When I look back on this bizarre scene, I feel ashamed at how callous I’d become. However, I’ve got to tell this story as it is a good example of the routine bullying that I dished out week-in, week-out. Regularly intruding into the saddest and most private parts of people’s lives, often when they were at their weakest and without any justification. Gratuitous persecution for no good reason, as many of the stories didn’t even make it into the paper. Intimidation was a good way of making sure I got maximum rewards from fishing expeditions.
The story had started the week before, when a tip came in from an anonymous ring-in that Steve McManaman’s mum was dying of cancer. Once a tip like this comes in, the sole objective is to get an ‘emotional’ sit-down chat with the star in question, saying how hard it is to deal with the cancer, with pics of him and his mum together. This type of celebrity tale is known as a ‘my cancer hell’ story. If she gets better, then it can easily be flipped around into a ‘medical miracle’ story. The hideous truth is this – neither I nor the News of the World really cared about Steve Mac’s mum or any other cancer victims – the prize is just a chat with the footy player at the end of the day. End of Story. That may sound harsh, but I’d be lying if I said anything else. The interview was just a vehicle to get a cheap, non-libellous celebrity story into the paper. The mad thing was: I no longer thought that there was anything wrong with this. As the months went by, I was becoming increasingly desensitised to the suffering of others.
First of all, I called a footy contact who knew Steve McManaman to get some background, to sound them out on the QT. I asked whether he had heard on the grapevine that his mum had got cancer, and if so, what were the chances of McManaman doing a chat about it? ‘Fuck off,’ my mate said straight off the bat, ‘If she has got cancer, he’s keeping it quiet and no one knows. And anyway, Stevie is fiercely protective of his ma, so he won’t talk to you. You’ve got no chance.’ It was clear that McManaman wouldn’t want to speak about such a sensitive aspect of his private life.
However, this was a common problem in my line of work and there were several established News of the World protocols for dealing with it. Basically, the process amounted to a subtle form of blackmail to change McManaman’s mind. In short the News of the World would say to the player that the paper is going to run a story anyway, with or without the player’s or his mum’s say so – a straightforward cancer story announcing to the world that Steve’s mum is in a bad way. The intended effect was to shock and awe his mum, who probably wanted to suffer in private, which in turn would put Steve under pressure to enter into negotiations with us. Of course, this is a despicable strong-arm practice, but so common that I didn’t even think twice about it.
To increase the chances of the blackmail working, it was better to be armed with real medical evidence. Not a problem – I had been commissioning inquiry agents to illegally pull confidential medical records for a month or two, as I grew more confident about going ever deeper and darker into the lives of others. However, on this occasion the job was given to another reporter. To ring up an enquiry agent to pull McManaman’s mum’s medical records. First of all, the agent found out her full name (Irene), age (48) address, social security number and then an NHS number. Looking the address up in the A to Z, I remember being surprised that a Premiership star’s mum still lived in a two-up, two-down in Bootle. Steve McManaman could have afforded to buy the whole street with a month’s wages. In fact, his best mate Robbie Fowler went on to become the richest player in British football by doing just that – by buying up whole areas of terraced houses in run-down areas all over the UK. Coincidentally, at around the same time, I’d tried to turn Robbie over for going on the piss a couple of nights before his first England call-up. I ended up blagging my way into a party in his hotel room during the early hours. Secretly, I’d boshed-off some sneaky shots of him, sitting on the bed with a bevvy of beauties draped all around. But the flash on the disposable hadn’t gone off, so the pics didn’t come out and I lost the story.
Back on McManaman’s mum, the story moved on to the next stage of the process, which was heavily dependent on ‘blagging’. The inquiry agent then phoned up her GP and tried to blag the receptionist. The blaggers usually posed as NHS officials from regional hospitals who were trying to update records. One blagger that we used, who later went on to work for the Fake Sheik, was a woman in her thirties called Marjorie. She was a busty, tactile, dirty blonde who loved SAS soldiers and reading about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. According to Fleet Street folklore, Marjorie was also the illegitimate daughter of Moors Murderer Ian Brady. Though clearly untrue, this image gave her a dark edge, perfect for her job. From her luxury dockland’s pad, Marjorie blagged hospital nurses and the back office staff with a reassuring estuary accent.
Unfortunately, on the McManaman case, the inquiry agents largely drew a blank. The failure didn’t necessarily mean that the mum didn’t have cancer, and that it was a duff tip, because medical records are notoriously incomplete and the bureaucracy was painfully slow, especially so in the days before computerised files.
After trying to blag several of the local hospitals and hospices, the enquiry agents still hadn’t got the specifics I needed – the type of cancer, date of diagnosis, treatment etc. So, I then put a surveillance photographer on the house, in the hope that we could get a picture of the mum showing signs of illness – if she was having chemo, for instance, her hair might have fallen out. Or hopefully, she might get driven to a local Macmillan Centre on which we could focus our inquiries.
When faced with this situation, many newspapers would simply drop the story. Not the News of the World. In fact, the opposite is true – it was time to re-double resources and blag harder. I decided to front Stevie and his mum up and blag it myself.
I drove up to Liverpool. On the way up, the local photographer who was watching the house said that he could act as a go-between. Billy Griffiths revealed that he knew Steve McManaman personally because he was regular match photographer at Anfield, and had taken pics of him several times. Instead of banging on his door cold, Billy said he could arrange for us to go around and see him. That might be a more sensitive way of handling the story, I thought. I get a foot in the door, Steve McManaman doesn’t get a nasty surprise and his mum doesn’t get ‘monstered’. ‘Monstering’ is newspaper jargon for ambushing a target and aggressively bombarding them with questions.
Sure enough, Stevie agreed to talk to us. For anyone else, this might have been an embarrassing situation, but I had skin like a crocodile. Of course, I feigned humility and empathy. My patter, delivered with phony humility, went something like this:
‘Steve, we know it’s a bad time for you and your mum. And we really, really, really don’t want to give you any more grief than you’ve already got on your plate. But there’s two ways of handling this. Either we do a straightforward, up-and-down news story [covert message: If your mum’s fucked already, then this might tip her over edge further] or you can do a tribute story to her. Do a nice bedside chat with us, that kind of thing. You can have control of the story and copy approval: “How I’m helping mum to fight cancer . . . How she inspired me etc.” We’ll even throw in a few grand’s worth of donations to a cancer charity of your choice.’
Steve was gracious when I put the ‘allegations’ to him, but frustratingly he denied it straight away. I tried to front it out, blagging that we had definitive proof in the hope of backing him into a corner.
‘Listen, I know it’s a sensitive time for you and believe me, I didn’t want to do this, but my bosses in London insisted. It’s down to them – if it was down to me, I wouldn’t have come, out of respect for you and your mum. But the bottom line is that I know that your mum definitely has got cancer – we’ve got a very good source and I’ve seen the paperwork . . .’
I was getting very good at faking the right human emotions and responses. Later in my career, when I turned into a proper reporter, I met a professional contract killer dubbed The Rock
Star, who had thought about killing me twice after I exposed his drug-dealing partner and put him in jail. Over a Fiorentina in Pizza Express on Millbank, he told me his history – how he had helped to kill his own brother at the age of two, carried out his first hit at 14 before clocking up more than ten further targeted killings. The Rock Star told me that he no longer felt human emotions, but that he was a good mimic of feelings because it made getting through day-to-day life easier. He knew when to laugh and joke and put on a sad face when grieving. I realised that I had undergone a similar process while working at the News of the World.
But Steve remained completely calm and firm. ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘You’ve got your facts wrong.’ It was unusual for targets to be so robust, and I smelled a rat, as it was often quite easy to get people to fold under questioning with a dose of passive-aggressive intimidation. I immediately got on to what was going on. I suspected that Billy and Stevie were conspiring to play me. It was obviously in Billy’s interests, even though he was an NoW freelancer, to keep in with Steve, and Billy had probably tipped him the wink that we didn’t have any real proof.
What happened then was a very absurd and humiliating charade – humiliating for his mum, that is.
Stevie said: ‘Well if you don’t believe me, you can ask my mum yourself.’ Sure enough, a frail but well-dressed lady appeared from a curtain near the back kitchen. She was smiling. I could tell that she was shy, but she was pulling off some good, forced cheer.
Steve said: ‘Look at her – she looks the picture of health.’ And sure enough, as though she was reading from a script, Irene told me that she didn’t have cancer. It reminded me of when Jewish women in the camps had to rub pin-pricks of blood into their cheeks to make themselves look healthy so that the camp doctor wouldn’t select them for extermination. In this case, to my disgrace, I was playing the role of the feared inspector.
To hide my embarrassment, I said: ‘The cancer rumour was probably just somebody winding me up, rival fans spreading gossip, to have a go at Steve.’ She looked at me, relieved that I’d bought it. But there’s no way that she was getting off the hook that easily.
‘So you haven’t had any tests or that kind of thing?’ I pushed.
She looked hesitant.
‘Or you haven’t had a cancer scare, and then it’s gone into remission?’
I could see that she was wobbling, and she looked desperately at her son for guidance.
‘Listen, my mum hasn’t got cancer, OK,’ Steve intervened. ‘My mum’s OK and you can see there’s nothing wrong with her.’
By sticking to a limited rebuttal, they could truthfully say that she hadn’t got cancer at that moment, and obscure any more niggly questions about previous or future attacks. It was obvious that Steve had put on this show to prove to me that I was talking bollocks. Quite rightly, in order to protect his mum. Steve had double-bubbled me. I had gone up to blag him and he was blagging me, in another of those bizarre and merry dances.
What could I do but apologise profusely and get off, head bowed? Outside, I felt a strange mixture of fear and confusion. Fear that I’d have to tell Ray that the story had fallen down, with all the usual long silences, the odd ‘For fuck’s sake’ followed by ‘What else have you got?’ But also I felt a sense of humiliation that I had degraded Steve McManaman and his mother.
We couldn’t use the story without an admission. A couple of years later Steve’s mum died of breast cancer aged 50. Not long after I’d gone to front her, she’d become bed-ridden with pain. She’d been fighting the disease for six years.
Back then, I didn’t feel any real sense of shame or sorrow. Today I can only apologise to Steve McManaman and his family for my behaviour. I take full responsibility. However, at the time it felt like I had been brainwashed. Later, I remember reading about how the US army conditioned new recruits in Vietnam to dehumanise the enemy. Most trainees were appalled at the idea of killing people and their officers knew it. The commanders knew that young men had to be coached to accept death as routine. Consequently, the first job new soldiers were given on arrival was burying dead enemy soldiers. Soon, they were encouraged to boot in the heads of dead VC and throw their bodies off cliffs. A gruesome but effective ritual in order to desensitise normal people so that they would disrespect and be cruel to other normal people. I could understand that. In my case the enemy were people like Steve McManaman and his mum.
Without a conscience, I was able to carry on doing stories in which medical records were pulled and sometimes they worked out. However, doctor’s notes were expensive to get – around £500 if successfully obtained and a story based on their contents went in the papers. So the service was mostly confined to high-value celebrity stories. To prove that starlets had had an abortion. To prove that they had got AIDS or other diseases. Eating disorders. Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Alcoholism. Depression. Drug abuse. Medical records were doubly useful, because if the star didn’t want to talk about their specific affliction, it was common practice to blackmail them into giving me another completely unrelated story to use instead.
7
Official Files
Steve could find out a plethora of information held by the government on a person – social security files, National Insurance numbers, Inland Revenue tax codes, information which could then be used in a variety of blags to get wage slips, benefit payments and immigration status documents to build up a dossier on a target. He had a civil servant on the payroll. In addition there were blagging manuals that contained psychological profiles of benefits staff as being ‘subservient to the rules, rather lacking in personal character’ and ‘utterly paranoid about bogus callers’.
The script advised: ‘The way to con this type of person is to convince them that you are just as prim and proper as they are. Don’t even bother calling them under the pretext that you are a cockney or an idiot, because you won’t last five seconds.’
Here are the other data-rich files targeted by private-detectives:
PO Boxes
Good value on vice stories to find out who was behind the small ads that traded in pervy mags, hard core porn, swingers, sex clubs and high-class cat houses in the pre-internet age. I once exposed a load of cranky neo-Nazis in Manchester by identifying them through their PO box. I then blagged the password to open the box and stole the contents. I often stole mail from ordinary houses as well. If I was doing a door knock or a watch (surveillance of a house), and no one was in, I’d sneak up the path and swipe their letters as a matter of routine – just to make sure I had the right address – and have a nose at their correspondence.
Bank Accounts
I asked inquiry agents to look into the accounts of several famous people but to be honest it was often boring and inconclusive.
Criminal Records
Always hard to pull, as the police were continually clamping down on it, building in more security traces or moving around the moles that the papers relied upon to non-sensitive posts. Despite having a civilian worker at South London’s Wandsworth police station on the payroll, Steve’s service was hit and miss. In order to log on to the Police National Computer, his insider had to create phony reports from the public to justify each pillage.
Two ex-coppers, who had been booted off the force for having shadowy links, joined forces with a bent immigration lawyer and could sometimes get police data. Later, when I worked at the Sunday Mirror, two journalists were hassling me to pull the criminal record of a boyfriend of EastEnders star Jessie Wallace. I phoned them up and they sent over a dossier, which they claimed was a ‘criminal record’. However, much of the data seemed to be in the public domain already.
Often gangsters were the best people to go to for criminal records. The reason was simple – they were always paying off bent civilian workers at police HQs to get info for them so that they could stay one step ahead of getting nicked. A feared underworld enforcer once sold me the Merseyside Police Threat Assessment of Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard for a £1000
in cash.
Extract from blagger training manual
OBTAINING SOMEONE’S BANK DETAILS DIRECTLY
TO:
THE SUBJECT
AS:
BT ACCOUNTS
Subject
Hello.
Agent
Good afternoon. British Telecom Accounts section. May I speak to Mr [Subject]?
Subject
Speaking.
Agent
Regarding the last bill relating to telephone number 081-123 4567, there is a possibility that your meter may have been faulty and overrunning. We’ve had complaints from quite a few people on the same side of the road as yours about abnormally high bills. Have you noticed that your last quarter bill was abnormally higher that usual for a quarter?
Subject
Yes, it was a bit high.
Agent
Our engineers have notified us, from various meter tests, that you were probably overcharged 537 units over and above that which you used. This comes to a credit fund of 4.02p/unit x 537 [tap it out on a calculator next to the phone for the subject to hear], this equal a total refund of £21.59.
We can credit your account on the next telephone bill next quarter or pay the money directly into your account today by Direct transfer.
Hack Page 5