Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Ray: ‘OK, what you got?’

  I winged it with the flyer.

  ‘There’s a showbiz story in today’s papers,’ I said, offering up the page, ‘about £4 grand-a-week bad boy snorter Noel Gallagher secretly having a heart of gold. What’s not known is that behind their hell-raising facades, Liam and Noel give loads to charity.’

  I could see Ray’s eyes glazing over at the mention of do-gooders and helping old ladies across the road. This was the News of the World not Peoples Friend.

  Ray: ‘How much have they given away?’

  Me: ‘Loads. Fucking loads. I’ll find out from my Oasis contacts.’

  I could carry this off because I was considered to be a minor authority on Oasis. The reasons were: Number 1: I was considered to be working class.

  Number 2:I was from the north.

  Number 3:I had done loads of mad-for-it exclusives in the past – first an interview with their doleite brother Paul Gallagher, a Liam Gallagher kiss ’n’ tell, etc., and many doorsteps resulting in Liam threatening me in person to stay away from his mum’s old house in Longsight, Manchester.

  In truth, I had no idea how much Oasis had given to charity, if anything at all. Their arsy press officer Johnny Hopkins wasn’t playing ball either. However, by the end of the week, by the time the story had gone through the scamulator, the headline was, ‘Wonder Wallet.’ Incredibly, in the story Noel and Liam had donated a ‘staggering’ one million to charity including £250,000 to ban nuclear testing, £300,000 to assorted unnamed good causes and £225,000 in foreign aid. All complete bollocks, by the way. Flyers like this work because they’re harmless and Oasis aren’t going to complain that we’ve over-egged their generosity. It’s a subtle ‘manufacture of consent’ that underlies most showbiz journalism and one that would play a central role in the explosion of celebrity culture that was to come.

  Stunt-ups always left me feeling hollow inside. The lies chipped away at my self-worth. I felt like a shadow man, as though my life was simply a rehearsal for a proper life that would come later. Shrinks call them ‘dissociative events’ when a person experiences a situation and perceives themselves as outside. Is that why so many NoW reporters were outsiders? Were they the only type of people who could cope?

  This life, it would seem, could be frittered away on untruths and bodily needs. A permanent sense of cloudiness hung around at the front of my mind, pressing down on the back of my eyes. I felt a faint net of tension across the top half of my torso, like an invisible, sinewy cage. Once I’d had a brilliant memory that could recall the periodic table of elements, whole soliloquies from Henry IV Part One and the reasons for the Franco-Prussian War, a minor feat I’d carried out without the aid of a private education or a tutor. My emotional intelligence had been as sensitive as a Geiger counter – the smell of a chemical could rewind me back into the chemistry lab at school in a breath. I could pick up on people’s moods and feelings like a whale can hear sounds underwater from hundreds of miles away. Now the world was a faint, transient mush that made no impression on me. Like a senile pensioner, I could no longer remember what I had done 30 minutes ago.

  I was staying at the Moat House Hotel in Liverpool that Sunday night. I was now living in limbo virtually full time – deliberately staying on the road to avoid my flea-ridden flat, and to avoid the day-to-day responsibilities outside of the tabloid bubble. Domestic responsibilities such as shopping seemed like enormous tasks. When my girlfriend turned up at my flat I couldn’t wait to get rid of her. I was turning into a very dark version of Alan Partridge.

  I got talking to two girls at the hotel bar. One was an agitated blonde who had a black eye after being thrown out of a nightclub – I could tell almost at once that she hadn’t been to finishing school in Switzerland. The other one was a fat slapper in a short black dress. I invited them back to my room for a drink. I was a lonely guy. I remember waking up to a hissing and splashing sound. I turned over, and through my hangover haze, saw the big fat girl squatting in between the twin beds and urinating over the warped, ciggie-burned floor tiles. I was completely blown away at how long her relief went on for – it was like watching a police horse at the match piss in the street. It was a grim scene and somehow symbolised the existential problems that I was going through.

  10

  Stunt-Ups

  From then on, my stunt-ups roughly followed two types: theme-based and prop-based. Ideas for theme-based frauds were inspired by that week’s news agenda. It could be a big sporting event like the UEFA European Championships, and I would make up a story to cash in on the public interest.

  Prop-based fake stories depended on my ability to source genuine criminal merchandise such as real guns, counterfeit official documents and drugs which I could then attach a ‘body’ to, and fabricate a false investigation.

  Ironically, what started out as a quick fix to get me out of a hole occasionally turned into a surreal production line in which the fake stories took more money and more effort to construct than the real thing. The theatrics and the drama became increasingly elaborate, and I began to take a perverse pride in the attention to detail. I used to call it the ‘studio system’, churning out fictional drama efficiently. It was like being a cross between Nick Leeson and the deluded Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

  ‘What do you want this week?’ my mate Phil asked. Calligraphy-buff Phil was an unemployed, part-time TA soldier with an A-Level in art.

  ‘I’d like you to paint the symbol E96 on this tablet,’ I asked, handing him another Ecstasy from my collection.

  ‘No sweat,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got some really thin brushes and I’ll use a magnifying glass. Should be OK.’

  Carefully, Phil painted on the colorful logo of the Euro 96 football tournament on the tablet. He repeated the process on a sheet of LSD trips that I had bought and given to him.

  Headline: ‘Evil Ecstasy Dealers Score at Euro 96: They’re Flogging Fake Tickets Too.’

  Best made-up quote: ‘Menacing Roy McManus, a 40-year-old Glaswegian, selling his vile wares in Liverpool and Manchester, gloated: “Business is good. Football and drugs. What more can you ask for? The E’s are bang on at 5 pound each. What about £90 a sheet for the trips.”’

  Evil Roy McManus was of course as real as Mary Poppins. He was a friend of a friend who was glad of a £100 bung to play the part and take his cue from me.

  I recruited my best mate Samy on to the firm and he became a secret full-time fixer on NoW stunt-ups. By day, he was a general manager cum prop-finder. By night, he was a black cab driver who had easy access to a ready made pool of unemployed foot soldiers who would have walk-on parts in the productions. Most of them were glad to do it for two reasons. It was easy money without having to break the law – some of them were petty criminals glad of some hassle-free graft. In addition, there was the usual sense of criminal camaraderie combined with an undercurrent of resistance. A lot of people in Liverpool still hated News International following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 when the NoW’s sister paper the Sun had falsely accused Liverpool fans of urinating on and stealing from the dead.

  I disguised McManus using a joke-shop wig and a baseball cap and then ‘beauty-paraded’ him down the street so that a News of the World photographer could get a snatch of him. The snappers were never part of the deception. Sometimes the picture editor Ian would call me to thank me for ‘dragging’ the target out into the open so that his snappers could get a good shot of him. He said I was ‘always very helpful’.

  The beauty about stunt-ups, as opposed to real stories, was that they were 100% controllable and not affected by the million-and-one variables that made doing real journalism a nightmare. If the Features desk asked for something extra, their desire would be met immediately. All of the prep took days, but the stories were useful in boosting my reputation as someone who could deliver on demand without fail. I remember Denna Allen, the new Deputy Features Editor rang me up.

  ‘Yes, I
like this Euro 96 story,’ she crowed. ‘But can we link McManus directly to the football? For instance, would he sell us any tickets to a game?’

  ‘Oh!’ I said faux thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know about that, he’s a drug dealer not a ticket tout but I’ll give it a whirl.’ My can-do attitude got brownie points. As soon as I had finished the call, I phoned Samy to source me a real ticket for a Euro Championship game, which he did from a real tout. This was then given to our in-house graphic designer Phil, who crudely doctored it to make it look like a fake ticket. Which I then told Denna had been sold to me by McManus. Denna Allen was really thankful – she could then go into conference the following morning with a new line on a story that was working. Denna rang me: ‘You’ve really done well on this all week. I really appreciate your hard work.’ Like a serial self-harmer, I was incrementally salami-slicing my reputation in order to please her. Later that day an agency photographer from the News team in Manchester was sent round to take a picture of the phony counterfeit ticket. The snapper was immediately suspicious that the whole thing was a stunt-up. But I knew he wouldn’t grass me up because I knew him and his boss. They weren’t happy but again it was a case of we’ve got no choice but to go along with it.

  Samy: ‘I can get some fake car documents there – blank driving licences, phony insurance cover notes, and counterfeit tax discs.’

  Me: ‘Ace – we can build a story around that? Let me think. Yes, I’ve got it. What about a petty villain who supplies fake car docs to banned drunk drivers to get them back on the road?’

  Samy: ‘OK, sounds do-able.’

  Me: ‘Can you get me a body to front it?’

  Samy: ‘Yes, one of the lads on the taxis will do it for a oner?’

  Me: ‘OK. We’ll call him Paul Humphreys. We’ll set it in, erm . . . let’s say Sheffield. We haven’t used that as a location yet.’

  I always used a different city in each stunt-up in order not to arouse suspicion.

  Headline: ‘Licensed to Kill. NoW Investigation.’

  Intro: ‘Car sprayer Paul Humphreys looks like a harmless grease monkey in overalls and baseball cap – but he shamelessly deals in death putting convicted killer drivers back on the road with fake licences.

  ‘Evil Humphreys rakes in thousands selling forged documents to banned drunks and crazed joyriders. Some have never even passed a test.’

  Best made-up quote: ‘“I flog a service,”’ he boasts. “Everyone drinks and drives. It’s no big deal. At the end of the day if you get caught it’s just rotten luck. It’s not like I’m helping people who’ve done something really bad.”’

  I was astonished that no one ever found out. All of the stunt-ups had tell-tale similarities. In each photograph the target always wore a baseball cap. The copy contained drama-heightening phrases like ‘glancing from side-to-side the shifty villain offered to etc . . .’. Or alternatively, ‘Looking over his shoulder, etc . . .’ They contained far too many, long-running flowery quotes – on average a 30-paragraph story contained 12 paras of reported speech. This was immediately suss because villains are notoriously tightlipped during ‘handovers’ – the meetings at which contraband is physically exchanged – and in reality for technical reasons very few real conversations came out clearly on tape.

  I was also surprised that Ray didn’t pick up on the unusual admin footprint left by my fake stories. They were extraordinarily cheap compared to real investigations. I was very conscious of not ripping off the company financially. Strangely, I thought that financial fraud was a greater moral crime than deceiving the readers, probably as a result of my fanatical devotion to the News International deity. But mostly, I was so deliriously happy to deliver up the stories to Ray, and see his face light up, that I didn’t think for one moment about the costs of stunting-up. Consequently, I only ever put through small tip fees in relation to the shows. On other occasions, I paid them for ghost stories – a common practice on newspapers. Paying them money for projects they hadn’t worked. Those were paid directly from News International contributors to stunt-up fixers such as my flat mate Gav and taxi driver Samy. That covered their production fees for the fabricated stories and sundry expenses such as payments for props and actors. As the productions were becoming more elaborate, I often paid out of my own pocket.

  One day I stunted-up a story about a phony underworld armourer who sold homemade bullets. A few weeks later, the fixer on the story said that he could go one better. He could supply a whole range of highly illegal guns, weapons and explosives.

  ‘Great!’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Meet me in Liverpool tomorrow. I will take you around all the lads. You can buy whatever guns and stuff you need.’

  ‘OK,’ I replied. ‘Once we’ve bought the props we’ll relocate to Manchester. I will get a body to pose up as the seller. And bingo! That’s done.’

  The next day we went around Liverpool buying up whatever weapons we could find. First of all, we went to a backstreet garage in a district called Walton where the mechanic took us around the back. He rummaged in a bin and pulled out a sawn-off shotgun wrapped in a towel. Without prompting, he loaded it and fired off two cartridges at a rusty metal bin in the back alley. Boom! Boom!

  ‘Fuck’s sake!’ I said, genuinely surprised. ‘What the fucking hell are you doing? You’re going to bring it on top for all of us.’ I was looking around for neighbours who might be wondering what three shady looking fellers were doing in their back yards with a gun.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said calmly. ‘There’s always people shooting around here – no one’s arsed.’ He was right. At that time, there was a fierce gang war raging in Liverpool between armed drug dealers that drew routine armed police patrols on to the streets for the first time on mainland UK. No one raised an eyebrow. I bought the gun and 40 rounds of ammo for £150 and put them in the boot of my hire car.

  Our next stop was a drug dealer who sold me a Colt .45 pistol. Then we went to a lad who was in the army. Under his bed, he had a ‘hand-launched phosphorous rocket’, a thunder flash stun grenade and a case of British forces standard issue nine mm bullets. For good measure, we bought a couple of 18-inch US military coshes and balaclavas from another supplier based in Manchester. We put them all in a ‘swag bag’.

  Headline: ‘This Evil Thug Will Sell You Anything from a Rubber Truncheon to a Rocket.

  NoW Investigation into Stolen Weapons.’

  Picture caption: ‘Sinister. Molloy and part of his armoury.’

  Intro: ‘Drug gangs are being supplied with stolen Ministry of Defence weapons to enforce their reign of terror on the streets.’

  ‘The News of the World has infiltrated the network of a major underworld dealer.

  Over the past few weeks we’ve been able to buy an armoury of hardware including a phosphorous rocket complete with launcher.

  ‘Almost all of the items have tell-tale markings. They are normally destined for Northern Ireland or NATO firing ranges.’

  Best made-up quote: ‘They are high-projectile flares. There’s enough pyrotechnics in there to destroy whatever you need. If you fired one at a man there’d be nothing left but ashes.’

  Payoff: ‘Our dossier is now available to both detectives and military police.’

  As with most newspaper investigations, the police weren’t really interested in following them up. The reasons are varied, ranging from lethargy to genuine legal issues. For example, newspaper-gathered evidence of crime is rarely of a high-enough standard to wash with detectives and the CPS. Newspapers use provocation to entrap targets, collect evidence in a non-structured way and are highly selective on the damning quotes they use from taped conversations.

  However, on this occasion, I was forced to contact Greater Manchester Police because I needed to dispose of the guns and flares safely. Being in possession of unlicensed firearms is a strict liability – that means it’s totally bang-on and you can’t get out of it by giving the excuse, ‘I’m a journalist and I bought them as part of sto
ry in the public interest.’ They were sloshing around in the boot of my car. Two officers came down from Greater Manchester Police on the train, picked up the swag bag and we never heard anything again.

  My descent into spoofing didn’t happen overnight. It was an incremental fall from grace, driven by a combination of inner demons and external moral problems.

  The first problem was that I never had any morals – I didn’t even know what morals were until I was 39 years of age when, on the tail end of a long-running nervous breakdown, I walked into a bookshop in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France and bought a book on philosophy. It was a revelation to learn that there were six virtues to keep at hand, namely Truth, Patience, Kindness, Courage, Prudence and the mother of them all Justice. To me, this was truly fucking mind-blowing. And why no one had ever told me, I couldn’t work out. As a kid, I’d had a vague sense that it was important to be kind, hard-working and humble and I came from a loving family who randomly reinforced these virtues. But that was the extent of my classical education.

  11

  Contagion

  I was sitting in a surveillance van with an experienced staffphotographer called Alistair. It was a gloomy November day in swish West London. Ray had phoned me a couple of hours before, instructing me to link up with Alistair. ‘He’s got a good story,’ said Ray. ‘Something about cannabis and Princess Di.’ Say no more – I’m there.

  Alistair was an angry former cruise holiday snapper with a black sense of humour. He could be vindictive if you got on the wrong side of him. Unfashionably flashy, on his day off he drove an Arnie-style jeep with chrome roll bars that matched his mirror shades. Took the job seriously though. The white Renault surveillance van, that he used for snatching celebs and villains, was kitted out with state-of-the-art fittings, walkie-talkies and swivel chairs. On mind-numbingly boring ‘watches’, Alistair passed the time by painting his Nikon telescopics in Airfix camouflage, so that if and when he had to hide in the bushes he wouldn’t be seen.