Hack Attack Page 11
Green quickly rose through the ranks and became a trainer for one of the older tracing outfits, run by an Italian called Dick Rinaldi in Ealing, west London. There he passed on his skills to dozens, possibly hundreds of others; and then, in 1987, he moved to the Streatham branch of Nationwide. It was here for the first time that he connected with Fleet Street, picking up on Withers’ connection with the Sunday Times, for example blagging military sources for the personal details of the special-forces soldiers who had controversially shot dead three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar in March 1988. Then the heroin played its part.
By 1988, Green had reached a point where, according to one source who worked with him, he was ‘off his face’ all day and having to stop his car to vomit on the way to see clients. Realising the trouble he was in, he started going to meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. And, during those meetings – by the kind of chance that often lies behind game-changing events – he heard of another tracer with a heroin history who also was going to NA meetings. He is entitled to keep his past addiction private, so I will call him ‘Blue’.
Like Al Green, Blue was one of the few PIs then who was not an ex-cop, and he too had been working as a tracer, for an agency in Fulham. He had a natural charm and he had found ways to blag the three government agencies for sickness, unemployment and supplementary benefits. People might leave their partners without paying their alimony or abandon their businesses without paying their suppliers, but very few of them cut themselves off from the benefits of the welfare state. Blue discovered the numeric codes by which local offices identified themselves when they called in to the centre, he learned their internal jargon and then he would call up and, with a few minutes’ work, he would uncover the whereabouts of his target. ‘The trick,’ he used to say, ‘is to pick the lock nice and carefully, not leave any mark, lock it up and leave it so that nobody knows you’ve had the information.’
In 1986, Blue had struck out on his own, running a specialist tracing business in south London, with an offshore sideline which specialised in blagging international banks. Although he had been clean for some years, he still went to London meetings of Narcotics Anonymous – where Al Green found him. In 1988, they started working together. They formed a perfect partnership. Both knew the trade. Both had had enough of earning money for other people. Al Green could train new recruits. Blue could find those recruits and a steady cluster of good clients at NA meetings (Chelsea meetings delivered some particularly wealthy ones). So it was that his south London base became a kind of blagging factory, populated by a steady flow of recovering addicts.
Their finest recruit was Michael Boddy, known as ‘Micky the Mouse’, a public schoolboy who had become addicted to heroin and spent years sleeping rough and living off the streets. He had developed septicaemia, probably through using dirty needles, and surgeons had amputated one of his arms. As he recovered his health, with the help of Narcotics Anonymous, he returned to a more stable life, gardening, joining the Orchid Society of Great Britain and collecting antique prints of plants. Under Al Green’s expert tuition, he also became a specialist in blagging British Telecom and mobile phone companies, from whom he extracted ex-directory numbers, lists of Friends and Family numbers, and rocs. He claimed that his thousands of victims included the Queen, Princess Diana and David Beckham. He became widely regarded in his profession as the UK’s premier blagger of phone companies – or, as he himself put it, he was ‘the ace trace from outer space’. He was also known to be emotionally highly volatile and was dispatched from Blue’s base to work from his own flat.
Members of the network claim they really didn’t know that some of what they were doing was against the law. One says he knew it was ‘naughty’ but since they were often tracing fraudsters and debtors, he believed it was acceptable. Operating quite separately from mainstream PI agencies, this highly skilled group rose on the tide of debtor-tracing, working regularly for the mortgage outfits of Lloyds Bank and National Westminster Bank. And also for Rupert Murdoch’s papers.
Al Green kept up his link to the Sunday Times and did jobs for the paper’s investigative team, Insight. Now, Blue started working for them too. By one means or another, he was able to help them find a way through the banking labyrinth of Polly Peck, the giant textile company which collapsed in debt and scandal in 1990, and to trace cash that had been laundered by some of London’s leading gangsters.
It was through this network that the former actor John Ford learned his skills before going on to become a full-time blagger for the Sunday Times. Ford had been struggling, his career reaching a low peak in a TV advertisement for McDonald’s. He became a brilliant generalist, blagging any target he chose. Numerous reporters on the Sunday Times had his number. He worked on serious stories – exposing corruption and alleged sexual abuse in sport – and on pure gossip, succeeding, for example, in extracting personal data about the then Labour minister Peter Mandelson in an attempt to prove that he was in a gay relationship.
Along the way, other newspapers started to use the group. One member of the NA network says that in 2000, Andy Coulson, as deputy editor of the News of the World, was dealing direct with them. Blue developed a relationship with the Mail on Sunday. One Mail on Sunday journalist recalls his network blagging records of calls made by the former prime minister’s son, Mark Thatcher, and by the Indian steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, who was accused of buying influence in Tony Blair’s government.
But the main link from the Narcotics Anonymous group to the rest of Fleet Street was forged by a middleman, a stocky former soldier from south London called Gary Lowe, occasionally known as The Corporal. Lowe ran his own investigation company, Chimera, from his home in Croydon and was also a partner in Blue’s offshore venture. When clients needed tracing, Lowe subcontracted the work to Al Green and Blue and their network. At first, Lowe was involved with commercial clients but, according to some of those who worked in this field, Lowe became the most prolific of all the private investigators who worked for Fleet Street – and, as ever, it appears he began with a Murdoch paper, the mid-market daily Today, which News International bought in 1987 and closed in 1995.
One of the NA network recalls that this started as a hostile move. A journalist from Today contacted Lowe and asked him to do some tracing. Lowe relayed the job to Al Green who was told to do the work at top speed. Green did so, and twenty-four hours later, the result was splashed across Today – as part of an exposé of the hidden world of private investigators. A disaster for the secretive blaggers. But then, in a dazzling display of double standards, the Murdoch paper appreciated the value of a man like Lowe and started to hire him. Lowe picked up more work from the Murdoch titles, particularly the News of the World and the Sunday Times.
And in the classic shape of Fleet Street crime, the infection then spread from the Murdoch papers outwards to their competitors. By his own account to friends, Lowe went on to work for fifty different national newspaper journalists including those at the Mirror Group, frequently subcontracting work back to the NA group. For example, when the Daily Mirror in 1990 investigated the financial affairs of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, according to one source, it was that alliance which blagged Scargill’s bank accounts.
Lowe had his problems with the law. He has told friends that, at one point, he was charged with corruption for allegedly buying confidential information which came from an employee of the DVLA in Swansea, but, he has said, the charge against him was dropped before trial. He continued working for newspapers until 2010.
Numerous other blaggers followed the path to Fleet Street (see appendix), including Steve Whittamore, who was a commercial tracer until 1991 when he was approached by the News of the World who offered to pay far more than other clients. All of this activity was potentially illegal if it was not necessary for the public interest. Some of it doubtless was lawful. But the reality is that in Fleet Street at this time, nobody was really very worried. There were no rules.
* * *
For a
nybody who wants to understand why things went so wrong in British newspapers, there is a very simple answer which consists of only two words – ‘Kelvin’ and ‘MacKenzie’.
When Rupert Murdoch made him editor of the Sun in 1981, MacKenzie effectively took the book of journalistic rules and flushed it down one of the office’s famously horrible toilets. From then, until finally he was removed from his post in 1994, MacKenzie’s world ran on very simple lines: anything goes, nobody cares, nothing can stop us now. Appointed by a man who prided himself on being an outsider and on pushing boundaries, Kelvin MacKenzie was an editor who precisely matched his employer’s approach to life – a journalist uninterested even in the most fundamental rule of all, to try to tell the truth. As he later told a seminar organised by Lord Justice Leveson, MacKenzie had a simple approach to fact-checking: ‘Basically my view was that if it sounded right, it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in.’
This was the editor who referred to the office computers as ‘scamulators’ and who scamulated a long list of phoney stories, including most notoriously the ‘world exclusive interview’ with Marica McKay, widow of a British soldier killed in the Falklands, who, in truth, had given the Sun no interview at all; the vicious libel on Liverpool football fans, accused by the Sun of pissing on police and picking the pockets of the dead at the Hillsborough stadium disaster; the fictional front page claiming that the comedian Freddie Starr had eaten a live hamster in a sandwich; the completely false story about Elton John paying to have sex with a rent boy. For Lord Justice Leveson, MacKenzie recalled how the Sun had paid Elton John £1 million in damages for that particular piece of scamulation and how he had then reflected on the Sun’s attempts to check their facts and succeeded in drawing the most perverse of conclusions. ‘So much for checking a story,’ he grumbled. ‘I never did it again.’
The PCC Code of Practice said journalists should not invade people’s privacy. MacKenzie simply and baldly said that he ‘had no regard for it’. As one particularly sensitive example of protected privacy, the law said that newspapers should not publicly identify the victims of rape – MacKenzie went right ahead and published a front-page photograph of a woman who had been raped with special violence.
The rule-breaking was taken to a peak after the coincidence that in the same year that MacKenzie became editor of the Sun, the United Kingdom saw the opening chapter of what was to become the biggest human-interest story in the world. In 1981, the royal family acquired a new princess. For better and worse, the Diana story busted straight through the wall of deference which previously had concealed most of the private lives of those who lived in the Palace. MacKenzie’s Sun led the way. If that meant publishing photographs of Diana six months pregnant in a bikini, taken on a telephoto lens without her knowledge, then that was fine because he was merely showing ‘a legitimate interest in the royal family as living, breathing people’. If it meant making up stories, that too was no problem. In their brilliant account of life at the Sun, Stick it Up Your Punter!, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie describe MacKenzie telling his royal correspondent, Harry Arnold, that he needed a front-page story about the royal family every Monday morning, adding: ‘Don’t worry if it’s not true – so long as there’s not too much of a fuss about it afterwards.’
Once Diana’s life had been dragged into the newsroom and converted into raw material to be exploited without limit, the private lives of other public figures were hauled in behind her. And then the private lives of private figures. There were no boundaries. MacKenzie adopted a crude populist view of the world, designed simply to please an imaginary Sun reader, defined in his own words as ‘the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house. He’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers.’
MacKenzie not only produced a paper to please this imaginary bigot, he himself was the bigot. Chippindale and Horrie record his habit of referring to gay men as ‘botty burglars’ and ‘pooftahs’. He published a story falsely quoting a psychologist who was supposed to have said ‘All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS.’ He was no better with race, for example dismissing Richard Attenborough’s film about Gandhi as ‘a lot of fucking bollocks about an emaciated coon’.
From this position it followed logically that he abandoned any pretence of fair reporting about the governing of the country. A couple of hundred years ago, British journalists had disgraced their trade by selling their collaboration to politicians – for a fee, these ‘hacks’ would write whatever their paymasters required. In spite of all the twists and turns through which journalism had tried to redeem itself, MacKenzie acted as an unpaid political hack, turning the Sun into a weapon to attack all those who might upset his ‘right old fascist’ reader, scamulating as he went.
MacKenzie inflicted his ways on those who worked for him. There probably never was a rule against bullying, but if there was, MacKenzie would have shattered it. He was an Olympic-gold-medal-winning office tyrant. Colin Dunne, a feature writer who had worked on the Sun before MacKenzie took over, described the regime of relentless labour which he introduced: ‘Whenever Kelvin saw an empty office, or even an empty chair, he was overcome with the fear that someone somewhere was having a good time. And it was his personal mission to put a stop to it.’ Chippindale and Horrie record the advice which MacKenzie offered to an elderly graphic artist whose presence upset him: ‘Do us all a favour, you useless cunt: cut your throat.’
The infection spread through the Sun and was then compounded as those who had served under him moved to rival titles, taking his reckless ways with them. And in newsrooms without rules, why would anybody obey the law?
* * *
Rupert Murdoch was right: the business of bribes had been bubbling in the dark gutters of Fleet Street for years. In the 1970s, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Robert Mark, discovered that crime reporters were buying information from serving officers and denounced it as ‘one of the most long-lasting and successful hypocrisies ever to influence public opinion’. The bribery stopped. What Murdoch did not say was that it was one of his own most senior editorial executives in the UK who revived it – Alex Marunchak, a crime reporter who rose to become executive editor of the News of the World.
Ukrainian by birth, devious and hard by nature, Marunchak ran a famous double act with Greg Miskiw, who is also Ukrainian. The two of them worked together, spoke Ukrainian together and broke the law together. Marunchak was always the leader. In order to get stories and praise; in order to beat the opposition and pay for his massive alcohol and gambling habits; and finally in order to have himself promoted to the highest ranks of the paper, he bathed in a sea of corruption. He made little secret of it. He didn’t need to.
His former colleagues say that from the mid-1980s, Marunchak was a prime user of the former detective who I had come across when researching Flat Earth News, who had been pushed out of the Metropolitan Police after a corruption scandal and reinvented himself as a conduit for bribes from Fleet Street to serving officers. His name – published here for the first time – is John Ross, known to News of the World journalists as ‘Rossy’.
Marunchak and the ruddy-faced former cop formed a powerful alliance, drinking together at the Old Rose on The Highway in Wapping; going to police Christmas parties which are said to have been awash with drugs and prostitutes; setting up stories with serving officers; even paying some officers to moonlight for the paper by doing surveillance on targets or appearing as backup when a reporter got into trouble in a crack house. The former colleagues claim that, with Rossy’s help, police officers were being paid ‘left, right and centre’. It was all against the law. But nobody cared. At one point, they say, Marunchak even hired a couple of Flying Squad officers to drive out to Eastern Europe to bring back a load of vodka he wanted to import.
Rossy’s way soon spread into a network of bent police contacts. Word travels in an organ
isation like the Metropolitan Police, where people move from one station to another, from one squad to another, and so it became well known that if you came across a celebrity breaking the law or as a victim of crime, or if you came across a bit of scandal or a juicy sex crime, you could dip into confidential police files and earn yourself some extra cash by contacting John Ross. This hit a high in February 1994, when police found the dead body of a Conservative MP, Stephen Milligan, who had accidentally suffocated, apparently during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation. An officer tipped off Ross, who sold the story and pocketed thousands of pounds. One source who knows both Rossy and Marunchak claims that at one point, some serious money was being paid to a very senior officer at Scotland Yard. One of the Yard’s press officers, now dead, was disciplined for selling information to John Ross.
Rossy wasn’t Marunchak’s only way of dealing with dodgy police. In March 1987 – as Marunchak was being promoted to work on the news desk – there was a murder in south London. A private investigator called Daniel Morgan, aged thirty-seven, was found with an axe in his face in the car park of a pub in Sydenham. For some journalists, this was an important story because it soon became clear that the police investigation into the murder had run into a rat’s nest of crime and bent policing and so they set out to expose it. For Marunchak, the evident corruption was an irresistible opportunity, and he set out to take part in it.