Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Now I was free to crack on with a bit of colour. Push her harder for more shocking revelations. Always a risk. But even if she backed off now it didn’t matter, because I had the main part of the story in the bag. To me, Susan was just low-hanging fruit. I left the melodrama to the sub-editors.

  I stalled her with small talk, in a bid to get more out of her. Before making my excuses and leaving. No way I was going into the cubicle with her – out of sight of witnesses, including the News of World surveillance photographer who was shadowing us like a Rolex robber in Mayfair. Imagine that – after the story comes out, you get accused of shagging a 12-year-old-girl on the job. For fuck’s sake! The things that go through your mind. A dark world of twist. Once you enter, it fucks you up just thinking about these things. No wonder Roger the Dodger’s head was wrecked. Doing this day in. Day out.

  ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ I said. ‘Have you done this before?’ An old one, but it always gets a reaction for the tape.

  ‘I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve done it. I’m not happy about it. It’s just something that happens.’

  Susan’s was one of the easiest stories that I’ve ever done. Even more so than a stunt-up. It’s very easy for a professional liar like me to manipulate a 12-year-old girl into saying anything that I want. How do I know that she’s telling the truth? How do I know that she really is a child prostitute? She could be telling me a pack of lies. I don’t care. I could get her to confess to anything. Selectively choose the quotes that stand up the story. Discard the one’s which make her look less serious. This is my trade.

  How do I know that she’s hasn’t been groomed by the tipster to big-up the story? Am I bovvered? Her pram-faced mate was still hanging around. I’m a glory hunter not a Pulitzer Prize winner. One of the tipsters was a 16-year-old paperboy, who claimed to have seen Susan going into the cubicle, night after night, with strange men. But how do I know he hasn’t just cooked the whole thing up? Groomed the girl on what to say. In order to rip a few quid out of the News of the World. The correct journalistic approach would have been to put surveillance on Susan for a few days. Plot a van up on the taxi rank. Watch the cubicle where she allegedly solicited punters.

  Caught them red-handed. Independent corroboration. But the expediency of modern journalism won’t allow time for that. This story had to go in the paper fast. We had the confession on tape. That’s that.

  I asked Susan where she lived, agreeing to walk her home – so I could find out her address. Spin it through Steve Whittamore. Find out her second name. Identify her parents. Once that was done, I was off.

  After I’d cut her loose, I phoned the senior tipster on the story – the one who’d delivered up the paperboy. His name was Paul Samrai and he worked part-time in his dad’s newsagent’s, opposite Sainsbury’s. After his shift selling sweets to school kids, he moved next door to the chippy, also owned by his dad.

  I found him behind the counter.

  ‘Sorted!’ I told him. ‘Your child prostitute tip worked out.’

  Paul: ‘Thanks, mate. Fucking well done, mate.’

  Samrai looked like a typical newsagent. A Punjabi Sikh with bed-head hair from a crucifying 5 am start to get the papers in. Blue Berghaus fleece, scruffy jeans. Smoked like a chimney because his fags were free. Just after midday, but already slightly manic from booze. The warrior yeomen from the Jalunda plains had a soft spot for that homegrown burn-throat whisky they drank. But Paul’s poison was straightforward British lager. Paul had alcohol issues.

  However, there were hidden mysteries to him. And if you looked closely enough, they gave you clues as to a previous life. Glimmering around his furtive eyes, super pricey designer glasses. Not for sale on these shores. Incongruously red £200-a-pair handmade socks. Fine-stitched leather shoes, more at home in chambers than on the patchy lino behind a sweet counter. And a cashmere overcoat with shoulder pads that suggested he’d been out of circulation for a while.

  ‘I knew you’d stand it up,’ he projected in near-enough received pronunciation over the mag stands. ‘I knew you’d get her.’ Paul was beaming, knowing that for a spread he’d get a tip fee of around £3500. Paul was extremely clever and manipulative. He would go on to become one of the country’s highest paid freelance journalists.

  The following week, I flew off to New York for a mini-break with my new girlfriend. A hard-as-nails fifty-grand-a-year fashion buyer for a high-street supplier. Her own tasteful terrace in Watford with a spiral staircase and a brand new company Beamer outside on a permit. We weren’t suited. We’d only got together after I nearly got into a fight with Pulp bassist Steve Mackey at a backstage Oasis party in Manchester a few weeks before.

  Angela was a Pulp groupie who hung around with a pony-tailed cocaine dealer-to-the stars. Later, the dealer became mildly controversial in his own right, after Noel Gallagher slagged him off at an awards ceremony for being an old man with a ponytail who sucked the life out of the music industry. Anyway, one night we were all talking in a hotel bar. I started acting the goat. Chatting this half-tasty redhead up. Next minute the Pulp man came over. I was pissed. He was all right, to be fair. Bit of a student ponce. A fanny-head fringe, hanging over a miserable Morrissey pout. But I started spouting off about my claim to fame – that I was the reporter who’d just turned his band-mate Jarvis Cocker in a £30,000 kiss ’n’ tell in involving a busty make-up artist.

  Steve Mackey started crying about tabloid scum, saying that the story had nearly given Jarvis a nervous breakdown. I played up even more, ‘That’s a good result for us,’ before the coke-dealer bundled them out. Anyway, a few weeks later I called Angela. She was looking for someone to settle down and have a baby with after years of partying hard. I was like, ‘Fuck all that’, but I had my eye on getting out of my Holloway bedsit and slipping between her Egyptian cotton sheets. How shitty is that? But that’s how I viewed everything then – I was the centre of the universe and it was all about what could I do to get myself any advantage. The venality and selfishness that I nurtured in my professional life was now guiding my private life. I told her that I was on much more money than I really was.

  Anyway, we were doing the whole Cool Britannia thing. Shacked up in a Manhattan boutique hotel, where the lobby smells of fresh lilies and expensive coffee. I was hanging around the retro cappuccino machine, in the teak-hemp-furnished breakfast bar. Nodding away to ‘Free John Gotti’ by the Fun Lovin’ Criminals on MTV. Suddenly a gay concierge in a grey Paul Smith suit smiled at me. ‘Mr Johnson, there’s a call for you from the Clay Ravine somewhere.’

  Ray: ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  Me: ‘I’m in New York with my new bird.’

  I gathered that Clay hadn’t dialled me up himself otherwise he’d know – he must have got Tara to track me down.

  Ray: ‘For fuck’s sake – are you on holiday?’

  Me: ‘I told you I was going away.’ Butterflies, my breath nipping itself in. ‘Last week.’ No wonder he’d forgotten – I’d buried it in a busy conversation. Asking for holidays at the News of the World was like asking for a pay rise. I’d been there 18 months and this was my first official break. Asking for holidays felt shameful, a double-barrelled admission of betrayal and weakness. At Christmas, I was so exhausted that when my previous girlfriend turned up at my flat, dressed in a naughty Xmas costume, I couldn’t do anything because I was so tired. In order to get a few days off, I’d lied to Ray that my dad had had a heart attack. He was back in Liverpool, fit as a fiddle. I was telling so many lies to everyone that I couldn’t remember what was true. One day the Editor Phil Hall took me out for lunch, and asked how my dad was. ‘He’s sound,’ I said. ‘He’s into cycling. He rides 20 miles a day on his hand-built Pete Matthews . . .’

  ‘Wow – that’s a quick recovery,’ Phil said.

  For fuck’s sake, I’d forgotten about my dad’s phony heart attack and now he’s asking me about it.

  ‘Yes it is, Phil,’ I spoofed. ‘It is a great recovery. After a scare
like that, he’s got bang into fitness.’ Red-faced, moving on.

  Anyway, fast-forwarding back to New York. Ray was obviously seething.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he continued. ‘What a fucking week to go away.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘The Chief Constable of Warwickshire has gone fucking ballistic over the child prostitute story. Saying that it was a load of bollocks and that you stitched the girl up.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ray, I had her bang to rights on tape.’

  ‘Have you got the tape with you? Can you do me a transcript and a full memo?’

  ‘No – course not. I’m on holiday. I’m not in the habit of taking my tapes with me on holiday.

  ‘It’s in my desk, if you need to listen to it.’

  I knew he wouldn’t go for that – who wants to go scrabbling around in my desk, listening to tapes of all mad stuff? I was just hoping that he wouldn’t courier it to the Big Apple. So that I’d have to spend the rest of my holiday doing up a big fuck-off memo for him and Cap’n Bob, when I should be out having a drink with Westies or something. Of a day, Angela had been ‘working’. Out taking sneaky pictures of £2000-a-piece designer dresses on Fifth Avenue. That’s what fashion buyers do – they’re no better than NoW reporters. They make a copy of a designer dress in a shop, by covertly snapping it or sketching it. Send the design off to an Indian sweatshop. And get 20,000 made up for the UK high street. I couldn’t believe it. Anyway, of a day, while she was out doing that, I’d taken to walking all over New York to all the worst bits – Brooklyn, Queens, Harlem. Fuck the Empire State and holding hands in Central Park. I preferred to take a look around Little Italy and the West Side.

  ‘OK, wait until you get back,’ Ray said. ‘But don’t fucking take all day about it, because we’ve had a letter off the girl’s social worker as well. Saying that the parents have gone fucking mental and that the girl wasn’t really on the game.’

  “Who gives a fuck?’ I replied. ‘They’re bound to say that, aren’t they? The police are going mad because we make them look silly by exposing a child prostitute under their noses. Same goes for those social workers, fucking socialist worker students, whatever.’

  ‘I know,’ Ray agreed. ‘But I just don’t want any shit off them. OK. Well, have a nice time.’

  ‘OK, ta. See you next week.’

  ‘Oh, just before you go, one more thing.’

  Here we go, I thought, the old Columbo bollocks.

  ‘I want to ask you a question,’ said Ray, ‘and I want a straight answer.’

  ‘OK What is it?’

  ‘Did you fuck her?’

  ‘Did I fuck who?’

  ‘The 12-year-old prostitute, that’s fucking who.’

  ‘What?’ I exploded. ‘Are you fucking mad?’

  The colour drained from my face. I felt weak and worried.

  ‘No I’m not mad. This is important. Did you fuck the child prostitute in Warwick or not?

  If we’re going to fight this, I need to know that there aren’t any skeletons that are going to come back and bite us in the arse.’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t shag her. For fuck’s sake, what do you think I am, a nonce?’

  ‘I’ve got to ask you, that’s all.’

  ‘Fucking hell – you’ve knocked me for six there. I’m being accused of being a paedophile and having sex with 12-year-olds when I’m supposed to be enjoying a mini-break in New York with my bird.’

  ‘No one’s accusing you.’

  ‘Well, you are, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not accusing you. I’m asking.’

  ‘Well, the answer is fucking no.’

  I got paranoid. Even telling the truth. What value had the truth in my world? Where only lies and blags had currency.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are the busies saying that I shagged her?’

  ‘No, course not, but I’ve got to be sure.’

  ‘Fucking hell, you’re freaking me out. One minute you’re saying to me “have a nice time,” the next you’re saying that I’m noncing off underage schoolies on the job.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. See you later.’

  Phone down.

  Everyone was getting jittery about vice stories. Rumours were flying around the News of the World about how one investigator had raped a 14-year-old prostitute on a job, after buying her drugs in exchange for a story. On another job, an agency freelancer had gone on a brothel job for Features and said that he’d made his excuses and left. The prostitute had a different recollection. On the Tuesday, after publication, she rang in saying that the reporter in question hadn’t been entirely virtuous. Saying that he hadn’t made his excuses but had paid her and then gone on to have anal sex. When confronted, the reporter denied it. But he was caught out by a million-to-one chance. Astonishingly, the hooker had been secretly working for our rival department, News, on a completely separate long-running job. A different team of News Of the World investigators had wired up her massage room with secret video cameras in order to catch a celebrity who was meant to be visiting the girl. How mad is that? Of all the brothels in all the land, the agency reporter chose to go into one that was already NoW property.

  ‘Not possible,’ said the Screws executive who was talking to her.

  ‘Well, if you don’t believe me then,’ the prostitute said, ‘here is the fucking videotape, showing the reporter shagging me up the arse.’ And it was true – she had it on video. News of the World video. Which our rivals on News were only too happy to hand over. He was sacked. Everyone laughed at the madness of this story. But deep down it struck a nerve – that could have been any one of the sleazy bastards who worked here.

  16

  Samrai Warrior

  I quickly phoned Paul from my New York hotel.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I demanded. Becoming sharp with the lesser mortals in the food chain. Just like my bosses were with me. The Murdoch way. That keeps everyone in line.

  ‘I’ve just had my boss on saying that the police are pouring shit all over our child sex story.’ Paul ignored my slights. Like most Indians he ignored the status anxiety and focused on the payday.

  ‘Fuck them off,’ he said, always reassuringly decisive in a mini-crisis. ‘I’ve had heat on me as well. The chief con sent round a couple of coppers to lean on me. They were spitting feathers, jumping up and down, saying that I was bringing shame upon the whole of Warwick, that I was making the police look like dick-heads by exposing all this crime every week.’

  They had a point – Paul and I had been turning over villains and darkening doorsteps in Warwick for just over six months now. We turned over an immigration scamster called Ranjiv Malik who sold fake Portuguese passports to illegals. He also ran a marriage con in Warwick. A Warwick-based people-smuggler had also been plastered all over the paper as a result of Paul’s tips. And we’d also exposed a local sex-pest.

  Warwick wasn’t a hotbed of crime – it’s just that Paul was tied to helping out his dad at the shop and in the chippy. That meant all of his stories had to be local. Resourceful to the extreme, Paul had an uncanny way of turning a little early morning gossip over the counter into a News of the World story. His drinking problem also prevented him from doing stories in different parts of the country. Reading between the lines, his dad didn’t want him straying too far from the family manor in case he went on a bender.

  ‘Well, what exactly are the police saying?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re saying that if I don’t stop dealing with the papers, they’re going to send me back.’

  ‘Send you back where?’ I asked.

  ‘Prison – the police said they’ll send me back to prison. I’m still on licence.’

  Paul Samrai had once been one of the richest and most successful young barristers in Britain. After being called to the bar, the UCL law graduate specialised in immigration, setting up practices in London and Hong Kong. During the late 1980s, he lived the dream with a Docklands flat overlooking Tower Bri
dge and an ambitious wife who loved money.

  But Paul wasn’t happy. Like many second-generation Asian kids, he had been pushed by his father through school. He was living his dad’s ambitions rather than his own. An outsider by nature, Paul had been picked on at school, despite winning a place at a very good one. Now in the rarefied, all-white circles of the bar, Paul felt out of place again. Secretly, Paul was nurturing a bohemian desire – he wanted to be a journalist instead of a highflying legal eagle.

  Lured by the prospect of easy cash and a misplaced sense of adventure to satiate his inner lack of fulfilment, Paul relocated to Hong Kong, to take advantage of worried Chinese who wanted to get out before the handover. Cleverly, he found loopholes in the law, through which he could obtain British passports and visas for rich businessmen. By pretending that they had been educated in the UK. Then he got into bed with the Kowloon Triads. Then he started forging documents and fraudulently obtaining British passports. In 1994 Paul Samrai was busted by Scotland Yard and flown back to the UK in handcuffs. He was convicted and jailed for immigration fraud. Inside he met Peter Trowell who taught him the ropes of freelance tipping. When he got out, Peter hooked him up with me.

  Stood there in his dad’s sweet shop, in which he was forced to work in penitence to restore the family’s honour, I was getting one of my first lessons in how some police propaganda works. If some constabularies police don’t get the press they want, they bully people with threats and smear tactics.

  ‘Well, do you give a fuck?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really, but I’ve got to be more careful about doing stories for the Screws. I’d rather not go back to jail.’ Prison had shaken up the middle-class Indian boy. Unlike us at the News of the World, Paul was genuinely scared of the authorities. Unlike us, he didn’t think that he was untouchable.