Hack

by Graham Johnson

  14

  Conman

  Peter Trowell was a corpulent former con who specialised in tipping underworld stories with a precariously ‘investigative’ edge. His MO was simple. Peter used entrapment to manipulate targets so that the stories escaped the slur of‘fabrication‘ by slivers of evidence so thin that the in-house lawyers asked, ‘Fucking hell – this is not one of his is it?’ every time his name came up during legals. An incredible bullshitter-cum-fantasist, the thirty-something businessman had started working for Her Majesty’s Press when he was a guest at one her prisons a few years earlier. Trowell had started out on his career in journalism in estimable fashion – by ringing the News of the World in 1994 from Ford Open Prison – where he was serving time for video piracy – and ratting out a fellow con who had been caught running a multi-million pound fraud.

  Trowell was an ideal News of the World contact for several reasons:

  1. He was a professional conman.

  2. He was a shameless and persistent liar. If you stopped him on his way to buy a pint of milk he would tell you that he was off to the opera.

  3. He had a massive ego – like the majority of fraudsters he was convinced that he was cleverer than most. People were there to be ‘played’ for his benefit – including the journalists he worked with. Everyone was fair game. Astonishingly, this streak of dangerous arrogance gave him the ability to plough through stories at breakneck speed, not caring for the consequences.

  4. He had a cavalier attitude towards the truth – and a complete disregard for legal constraints such as libel laws and PCC.

  For all these reasons and more, Trowell became a prized asset, one whose career flourished under my watch. In short, Peter made a living by turning over the lags he’d been padded up with in jail, one after the other. Many of them were still inside. Which was great, because at the time, the tabloids were screaming out for prison scandals that ‘proved’ the government was soft on crime. The first story we did together was what’s known as a ‘cushy jails’ story.

  Many prisoners in open nicks are cons who are coming to the end of long sentences. In order to rehabilitate them back into society, they are often given work placements in local firms to get them used to life on the outside, which sounds perfectly reasonable. Not to us, it wasn’t – this was just a good opportunity for NOTW to turn them over and manipulate them for our own ends. What if we could intercept some of these ‘outworkers’ as they exited the prison gates and lure them into falsely constructed compromising situations to heap shame on the prison service, the justice system and the Home Secretary? In addition, what if we could grossly exaggerate the threat posed to the public by these monsters who swaggered through the streets in civilian clothes and were not identifiable as cons? ‘Great story,’ said Ray when I put it up in conference. ‘Let’s do it.’

  It was easy. The lags at HMP Ford Open Prison, near Littlehampton in West Sussex, were low-hanging fruit. Of course, we didn’t tell them we were reporters. Our cover story was that Peter had a VO (visiting order) to see one of his old cellmates. Instead of waiting by the gates, Peter pretended to bump into the resettlement workers in an alleyway as they came out of prison at rush hour in the morning. We caught some with small talk, leading them on to boast on tape about how good their jobs were, before secretly trailing them to their offices and workshops. Firstly, we followed convicted murderer John McCourt – doing time for sadistically bludgeoning his father to death – to his placement at the Body Shop, of all places. Bingo! There’s the headline straightway. Another lag called Francis Quinn walked to his job through the town centre. Though it had been 20 years since he had committed murder, and he was reformed in the eyes of the prison professionals, we made a big deal of the fact that his route took him though a park where children played, as though he was eyeing them up to kill them, which he wasn’t. The exaggeration of risks is a common theme in tabloid stories, as it spreads fear and prejudice among readers, making them easier to govern. Tactically, the overblown threats can also be used as justification for stories that are not in the public interest. For example, Rebekah Brooks’ ‘For Sarah’ anti-paedophile campaign whipped up hysteria that was seen by many as disproportionate to the problem.

  However, when I checked in with the desk to update them of my early success, one of the execs said: ‘That’s good – but we haven’t proved that the place is fucking Butlins yet, have we? They’re not all sunbathing or going down the pub, are they?’ Oh yes, they are – if you want that. I told Peter what was required to ‘make it work and he was only too happy to oblige. After all, if the story didn’t ‘make’ then he wouldn’t get paid. The vast majority of stories on tabloids are payment-on-publication and therefore there’s a lot of internal pressure on freelancers to ‘make them work at all costs’.

  As we were watching the alleyway, to see which lags would come out next, Peter locked on to a convicted wife-killer called John Featherstone. We found out that his cushy number was to fix boat engines for the Chichester Canal Society. Later we pretended to bump into him at the marina where he worked. In order to get the pics, Peter bought him three pints of lager from a nearby pub and pushed them into his hands, along with packets of crisps, cigarettes and cigars. All the while the snappers were boshing him off from the other side of the boating lake. I wrote the story as though Featherstone himself went to the pub every afternoon and made no mention that we’d bought him the booze and staged the whole thing.

  All in, the story had taken less than a couple of hours, which left it wide open for an early dart back to our luxury hotel – Arundel Castle. As usual, Peter cleaned out the mini-bar on arrival, loaded up the room service with a couple of hundred pounds’ worth of booze and fine dining on the sly, in my name, and then fucked off.

  Headline: ‘Killer’s Let Out to Work at the Body Shop. Butlins Nick Lags Unleashed on the Public’

  Picture caption: ‘Cheers – Evil Featherstone enjoys his pint in the sun as children play nearby.’

  Not long after publication the Executive Editor, an elderly former Royal Naval officer known as Cap’n Bob, plonked a massive complaint on my desk. The prison governor had fired off a big letter to the PCC. ‘Can you do me a full memo on this, please?’ Cap’n Bob asked.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mumbled under my breath. Writing memos is the bane of a red-top reporter’s life. No one wants to be bogged down in last week’s fish ’n’ chip paper when there’s huge pressure to come up with stories for this week. Filled with the usual pre-memo dread, I picked it up – it read like a death sentence. The governor had blown the lid on all of our devious tricks. Of course, I went through it line by line and rebutted everything. Contrary to popular belief, complaints to the PCC were taken very seriously. Not because we cared about the targets, whose life we had unjustifiably destroyed, but because you risked incurring increased wrath from above. I always tried desperately to wriggle out of everything. Never cough to nothing. Never give anything away. Never tell it straight when it can be waffled and obfuscated. The art of rebuttal was simple. Inevitably, complainants made small errors in their memos. Home in on these to undermine the greater thrust of the attack. A trick that I had picked up from reading about New Labour’s Rapid Rebuttal Unit at Millbank.

  Often my memo lies didn’t pass muster and we lost the complaint and the PCC instructed the NoW to publish an apology. Oh dear! I had the ignominy of not only having the biggest ever apology in the history of the News of World – my record was only surpassed years later by ads taken out by Rupert Murdoch himself re: phone hacking – but also the highest number.

  My record-breaking PCC apology came in the aftermath of the Canary Wharf bomb in 1996. A 23-year-old African office cleaner called Barbara Osei was horrifically injured after her face was cut to shreds by flying glass. As she lay recovering in her hospital bed, with all pipes and tubes sticking out of her, I posed as a relative and sneaked on to the ward with a bunch of flowers. She was about to go into an emergency three-hour operation to
save her eyesight. Instead of comforting words, I pulled out a disposable camera and bosh-bosh-boshed her off. Even in her semi-comatose state, high on morphine and still reeling with pain, Barbara could sense something was terribly wrong. The flashes were distressing and my aggressive posture was intimidating her. Reflecting back on this now is like looking back on someone else’s life – I can’t believe I did it. Barbara struggled, her bandages bloodied, to save her dignity, shifting helplessly in the bed and feeling for the panic button. But I carried on hosing her down with the flash. ‘Calm down, Barbara!’ I whispered, as I checked no one was coming to her aid and toed the door shut. I was nervous but my cruelty was strangely emboldened by her babyish vulnerability. What could she do? Fuck all. ‘Don’t worry. I’m a friend,’ I said pathetically, as I stepped round the side of the bed to get a better angle. I was hoping that she would think I was some kind of doctor, taking pics of her injuries for medical reasons. Barbara started to scream. The weak nature of her voice rattled me. I dropped the flowers on the bedside chair and walked purposefully away down the corridor, to the lift. Apologising for shocking behaviour seems self-indulgent. But I do accept what I did was wrong and I’m ashamed of it.

  In the fresh air, I was ecstatic with delight – proud of my cunning and my bottle. I could barely wait to ring this one in:

  Ray: ‘Hi, how’s it going?’

  Me: ‘Got it – it’s in the bag. Got a pic of the Canary Wharf bomb victim.’

  Ray: ‘Great – well done, Graham.’

  Praise was like hearing that I’d got an A in an exam.

  Me: ‘No problem.’ Humility was my watchword.

  I can’t remember exactly what else I’d told Ray. To cover my back, I think I told him that Barbara had actually cooperated and given me permission to take the pictures.

  Ray: ‘Did she say anything else – did she talk about her ordeal?’

  This threw me – he was asking me a straightforward question but to me it was as though he was trying to catch me out, hinting that I hadn’t gone far enough. It was as though I’d failed and getting the pics wasn’t enough.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘She gave me a little chat.’ I made up a few anodyne quotes and filed them across. It was a high-risk play. But I was relying on two get-outs to cover my arse.

  1. That Barbara was so pumped full of pharmaceuticals and trauma that she wouldn’t remember what she’d done or said. In the unlikely event of a complaint, it would come down to her word against mine.

  2. That she was a poor, powerless African immigrant, confused by the horrific events that had befallen her and that she wouldn’t dare go up against the News of the World. I guessed that she was barely literate – so who was going to write her fucking memo?

  Her fucking maxillofacial surgeons, that’s who. Two of top doctors that were caring for her went into shock-and-awe when they saw the article in the paper. A pair of them got on their high horse and fired off a letter saying it was strictly forbidden to take pics in a hospital whether we had her permission or not. I wriggled and squirmed double-hard. I was confident that if I could get to Barbara I could talk her round. I went to see her again I kissed arse with her, her brother and her employers. Paid them some money. She said that it was all OK and that she wasn’t really worried about the docs. Phew! I had done this loads of times before with complaints – headed them off at the pass with some fancy footwork.

  But the docs weren’t having any of it. When they heard I was trying to divide and rule, and confuse the girl further, they went ballistic. I couldn’t give a fuck – who were these meddling fucking Teddy boys anyway? They went over Barbara’s head and put pressure on the PCC to take a stand. Cap’n Bob was on the phone, sweating. People respected him and said he was a nice feller. But he spoke in a faux-posh accent, clearly designed to lend his racket respectability. He reminded me of one of those cad antiques show presenters on daytime telly. All this old naval stuff lent an air of trustworthiness to the whole charade.

  Even so, I upped the ante. One night I drove 300 miles from a job up north to Barbara’s dingy tower block in East London. I woke her up and got her out of bed. This time I leant on her, coercing and bullying her into signing a scribbly hand-written (by me) ‘statement’. It was a get-out-of-jail-free card stating that she had given me permission to do all the bad things to her in the hospital and she didn’t want to make a complaint against us and that she considered the payments I’d got her as sufficient compo.

  Before I left her flat I flipped it, saying that I was going to lose my job if she didn’t straighten the doctors out. Pathetically, I asked her for pity. Barbara was vulnerable and lonely and living in a shithole, but I left her in no uncertain terms that I’d be fucking livid if she didn’t sort all this shit out. After all, she was a fucking cleaner. As the silver metal doors closed on the piss-stinking lift, I could see the ridges of scar tissue on her arms and face – the remnants of the 300 stitches that had sewn her back together. I was pleased – it was a good night’s work.

  But the doctors still kept firing off letters and Cap’n Bob wasn’t happy with my statement scrawled out on a ratty piece of paper. This time I tried to dig the dirt on her. Find out her immigration status to see if she was illegal. Was she working cash-in-hand and claiming benefits? I made inquiries to see if she was involved in petty crime? I drew a blank. In the end none of it worked and Cap’n Bob caved in. The NoW published a massive apology.

  Later, when I fell out with Rebekah Brooks, she called me into a meeting in her office. Like the sneak she was, she pulled out my complaints file from under her desk as though she was pulling out a gun to finish me off. The stacks of paper looked like a copy of Hansard – with some heavy-duty European Directives thrown in for good measure – it was that thick. For effect, she was throwing reams and reams of letters and memos on the tabletop and saying things: ‘This is not good – look at all these complaints you’ve got. This is not a good record.’ I just stared at them. I may have been a perennial reoffender, but handing out legal memos at the News of the World was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indie 500, as Martin Sheen said in Apocalpyse Now. All I could say in response was that it was because of the relentless pressure to come up with stories. But by that time I didn’t care – I was a defeated man. I was shaking with some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. The game was up. My world had collapsed.

  15

  Sex Kid

  Spring in full bloom. Sunny April day. Strolling into town, along a glistening cobbled street, with my new girlfriend – a 12-year-old schoolie called Susan. I was supposed to be making small talk, getting her relaxed for our first date together. But what do you say to an anorexic tweenie – I knew nothing about kids? Especially ones with issues. I was an anti-family corporate drone who ate prawn sandwiches at my desk all day. Maybe we could visit the medieval castle, its scrofulous walls casting a dark shadow over the Middle England market town where Susan plied her trade. Shiftily, my face reddened, acutely conscious of how on-top we looked, as we made a bee-line through the tourists and the shoppers.

  Rake-thin and dirt-poor, Susan was the post-Thatcherite offspring of Britain’s new underclass. Nibbling her nails to cover up the cloud of submission that enveloped her whole life. A Victorian match-girl zoomed forward into the dirty shopping malls and retail parks of the old heartlands. Susan was a child prostitute. Her clothes were the trademark rags of Milton Friedman’s residual pool of labour – off-the-market bubble jacket, JD sweatshirt and paper-thin trackies. Topped off with greasy, stale, moussed-up hair. A complexion bleached white by never-ending urban winter. Pimpled-up by junk food.

  ‘I need the cash to get my ears pierced,’ she said. A little satellite of her friends tailed us at a respectful courting distance. Not watching out for her, but egging her on to go into the baby changing room in a nearby shopping mall. A girl with her blonde hair, pulled tightly back on her face, shouted: ‘Go with him now and do it, she wants as much money as she can get.’ Laughing, they wan
ted a cut of the £15 that Susan claimed she regularly charged for sex.

  ‘I’ll meet you in the cubicle,’ Susan whispered. Raised on a diet of crisps and ice pops until she was old enough to neck Ecstasy tablets. ‘You can lock it inside.’

  ‘OK, that’s good,’ I said, brazening up now. Getting into the zone. To the meat and bones of the story. As usual, tape whirring away in my inside pocket like an extra bodily organ. I couldn’t really give a fuck what anyone thought now – I had a job to do.

  ‘How much is it, to . . . er . . . do it.. . with you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s £15,’ she replied.

  ‘D’you mean sex?’ I said emphatically for the tape.

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘But I will do whatever you want. And I want paying up front.’

  When the story was published on the following Sunday, the fifth paragraph read:

  ‘Even an experienced News of the World investigator was moved when Susan pathetically offered her young body to him in broad daylight for a paltry £15.’ This was a lie.

  Or, rather, I was moved – but to relief and excitement. When Susan muttered her offer for sex, in exchange for pocket money, I was buzzing. Getting the offer on tape is the crucial part of the story. Journalistically, very important. But legally like gold dust, because the story won’t get in the paper, if that offer isn’t on tape. In her words. Clear as a bell. End of story. So, I wasn’t really saddened by Susan’s plight. Simply focused on getting her to say the right things. Ticking boxes and getting through the day.