[2][3] During his career, Rogerson received at least thirteen awards for bravery, outstanding policemanship and devotion to duty,[4][5] before being implicated in two killings, bribery, assault and drug dealing,[6] and then being dismissed from the force in 1986.
Smith was a convicted heroin dealer, rapist and armed robber who claimed Rogerson gave him the "green light" to commit crimes in New South Wales, while Flannery specialised in contract killing.
Their trial was started in July 2015, but was aborted when McNamara's barrister Charles Waterstreet made a reference to Rogerson "killing two or three people when he was in the police force".
[12]: 10 Rogerson worked on some of the biggest cases of the early 1970s, including the Toecutter Gang Murder and the Whiskey Au Go Go fire in Brisbane.
[13] By 1978, Rogerson's reputation was sufficient to gain convictions based on the strength of unsigned records of interviews with prisoners (known as "police verbals").
This was tainted by Purdey's claims that Rogerson assaulted him, prevented him from calling his solicitor and typed up to five different records of the interview.
Drury claims he refused to accept a bribe Rogerson offered in exchange for evidence tampering in a heroin trafficking trial of convicted Melbourne drug dealer Alan Williams.
[19] Rogerson was dismissed from the New South Wales Police Force on 11 April 1986, while suspended from active service since 30 November 1984 as a result of the Drury investigation.
He also became an entertainer, telling stories of his police activities in a spoken-word stage show called The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, with former Australian footballers Warwick Capper and Mark "Jacko" Jackson.
[20] In 1988, Rogerson told a Bulletin reporter that he and the other lead detectives fabricated evidence in the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub fire investigation.
[27][28][12] During legal proceedings surrounding the trial against suspects involved in the 2009 contract murder of Michael McGurk, the Supreme Court heard evidence that, while in the Cooma Correctional Centre in 2014, Rogerson, McNamara, and Fortunato "Lucky" Gattellari attempted to extort Ron Medich, a businessman and suspect for masterminding the murder of McGurk.
[32] On 21 January 2015, he and his co-accused, Glen McNamara (also a former police detective), were committed to stand trial over the alleged murder.
[34] On the second day, the trial was aborted because of the potential prejudice caused after McNamara's then-barrister Charles Waterstreet made a reference to Rogerson "killing two or three people when he was in the police force".
[35] One detective witness told The Daily Telegraph it was like tracking the "stars of Amateur Hour", regarding the killing of Jamie Gao.
[36] On 2 September 2016, Justice Geoffrey Bellew sentenced Rogerson and McNamara to life in prison, with the statement "The joint criminal enterprise to which each offender was a party was extensive in its planning, brutal in its execution and callous in its aftermath".