Hack

by Graham Johnson

  I understood right from the outset that there were no ethics in journalism – it was a business. Stunt-ups like these are the life-blood of many agencies and freelancers. And again they require a weird manufacture of consent between all the parties, often shored up by the media’s need to plug a product such as a film or a record.

  By the time I got to the News of the World I was already on the slippery slope. The increased pressure was now a stronger motivator of course. I was also acutely aware that News of the World investigations weren’t really anything of the sort – they were often no more than excuses to turn over petty criminals whose crimes were then blown out of all proportion in order to promulgate scare stories that spread unnecessary fear and division amongst readers.

  My next stunt-up was headlined ‘Crooked Tutor’s Lessons in Fraud: He Sells Illegal Aliens False Birth Certificates.’

  I paid a hard-up mini-cab driver called Peter to pose as a teacher called Kenneth Muirhead, 49, from Balsall Heath, Birmingham. The counterfeit IDs that he allegedly sold were blank birth certificates that had been sold to my fixer Samy the day before by a petty criminal in Liverpool.

  I also did a similar one based around a counterfeiter who traded in funny money and stolen American Express travellers cheques. Samy had sourced the fake £20 notes on the black market while I commissioned our in-house designer Phil to mock up a few travellers cheques with untraceable serial numbers. For this outrage, I recruited an old mate of mine to play the part of an underworld forger. Bungy was a reformed alcoholic whom I’d met whilst working on a building site in London during the summer when I was a student. He desperately needed the money. When the fraudulent story was published, I was nearly rumbled once again. Three different people smelled a rat. Firstly, a drug dealer recognised Bungy and phoned me up. In a very subtle way, he tried to blackmail me, implying that he knew the story was false and that he was going to tell my boss. Samy was dispatched to straighten him out and talk him around. Secondly, a genuine forger phoned me from jail. The villain, from Stepney Green, East London, laughed at the story and said that it was clearly moody. He sent me a visiting order and I went in to see him to talk him around. I took up the invitation in order to placate him. In the visiting room, the old lag tried to go easy on me. I could tell that he knew that I was a conspirator, but he said: ‘You’ve been had. Whoever the guy in the picture is, he’s not proper and those travellers cheques are complete nonsense.’ Finally, the next day the head of security at American Express called. He wanted to see the cheques. I fobbed him off.

  The irony was this – I never had to spoof. Even without fake stories, I had a phenomenal hit rate for legit big stories. In the annual byline count, overseen by the editor Phil Hall, to determine who was going to get bollocked and binned, I came third or fourth. Ray later described me as ‘prolific’ in a statement to an industrial tribunal. In between spoofs, I was breaking genuine dynamite exclusives. It was true to say that the beast was never satisfied. My need to lie was born out of an irrational fear of unemployment. A cancerous complex heaped upon a whole generation of youth by Margaret Thatcher whose monetarist shock therapy heralded a natural rate of unemployment designed to terrify the pupils of post-war comprehensives. In my case, she succeeded.

  In addition, I had low self-esteem, which probably dated back to my lacklustre O-Level results and my failure to live up to the hopes of my aspirational C2 ma and pa. When you’re a tabloid journalist, your self-worth is directly linked to whether you get a story in the papers. You’ve heard the phrase, ‘You’re only as good as your last story’? It’s not even that. You’re only as good as your next story. Tabloid journalism is like a stock exchange of self-esteem. One day you’re soaring. Your story is working out and it goes in the papers. The next your esteem turns southwards like a run on the pound that falls off the screen – because your story falls down and Ray is shouting down the phone, ‘Are you taking the piss? What the fucking hell you do for a living? For fuck’s sake . . .’ etc, etc, etc.

  I desired the esteem boost at any cost – and to avert the attacks. So like a crack-head who boots in the door of the bedsit downstairs to get some rock money, I did a stunt-up every time I needed a quick fix.

  13

  Kiss 'N' Tell

  When the high from the stunt-ups wore off, and I felt I could no longer live up to the expectations of my boss – I turned to drugs.

  I racked out the stripes on top of a cistern in a small cubicle just outside the staff canteen at Wapping. Even before I snorted, the comforting odour of the powder gave me a tingle-on. Smelling like fresh, wet brick. The yellow stickiness indicated that the gram was right off the block. High-quality gear that I’d robbed from my girlfriend’s bathroom cupboard – she scored off a high-roller who served up to Oasis and Pulp. She was into that – hanging around with bands. I leaned in to do the nasty. Excellent! The chemically nectar rolled satisfyingly into the back of my nose, through the nasopharynx passageway into my throat.

  I opened the door. The cheesy vapours from the kitchens poisoned the clarity, smothering the pleasant taste of the gear. Taking cocaine in Wapping, a death camp of the soul, is a deadening, gut-wrenching experience.

  My flirtation with cocaine did not last longer than a few months. Snorting was never going to get out of hand – I was too ridden with the vices of a different nature, such as of ambition, to allow any other cravings to become top dog.

  Like most people I took cocaine for two reasons – to stop thinking and to anaesthetise perceived pain. Today, I realise that the most powerful asset any human has is the ability to think, to basically whittle down your thoughts to find out the truth in any given situation. On the few occasions that I had time to reflect, and reason burst through, it was a terrifying and stressful experience. Immediately, I concluded that tabloid journalism was killing me. But then I was too terrified to leave. So in order to stop me ever thinking this again, I took cocaine. A vicious circle.

  I also found it difficult to relax. After living a life of complete distraction, time off when there was nothing to do made me anxious. I stayed in the office till ten of a night, and came in on Sunday and Monday. When there was no more work to do, I kept up the stress levels by taking cocaine.

  Cocaine also blocks out the pain. The blackness of being a hack was converted to mere blankness. The brain-box political editor at the Sunday Mirror, where I later worked, suffered a nervous breakdown at deadline one Saturday afternoon. He was found squatting on top of the office bogs with a crack pipe, in a stupor drug-users refer to as ‘sledging’.

  Drugs were rife. A former high-flyer at News International told me this: ‘What the hacking scandal overlooked is this: it’s the culture of News International to have drink and drugs problems.’

  Nervous breakdowns due to stress are also common. This goes to the very top. Alcoholism even in the case of a former editor. The more stress the worse the problem. The high-flyer added: ‘The editor once told me in his office that I would be shocked at the number of people on Class A drugs and with alcohol programmes at the paper that he knew about. We were doing a piece about the wide use of cocaine in society. He said there was a well-masked problem at the paper which he was aware of. A current senior executive offered me a line of coke at my job interview when I began my career. His behaviour was marked by extreme mood swings as a result of cocaine use and made working for him extremely stressful and unpredictable. But that type of personality is encouraged – he is now at the very, very top of the pyramid. The stress was comparable with a constant fearfulness, the only thing I can compare it with in my life now, away from newspapers, is the feeling that one of my children may be hurt. Not a healthy place.’

  Celebrities take cocaine for the same reasons. Fame is an unnatural state of being, driven by a person’s irrational craving for praise. When the fame wears off, the victims turn to coke, for the same reasons I did. As a tabloid reporter, my job was to track celebrities to find out these moments of artificial love, when the ce
lebrity felt vulnerable, when the mask slipped momentarily and they turned to cocaine. My goal was to home in and expose the celebrity for immoral behaviour. The hypocrisy was not lost on me.

  Kiss ’n’ tell stories are an excellent way of getting relatively cheap sex and drugs stories into the paper. It’s double-bubble – the papers gets two immoralities attached to a big name for the price of one – the ‘shagging’ story and the coke shame. Great!

  Kiss ’n’ tell stories follow a loose formula. The Wapping workshops churned them out like a factory. The raw material was ‘the bird’, as she was known. The birds were generally sub-divided into two types – models, often girl-next-door Page 3 types. Or ‘slags’ – strippers, hookers, groupies, wannabe WAGs, party-on types. The Page 3 girls would often get slightly better treatment so as not to damage the Page 3 brand of the NoW’s sister paper, the Sun. The slags got stuck in a hotel, babysat, ‘water boarded’ with prawn sandwiches and warm wine, until they’d done the chat and been coerced into putting in a taped call to the target of the kiss ’n’ tell. Often a famous footballer/EastEnder/politician that she claimed to have had sex with. The purpose of the taped call was to provide proof, to back up the claims that she had made in the interview. I’d put down my micro-cassette tape next to hotel phone, plonk the girl on the side of the bed, and put my TP3 earpiece into her external auditory canal, a device which recorded both sides of a conversation.

  Before the call, the girl would be coached and a rough script scribbled into my notebook. I also used prompt cards to guide her in real time through the conversation. The girls acted normal and flirted with the man, dropping in questions like: ‘Remember that lovely night we spent together?’ To which the guy would often reply: ‘Yes – can we do it again?’ Bingo – proof that they were together.

  Then I’d hold up the next line.

  Girl: ‘I can’t wait to see you. You were so good in bed – remember how you fucked me? Etc.’

  Or: ‘Wow I was really caned off that coke you gave me.’

  At some point the man, on the other end, would start to get a bit suss about all the leading questions, saying things like, ‘What are you on about? Why are you saying things like that?’ But by then it was too late – he’d already hanged himself on tape.

  Some of the more experienced soap stars and footie players, who had been turned over regularly by kiss ’n’ tells would start to get to know the drill, get on to it and stay silent or slam the phone down. But more often these girls could lure them into phone sex – spicing it up with lines like, ‘This time I want you to snort a line off my arse, etc.’ He goes, ‘Yes yes I will.’ Bingo! Game over. That’s all the proof that was needed to stand up the double-page spread about the ‘Soccer Ace Who Scored Between the Sheets’ etc.

  At first, in order to cheat her of her story, the girl got promised a ten grand ‘contract’ that wasn’t worth the gibberish that it was written in, a holiday in Spain and a boost with her career in modelling. We’d tell her that the News of the World was going to build her as a big name. However, once she had done the full chat, and the story was in the bag, she got dropped the minute the story came out – and also stuck with the £700 hotel bill. I often left the hotel by the back door, into the car park and back to London in readiness to repeat the process the following week.

  And when she phoned up on Tuesday for her money she was getting threatened with all sorts that would go in the paper if she didn’t go away. Getting well and truly fucked off. If she was lucky, if we needed to keep her onside for legal reasons, in case the target PCC’d or sued us, then we might show mercy by renegotiating. After being asked in court why a dominatrix hooker who turned Max Mosley was paid only half of the £25,000 she was offered, a later editor of the News of the World called Colin Myler said ‘every fee is renegotiated’. Instead of the big-time studio modeling contracts, the wannabe Page 3 was humiliatingly offered a ‘Dear Jane’ photo strip which saved the paper having to pay an underwear model.

  On the face of it, a kiss ’n’ tell seems a more expedient way of getting a sleaze story into the paper. The alternative is to catch the celebrity red-handed. Of course, I have done this many times – but it’s like trying to catch an international drug lord with a couple of kilos of cocaine under his arm. You have to be very patient. I have spent weeks following celebs around. It costs the papers thousands of pounds to wire up hotel rooms and toilets with secret video cameras, on the off chance that the target is going to have sex and a snort. Then, when the pressure’s on and the bills start mounting, the legal side often begins to stray across the line. How can you be sure that there is definitely going to be a secret date between a footballer and his mistress? Listen to their phone messages, of course, to pin down places and times. How can the paper be sure to get the evidence on tape? Illegally bug the room. And when none of these things work, it’s time for a bit of entrapment. Entice the celeb in an orchestrated honey-trap by paying a tart to deliberately seduce him. Sometimes, papers do all these things at once.

  In theory, a kiss ’n’ tell is a short cut all around this hassle. The truth is kiss ’n’ tells are enormously draining and emotional experiences. The process requires: stamina; patience; head-burning-out levels of concentration; guile to outmanoeuvre the prey; and sharp organisational skills to take care of the 100 simultaneous jobs going on all around. Being hothoused in a hotel with a girl who you’ve got to control is extremely dramatic, entailing a whole range of unforeseen twists and turns that always left me thinking: ‘What kind of a fucking life is this?’

  Shirley Ann Lye was Fleet Street’s Queen of the kiss ’n’ tell. To the untrained eye, she came across as a painfully skinny, haggardish woman in late middle age. She was frail, slightly stooped and buck-toothed. But as soon as she opened her mouth, it was like being hair-dryered by Alex Ferguson. Like a cockney dockworker, the expletives ‘fack and ‘cant’ rampaged out of her spittle-tangled gob into sentence after sentence. Hard as nails, foul-mouthed and mean to the point of indecency. Going out for drink with her was like going on tour with The Who, involving a trail of trashed hotel rooms, smashed glass, falling-over-drunk violence, deviant behaviour and abusive clashes.

  During the rapacious golden age of 1980s tabloid excess, she’d made a fortune selling big buy ups to Sun Editor Kelvin MacKenzie. Enough to buy a smart terrace in swishy Barnes with her incongruously mild-mannered partner who did ‘something in the city’. Her graft was simple. Once upon a time she’d been a model before drifting into being an agent. But she quickly realised her stable of Page 3 girls could make stacks more money from selling their stories of nights out with celebs than from photo shoots. She became a kind of mini-Max Clifford. By the time I arrived at the News of the World, she had worn out a long line of reporters and a few of them would only deal with her in short bursts because sometimes she was a fucking nightmare.

  One day a reporter called Phil Taylor came over to me desk: ‘This woman’s got a good story – give her a ring.’ I got the feeling he was glad to offload her. As I was always desperately hungry for stories, I took up the baton.

  ‘Who the fack are you?’ she screamed. ‘I want a proper facking reporter – not some facking arsehole who just landed from up norf. Those facking bastards pay you fack all to run round like a cant . . .’

  I charmed her round and eventually she said: ‘Get down to facking Wine Press on Fleet Street – I’ve got a good story for you.’

  The Wine Press was a fucking nightmare. An old-style hack-haunt that should have died out with the print unions. A place where previous generations of journalists spent their days and nights on the piss. Today’s journalists like me didn’t drink much – it was a sign of weakness, strictly for bullshitters and time-wasters. Too much pressure. For my generation, brainwashed by the corporate propaganda of the workaholic yuppie, lunch was an uncomfortable, rushed affair. I ate cheese sandwiches and portions of chips stealthily at my desk, answering the phone and replying to messages, terrified that Ray or one of
the other editors would look over accusingly and think that I was skiving.

  The decline of the long lunch was just one of many barriers that sprung up to isolate reporters from the general public. Not only were the nation’s greatest communicators banished to sterile gated communities like Wapping, or into the gleaming citadels of Canary Wharf like Trinity Mirror, but they also seldom had human contact with people outside of newspapers. The Wine Press may not have been cool but I could see its purpose.

  There were ex-coppers flogging titbits from inside the Yard. (My motto was: stay clear – there’s nothing as useless as an ex-copper. Too slow. Too tedious.) Wizened-faced, odd-bod ex-hacks. Mad women who made a living by linking up lawyers with journos and poncing off the stories they traded. Drunken barristers. The Wine Press was a Star Wars bar of has-beens and hangers-on. A stock exchange for sleazy stories.

  Shirley always had good stories. But there was a strict ritual of getting to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She’d tap-dance around the houses, and then bleed you and the newspaper dry, for every single penny she could get – down to the free soap from the bathroom in the hotel that she was comped on jobs. First of all, she got me to put my card behind the bar. Then it was an early hours crawl around some very expensive wine bars – Motcombs of Belgravia and the Ebury Wine Bar. Then we were joined by Antonia Moore, a former Miss Whiplash, who also demanded free drinks and ‘cars’ everywhere. The next day Shirley Ann Lye forced me to pay for a £350 cooked breakfast for one of her contacts saying that it helped one of her dodgy clients remember a story. The problem was Managing Editor Stuart Kuttner was such a ‘cant’ that he would red-line through most of these expense claims for ‘entertainment’. I ended up subsidising the News International shareholders once again.

  ‘I’ve got a girl onside,’ Shirley whispered. ‘She’s getting on a bit now. But a few years ago she was a bit of a goer – she was fucking Michael Douglas and Jim Davidson.’