Luckily, Ray had taken half a shine to me and wanted to keep me on the firm.
‘You’ll make a good News of the World reporter,’ he said. ‘Because no one will ever fucking believe that you are one.’ This was true. I was an expert at ‘getting into’ Britain’s new burgeoning underclass (despised by Murdoch) disguised as a smack-head or a ‘scally’ villain. To gain the trust of the local campesinos, I went around the pubs selling batteries and razors. Shortly afterwards I did a story exposing a teenage vampire cult in Dorset whose leader slit his wrists so that spellbound schoolgirls could drink his blood whilst performing naked rituals on gravestones. Afterwards, when I went to the local nick to hand over my ‘dossier of evidence’ – fuck-all really – the police didn’t believe who I was, and thought that I was taking the piss. I stood behind the glass panel for a while and then just got off back to London. Ray also assumed that because I was from the lower orders that I’d be good on the doorstep on the estates. One day, when everyone in the office was given a Spice girls nickname for a laugh, I was dubbed ‘council Spice’.
Consequently, at the end of my second week, Ray handed me a story on a plate, which made Paul McMullan jealous because it made me look like teacher’s pet. It was only a medical miracle story, about a dying dad whose wife had saved his life by donating a kidney – which turned out against all the odds to be a perfect match. Easy-peasy, bish-bash-bosh. Did the chat with the happy couple. Got them to pose up for pics with their grinning bin-lids. Filed the copy. The big problem arose when I put in a call to the ‘stunned’ consultant surgeon who had performed the op. Problem was that he wasn’t that stunned. It was as though it was an everyday occurrence to him. He said the odds of getting a compatible organ from a spouse were in fact not that mind-blowing – 1 in 36,000 to be precise. No big deal in the high-stakes world of organ transplants. ‘Fuck! That’s no good.’ I said. The whole story rested on the fact that the match was an astronomical, lottery win-style occurrence. The headline needed to be: ‘Wife in a Million Saved My Life’. Not ‘Wife in a Few Thousand’. However, the problem was easily rectified. I took a knife to the surgeon’s quotes and miraculously transplanted them from ‘The odds are 1 in 36,000’ to ‘the odds are millions and millions to one against’. Thereby standing the whole story up. I reckoned that the surgeon was unlikely to complain as the story made him look good next to a nice picture of his grin. Bang! In the paper. Front of the book spread. Job saved for another week. This was the beginning of my descent down the slippery slope.
5
Dark Arts
When I started at the NoW, it was like becoming a ‘made man’ in the mafia. I got access to a secret world that I never knew existed. Vice and secrecy were the stock-in-trade. The objective was simple – the destruction of people’s lives with hitman precision. The mafia use trained button men to do their dirty work. Our secret weapon was the private detective.
Sixteen years later News International Exec Chairman and super scion James Murdoch may not have liked his company being compared to the mafia. And he denied to a Parliamentary committee ever knowing about the private detectives that his company employed to smear lawyers investigating phone hacking. But for me, working at the Screws was like watching a live version of Goodfellas streamed in real-time before my eyes in which everyone was getting leaned on. And ‘enquiry agents’ were the enforcers that would have made Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano wince. Not long after my first day, I was given a list of confidential numbers. One for a shed-worker gumshoe that could ‘spin’ phone numbers. Another for a ‘blagger’ – a professional impersonator/mimic – who could deceive people into giving out valuable info on the phone. Another for an expert ‘tracer’ who can find the whereabouts of anyone in the world, by tracking their financial footprint. A ‘sub-contractor’ with a contact at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), that could ‘convert’ car registrations. An ex-Customs officer, who had an insider in the passport office, who could slip out mug shots and bio data of anyone who had ever been abroad. A retired copper who could pull CROs, criminal records including confidential police intelligence reports. A mind-boggling array of ‘secret squirrels’ were just a phone call away.
Private detectives were like smart bombs. They enabled me to destroy people’s lives with surgical impact without having to do lots of tedious legwork. Like the CIA calling in a drone strike, I didn’t even have to leave the office. I had no idea papers used these ‘inquiry agents’, as they were called, despite having sold stories to the nationals for two years previously.
I found out by accident about one week into the job when I was desperately trying to come up with a story. As an agency reporter, I’d done quite a lot of background on the Fred and Rose West murders at the ‘House of Horrors’ in Gloucester. In November 1995 Rose West was sentenced to life imprisonment, so I was trying to get a new line on the story. I’d got to a former victim called Sharron Compton, who claimed that she’d been raped by Fred in a satanic ritual – complete with red satin robes and all that. Sharron had a few issues – she was hard work and morbidly fascinated with the sense of control that being at the centre of a story gave her. In addition, I’d spoken to another ‘one-that-got-away,’ a fucked-up lesbian who claimed that the case opened up a can of worms. Through scary, piercing eyes she hinted that the multiple murders were linked to an underground network of necrophiliacs who traded in dead bodies out of the back door of mortuaries. All far-fetched, gruesome stuff– but the depths of the Wests’ depravity knew no bounds so I had to check it out. The witnesses had given me the possible second names of other people that I needed to track down in Bournemouth and Wiltshire, in the hope of corroborating their stories, and giving me more info. I needed to find numbers for one of them quickly so I could do a quick ‘phoner’ with them and arrange a sit-down interview if it was worth following up.
Usually in newspaper offices, at that time, there was a cupboard with dozens of chunky phone directories in them. Phone books were the first places to start. I asked the Features secretary Tara. She looked surprised and showed me to a little shelf with a couple of out-of-date blue BT books on them. The Yellow Pages were ripped to shreds, so it was clear that no one really relied upon them.
I phoned 192 directory enquiries, but I didn’t have a full name, and the number I wanted was probably ex-d anyway. In those pre-internet days, when ‘a tablet’ referred to an ecstasy pill and not an iPad, there was only one way to track people down – by hitting the streets. Firstly, I phoned the local papers in Wiltshire and Hampshire, to see if they had a number or address of the people I was looking for. I never liked doing this because it risked tipping off the local journos, who would often double-bubble you to their contacts on the Sun and the Sunday Mirror and so on. Plus a lot of local reporters were useless doughnut time-wasters anyway. It looked like I’d have to hit the road. Go to the local libraries in person, wade through the electoral registers to find a proper address. Often the info was out of date, so then I’d have to pull a birth or marriage certificate from the local register office. All very tedious, time-consuming and expensive. I’d put the stories up to Ray in conference on Tuesday – I’d have to deliver by Friday, so I didn’t really have two days to fuck about with, knocking on doors all over the countryside. Just then Ray walked briskly over and looked at the phone book as though it was a curiosity from a more genteel era.
‘Take this number down,’ he said. ‘His name is Steve Whittamore. He’s a PI.’
On the other end of the line was a jovial, avuncular voice with a dry wit. Steve lived in a sunny part of Hampshire on the coast. He had a gentle but mischievous sense of humour that was a refreshing ray of light in the tricky atmosphere at the News of the World. We hit it off immediately. I gave Steve the surname of the person I was trying to trace.
‘Do you know where they live?’ Steve asked. I gave him the name of the approximate cities and towns where I thought they might be.
‘All I know,’ I said, ‘is that one of th
em is in Wiltshire and she’s a woman in her mid thirties and she’s probably married.’
Within half an hour he was back on with an ex-directory phone number.
‘Do you want anything else?’ he asked.
‘What like?’ I said
‘Well, I’ve got her address, and the names and ages of the woman and everyone who lives at that house with her.’
In 30 minutes, he’d traced a target that it would have taken me two days to find in a previous life – saving me a 200-mile round trip to Wiltshire and a ball-aching day of banging doors looking for people who like to have sex with dead bodies.
Steve was basically at the centre of a spider’s web of secret inquiry agents. Each one had a crafty speciality. For instance, in Salisbury, Steve knew an investigator whose talent was relieving mobile phone companies, including British Telecom, of their data. The sub-contractors could have dealt direct with us, but because Steve was such an amenable and trustworthy person, they all bounced off him. He was a front-of-house broker for Britain’s network of shady data pirates. I began to use Steve on almost every story that I worked on and found out the full reach of his services.
On the next story I used Steve to do some tracing. He didn’t even need a proper name to find people. Flaky newspaper tipsters, who frequently overheard stories in the gym or at work, would often give me the wrong names of targets, or at least dodgy phonetic spellings. No matter. Steve routinely found these long-shots using a combination of intuition and experience. A wide Area Search cost £60 a throw. If I gave him an old address of a target, he could do a ‘trace on’ to a new or current address, and then back again to almost every previous address they had lived at since they were 17, the age at which they generally appear as adults on electoral rolls. This historical data was a goldmine. If I was digging up dirt on a celebrity, I could find old girlfriends, ex-wives and secret love-children. Alternatively, if I was working on a murder case, I could quickly find out where the parents of the victim lived, along with current addresses for brothers and sisters, so that they could be ‘death knocked’ literally before the body got cold. By the time the pack turned up, the News of the World had the ‘buy-up’ in a hotel eating prawn sandwiches, watching Sky News and dreaming about the holiday in Spain bought with our blood money.
Steve owed his sorcery to the Square Mile in the City. He told me that he’d learned his trade whilst working as a financial investigator in the ’70s and ’80s. He would track people down that owed money to the wealthy businesses that made up his client base. Some of this could be done perfectly legally by accessing files at Companies House, which holds the names, addresses, and DOBs, of every limited company director in the UK.
In addition, Steve could trace people who’d deliberately hidden their identities, changed their names or gone on the run. Once I found a supergrass, who was in hiding on the police’s secret witness protection programme, with a £100,000 contract on his head. Within an hour of making a call to an inquiry agent, I’d tracked the dead-man-walking down to his safe house, something two of Britain’s biggest drug barons had been trying to do for years in order to iron him out.
Steve didn’t just use the electoral role. He often confirmed someone was living at an address by saying: ‘There’s a gas bill going into that address under such-and-such’s name.’ He could find out who was paying for what utilities, and a whole range of credit info. If a person had a County Court Judgement (CCJ) against their name, then that might give you an idea of whether they were ‘pond life’ or not. The News of the World viewed the world in black and white – scumbags (the great unwashed mass of poor people and criminals) and posh people (middle class and above, high status and celebs).
A couple of months later I tried to buy a mobile phone for my girlfriend at Christmas, but I failed on the credit check. I kicked off in the shop, losing my temper, and seething things like: ‘Do you know who I am – I’m a News of the World reporter?’ etc. to the not-very-arsed staff. Cringe-worthy explosions of wrath were becoming normal. Not only in me, I noticed, but also in my control-freak colleagues. My new-found status, along with my belief that I could do anything by sheer force of will, was making me quick to anger. Anyway, when I calmed down, I asked Steve to spin my own address – and he found three CCJs against my name from three £400-odd-quid student loans I’d taken out to fund my 2:1 in Accountancy and Finance from Lancashire Poly. Thus proving to myself, that in the eyes of the NoW, I was in fact a scumbag.
Spinning numbers was also one of the most effective tricks in Steve’s spell book. Like magic, the process could conjure up proof that made it possible to run stories. After a couple of months I started doing consumer investigations. I found myself in a Manchester backstreet with a giant purple ‘Tinky-Winky’ under my arm. In the other, I was holding two red ‘Po’s by the ‘TV aerial’ circles on their heads. Move over Woodward and Bernstein.
Eh-oh! Evil toy-trader Surinder Greual was the mastermind behind the scandal of the killer Teletubbies. Greedy Greual was just one of the many two-bit ‘villains’ that I ‘exposed’ in the News of the World. His crime? Grinning Greual sold cheap, counterfeit toys on market stalls. Or, by the time his story had gone through the scamulator, he flooded Britain with fake Teletubbies that could ‘kill or maim a child in seconds’. Of course, this claim was a gross exaggeration. However, by the time I’d finished with him, he’d gone from being Del Boy on the street corner to a threat to national security. In many ways, a Tellytubby turnover was a perfect, bog-standard News of the World ‘investigation’. The NoW may be famous for its big, set-piece exposés such as bungs to the Pakistani cricket team or the Fake Sheik–Sarah Ferguson sting. But the vast majority of people who were targeted by me and my fellow journalists were straw men. Petty criminals and rogue traders who we could trick, before hyping up their wrongdoing beyond recognition.
The reason was simple – they were often poor, powerless and confused, and rarely had the resources to fight back. Backstreet Asians and ethnic minorities were easier marks because they were often working in the black economy, illegal immigrants who were unlikely to complain when they were splashed all over the News of the World. A time-honoured trick of the trade.
I could never understand the huge amount of resources that would go in to exposing a low-life that even Trading Standards wouldn’t bother with. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds were spent on inquiry agents to find out every detail. Surveillance photographers plotted up on them, ‘followers’ tailed them through the streets and £150-a-day video bags caught them red-handed peddling their tin-pot wares.
The problem on this one was that Greual never dealt direct with his customers. He did deals over the phone and directed his customers to pick up his fake Tellytubbies at shady warehouses at which he was never present. He rarely used his real name and he kept his home address secret. Although I had his mobile number, I had to make sure it was linked to him. I gave the number to either Steve or another ‘phones man’ called Skinner. The agent then ‘span it’ and ‘converted’ it to a name and address. A mobile reverse trace cost about £75. Bingo! The phone number came up as belonging to Greual. Therefore, we could prove that Greual had given us his real name, and take a snatch pic of him coming out of his house.
Once we had given a number to Steve Whittamore, he then passed it on to one of his sub-contractors, such as a long-haired Hell’s Angel on the Sussex coast. The Hell’s Angel was a blagger who used a scripted spiel to con British Telecom workers into handing out addresses attached to numbers as well as ex-directory numbers. He charged Steve around £40 for this service on top of which Steve loaded up his fee of £35. Coincidently, Skinner also offered a similar service but he was connected to a rival gang of bikers called the Outlaws.
6
Bully
I was standing in the tiny living room of a Victorian terraced house in a solidly working-class part of Liverpool. The decor was comforting, like going back in time to the 1950s and ’60s – lots of doilies, porcelai
n figurines and brass ornaments. The kind of kitsch antiques shops sell in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for an ‘I saw you coming’ amount of dough. But this was for real. Familiar smells of cooking wafted in from the back kitchen, however I couldn’t see behind the curtain to see if anyone was in there. The atmosphere reminded me of my nan’s house and those of my uncles and aunties. These were my type of people. But I wasn’t here to get sentimental. I was here to put on a ‘performance’.
I was here to act out a subtle kind of blackmail on one of the football Premiership’s biggest stars, England and Liverpool ace Steve McManaman. If I could crack it, this was a big story because McManaman was a big name at the time. Not only was he a star striker at Anfield, but off the pitch he had gained notoriety as a ‘Spice Boy’ who revelled in being a bit of a lad, drinking a little too much and modelling Armani suits. Unusually, I wasn’t here to lean on a football player for shagging a Page 3 girl. I scanned the room again. In between the clocks and mirrors, I was looking for evidence of get well cards on the mantelpiece or pills on the small round table by the window. Was there any medical equipment on show in here, such as portable infusion pumps, bedpans or disposable gloves – the detritus of chemo-therapy? I was here to lean on Steve McManaman because his mum had cancer. And I wanted him to talk to the News of the World about it, whether he liked it or not.
Hack Page 4