Calls me and he says, men died because of what Roger Rogerson did. I don't want to talk over the phone. Come and see me and I'll tell you the whole rotten.
Story, Isn't it perfect.
He's gone down the street and grabbed a willing hooker to whack a wig on and played the part for fifteen minutes.
And where we going?
As I say in the book, Philip Western might have fired the gun, might have shot the bank manager, but Roger loaded the gun.
He did.
I'm Andrew Rule is his life in crimes. Today we have a distinguished guest from Sin City. I've long been a critic of things that come out of Sydney. You know, criminals, police, some judges, a few lawyers. But I've never been guilty of criticizing Sydney journos because I've always found that they were among the best in the business. And one of the best of the best. I'm forced to say this because it's true, is Neil Mercer, who is our.
Guests here today.
As I was saying to him a few minutes ago, he's one of my few contemporaries. Were both the old blokes playing in time on Neil mate No, you've distinguished yourself by writing a new book which is out any minute now, called The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop. And some would think it's a well plowed paddock the stories about Roger Rogerson and his mate Neddie Smith. But you have uncovered fresh layers of material that I personally found fascinating and that I think dedicated readers of true crime
will really appreciate. For any listeners who have lived under a rock for the last forty years, Neil, what is your five second version of who Roger Rogerson is?
Perhaps ten seconds?
Roger Rogerson, detective sergeant in New South Wales armed hold up Squad, the most notorious detective of his generation and problem in Australian policing history.
And the stories that really grabbed me was the way that you've gone back into history to establish that Roger Rogerson was pretty crooked a long time ago.
That's right. I mean, what I set out to do was to get the facts as much as I could about Roger Rogerson and ned Smith, because there's a lot of misinformation. There are a lot of urban myths, you know, there's lots of stuff said that's true, maybe not true. I set out to gather original source material, and I went back to the seventies with court transcripts, witness statements and so on, and started with the shooting of an armed robber by the name of Philip Weston in nineteen
seventy six. And I knew very very little about that. Roger had boasted about it over the years, but I knew nothing about it. Virtually. I went back, went through state archives in New South Wales, the National Library in Canberra, and Andrew. What I turned up was a revelation to me, and I thought I knew Rogerson pretty well.
Yes, you also found by doing that it led you to dig up basically an old retired police officer. And I found him a very interesting character. And I'm sure you were delighted to find him still alive with his marbles and some old files under the bed.
Who was that It was a detective by the name of Ian Whirley, who's now I think eighty six eighty seven. He was a contemporary of Roger Rogerson's and going back to nineteen seventy six, Ian Whirley and Roger were pretty good mates working in the arm hold Up Squad in Sydney. Together they are involved in the arrest of this guy, Philip Weston, who is an arm dropper. He's robbed a
bank late in seventy five. They pick him up January seventy six, and west And applies for bail in the first few months of seventy six, repeatedly, time and time again, and at first the armed hold up squad says, no, no, he's a dangerous man. If he gets out here will offend no way, and he's refused, bail, refused, refused, refused. Then Roger gets involved all of a sudden, and he says, Philip Weston, the bloke they've arrested, the armed robbery. He's look,
he's the black sheep of the family. You know, his mother and his wife are people of the highest caliber, and his mum really needs him out to help her out. And his wife's here with their two children. I've been to her, I've been to meet them. I've met the wife, I've met the children. And he softens. All of a sudden, the opposition of the armed hold up squad is gone. There's this distinct softening, and you know, eventually he gets bail.
And it's what I've found. It was manipulated by Rogerson for instance, colleague Detective Ian Whirley, the guy who's still with us thankfully. Yep, he's been refused bail about six seven, eight times, Philip Western Ian Whirley's one of those opposing it. Whirley goes on a cruise on a Monday. On Tuesday, Philip Weston applies for a new bail hearing, and two days later, with Whirley on his cruise and another detective
who'd opposed it on holiday, Philip Weston gets bail. Amazing, amazing, amazing. I mean, he'd been arrested at gunpoint. He had a Magnum three five seven, He had a whole pile of weapons, false passports, whigs, you know, driver's licenses, the box and dice. He was a dangerous man. But he gets this bail.
And going back through the records, I sort of noticed that Whirly, Ian Whirley, the old detective, he'd gone on this cruise and Philip Weston had remarkably got bail, and I thought, I wonder if he and Whirley's still with us, So I tracked him down him a letter popped it in the post, good All Australia Post. They came through. He calls me and he says, men died because of what Roger Rogerson did. I don't want to talk over the phone. Come and see me and I'll tell you the whole rotten story.
And I thought that he's beautiful.
And I thought Jesus. I said, can I come and see you tomorrow? And he's a long way out of Sydney. He said, no, I can't do it for various reasons. I went to see him and he has kept the entire police brief of the Philip Western case, the armed robberies, the bail applications, he's kept his police diaries.
Why would you do that, Neil? Why would he do that?
I think because of what he then told me. He said, Western got bail because Roger Rogerson took a fifty thousand dollars bribe.
So that's why he kept it all these years until you knocked on his door. That's right, One day an honest journo would knock on the door of honest copper.
And the sting in this Andrew is that after Philip Western got bailed back in seventy six, the reason all this becomes tragic important is that days after he gets bail, in my view, by the manipulation of Roger Rogerson. He tries to rob another bank and shoots dead the bank manager.
So this is huge news in Sydney at the time, of course, and Philip Western is then immediately on the run and he's tracked down a few days later north of Sydney, surrounded by thirty police, heavily armed, bullet professed, tear gas and the whole thing, and there's a shootout and Western is shot dead.
He's shot dead a lot, isn't it. Many bullets were fired at he.
There were three police probably two meters away in an adjoining house. They were all armed with Remington shotguns. He stuck his head out of the top half of his body out of a bathroom window, pointed. The police say he pointed his shotgun at them. Words were exchanged, but very quickly the police opened fire, all three of them with their shotguns, and he was dead, dead as a doornail.
And now we come back to w In Whirley, the detective who went on the cruise and comes back to find that the bloke he's arrested is now out on Balin on the run. He says Rogerson took this fifty thousand dollars bribe, and you know, he knew when he'd been told that. And I said, well, you know, what else do you know? And he said, well, I know that Philip Western's mum tried to bribe me. And I said what, and he said, yeah, she came round to my house when I wasn't there. This is in early
nineteen seventy six, when he's still in prison. He's trying to get out. The old detective said, he left an envelope with my daughter who was at home. It was school holidays. I get home, I opened the envelope. There's four thousand dollars in cash. It's a sweetness, a lot of money, a lot of money in nineteen seventy six, absolutely, and that's just a sweetner. He was told if he plays ball, he said. He refused the money. He told his superior at the CIB and not long after that
he and Rogerson had a massive falling out. He was kicked out of the armhold up squad, he says, and shortly after he left the police but tracking him down filled in some of the gaps of the documents in state archives, of some of the stuff at the National Library and there was just this extraordinary story which you know, I mean, you look at Rogerson, a very clever man. In this case. He has, in my view, eating all the evidence, talking to people, talking to Ian Whirley, the
old cop. He's manipulated Crown prosecutors Rogerson. This is he's manipulated the court system, judges, He's manipulated some of his own many of his own colleagues to get this dangerous bloke, Philip Western out on bail. And it all appears to be for greed. This is nineteen seventy six, years before he really comes to prominence. Yes, for the shooting of Warren Land Franchi, which happens in nineteen eighty one, which is really the first time his name crops up all
this stuff. In nineteen seventy six, he I don't think his name might have been mentioned once in a newspaper report and that was about it.
But everybody in the police force knew, but the wider public had no idea. That's right, talking of manipulation, Neil, there's a part of that charade that I found fascinating when I read your most excellent book, which we will talk about in detail about where to find it.
And so on. It's a very good book.
And part of the reason of that is you've uncovered these anecdotes that I've never heard before. And one of them is in the Western case, Western or Western's advisers purport to have produced his wife as well as his mother. And Rogerson said, he went around to such and such an address and knocked on the door and spoke to missus Western. Was it really missus Western or was it somebody else?
That's where I was pretty gobsmacked when I started going through this material, Roger says, and he gives evidence about this in court. He says, I've met the wife, I've seen the children. The wife is of the highest caliber. So's the mum. Lovely kiddies, lovely kiddies. And of course this goes to bail. This is part of the process of before Western actually gets out. And it helps if you've got family, wife, kids that need their dad, that
sort of thing. It helps in a court of law, but a judgeable abe be more sympathetic to granting bail, it turns out, and the old detective Ian Whirley was with Rogerson on this night, and Whirley noticed that the wife was wearing a wig that wasn't particularly well adjusted, like she'd sort of just put it on in a bit of a rush. Turns out that the wife, Roger says, is of the highest caliber, and the kids, you know, they need his dad. She's an impostor. She's a ringing.
The real wife is in New Zealand with her kids. There are no kids at this flat. Rogerson gives evidence that he's seen them, that the wife is there. She's an impostor.
Where was she from, Neil? Where did he find her?
That's that's one of the things I just couldn't find out. Ian Whirley, who knocked on the door with Rogerson that night, thought she was an impostor. He thought she was a sex worker that he'd met during his police work up around King's Cross.
Oh, I see.
She'd been hired for to play the role of Catherine Weston, the wife, and this is a matter of record in the documentsy She's turned up about an hour before Rogerson knocks on the door, and she leaves fifteen minutes after he does. She's never sighted again. That's pretty good timing, Andrew.
That is a wonderful thing. Could you possibly make that up for a script? About a bent copper, isn't it perfect? He's gone down the street and grabbed a willing hooker to whack a wig on and play the part for fifteen minutes and where we go?
And she did, and she turned up in court and she signed an affidavit with a solicitor and she's in court and the barrister's going, he is missus Western, your honor, and the Judge's going, well, okay, she's here. It's not her at all. It's an impostor. She's a ring in front?
Did Roger Rogerson?
He had a huge amount of front. I mean there was an old department store in Sydney called Anthony Harden's, which was a very very big building. And there's an old saying more front than Anthony Horden's, and Roger certainly had that, and there was more Andrew there's another little twist in this tale because he's granted bail Philip Weston,
but somebody has to actually post it. So two people turn up at Waverley Court, which is the Waverley being in Sydney's eastern suburbs, and they say, oh, we're here to you know, put up our house as surety and the guy gave his name as Ali Barber, and I said, this is my wife. The wife doesn't speak at all, and bail is granted. The chamber magistrate phones Long Bay and you know, looks at all the documents. There is a house that's legitimate, and says to the wife, are
you you know Ali Barber's wife? If she nods, doesn't say anything. Mister Barber is in fact real enough. He is a real person, but the wife is another impostor Ali Barber, who is real. His actual wife was in Finland at the time, which is about which is a
long way from Sydney's eastern suburbs. So you've got you've got these ringings, and you've got this evidence by Rogerson where you know the armed hold up squad go from no, no, he's dangerous, don't let him out, bail should be refused to Roger going, oh, you know, he's not such a bad blake. The family's nice and all that, and look, he probably will turn up if he gets bail. It's hard to tell. It's reading his evidence. He's very very clever.
He doesn't say he should get bail. He just he says, you know, look, most people do turn up if conditions are imposed, and if they've got family and that sort of thing, and it's an extraordinary story. I was just gobsmacked when I read a lot of this stuff and finally met Ian Whirley, who filled in further detail and shocked.
Me even more.
It's hard not to smile about Rogerson's effrontery, but when you analyze this for longer than three seconds, you realize that this whole charade is probably only to get this bloke on the street so that he can then lead them to large amounts of cash which they can take and distribute among themselves. This is a cabal of bent police. That's what it was all about, really.
Wasn't it.
And then when he shoots a bank manager dead, they go, well, not only we want the cash, but we want him dead because we don't want him saying anything about anything. So I'd be far better if he's dead on arrival. It would solve a lot of problems. And that's indeed what happens. They shoot him.
Indeed it is I mean, Rogerson wants him out to get his money. The bank robbery in late seventy five. At the end of seventy five, had nabbed, had you know, they'd taken eighty nine thousand dollars. In fact, Philip Weston had robbed exactly the same bank some months earlier, so there was a total of one hundred and sixty five grand lying around. Remarkably none of it was ever recovered. But you're right, that's why Rogerson wanted him out on bail. He was promised a very large amount of money and
perhaps an ongoing amount of money. And that's why Philip Weston, days after getting bail, goes to rob this bank at Paramatta and shoots the bank manager dead. And that's what Ian Whirley when he phoned me, that phone call that I'll never forget, when he said men died because because of what Rogerson did. He's talking about Lynn Callahan, who was the unfortunate bank manager who was murdered, you know,
and Weston himself who was shot dead. I don't think the police who actually fired the shots knew anything at all about Rogerson's Sheerah, No, no, and I think it was one or two officers who knew. But of course it's your point, is exactly right, Andrew, that once Philip Weston had shot this bank manager, he was a complete liability for Roger and one of maybe one other He does get shot dead in this siege, it does. He did have a shotgun on the evidence. That's the evidence that I can find.
What.
I also got a whole lot of stuff from the coroner's court after two years after I originally applied for it. But one of the chilling aspects was that Rogerson's intimately involved in the planning of this, you know, capture of Western. If Western was taken alive at a voca, which is about ninety k's north of Sydney on the coast. If he was taken alive, guess who was going to drive him back to Sydney.
Roger, of course, what could go wrong?
He had all bases covered, so in the end that obviously wasn't necessary. Western was shot, and as I say, I don't think any of the other police there that day had any idea of what was going on, And it appears the shooting itself was.
More or less a clean kill.
Yeah, yeah, he had a gun and he leaned out the window and shots had been fired. But yeah, that was seventy six and I was just.
That opens up a whole new early chapter, a prequel. If you like to the established and well known stories of Roger Rogerson's life and crimes.
That's right, it's happening years earlier than perhaps we originally thought, certainly. And the detail, I mean, it's circumstantial, but it's quite compelling to me. As I say in the book, Philip Weston might have fired the gun, might have shot the bank manager, but Roger loaded the gun.
He did.
You've managed to find these new nuggets of information and feed them into your narrative of the Rogerson and Neddie Smith he's a great friend, it is the wrong word, really, but his colleague and crime he's associate, as they say, You've fed these nuggets of fresh information into that narrative with great skill. And I've found that even though many of us are familiar with some of the landmarks of the Rogerson story, you've filled in a lot of the
valleys between the landmarks with this book. And I found it fascinating in a way that we don't always find true crime books as fascinating as they should be, Neil, not all of them are. It does attract a lot of amateurs and would.
Be I really wanted to nail down as much as I could and look let's face it, with Roger and Ned, the truth is sometimes an elusive commodity. But I really wanted to try to nail down as much as I could the facts, and to go back to the courts, to go back to witness statements from the day, from the days of the shootings or the armed robberies or whatever, and to use that as a you know, at least as a basis for a starting point to then weave
the story. Because there is so much about written about Roger. A lot of it's right, of course, I mean, but some of it, a lot of it's wrong. And I think it's actually important. This is part of our history, particularly in New South Wales history, Sydney history, policing history, and I think it's important that we get it right. And there's no need. The thing with Roger and Ned, there's no need to exaggerate anything about them. There is
so much material there. They did so many things. Gee, there's a lot of there's a lot of intrigue, there's a lot of skullduggery. Shenanigan's call it what you will.
Funnily enough, although I'm from Melbourne, I did spend a bit of time with Rogerson but not as much as you did, and not as early as you did, obviously, because you are the homegrown article there. But he was an interesting figure because he could be at times charming and entertaining and all that sort of thing. I talk to other people about him. You know, you can talk to someone about themselves and it only takes you so far. They only really give you a very sensited view of themselves.
But if you talk to others about.
Them, it can be interesting. And I found an ex copper who's in the security industry who knew Rogerson quite well. But he also was friendly with Mick Drury, who, of course famously was the undercover policeman who Rogerson organized to have shot, which was a terrible thing. And that policeman said to me that that ex policeman, he said, I'm in sort of two minds about Roger. He said, he's a wicked, conniving, whole blooded reptile, and yet I knew
him to do genuinely kind things. He said, this is what he said, and he gave me examples of that. How do you read that? Do you think he was had the wool pulled over his eyes.
Or no, no, not at all.
That's exactly.
We rather liked him, That's what people have said to me. I met him in late eighty two. I did an interview with him for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was the first interview he'd done since the shooting of land Franchi, you know, and I got to know him over the subsect over the next you know what, forty years or so. He was I liked him. I mean, there are elements of Roger that were very likable. He was good company,
He did do some good things. And you know, it's interesting, Andrew that people sometimes don't really want to hear that. They just want the cardboard cut out. Bad guy, evil, wicked. And what he did to Mike as he was shocking, terrible, was shocking. I mean, you know, there's police who were his colleagues who still they believe it, but they can't quite bring themselves to believe it, if you know what
I mean. They're still shaking their heads that one of their own could plan and execute the murder of one of their own as he stood in his own home next to his little girl. As it turns out, he survived. He met Michael Drewy, which very thankful for that. But when I spoke to Michael the other day, and you know, he still in a sense bears some scars of that.
Of course, as you'd expect.
It was he almost died. He was so close to death. He was so close to death.
And the dying deposition, of course that he made, that's right, put Roger away.
That was the first real chink in the armor. This is nineteen eighty four, mid nineteen eighty four. Michael Drury's standing in his kitchen at his home. He shot. He's critically wounded. His kids are there, his wife's there. He manages to survive, but he's in hospital and they think
he's going to die. He makes, as you say, the dying deposition in which he says Rogerson tried to bribe him over a case a drug bust down in Melbourne, and you know he spoke to him about it, said there was I think fifteen or twenty five thousand, there were a couple of amounts mentioned. It was Drury's dying deposition, and that's what really started Rogerson's demise because the two the earlier shootings, Philip Weston worn Land Francis, he'd survived those,
but here was a police officer. You know, critically horribly wounded, and he made these allegations against the Golden Boy of the CIB. A lot of people turned on Drury, which must have been terrible for him because they didn't want to believe that Roger, you know this, the golden Boy could do something like that. And the investigation into the shooting of Drury that followed was a fiasco, an absolute debarkle.
They split it up. They had one lot of cops investigating the alleged bribery and another team investigating the shooting when they were clearly linked. Nobody knew who was in charge of what. One team was raiding somebody's place and they weren't telling the other the shooting team and the bribery team wasn't telling the other team it was. It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious, Andrew, it'd be funny.
It was just an absolute fiasco the investigation, and in the end that was partly the reason, or a big part of the reason why Roger was found not guilty of the attempt at of Michael Drury. Because the New South Wales Police could not investigate the attempted murder of one of their own. It still stands as an absolute disgrace.
It does.
I note there are many good stories in this and many of them, of course involve Neddie Smith, another giant figure in crime stories in New South Wales and across Australia. Giant in both ways. He was what six foot five in the old money and basically he was sort of Roger Rogerson's attack dog in some ways, wasn't he?
He could do the dirty work? Does that makes sense?
Their relationship was really interesting. I mean, there were some Australian Federal Police intercepts telephone intercepts from nineteen eighty three where Neddie Smith is phoning Darlinghurst, where Roger is now stationed, but Smith knows some of the other cops there. One of the main topics was lunch and getting on the grog, getting on the I mean, it came up in just about every conversation. Other things came up, like ned Smith saying to a police officer who was a mate of
Rogers at Darlinghurst, shall I bring the ten? Shall I bring the ten? We can whack it up three ways. You probably don't need to be a genius to figure out what he was talking about there. And he was openly calling them all sorts of four letter words, which I obviously can't repeat. But there was this. It was like he was one of the boys.
It wasn't.
This was not an informant police officer relationship.
Wasn't saying hello, mister Rogerson. No, no, no, they're all gangsters together.
I wouldn't have spoken to a detective like that. Let me give you the tip. He was clearly very familiar with them. He was drinking with them, he was getting drunk with them on a regular basis.
And they got him out of several times. I got him out of terribly big scrapes, like he'd attack somebody with a hammer, or he'd pull a gun on somebody, or.
He'd do whatever.
But he would be able to bribe his way out through his network of corrupt police.
Is that right?
Oh?
Oh, he paid police a lot, and he paid He says he paid Roger large amounts. The problem with ned Smith is that his central story is absolutely right. He was paying bribes and he was committing crimes. His problem was a problem for me for others, is that he started to embellish everything and put in people who he just hated because he wanted to dob on them who hadn't taken bribes. It was a sort of a scattergun approach, and in the end his word, I'm afraid was sort
of almost worthless without any corroboration. But I mean Roger did him and did Ned smith favors. One of the favors was Ned and a bloke called Bobby Chapman had tried to do a robbery on a payroll, a bakery payroll. This is nineteen seventy six. This is when they first meet, actually Smith and Chapman that they botched the robbery, but shots are fired and one of the blokes carrying the payroll narrowly escapes death, misses his head by a whisker.
So it's pretty serious. Long story short, they're charged with one of them's charged with attempted murder, and you know, time goes by. Roger takes a statement from Ned's mate Bobby Chapman, saying, oh, yeah, I did fire the shots, but it was accidental. The gun went off, I didn't mean to sort of thing, which is suss in itself. But then when it gets to court, Roger's in the witness and he says, I've done further investigation. It wasn't Bobby Chapman needs mate who fired the shots at all.
It was a bloke, this bloke by the name of Robert McKinnon. This is astonishing news to the Crown prosecutor.
Courts adjourned.
Crown Prosecutor not happy outside court, doesn't believe Rogerson, who says, oh, and informants told me this new information that it was not needs mate Bobby Chapman who fired the shots, that it was this blake, Robert McKinnon. The Crown prosecutor doesn't believe him. Roger won't reveal his source. Okay, maybe that's fair enough. Well, of course, where's Robert McKinnon, the man who did fire the shots allegedly according to Roger and
his new investigation is new details. Guess what, Robert McKinnon has disappeared? Oh no, yes, bad luck, Well, bad luck for Robert McKinnon because that was nineteen seventy six and he's never been found, seen, heard of since, just disappeared off the face of the earth. And the court case was aborted and they both got you know, Bobby Chapman, the Kaki has got a much lighter sentence thanks to Roger.
And a bloke that they blamed, and a bloke that.
They blamed, who conveniently, of course, could not then or ever since be found that just gone is.
So sinister, is it not?
Not?
You know, it's full of sinister things, and there's no doubt in the end, none of it's funny. But there were sort of funny things along the way. One of them. I know, it's an old story and we often tell it, but you tell it particularly well in the book, and that is the time when Roger Rogerson came to the rescue of a damsel in distress, and that would be Dame Shirley Bassey, who was then singing at Checker's Nightclub.
He said, is this is this right, witness?
Well, Roger says, it is that way way back in the seventies. He was happened to be walking down I think it's Golden Street in the middle of Sydney, Checker's Nightclub, very famous nightclub way back then. Lots of international acts appeared there. It was an incredibly popular nightclub and also favored by detectives from time to time. Shirley Bassey was singing there and Roger says, he's walking down Golden Street thereabouts and he sees this bloke with a sequined handbag
bolting out of the nightclub. He says, I gave chase, and of course he apprehends this bloke. He was always reasonably fit. Roger he grabs, grabs the offender, grabs the handbag. The sequent handbag or very expensive handbag. Offender is marched off to the slammer. Roger goes back to Checkers and he with his Shirley with the handbag, and he says to me, and not just to me, but to others over the years that Shirley BASSI showed her appre appreciation in a very special way. There you go, which may,
of course be true, Andrew, may not be true. I did ask a couple of other members of the armed hold up squad from that time if they'd ever heard that, and they just looked at me and said, no, never heard it before. But it's a story he did tell. And look, that was as you said earlier. He was charming. He was good company. You could sit down with him, have a beer, and he could talk to anybody. He could talk to crooks, he could talk to politicians, he
could talk to all levels of society. He was a highly intelligent man, and he is something to me of enigma that somebody with so much talent can go so bad.
A highly functioning sociopath. You'd think you have seen well.
Well if you put together the words intelligent, charming, manipulative. I'm not a psychiatrist psychologist, but they might suggest that he's a sociopath. But look, he was. He helped out neighbors, he you know, he did. He did good things for people he barely knew. As you said earlier, he on many occasions displayed great courage and arresting seriously bad men,
armed robbers, heroin dealers, all that sort of stuff. So is this this strange, this enigma that you know, on the one hand, there was a lot of good things he did and part of his character was admirable. And on the other hand, you've got this cold, calculating person who can who can arrange the murder or the attempted murder of one of his colleagues in his own home.
Yeah, of innocent people. It's one thing to kill a bad crook, quite another to arrange the death of a younger, married policeman merely over.
Cash for nothing but money, yeah, you know. Money.
In the end, you'd have to say on balance, he wasn't going to go to heaven, which is I think he acknowledged himself had an interview with Julia Baird.
Is that right he did?
I think he said there were there more deserving people to go to heaven. And I think there are many many people probably around the country who would agree with Roger.
On that note. Neil, we'll say amen. But your book I have read every word The Kingpin and the Crooked Cop. The Kingpin, of course is Neddie Smith, but the Crooked Cop is the one we've spoken about mostly today because we can't cover every story in the book.
There's a lot of it. It's a big book. It's I've got a lot of detail.
It's got a lot of new material mixed in very artfully with established material and written by one of our finest investigative journalists and Wordsmith a combination of abilities that don't always go together, Neil, but you've you've got both. You're you're a fighter and a boxer.
You're too kind.
It's a pleasure to talk to you in long may you reign.
Thank you very much, Andrew, Thanks for having.
Me, Thanks for listening.
Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcasts song and if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.