingly to those individuals of maturity and experience who embody time-honoured values such as integrity, self-discipline and practicality. But, as Duncan McNab demonstrates in this compelling and unapologetically unsympathetic account of Australia’s most notorious former policeman, a person can also be old-school in a negative sense.

The Inside Story.

Now aged in his mid-70s, Roger Caleb Rogerson was once seen as an exceptionally capable and resolute NSW police officer, having joined the police cadets as a teenager. From the early 1960s until the mid-80s, he gained a reputation for being just as tough and ruthless as the armed robbers and drug dealers with whom, on occasion, he would exchange gunfire on the mean streets of Sydney.

Rogerson was involved in the violent deaths of several criminals in the line of duty. He was a highly decorated detective, typically seen wearing neat plaid ties and shiny shoes while carrying the pump-action shotgun used by plainclothes police officers back in those days. Even in the grainy news photos taken at crime scenes in his heyday, you can see the sparkle in Rogerson’s eye as well as the steeliness there. He seemed to be enjoying his work.

In this book, McNab, a true-crime author who himself is a former NSW policeman from the same period as Rogerson, characterises his subject as evil and corrupt rather than heroic, more of a villain than a maverick.

McNab met Rogerson when the former was a junior police officer: “Roger was memorable because he was utterly charming and lacked the aloofness of many senior coppers. He immediately engaged with me, finding out where I’d been, where I hoped to head — smart, probing questions that also left you feeling part of a greater team of blokes who gave a damn.”

This new account of Rogerson’s life and crimes appears in the wake of the guilty verdict earlier this year that resulted from a murder trial at which Rogerson pleaded not guilty.

Rogerson in Sydney in 1981.

The jury accepted that Rogerson, together with Glen McNamara — another ex-copper who, after leaving the NSW Police Force, reinvented himself as an anti-corruption campaigner — had lured a 20-year-old student and aspiring drug dealer named Jamie Gao to his death. The two accused men planned to steal the large quantity of ice Gao brought with him to the meeting. Gao’s body was discovered floating in waters off Cronulla. He had been shot twice in the chest.

The prosecution contended Rogerson and McNamara intended to sell 2.78kg of ice and keep the proceeds. After a trial lasting more than 80 days, during which the two accused men turned on each other, each former detective was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In addition to reconstructing the events that led to Gao’s death and the subsequent arrest and trial of Rogerson and McNamara, McNab seeks to explain how these two one-time law enforcers ended up engaging in what is known as a joint criminal enterprise.

To borrow from Oscar Wilde, McNab tells the story of the life and crimes of Roger Rogerson with all the added bitterness of an old friend. He certainly doesn’t hold back in condemning Rogerson and McNamara as inept criminals with no understanding of technology or much in the way of situational awareness. (He goes even further, at one point criticising Rogerson’s parents for being “unimaginative” in naming their first son Roger.)

McNab relates how the whole plan to rip off and then bump off Gao was flawed from the outset. Rogerson and McNamara were so used to doing things analog that they neglected to consider how CCTV might follow their every move. McNab reckons the murder of Gao “is probably the most electronically recorded crime in Australian history”.

He notes the damage Rogerson and McNamara have done to the reputation of former colleagues with whom they served, as well as the NSW Police Force as a whole.

Both Rogerson and McNamara are published authors who have made innumerable media appearances and attended speaking engagements. Rogerson had a four-hour documentary made about his life and was portrayed memorably by actor Richard Roxburgh in the TV series Blue Murder.

According to McNab, there are some people who will never believe Rogerson has done anything wrong, despite his going to jail more than once for crimes encompassing perverting the course of justice and perjury as well as murder.

“Rogerson has always had an almost cult-like following, with one former colleague telling me that he had a ‘mesmerising’ quality — a combination of the smile, the twinkling eyes and a charm that made you feel special when you were acknowledged by him.”

McNab thinks McNamara fell under Rogerson’s spell and became just the latest in a long series of acolytes.

“McNamara was like many of his predecessors — he craved a strong and decisive male in his life, would do as he was told, was easily manipulated and didn’t ask too many questions.”

One reason for Rogerson’s ultimate downfall was that he did not know when to stop. “When Roger got out of prison in 2006, we all should have known that he’d go back to what he did well — crime. Ego, power, greed — along with a strong work ethic — were still driving him hard in his mid-60s.”

While a strong work ethic would normally be considered an old-school virtue, in this case it proved to be a vice.

Widely viewed back in the day as a good bloke — not least by the author’s younger self — Roger Rogerson is now judged by Duncan McNab to be a thoroughly bad old man.

Simon Caterson is an author and critic.