Hack

by Graham Johnson

  ‘I’ll carry on doing stories,’ he vouched. ‘But we’ll have to cool off on Warwick for a bit, spread our wings a touch. I’ll square it with my dad so that I’m not chained to the shop so much. If I can prove to him that I’m making good money from the papers, and that it’s a proper job kind of thing, then it should be OK.’

  ‘Good,’ I thought. I couldn’t afford to lose Paul. Too valuable a contact. Samrai was a gatekeeper into two hot-potato issues that Rupert Murdoch wanted demonised. The undeserving poor and illegal immigration.

  A few weeks later a hollow capsule of air was turning over in my guts. Conference, and I had fuck all for my list. Desperately I rang Paul.

  ‘Hi, mate, have you got anything for this week?’

  ‘Nah, mate, not much. Fuck all going on . . .’

  ‘Fuck’s sake . . . I’m desperate, mate.’

  ‘Well, there’s one thing?’ Paul said. ‘What about a sex pest terrorising a local estate?’

  ‘That sounds good. What’s the story?’ Like a salesman, Paul could sense that it was a seller’s market. So whatever shit he had to flog, he polished it up pronto and put his best spin on it.

  ‘One of the fellers who comes in the shop told me about a dirty old man. A nonce in fact, on one of the estates close by, who keeps preying on the kids and that.’

  ‘That sounds good, mate. What does he get up to?’

  ‘He fondles the local schoolgirls, plies them with drink etc.’ Paul was vague on the details. Sounded like a load of bollocks to me but beggars can’t be choosers. So I chose to go along with him and not probe him too hard in case the story fell apart under closer scrutiny.

  ‘Can we expose him?’ I asked. ‘Can we turn him over?’

  ‘Yes, I know all the people on the estate. I’ll get you into him, and you can get him on tape, boasting about wanting sex with the young girls.’

  ‘I like that,’ I said.

  I rushed into conference. Pitched it up, hard.

  ‘OK, what about this?’ I told Ray. ‘An investigation into one of Britain’s most depraved sexual predators.’ I hyped up the tip and oversold the story. ‘I’ve got a steer from one of my contacts about a twisted council estate resident who is grooming young girls after plying them booze. He then lures them to his lair and forces them to have sex with him.’

  I knew this type of story would play out well in conference. The new buzz word doing the rounds was anti-social behaviour. The country was on stand-by to go into a General Election. And the New Labour leader Tony Blair was fighting on a ticket of bashing the unruly idle poor. The burgeoning underclass, that had been out-of work since the early ’80s, were clogging up the sink estates. Being poor wasn’t against the law yet, but their behaviour could be criminalised if a raft of new offences was trumped up. My job was to demonise anti-social behaviour to pave the way. The underclass, along with other on-trend vulnerable sub-groups, such as single mums and asylum-seekers, were now fair game. Unusually, the News of the World seemed to be supporting New Labour and Tony Blair. Slavish support of the Tories had been dropped. Little did a lowly functionary like me know that Tony Blair had courted Murdoch by flying halfway across the world to see him. In 1997 Blair and his press aide Alastair Campbell flew to Sidney to address a Murdoch conference – I assume my Editor Phil Hall had been there to take note of what needed to be cooked up. To make it work for everyone. To manufacture the consent.

  I kept overselling my pervert story to Ray, stating that the target was ritually violent and abusive to his salt-of-the-earth neighbours – council estate peasants. Our Readers. Our Punters. That needed our protection. In the end, Ray went for it.

  ‘I quite like that,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a load of bollocks, but if we can get the whole estate up in arms about him, that could work.’

  I was dispatched up to Warwickshire to turn him over.

  If you had a story to feed to the bosses, then they’d get off your back for another week. That’s all that mattered. That brief respite from the heat of battle. That feeling of isolation-tank contentment that you had survived another seven days at the cutting edge of the most competitive newspaper in the most cut-throat tabloid market on the whole of the planet. If I can cut it here, I can cut it anywhere.

  So, it was around a month before the New York mini-break that I got to Warwick, and, as usual, the story was definitely not sold-as-seen. I checked the target out. His name was Derek Coop. In reality, he was no more than a poverty-stricken odd-bod who kept himself to himself. Got a bit grumpy when the local hood-rats wound him up. I spoke to the neighbours and they didn’t really have anything bad to say about him. OK, he was a bit of a dirty old man. But didn’t every estate have a person like him hanging around? Derek Coop was special needs. The type of person who needed help rather than to be exposed by the News of the World. He reminded me of a man who used to hang around my area where I grew up. We used to call him Dirty Dave. He was a bit slow and trampy. He used to stash porno mags on a disused railway line. Now and again, Dirty Dave robbed knickers off people’s washing lines – but he wasn’t a monster and he had to endure a life of bullying and hate crime, as so many disabled people do. Similarly, there were allegations that Derek Coop was a flasher.

  I knocked on his door. Like most fellers like him, he lived in squalor. But he had a caring daughter who did her best to look after him. The poor girl was at the end of her tether. I lied and smiled that I was there to help her. To offer protection from the people who had it in for her dad. Tape on. Kindly, she offered me a cup of tea. Reporter’s trick: always accept one as it builds trust and is an excuse to stay in the house longer.

  ‘What’s all this I hear about your dad being harassed by the local yobs?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s not a pervert, like they make out,’ she said. ‘He’s just had a nervous breakdown since being made redundant. The neighbours accuse him of doing all sorts, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time. We’ve asked the social for help, but there’s nothing. We’ve fallen out with the lot of em. The kids shout at him and give him stick.’

  Strife on the estates between residents was increasing – I’d noticed it. As society was becoming more selfish and hard-faced, people were turning on each other. Community spirit was dissolving in favour of dog-eat-dog.

  The daughter carried on: ‘Far from being a pervert, the kids use him. He drinks a lot, so the kids who play truant come and have a drink here. My dad doesn’t know what he’s doing?’

  I felt really sorry for her. She broke down in tears. I couldn’t face phoning Ray and telling him this was a non-runner. Have him scream down the phone. Instead, I did what every News of the World reporter did when faced with a listed story that didn’t stand up – I made it work. Who was it going to be? Me or the defenceless Derek Coop and his lovely daughter? One of us would have to be sacrificed up to Ray and that was that.

  Wedgnock Green was my kind of place. I surveyed the battlefield of ideas. A tattered rim of 1930s parlour houses, set around a weedy half-oval of contractor-maintained grass. These were my kind of people. Conclusion – I knew I could manipulate the residents into saying pretty much anything. Feeding off their greedy desires and petty hatreds. To slag off old Coop and serve him up like a roast chicken. Estates are riven with politics and grievances just like offices – I was certainly better at playing this kind of chicanery than boardroom poker with Rebekah Brooks and Ray Levine. I went to work.

  As usual, the first witness was a 15-year-old paperboy who worked for Paul Samrai. He said: ‘Coop offered me cigarettes and vodka and then urinated in a bowl before locking me in a bedroom.’ Course he did.

  I popped into Coop’s next door neighbour at number 13. Their sour-faced teenage daughter let rip with irrational babblings – perfect for NoW quotes. The 16-year-old schoolgirl said: ‘Coop has propositioned me dozens of times. He talks dirty and has shown me porn mags.’ Took me half an hour of wading through unusable mundanery about Coop to get that. Hardly Ian Brady, but I
could spin that up to make Coop look like the real thing.

  I scamulated up some quotes from No. 10, No. 16 and No. 17. I exaggerated incidences of low-level anti-social behaviour into horrific acts of dangerous and criminal intent. In short, I demonised the vulnerable loner who lived in the decrepit parlour house with the overgrown garden so that he would become a hate-figure up and down the land. By the time the piece was written up, it read like he was the most dangerous man in Britain.

  Ray called up: ‘Can you draw a little map of the street with a big arrow pointing to the pervert’s house? And then all the other houses where the people are in danger.’ Sure – an official looking graphic will only heap more grief on Coop. On the way back to the office, I got a herogram from Ray: ‘Well done, mate, fucking great story.’

  Headline: ‘Pervert on The Green.’

  Picture Caption: ‘Monster – Coop and his hell-hole home.’

  Intro: ‘We expose Britain’s most depraved neighbour – Dirty-talking fiend’s booze lure for kids.’

  Strapline: ‘One scared lad told the News of the World how Coop dropped his trousers, tried to kiss him and begged him to perform a sex act.’

  I was pleased with myself. The tipster Paul Samrai got a couple of grand tip fee and I went back to my hovel in Holloway to crash out from fatigue.

  Come Tuesday, the cycle was repeated. I started swaggering out of conference mantraing my new motto: ‘Let’s go and destroy someone’s life.’ Before hitting the road later that day to do exactly that. To another unsuspecting member of the public. Living in a nowhere town somewhere. Who hadn’t done much wrong. People started getting turned over left, right and centre for doing nothing at all. These were the good times.

  17

  Angry Men

  A few months later, I was desperate for a similar hit. Ray called me into his office. ‘Have you got any good stories?’ he asked, not looking up. He was examining several small diamonds and gold rings layed out on a soft black cloth on his desk. On the side, he sold jewellery – wedding bands, engagement rings, trinkets – that he bought off his mates in Hatton Garden, mostly, offloading them to members of staff at a discount. One time he sent me round to one of his mates with a stack of cash – Ray thought I was a good bag man because I looked pretty tough. Holding a monocle magnifying eye-piece to his eye, and without looking up, he said; ‘That nasty neighbour story was good – have you got any more like that?’ I phoned Paul: ‘Have you got any more of those “nasty neighbour” stories? They want more of them.’ New Labour were on the ascendant – the green light was given for a programme of mass criminalisation of the underserving poor, in a bid to pave the way for ASBOs.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said. One of his mates had told him about a very angry man-type who lived in Coventry and was upsetting the estate. True, lorry driver David Jerome was a nasty bully – but did he really deserve to take the title off old Coop and become Britain’s next nastiest neighbour?

  A few hours later, after a good reception in conference, I was stood outside David Jerome’s house, destroying his life. Jerome was irascible – so it wasn’t hard for me to wind him up and get the money shot: him chasing me and the photographer down the road with his Alsatian, just like one of those timeshare fraudsters do on Watchdog. The picture was irrefutable proof that he was guilty of being nasty. In truth, this ‘investigation’ was no more than a local story. But again I hyped up the quotes from the neighbours and even got his wife to slag him off.

  Headline: ‘Say Hello to the Worst Neighbour in Britain.’

  Picture caption: ‘Bullying Jerome hurls abuse and threats at neighbours.’

  Intro: ‘This is Neighbour From Hell David Jerome – he’s so nasty even his wife wants him out.’

  Another new trend was also creeping into stories. Celebrity culture was dawning and every story, no matter how far removed from showbiz, had to have a celebrity reference. News executives had decided that their readers were so stupid that they could not understand anything unless it was refracted through the prism of a soap opera. Everything was getting more disconnected from real life. The News of the World were picking on David Jerome for being from the underclass. As part of a cooked-up story. Then selling the story back to the underclass who bought their newspapers. But saying that he was different from them by packaging it up as a soap opera so that they could relate to it. Tabloid culture was now entering the world of twist at warp speed. To boot, all showbiz references had to be high up in the story – a prominent place in the first few paragraphs. Hence in my third paragraph on this story was: ‘Foul-mouthed Jerome, 55, is a real-life version of Coronation Street troublemaker Les Battersby.’ Without this line the story would not have got in the paper and it was an excuse to use a big picture of a Corrie star. Within five years almost all off-diary tabloid stories had to have a celebrity mentioned in them. This would be the language that the elite would use to simultaneously communicate with and distract the masses. Big Brother – that is the other Big Brother from George Orwell and not the reality show – could not have achieved a tighter manufacture of consent.

  No one ever batted an eye after my gratuitous attacks on the defenceless. Unpeople, whose destroyed lives became my stock-in-trade. A sign of the times. Britain’s once proud working classes had been reduced to cowering husks of suspicious and divided groups. Community spirit, trade unions and mutual support replaced now with poverty, smack heads robbing old bingoites, and people living on the street. I was employed to make sure that the truth that led to this state of affairs was never aired. How the peasants had been battered down with economic shock therapy and rampaging free markets. Instead, the vices of the poor were to be blamed on themselves. My job was to fabricate the evidence, painting a picture of a neo-Victorian Britain whose ills were self-inflicted. To this end, Paul Samrai’s stories were a perfect fit. A logical step-up from stunt-ups. Tales of the unexpected that weren’t exactly false, but not exactly true either. Not quite full-on falsehoods with walk-on parts for paid-up pretenders. But using genuine people who were selectively tarnished and fitted up and couldn’t fight back. A kind of soap opera using real-life people. An early pilot of The Only Way Is Essex.

  ‘Let’s do it to them, before they do it us,’ I laughed, as I bailed out of conference a few weeks later. A Big Swinging Dick now. A Big Top Operator on The Street. I was high off a successful pitch. Ray liked my tip about a vampire sex cult. All becoming routine now. ‘Can you book me a train to Weymouth in Dorset, please?’ I asked Tara, as I brushed passed the secretary’s desk. Mixing it with a bit of saucy banter, as though I’d been working here all my life. ‘And a little hire car, if you wouldn’t mind.’ I was getting used to the corporate slack afforded to the successful functionary.

  A few hours later I was playing Pac Man on a table-top video game machine, in a deserted amusement arcade on the whitewashed seafront of another town that beckoned nuclear war. Today, you’d get a grand-and-a-half for a sit-down console like that in a Notting Hill junk shop. But back then, the retro cocktail table was no more than a meeting point for bored teenagers in another coastal stretch with a high rate of petrol-sniffers. No wonder the kids were turning into blood-suckers around these parts. Teenagers need tower blocks, multi-storey car parks, decent clobber, big footy teams and good music. I was there to meet my contact, a disgruntled ex-member of The Family, an alleged Satanist sect based on psycho American Charles Manson’s infamous cult, now made up of the best virgins Dorset had to offer.

  Over a cup of Burger King tea and a Whopper with onion rings that I’d shit out within minutes, I asked the contact to introduce me to their self-styled leader, a bearded former car-robber called Wayne Phelps. A few minutes later, we were sat on the crumby floor of Phelps’ housing benefit bedsit, soaking up the patchouli oil jozzies and the gothy posters. Seaside towns were rapidly becoming a great source of stories because the big cities were using their looming Victorian rooming houses as dumping grounds for council estate jetsam. Squeezed out by right-to-buy.
Designated low credit scores. Community-care types, the disabled, drug addicts, special needs, single mums, anti-social families and petty criminals had turned the picture postcard into a bully’s paradise.

  ‘Hi Wayne,’ I said, giving a slight bow, ‘You don’t know how much of a great honour this is. Your name is spreading far and wide. The reputation of The Family has reached London. Me and my friend Paul (Paul Ashton – News of the World snapper, later picture editor) are also followers of the Carpathian religion. We’ve heard about your great work. Respectfully, we’ve come down to ask your permission to set up a branch of our own.’

  Crushed by a life of abuse and low self-esteem, Wayne was visibly blown away that someone had finally recognised his talents and come all the way down from London to seek his wisdom. His acolytes, a couple of pot-heads and girls wearing dirty tracksuit bottoms, were bewildered. But I knew Phelps’ prison cunning wouldn’t take long to roll with the flow. Within seconds he puffed himself up, and looked at his friends as though to say: ‘I told you so – all this stuff I’ve been telling you about my powers is true.’

  ‘I’ll have to make sure that you’re proper vampires,’ he said to me, getting carried away with himself. ‘We’re a serious outfit and we’ve got no time for time-wasters. We drink each other’s blood about once a month. It’s a ritual that makes The Family stronger. And the girls like it as well.’

  Every part of crap Britain has a Wayne Phelps. The Dungeons and Dragons kid who’s taken it a bit too far. Escaping into the fantasy world a bit too deep, probably to blot out the care home he’s in. Or the broken home that’s fucked him up. Banned from Games Workshop for robbing. Glue-sniffer. Rat breeder. Ouija board cutter-outer. I’ve met a few of these Warhammer-types who live a double life as a wizard of Mordor. Wayne called himself Vandarl, after an ancient Transylvanian, but quickly realised that he could get sly wanks off the local slags, by drama’ing up their sea-grey life in a mean, ageing town where happiness is a warm bus shelter. I got on to what was going on within seconds – no more than bizarre game of spin the bottle run by an over-active imagination. Given 50 grand’s worth of fee-paying education, Wayne would be working in the theatre today. But them’s the breaks. I was actually nearly reduced to tears thinking about Phelps. The squalor he lived in. Filling me with pity. The little life he’d literally dreamt up, down here on his own. He was only doing his best – I had loser mates like him back home. Not vampires – but just fucked-up doleite lads. But what am I going to do? Ring Ray and tell him that my Dracula tip, that so spellbound conference just a few hours before, is just kids who’ve watched The Lost Boys too many times? Or do I take Phelps’ low-level role-play and manipulate it up into a big ‘Hammer House of Horrors Devil-Worshipping’ exclusive that would excite our demographic because there were lots of mentions of virgins, the word ‘sucking’ and flashes of firm young breasts?