Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Which would you prefer?

  [Most people go for the bank option as this ensures that they get the money quicker. If the subject opts for the credit to the next BT bill, correct yourself and say “Oh, I'm terribly sorry but I've just realised that for amounts less than £30 our department policy is to credit your bank account or building society directly.”]

  Can I take your details please and I'll get the transfer made this afternoon?

  [Wait for the subject to respond before asking the next question as the subject may give you all the info without reecing to be asked.]

  Your bank is......? and the branch address? And the account number is?

  Do you have any other banks or building societies we could use to transfer the money to as [the first given bank] tends to take a bit longer to pay into than some of the others?

  [Then take details of ary other banks and building societies in the same fashion]

  You should get the credit through tomorrow or the day after. Thanks. Bye.

  If you’re asked for your telephone number say “Freephone BT Account North London” [Replace London with the relevant town).

  If you’re asked for your name just say “Mrs Adams, but anyone will he able to help you when you call our section as we are all computerised and on the same database screens.

  One day I asked Ray if there was anyone else in the office who could pull criminal records. He told me to go and see one of the reporters on News called Neville Thurlbeck. Thurlbeck was nicknamed ‘low level Neville’ because he was prepared to go where others wouldn’t to get the story. To get horizontal even. He gained notoriety in 1998 after naked pictures of him were published on the internet showing him getting a rub down off a swinger masseuse that he was supposed to be exposing. Later, when the paper was forced to publish the pictures with his privates blacked out, Neville’s defence was: ‘I am NOT ashamed of these pictures. As the Chief Crime Reporter at the News of the World, I have to operate at the very sharpest end of journalism to bring our readers the stories of crime, vice and deceit amongst the great and the good or the lowest of the low.’

  A couple of years later he was charged with and eventually cleared of police corruption related to the way he was able to get criminal records. Today he is on bail following arrest over suspicions of phone hacking. As well as being a highly respected NoW journo – he served as News Editor and Chief Reporter – Neville was a typical eccentric outsider. He cultivated a 1940/50s retro-faux-country gentleman’s look, complete with tweed jacket and brogues. His hair was slicked back like he’d just walked off the set of Casablanca. He often wrote under his granddad’s name Jack Tunstall. Like many senior Screws reporters, he was cash-rich – £90,000-a-year salaries were de rigueur – and he spent his day off on Monday doing the schedule A accounts of his portfolio of buy-to-let properties that were rapidly becoming the staple investment of salaried Blair-boomers.

  Quite a few of the reporters had this weird olde-worlde nonsense going on, a sharp contrast with the bland functionality of Fortress Wapping. The Royal reporter Clive Goodman retrod himself back to the Great Depression days with aplomb, often sporting a long mac and an Al Capone-style felt fedora. He went too far and actually used to arrive to work in some kind of sombre, dark-coloured English classic car. I think they were trying to recreate some golden age of Fleet Street. But to be honest they just looked like a pair of tools. I never had the money or time to buy a new suit. For years, I was still wearing a cheap, dog-tooth sports jacket that I had bought as a skint agency reporter. My boss at the agency always used to say that I looked like a bag of shit tied together around the middle with string. The rest of my wardrobe consisted of a two-sizes-too-big Gieves and Hawkes blazer, which was either counterfeit or stolen, that one of the lads had sold me before I left Liverpool.

  In 2003, around six years after I first started using Steve Whittamore, his house was raided by the Office of the Information Commissioner as part of Operation Motorman, an investigation to crack down on illegal information. In 2005 he was found guilty of obtaining and disclosing information under the Data Protection Act after passing on files from the police national database. The sentence was a two-year conditional discharge. The Information Commissioner found a sample of News of the World searches: 228 transactions from 23 reporters. His invoices mirrored headlines: ‘Bonking headmaster’, ‘Dirty vicar’, ‘Street stars split’ and ‘Miss World bonks sailor’ were just a few. He grossed £1.6 million in the period 1995–2003.

  I never stopped to think about whether any of this was illegal. To tell you the truth, I didn’t care. There was definitely a feeling that we, the News of the World, were above the law, and that we could do anything we wanted. Who was going to turn us over? No one. Why? Because that was our job. We turned people over. Not the other way round. Anyway, the police looked upon us as the good guys, or so we believed.

  Then there was the fear. The fear of failure far outweighed the fear of getting into trouble with the law. I was so fanatically devoted to the News of the World that I would have gone to prison for it. It was a kind of brainwashing. I wasn’t the only one – Neville Thurlbeck was prepared to go to prison when he was facing allegations of bribing police in 2000. During the trial, the court heard how Neville secretly pulled his CROs. He gave a copper called Dick Farmer info on criminals the News of the World had exposed. In order to do that, Neville had to register as an informant under the codename ‘George’. In return, Farmer gave him criminal record info from the PNC. The judge found nothing improper and said it was a ‘symbiotic’ relationship.

  Having access to private detectives had a simple effect – it gave me an immense feeling of personal power. At the time, I wasn’t really aware of it because, being a reporter and living a life of distraction, I never had time to reflect on my condition. But the power kind of seeped into me, and expressed itself in a blundering arrogance.

  A few years earlier I’d been a jobless pothead sitting on the couch at home in my boxers with the central heating turned up. Now I had been granted an instantaneous power to find dirt on anyone – and destroy their life.

  For the first time in my life people feared me: everyone from politicians to celebs to footie players. Three years earlier I couldn’t get into a nightclub. Now the most powerful people in the land are taking my calls and sweating on the other end during the long silences and the buttering-ups. Falling over themselves to keep me on side. Then I’m monstering them on the doorstep, sermonising to them about their degenerate behaviour. I was the tabloid evangelist.

  This had knock-on effects. Reporters and editors began to build personal fiefdoms, based on their access to inquiry agents. The types of personality that the NoW attracted were greedy for power and status, and once they realised PIs were an instant fix, the phenomenon created a kind of arms race to see who could get the ones that would break the law further and faster. A new generation of Princes and Princesses of Darkness started to stalk the corridors of News International.

  The other dangerous effect was incremental illegality. Once one criminal act had been committed, it was no big deal to go a bit further, and do one that was a little bigger. Once I was able to spin a number I wanted more. Could I get an itemised phone bill attached to that number so I could find out who the person was calling? Once a reporter could get the phone bills, could she or he hack into their voice messages? Once they’d listened to a soap stars’ phone message, was it such a big deal to do a Milly Dowler? Once they’d hacked the voicemails was it such a big deal to tap into live conversations? Could they bug rooms? Well, if they can tap the phone and bug the bedroom, then it’s not such a big deal to hack the computer on top of the kitchen table, is it? Driven by fierce internal competition, this is how Fleet Street sleepwalked into the phone hacking scandal. Steve Turner, of the British Association of Journalists later concluded: ‘Bullying and greed are at the heart of the phone hacking and blagging scandal engulfing Fleet Street tabloids. Reporters and writers have been bullied into br
eaking the law for fear of being sacked if they didn’t cooperate.’

  8

  Blags

  My next big assignment swooped in one Friday night when I was crashed out on a stinking mattress in my grimy, linoed-up Holloway shithole. I was only earning £400-a week, which in London, didn’t go very far. I’d moved into my mate’s bedsit flat off the A1. Gav was an aspiring writer and filmaker The February chills had exhausted me during an outdoor surveillance job all week, so I was looking forward to recuperating. The bonus was that my flatmate Gav was out, so luckily I could have the proper mattress. But fuck – the extremely loud ring on my Nokia suddenly went off.

  Ray: ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  ‘In bed,’ I replied.

  Ray: ‘Well, listen, get dressed and get down to Caspers Bar. It’s in Hanover Square. Ring me on the way and I’ll bring you up to speed.’

  No rest for the professionally wicked. Within minutes I’d hit the streets and I was swerving my way through the headlights of Friday night traffic on the way to the nearest tube. Finishing getting dressed on the move, my Nokia jammed in between my tilted head and shoulder with Ray filling me in.

  It turned out that England and Glasgow Rangers ace Gazza was on the piss inside Caspers Bar, while – SHOCK! HORROR! – he should have been at home with his pregnant wife Shazza, who heartrendingly was about to give birth. That was the story. No big deal to me. I couldn’t give a fuck what Gazza did. But apparently millions of our punters would like to know this and the News of the World newsroom had gone into a most severe DEFCON 1. Forces were being marshalled all over the place.

  The problem was this. Ray had already sent in half-a-dozen reporters to shadow Gazza. However, they’d been rumbled by the overweight Geordie and his smart-arsed Scottish teammate Ally McCoist. Then Ray had sent in a few of the sexy-looking girl reporters. They’d also showed-out. As had loads of doughnut photographers. Ray was throwing bodies at it left, right and centre, but it was a forlorn hope. I was the last throw of the dice.

  When I arrived, in my scruffy grey Berghaus fleece, the problem had gotten considerably worse. A fully-blown media circus had landed. Around 20 reporters from four or five rival newspapers were disguised as Friday night office workers, and were also desperately trying to lock on to Gazza. We no longer had the story to ourselves. So now, not only had I to follow the overpaid bell-end, get a story out of him, but also I had to simultaneously shake off the competition.

  I stood back from the crowd and took stock. Like an army officer sizing up the enemy before an attack, I tried to figure out what resources I could bring to bear to maximise success. I quickly concluded that there was only one God-given grace that offered any hope of a solution. I’d been doing it all my life and now was the chance to show the world what I was made of. This was my pièce de résistance.

  Blagging – derived from the French word ‘blaguer’, meaning to prank – is the act of using clever talk and deception to obtain information or access. It has been the bedrock of my ‘career’. If the philosopher Thomas Aquinas had studied tabloid journalism in his treatise On Being and Essence, he would have surely found blagging to be the essence of my profession. If you hadn’t already got on to it, tabloids are basically about blagging secrets that someone doesn’t want you to know, or blagging into places that someone doesn’t want you to go.

  I had learned all I needed to know about my future calling when I was 16. In 1984 I ‘blagged’ my way into Wembley to watch the sell-out Charity Shield clash between Liverpool and Everton. I couldn’t get a ticket, so first of all I found out what firm did the catering at Wembley, an American outfit called ARA. I also found out that the same company had a concession at the International Garden Festival in Liverpool. Promptly I ‘appropriated’ some of the liveried overalls from the show’s kitchens when the chef wasn’t looking and then used them to bunk into the VIP box at Wembley disguised as a kitchen porter. I managed to get within a few yards of the Royal Family by pretending to sweep up whilst carrying an empty box of crisps.

  A few years later I winged a £400 student loan, photocopied a counterfeit press pass that my mate had bought from a Thai brothel and blagged it to the frontline of the Yugoslavian civil war. These were my rights of passage into Fleet Street. A far cry from the recruits into the Fourth Estate today, who prepare themselves for a life of distraction by obtaining degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and doing work experience from the age of 13.

  Culturally, I’d been immersed in a milieu of blagging during my formative years. My teens coincided with the emergence of the rooting tooting ‘scallywag’ youth culture in which blagging was considered a virtue by a generation of terrace urchins obsessed with exotic sportswear and good music. In the 1990s blagging seeped into mainstream pop culture through ‘laddism’. Streetwise short cuts to success were celebrated. Noel Gallagher ‘blagged’ Beatles songs. Underachieving barrow boy-types blagged highly paid jobs in the City. Young British Artists blagged the establishment and entered the high-end art market. Blagging was the zeitgeist. Fortunately for me, I was one of the best blaggers of my generation. So it was only a matter of time before the NoW, a blue-chip company that ranked ‘blagging’ highly in the corporate skill set, would pluck me from obscurity.

  And now, as I faced Gazza across the crowded bar, was my chance to step up. To give the News International shareholders some Return On Investment. ‘Let’s do it to them before they do it us.’ The motto I always whispered to myself before going into action. I waited for the exact moment until Gazza swilled the bottom of his last pint into his gob, and was about to leave the pick-up joint. I quickly ran outside. Three cabs were stacked up on the rank. I paid two to move off the runway straight away. Then jumped in the remaining one. Just as Gazza got to the top of the stairs, I slammed the door in his face and told the driver to go.

  Now, obviously I knew that Gazza would be desperate for a cab, to get away from the pack and the paps that were now swarming around him. Bang on script, as the driver shifted into gear, he started knocking on the window frantically saying ‘Let me in, let me in,’ and crying like a big girl. The driver slammed on the brakes as Ally McCoist put a hand out in front. Playing it cool, I wasn’t going to let Gazza in straight away – in case he tippled that he was being set up.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted at Gazza through the glass. ‘This is my cab.’

  As if on cue, he sighed: ‘Please, mate. Help us out. I’m getting followed by all paparazzi and I need a taxi.’ His daft mates were acting the goat behind him going, ‘Do you know who he is? It’s Gazza, let him in.’

  All the time the pack was closing in, lighting up the rank with flashes. But it wasn’t time yet – I let him sweat, letting the blag soak in, all the while risking that he’d walk away or someone from the assembled press corps would recognise me.

  ‘Well I can’t help you, mate.’ I replied. ‘You’ll have to wait for the next one. Get out of the way.’

  Gazza: ‘For fuck’s sake, mate – give us a break. Let us in and we’ll pay for the cab to wherever you’ve got to go.’

  Bingo! He was now begging me to get into the cab.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ intervened Ally McCoist. ‘His wife’s just given birth – he’s wetting the baby’s head.’

  I kind of pulled a sympathetic face and looked around as if to say: ‘Yes I see your point – you’re surrounded by all these nasty press men.’

  Finally I relented: ‘Go on then, mate. If it was anyone else I wouldn’t do it. But seeing as it’s you’ etc.

  I opened the door and Gazza and four teammates piled in as though it was the last chopper out of Saigon. The carry-on out of them was unbelievable – you’d have thought I had rescued them from being chained to a radiator in Beirut for three years, I was their savior – they thanked me profusely. Invited me out on the piss. Back to the hotel and all that. Later, I watched Gazza fall off the toilet, and collapse with his trousers around his ankles, whilst being sick.
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  At one point, Gazza and I had become so close that he burst into tears and opened up his heart. Another player started crying that his gaffer didn’t like him. These footballers – what a bunch of fannies. It turned into a Jerry Springer-type scene with all these players breaking down and telling me how hard their life was. All the time the tape recorder whirring. All the time I’m nodding and saying that I feel sorry for them.

  During the party, I slipped out into the foyer to check in with Ray.

  ‘For fuck’s sake – that’s fucking excellent,’ said Ray about the caper. ‘I knew I could I rely on you.’

  That night I got a hotel room and watched Gazza being carried into his. And at breakfast I was next to them on their table.

  The headline on Sunday was: ‘Gazza Walks Out as Shazza Has His Babba.’

  When I got back to the office I got a hero-gram from Rebekah herself. We’d already been getting on well but this sealed the bond. I was from Liverpool and she was from Cheshire, just down the road. We were both the same age. Both had the drive and ambition of extremists. She was all over me, rejoicing in one of the funniest Fleet Street to-dos she’d seen in a long while. Of course, in the manner of a courtier, I said that it was all in a day’s work for a fool like myself. Rebekah had taken it upon herself to groom Shazza as a personal contact. They had become best mates. The canny Deputy Editor had figured out that Gazza was a conduit to speak to the lumpen peasantry that largely made up our readership: toothless Geordies in football shirts, criminals and the underclass, the people she believed inhabited the estates that besieged Wapping. If Rebekah could wrap his wife up, then that would be a goldmine of stories. Rebekah made Shazza feel like the only footballer’s wife in the world. She was also made up with me because by wrapping Gazza up in the cab, we had perfectly complemented each other like yin and yang. Rebekah was grooming me to become one of her special little soldiers that every court-in-waiting needs before the final ascent. It wasn’t long before her tasty-looking secretary was bringing over mugs of tea (cue hateful, wide-eyed glances from my colleagues) telling me that Rebekah thought I was the golden boy. I returned the compliment by inviting the secretary out for a drink, abusing my new patronage and making a mess of her in the bogs in the Kentucky Fried Chicken near Liverpool Street Station, before she jumped back on the train to Essex. That was my unofficial reward.