It was always going to be a peculiar challenge, interviewing Roger Rogerson. But in 2006, when he had been out of prison for less than a month, the man known as the most corrupt policeman in Australian history agreed to come on a radio show I was presenting for the ABC called Sunday Profile, and talk about his life.

Author Duncan McNab would later describe this as an “intriguing” choice, writing that, as Rogerson re-entered the world from his second prison stint, “instead of a feature piece with one of the coterie of journalists he’d mesmerised for decades with his stories, he opted for the high end – an interview on ABC’s Sunday Profile with Julia Baird. A small but influential audience.”

Roger Rogerson at his house in Padstow Heights in 2011. Credit: Fairfax

I was as surprised as anyone. I spent many hours doing research, trying to figure out how to shape the interview. I called some crime reporters – always the toughest in the newsroom, usually blokes who’d downed dozens of beers over decades with members of Sydney’s underworld, many of whom were charmed by Rogerson’s sharp intellect and blue eyes – and they advised me to be exceedingly cautious.

One was genuinely concerned and said Rogerson was still very powerful, had eyes everywhere, and could find out where my kids went to school, intimidate me if I pushed too hard. “Watch yourself,” he said. And above all, “don’t ask him about Warren Lanfranchi”, the drug dealer he’d shot and killed in cool daylight in the streets of Chippendale in 1981. A sore point, still.

Warren’s girlfriend, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, publicly accused Rogerson of murder, but a jury cleared him; her body was later discovered in a pond in Centennial Park. Others disappeared too.

It was the seedy side of the 1980s, a decade currently considered particularly nostalgic for some reason, perhaps because people believe it was a simpler, less noisy time, before technology snaked into our most intimate moments and places, commanding our time and obedience, demanding devotion. Easy to forget, though, as we bounce about to Wham! documentaries, the clouds of prejudice, intolerance, violence and corruption that shadowed that decade.

I called some other people who’d had dealings with Roger Caleb Rogerson, who for a decent period was the most highly decorated cop in NSW, in the 1980s. Two of them told me that public figures who started asking unwelcome questions about Rogerson came home to find their dogs had been poisoned.

Stories like this are legion; menace trailed his footprints.