On the 27th of June 1981, a heroin dealer named Warren Lan Franchie was shot dead in a laneway in Chippendale by a Sydney detective.
The man who brought him to that meeting was a criminal called Netti Smith.
For the next 40 years, the two stories would raise one question.
Where did Sydney’s police [music] end and its underworld begin?
This video follows two men who answered that question in very different ways.
Roger Roger was a decorated detective who ended his life in prison.
Netty Smith was a violent criminal who said police gave him a green light.
We will separate what courts and inquiries established from what was only alleged because in this story that line matters.
Start with a common mistake.
Many people believe Roger was convicted of killing Lan Franchi or of the murder of Salanne Hustep, the woman who accused him.
He was not.
He was never charged over either death.
What he was convicted of is a different list and it is long.
Roger Roger was born in Sydney on the 3rd of January 1941 and grew up in Bankstown.
A newspaper profile says he was a talented child pianist.
In 1958 at 18, he joined the New South Wales police.
He rose to become a prominent member of the armed holdup squad.
In 1980, he received the Peter Mitchell Award for arresting an escaped armed robber.
On paper, he was a star.
Outside the force, his name was already attached to serious allegations, and the same Wikipedia profile that records the award also records claims that evidence was fabricated in earlier cases.
Those claims were disputed.
Arthur Stanley Smith was born in Sydney on the 27th of November 1944 and raised in Redund.
He was first convicted of theft around the age of 11.
He spent much of his young adult life in prison with sentences from 1963 to 1965, from 1968 to 1975, and from 1978 to 1980.
The Sydney Crime Museum says that in the mid 1970s, he worked as a standover man for a criminal named Murray Riley, then distributed heroin for Riley’s syndicate before setting up his own operation.
The two men were closely linked.
Smith later claimed that Roger and other detectives gave him a green light to commit crimes in return for favors.
Police deny it.
That claim comes from Smith himself, and it has never been proven in a court.
But what happened in Chippendale in 1981 tied their names together permanently.
Warren Lanie was a 22-year-old heroin dealer and standover man linked to Smith.
According to the Sydney Crime Museum, Smith brought him to a meeting with Roger on the 27th of June, 1981.
At that meeting, Roger shot Lanranchi dead.
Roger said he acted in self-defense.
LanFranchi was said to have been involved in a robbery and the shooting of a young policeman earlier that month.
According to the museum, 18 police officers in the area supported Roger’s account.
The coronial inquest did not accept it.
The jury declined to find that the shooting was self-defense, but no charges followed, and Roger was not stripped of his standing.
Smith later said Roger had killed Lanranchi in retribution.
Roger denied that.
There is also a disputed theory about motive.
Some accounts say LanFranchi was carrying money to bribe his way out of trouble.
Police deny it and the Sydney Crime Museum notes that the motive remains debated.
What is not debated is who held the gun.
Lanfranche had a girlfriend.
Sally Anne Hustep was born in 1954 into a middle-class Jewish family in Sydney and left school at 15.
She worked as a sex worker and developed a heroin habit.
In 1981, she began a relationship with Lan Franchie.
After he was killed, she did something almost no one in her world did.
She went public.
She appeared on the television program 60 Minutes and accused Roger of being a killer.
She also gave police internal affairs a statement describing payments to Vice Squad officers and her belief that parts of the force were corrupt.
Her statement is described in her biography as helping to lead to the later inquiries.
She also alleged that Roger had killed Lani and taken money from him.
Roger denied it and the claim has never been tested in court.
On the night of the 6th of February 1986, Hustep took a phone call at a flat in Sydney, told her flatmate she would be back in about 10 minutes, and left.
She was never seen alive again.
The next morning, a man walking his dog found her body in Busby Pond in Centennial Park.
She was 31.
Her death was treated as a homicide.
An inquest ran across several years and found that she was murdered by a person or persons unknown.
No one was charged at that stage.
The question of who killed her would hang over both Smith and Roger for the rest of their lives.
Years later, police bugged Smith’s cell and had a cellmate talk with him.
On that recording, Smith allegedly claimed to have killed seven people, including Hustep.
He later said he made it up because he knew he was being recorded.
He stood trial for her murder in 1999 and was found not guilty.
In a 2005 interview, he said he was at home that night and that Roger wanted her dead.
Those statements are unverified and Roger has always denied involvement.
The murder of Salanne Hustep has never been solved.
Was it a case of a jury doubting a recording made in a prison cell or a case of a witness the underworld wanted silenced?
Tell me what you think in the comments and subscribe if you want the rest of the story.
Why does this matter?
Because the case of Roger and Smith is often told as a story of two monsters.
The record shows something more uncomfortable.
It shows a system that failed to stop either of them for years.
And the failure is the real story here.
Consider how it looked from the street in 1981.
A young police officer had been shot.
A detective with a medal and a reputation had killed the man said to be responsible.
18 officers backed his account.
For ordinary people, there was little reason to doubt it.
And that is exactly why the early years of this story went the way they did.
The jury at the inquest saw it differently.
But an inquest cannot send anyone to prison.
It can only say what it finds.
That gap between what people suspected and what could be proved is the thread that runs through every part of this story.
From Lan Franchie to Hustep to the Drury shooting.
Meanwhile, Roger’s career was unraveling.
On the 6th of June 1984, Detective Michael Drury was shot through his kitchen window.
He survived.
Drury later accused Roger of orchestrating the attack after he refused a bribe in a drug case.
[music] Roger was charged with conspiracy over the Drury shooting.
In 1989, he was found not guilty.
Drury never withdrew his accusation, and the acquitt did not end the questions about the man at the center of it.
Smith, meanwhile, was heading for his own collapse.
By the mid1 1980s, he had returned to armed robbery, focusing on payrolls.
Then came the killing of a truck driver, Ronald Flavl, in a road rage incident in the late 1980s.
Sources differ on the exact year, so I will not put a date on it.
In 1989, he was arrested trying to rob a council payroll, and his bail was revoked because of the Flavl charge.
That was the start of the prison term he never left.
He was convicted of Flavl’s murder and sentenced to life.
In 1998, he was also convicted of murdering Harvey Jones, a brothel owner last seen in 1983 leaving a hotel in Alexandria.
Jones’s body was found about 12 years later, buried off Botney’s Foreshore Road.
Smith was convicted of two murders.
For a man who claimed he had once been protected, he had become a prisoner who would die inside.
In 1992, Smith appeared as a star witness before the Independent Commission Against Corruption and told it that armed Holdup Squad detectives had passed on information that helped criminals plan robberies.
Commissioner Ian TMBI delivered his report in 1994.
He found Roger corrupt and wrote that his dealings with Smith brought discredit on the police service and must be described as scandalous.
Notably, one account says Smith refused to name Roger at that hearing.
The Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service, known as the Wood Royal Commission, ran from 1994 to 1997 under Justice James Wood.
Its task was to find out whether corruption in the police was systemic and entrenched.
By then, Roger was out of the force, so the commission was about far more than one man.
[music] Its first big break came in 1994 when Detective Sergeant Trevor Haken was summoned [music] by the New South Wales Crime Commission.
He agreed to work covertly.
For about 6 months, his car was bugged and his phones were tapped.
By 1995, the commission had uncovered hundreds of instances of bribery, money laundering, drug trafficking, fabricated evidence, and serious assaults in the King’s Cross Detective Division alone.
Detectives were confronted with recordings of cash handovers.
One practice was known as the laugh.
King’s Cross detectives took weekly payments from drug figures and other criminals.
After the hearings, officers flooded the commission with requests to make deals.
Police Commissioner Tony Lowour had told the commission that corruption was not systemic and his map of the force showed King’s Cross as corruptionfree.
He resigned shortly after the commission’s first report.
The commission’s interim report in November 1996 said the problems could not be fixed by what it called a mere patching up of the old system.
It warned that failing to reform could bring back the same culture and conduct that had prompted the inquiry.
It recommended that the commissioner be given control over appointments and dismissals, that officers be required to make integrity declarations, and that targeted integrity testing and random drug testing be allowed.
Hundreds of officers resigned or were dismissed.
Justice Wood also declared a conditional amnesty for serving officers who disclosed corruption.
Peter Ryan, recruited from the United Kingdom, became commissioner and put many of the recommendations into practice.
The commission’s staff and equipment formed the core of the Police Integrity Commission, which was later replaced by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission.
Think about what that meant for Roger.
In 1989, he walked free in the Drury case.
By 1992, he had a prison sentence and no police career.
By 1994, an anti-corruption commissioner had put his name on the public record.
The man who once wore a medal had lost everything the badge gave him, one step at a time, and none of it came from a single dramatic moment.
And Smith, he became the rare criminal who talked, at least in part.
But his words carry a warning.
A man convicted of murder speaking about police he says protected him has every reason to shape the story.
That does not mean he lied.
It means his claims need support and the commissions treated them that way.
What happened to Roger afterwards matters most.
In 1992, he was sentenced to 3 years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice after depositing $110,000 into bank accounts under false names.
That conviction cost him his place in the police force.
In 2005, he was jailed for 12 months for lying to the Police Integrity Commission during a hearing into possible corruption at Liverpool City Council.
He was released in February 2006.
By the time he was an old man, he had never been convicted of a killing.
Then came May 2014.
Jaime Ga was a 20-year-old Sydney student described by police as a drug dealer.
He was killed in a storage unit in Padto and his body was dumped in the sea off Krenella.
Roger, then 73, was arrested and charged with his murder along with former detective Glenn McNamera.
The prosecution said the two men planned to take Gow’s supply of 2.78 kg of ice worth about $19 million and that the killing was done for financial gain.
McNamera said his meetings with Gao were for a book about Asian crime gangs.
Prosecutors rejected that.
Both men denied pulling the trigger and blamed each other.
A first trial in July 2015 was aborted on its second day.
A retrial began in February 2016 and on the 15th of June 2016, a jury found both men guilty of murder after about 6 and 1/2 days of deliberations.
On the 2nd of September 2016, Justice Jeffrey Bellow sentenced both to life in prison.
He said the killing was brutal in its execution and callous in its aftermath.
He could not say beyond reasonable doubt which man fired, but he was satisfied one of them did and that Gao was executed in cold blood.
There is one more detail from the Gow case worth stating carefully.
Prosecutors said the plan was a robbery of drugs, not an arrest.
McNamera’s defense was that he was working on a book.
The jury heard both versions and it rejected the second.
That is a finding of a court, not an opinion from me.
The sentencing judge also noted what could not be proved.
He could not say which man pulled the trigger.
Under the law, that did not matter because both were found to have taken part in the killing.
Both received the same sentence, which in New South Wales means life.
Roger kept claiming innocence.
His lawyers argued he could not properly cross-examine McNamera.
The New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal described his case as completely lacking in credibility.
In March 2023, the High Court refused him leave to appeal.
Roger died on the 21st of January 2024, aged 83, at the Prince of Wales Hospital after being transferred from prison.
He had been serving life.
Netty Smith had died more than 2 years earlier on the 8th of September, 2021 in the Long Bay Jail Hospital, aged 76.
[music] Step back and look at the numbers the commission itself reported.
Hundreds of instances of bribery, money laundering, drug trafficking, fabricated evidence, and serious assaults surfaced from one detective division alone.
That figure comes from the commission’s work, and it explains why the report rejected the bad apple theory.
The theory was comfortable.
It said corruption was the work of a few individuals and that removing them would fix the problem.
The commission’s evidence pointed the other way.
It described a culture in which corruption had become entrenched.
That is why the recommendations went beyond sacking people.
They changed how the force was run, how officers were tested, and who answered for what.
Whether those reforms fully worked is a debate for historians.
But the commission itself is the reason Sydney’s police look different today.
Now, bring it back to the two men.
Roger and Smith were not the whole of the problem.
They were the faces of it, which is why their names are the ones people still know long after most of the evidence has faded from memory.
Spare a thought for the people at the edge of this story.
Warren Lan Franchi was a criminal, but he was also a young man whose death was never answered by a conviction.
Sallyanne Hustep was a 31-year-old woman who spoke up when almost no one in her position would, and her case remains open.
Ronald Flel was a truck driver killed in a road rage incident.
Harvey Jones was a brothel owner whose body lay buried for around 12 years.
Jaime Ga was 20.
Behind every name in this video is a family who waited for answers.
And some of them are still waiting.
Let me pull the threads together because this story is easy to blur.
What a court established.
Roger was convicted in 1992 of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, convicted in 2005 of lying to the police integrity commission, and convicted in 2016 of murdering Jaime Gao.
Smith was convicted of the murders of Ronald Fll and Harvey Jones.
What was alleged but never proved in court?
That Roger ordered or carried out an attack on Detective Drury.
That Smith killed Sallyanne Hustep.
That Roger had a hand in her death.
And that police gave Smith a green light.
Each of those has been denied.
And Smith was acquitted at trial over Hustep’s death.
That distinction is not a technicality.
It is the difference between history and rumor.
And it is the reason this video keeps returning to the words convicted, acquitted, and alleged.
If a version of this story you have seen skips those words, treat it with caution.
The two men’s stories end in prison hospitals.
One was a detective who had stood in court many times as a witness.
The other was a criminal who once said he was protected.
Neither was ever convicted of killing LanFranchi or Hustep.
That is the part that should stay with you.
The courts did what they could do.
They convicted Rogerson of corruption and of the murder of Jaime Gao.
And they sentenced Smith for two murders.
But the two deaths that began everything, Lanranchi and Hustep, were never answered with a conviction of the man most people suspected.
The Wood Royal Commission reached a harder conclusion than any single trial.
It found a culture that had to be rebuilt, not a few bad apples to be removed.
A culture that let men like Roger stay in uniform and let men like Smith think they had permission did not disappear when the two men went to jail.
Do you think the green light was real?
Tell me what you think in the comments.
