The remarkable downfall of former Northern Territory police commissioner John McRoberts is complete after a Supreme Court jury found him guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
The 59-year-old walked free from court in Darwin following the verdict on Thursday after being granted bail.
But that will be short-lived, with Justice Dean Mildren indicating he would likely deliver a jail sentence next month.
The maximum jail term is 15 years.
The 12-member jury found McRoberts intended to deflect and frustrate the fraud investigation into his former lover, travel agent Alexandra Xana Kamitsis, who was later jailed.
Kamitsis was the prime target of the NT's largest-ever fraud investigation, in which numerous Darwin travel agents were found to have been defrauding a Territory government pensioner concession scheme by millions of dollars.
The jury agreed by an 11-1 vote with the crown case that McRoberts was hopelessly conflicted, to be sexually involved with the prime target of a police investigation, but lied to his colleagues and public servants about it and was involved in the investigation.
McRoberts, the father of two adult children, was in a relationship with a woman he lived with at the time and Kamitsis, who was also the chair of CrimeStoppers, was married.
Among nine examples of his offending, McRoberts blocked a search warrant on Kamitsis's premises by his own detectives, which the Director of Public Prosecutions and Supreme Court had granted.
He knew if Kamitsis's phone and computers were seized it would reveal their relationship.
But his attempts to save his career proved his undoing.
He also pushed for an end to the criminal probe and for a civil remedy instead, allowing the dishonest travel agents to simply pay back the money they stole.
He said the investigation was costly and and that criminal charges would damage the tourism industry and the Territory's reputation.
That and his anger and resistance about the operation - and later Kamitsis's arrest that was filmed by the media - raised eyebrows.
Former chief minister Adam Giles, who was a witness in the trial, had demanded he "go hard" against the travel agents.
"The accused did what he did for an improper purpose ... it was all a smokescreen," prosecutor Michael McHugh said during the trial.
The jury did not accept the argument of McRoberts's lawyer Tony Elliot that he had acted cautiously and properly as a police commissioner should in the case of a major investigation and had not illegally interfered with the investigation.
