Hack Attack Read online

  Two men sat in the middle of that nest. One was Daniel Morgan’s business partner, a heavy-set, heavy-drinking Yorkshireman named Jonathan Rees, then aged thirty-two. Within days of Morgan’s murder, investigating officers came to see Rees as their prime suspect. As a private investigator, Rees was a man without any special skill: he had been in the merchant navy and then he had worked as a store detective and, in the late 1970s, as a bailiff for an outfit where Morgan also had worked. In 1981, he and Morgan set up their own investigation agency, working for local law firms, serving writs, collecting information. Since all their business, their contacts and their drinking life were embedded in the dreary, red-brick maze of south London, they called themselves Southern Investigations.

  The second key figure was a big, burly, bent detective sergeant, who ran the local crime squad in Catford, south London, Sid Fillery, then aged forty. Fillery, according to his former colleagues, often cut corners, bashed prisoners, ‘fitted up’ suspects with false evidence, drank copiously while on duty and kept in an office drawer a stash of photographs of young boys being used for sex. Within days of Morgan’s murder, investigating officers came to the conclusion that their inquiries were being obstructed by Fillery. They discovered that for the last five years, he had been a close friend of Jonathan Rees: both of them were Freemasons, and the two of them had routinely shown up in local pubs buying rounds, slapping backs and talking business, often with other police officers. Rees had been hiring Fillery and police colleagues to do jobs for Southern and paying them for information from the police computer. In fact, Rees had been spending so much time with Fillery and his colleagues that some officers thought he must be a detective and allowed him the run of local stations.

  When Jonathan Rees emerged as the prime suspect for the murder of Daniel Morgan, it was Fillery who went to interview him, and Fillery who went to his office to seize crucial paperwork which then disappeared. A year after Morgan’s body was found slashed and bleeding in that car park, it was Fillery who left the police and replaced the dead man as Rees’s business partner in Southern Investigations.

  Their activities had caught my eye when I was working on Flat Earth News. Far more detail has emerged since then, largely because it turned out that Scotland Yard’s Directorate of Professional Standards, the DPS, finally became so concerned about the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan and the network of corruption around Southern Investigations that they ran a covert operation against Rees and Fillery, uncovering a mass of information, including their links to Fleet Street. In 1997, the DPS approached a retired detective, Derek Haslam, and persuaded him to work as an undercover informant. As a serving officer, Haslam had known Jonathan Rees and seen the corruption of some of the officers who mixed with him. Now, he agreed to renew his connection with Southern and to report back each week to a handler whom he would meet in crowded public places, often airports. To protect him from leaks within Scotland Yard, all his information was recorded under a false name. They called him Joe Poulton. Early in 1999, alarmed by the scale of crime which Haslam was reporting, the DPS planted an electronic listening device in Southern’s office. For months, it sat there undetected, recording hundreds of hours of casual criminality.

  Some of the intelligence was connected to pure crime, nothing to do with newspapers – associates of Rees and Fillery importing drugs from Ireland and stashing kilos of cocaine in a London cemetery, laundering cash for a south London drug baron, stealing drugs from a rival dealer, trying to pass information to the police to cause trouble for two other south London drugs families, plotting to plant drugs in the car of a detective who was investigating Morgan’s murder. And always, there were the signs of serious police corruption, as ordinary as oxygen in the world of Southern Investigations. The hidden bug one day caught Rees discussing a bent officer. ‘He’s fucking bent as fuck,’ he said. ‘I love a bent Old Bill.’

  There were plenty of them and eventually some were caught: Detective Constable ‘Skinny’ Tom Kingston, jailed for his part in stealing two kilos of amphetamine from a dealer; former Detective Constable Martin King, imprisoned for corruption and perverting the course of justice; former detective ‘Drunken’ Duncan Hanrahan, jailed for conspiracy to supply drugs, rob, steal and pervert the course of justice; and a very powerful police commander who, according to Haslam, was up to his elbows in armed robbery, fencing stolen goods and the protection of one of London’s most powerful gangsters. He was not caught. All of them had their own contacts among other bent officers. The network of corruption, according to Rees and Fillery’s recorded words, spread beyond the police to a bent VAT inspector (who had access to confidential information on anybody running any business) and also to bent customs officers. And if all other contacts failed, according to one source who was close to Southern, Rees said he could always borrow a police warrant card and just pose as a serving officer himself.

  Among other benefits, the network granted Rees and Fillery promiscuous access to the confidential records held on Scotland Yard’s computers. The hidden bug caught them laughing about friends in the force who were stealing other officers’ swipe cards so that they could log on in their names. One of their contacts had left the force and taken with him the book of codes which allows officers on the road to call in for information from the computer. Rees’s immediate reaction was to wonder whether they could steal the code book.

  These contacts allowed Rees and Fillery to pursue their criminal ends – selling inside information or a little discreet assistance to a client who had been charged with a crime, extracting confidential police data on who was wanted for what offence, providing help to associates who were involved in major drug deals. In one call which was caught by the bug, Rees discussed using a customs contact to plant false evidence on a client’s enemy. In another, he boasted that he was paying £100 a month to a police contact to check the Met’s internal computer system for any intelligence on himself or Fillery: in this way, Rees claimed, they had discovered that a hostile officer had filed an intelligence report linking them to a conspiracy to sell £500,000 of amphetamine.

  The DPS tried to summarise their knowledge of Southern’s activities in an internal report, which concluded: ‘Scanning intelligence around police corruption in London, it can be stated that Rees and Fillery are a crucial link between the criminal fraternity and serving police officers. There is nothing that they do that in any way benefits the criminal justice system.’

  Alex Marunchak waded into the cesspit at Southern Investigations, scooping up whatever he could find for the News of the World. Journalists who worked with him have described how ‘Sid’s men’ were a familiar sight – in the newsroom; in the bar of the Old Rose; sitting outside targets’ homes, watching and snatching covert pictures which would then be served up in dossiers; going out on stories as bodyguards; and, above all, selling information which they had obtained by criminal means. Rees liked to boast that there was nothing he could not get his hands on – ‘even the Queen’s medical records’, he told Derek Haslam. In a single year, 1996/7, the News of the World paid Southern a total of more than £166,000.

  They targeted rock stars. They went after criminals. They hit the royal family, senior politicians and anybody else who caught Marunchak’s eye. When Marunchak wanted a Special Branch intelligence bulletin for a story, Detective Constable ‘Skinny’ Tom Kingston supplied it. When Southern asked about the movements of the royal family or government ministers or prisoners liable to escape, a motorcycle escort officer from the police Special Escort Group told them all they needed to know. When the News of the World wanted to expose the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, for having an extramarital affair, it was Southern who provided a former police officer, Steven ‘Sid’ Creasey, to follow him around.

  They even managed to find bent police contacts abroad. Marunchak needed information from the US about Darius Guppy, an Old Etonian who was wanted for staging a phoney jewellery robbery in New York and defrauding an insurance company. Rees had the answer
, as the hidden bug recorded: ‘We got some fantastic contact in America. Their ex-police officers’ association is just like a serving police force, still get hold of things that are going on, they get access.’ Rees went on to describe how he had got in touch with a former FBI agent: ‘He said “Yeah, yeah, leave it with me,” and, before Guppy got picked up, we had copies of his arrest notes, the photographs, the information, confidential top-secret file that had come from the Met Police … So before they even got him, the News of the World had it on their desks.’

  Independently of Rees, Marunchak had his own dark sources. He heard that another News of the World journalist knew a civilian worker in the police and Marunchak paid him £800 to leak confidential information. He also procured a contact in the Passport Office, who could supply the personal details of anybody who had applied for a passport, including a photograph, if Marunchak was willing to wait twenty-four hours.

  Marunchak did well out of all this. He rose through the ranks to become senior executive editor and then editor of the Irish edition, based in Dublin. He remained hard, unrelenting towards the targets of News of the World stories. During his rise, in May 1996, a Catholic priest, Father Benjamin O’Sullivan, killed himself after being accused of being a paedophile by one of Marunchak’s reporters. Marunchak reacted by sending a jokey message on the newsroom’s internal system, about ‘the death of that homo monk’.

  He also remained mysterious. Several colleagues believe Marunchak had links with intelligence agencies, a clear possibility for a Ukrainian based in the West during the Cold War. Certainly, he did work as a translator for the Metropolitan Police. One reporter recalls being invited by him for a drink in the Ritz hotel where they were joined by the former detective John Ross and a man from the US Embassy, who then tried to recruit the reporter as an asset for the CIA. Marunchak himself encouraged the rumours. According to one source who dealt with him in 2010, Marunchak pulled out his mobile phone and flashed several numbers which he claimed were his MI5 contacts.

  And, as ever, the collusion with Rees and Fillery spread from the Murdoch newsroom to others. Once Marunchak had established the link to Southern, several News of the World reporters found out what he was doing and took the link with them when they moved papers. Doug Kempster, who had worked in London and Birmingham for the News of the World, went to the Sunday Mirror in 1996 and became a regular customer of Rees and Fillery’s network. Gary Jones, who had worked with Marunchak in London, moved to the Daily Mirror as crime correspondent, and was soon in touch with Southern. A similar route was followed by Mark Thomas, chief reporter at the News of the World, then deputy editor at the Daily Mirror and finally editor of the Sunday People.

  The police bug recorded Kempster, at the Sunday Mirror, arranging for Southern to get inside the bank account of Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex; sharing his opinion that ‘Asians look better dead’; and cracking a joke with Rees about ‘a one-legged nigger’. It also recorded Rees arguing with Gary Jones about payment of the large bill which Jones and Mark Thomas had run up for the Daily Mirror, and telling him bluntly that he could not submit invoices which listed the phone numbers which had been blagged ‘because what we’re doing is illegal, innit? I don’t want people coming in and nicking us for criminal offences, you know.’

  But that is exactly what happened. Through Derek Haslam and the listening device, in late 1999 the DPS became aware that Rees had been hired by a client called Simon James, who wanted to stop his wife, Kim, getting custody of their child in divorce proceedings. Rees agreed to use his police contacts to plant some cocaine in her car and to record a false intelligence alert about her supposed possession of drugs so that she would be arrested and prosecuted. The DPS moved in. Simon James and Rees were jailed for six years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, extended in Rees’s case to seven years by the court of appeal.

  In 2002, with Rees still behind bars, police raided Southern again, seized Sid Fillery’s computer, and found his collection of pornographic pictures of young boys. In October 2003 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, Fillery pleaded guilty to making and possessing indecent images of children and was placed on the sex offenders’ register. Police also sent files to the Crown Prosecution Service summarising alleged involvement in illegal information-gathering by Rees and Fillery, naming members of his network and including evidence about Alex Marunchak, Doug Kempster from the Sunday Mirror and Gary Jones from the Daily Mirror.

  In all cases, the CPS concluded that there was insufficient evidence to justify a prosecution.

  After four police inquiries, the murder of Daniel Morgan remains unsolved. Neither Rees nor Fillery nor any of their associates has been found guilty of any offence in relation to his death.

  * * *

  It was in the fertile soil of the Sun that the crime of phone-hacking first took root in Fleet Street, in 1998. According to some who worked there, it was a young reporter from the provinces who introduced the trick. For legal reasons, he cannot be named, so I will call him Sand.

  MacKenzie had left four years earlier, but the culture of his destructive genius remained, and that included the bullying. Sand appears to have suffered badly from one particularly demanding editor. ‘He had no contacts,’ according to one former colleague, ‘and anyway if he had had any, his boss would have stolen them.’

  Quite how Sand learned to hack is not clear, but certainly by 1998, the hole in the security of mobile phone messages was becoming common knowledge. Struggling to survive, Sand started eavesdropping on voicemail. Apparently keen to advertise his cleverness, he made no secret of what he was doing. A former colleague, whom I will call Diamond, says that Sand’s phone-hacking was well known to be the source for the Sun’s long-running coverage in 1999 of Mick Jagger’s divorce from Jerry Hall and identifies Jagger’s PR man, Bernard Doherty, as a particular target.

  ‘He was an industry,’ according to Diamond, who was also new to the Sun and was shocked to see other reporters soon copying Sand. ‘I thought that journalists had just stopped having contacts, a whole generation coming up without being able to talk to people, wandering around electronically through these people’s lives.’

  One of those who saw the crime circulate through the Sun was Sean Hoare, who worked alongside Sand and later confessed openly to what was happening: ‘I hacked messages. Everyone was at it. All of a sudden, you have this power. You can access anything. You can tell their movements, where they’ve been. Everybody got a bit carried away with this power that they had. No one came close to catching us.’ Hoare cited the splits and tensions within the Spice Girls, and a high-volume dispute between David Beckham and Posh Spice as examples of stories which he landed through hacking. ‘It was so competitive,’ he said. ‘You are going to go beyond the call of duty. You are going to do things that no sane man would do. You’re in a machine. Everyone was drinking everyone’s blood.’ And so it spread like bindweed – outwards to other newspapers, who could not afford to be beaten by the Sun’s antics; and, according to some sources, allegedly upwards into the most senior ranks of Fleet Street.

  The Sun’s associate editor at this time was Andy Coulson. Diamond has no doubt that Coulson soon heard what Sand was doing, and claims to have seen Coulson playing some of the hacked messages about Mick Jagger’s divorce. Diamond also claims that Coulson said of Sand: ‘He’s a one-trick pony. But what a trick!’

  By the time that Coulson moved to be deputy editor of the News of the World in 2000, Glenn Mulcaire, with the help of Greg Miskiw, had already planted the hacking seed there. However, under the leadership of Coulson and his editor, Rebekah Brooks, who had also come from the Sun, hacking became embedded as a core activity in the newsroom. One of Brooks’s first moves as the new editor was to contact Miskiw, who had been master of the dark arts when she was features editor there from 1996 to 1998. Miskiw had just been sent to New York as US editor. Brooks recalled him to London, although she has always insisted that she had no idea that he was involved in
crime.

  Back at the Sun, Diamond, Hoare and one other reporter, ‘Sapphire’, all claim that the editor of Bizarre, Dominic Mohan, became an enthusiastic hacker. Mohan has made it clear that he denies this. Diamond and Hoare independently claim that Mohan hacked Andy Coulson’s own messages and then told him so – ‘I know what you did last night’ – thinking that Coulson would find it funny. As it was, they recalled, Mohan found himself on the receiving end of a furious verbal kicking. Hoare claimed that he had his own messages hacked by Mohan. At the Leveson Inquiry, Mohan was asked a series of questions about his possible knowledge of phone-hacking and denied being aware of any such activity.

  Counsel for Leveson, Robert Jay QC, asked him whether there was a pattern in the sources of seven different stories, published by him in the Bizarre column, which reported that Liam Gallagher from Oasis and his partner, Patsy Kensit, had had ‘a stream of fierce rows over the phone’; that the TV soap actress Martine McCutcheon and her partner ‘had phoned each other every day since they met’; that TV soap actor Sid Owen had ‘made a series of phone calls’ begging his girlfriend to come back to him; that Anthony Kiedis from Red Hot Chili Peppers had been dating one of the Spice Girls and ‘has been bombarding her with phone calls’; that the rock singer Robbie Williams had been ‘making late-night calls’; that the fashion model Caprice had been ‘bombarding 5ive singer J with phone calls’; and that a Manchester United footballer ‘has been bombarding’ a model with phone calls.

  Mohan said it was difficult to remember the source of stories many years after they had been written, that they had probably been obtained from contacts and that he was not aware that anyone on Bizarre had hacked messages to obtain any of them although he could not be 100% certain of that. In his report, Leveson specifically refrained from criticising Mohan. By this time, Mohan had been promoted by Rupert Murdoch to be editor of the Sun. Later, he became an assistant to News Corp’s chief executive.