Hack

by Graham Johnson

  20

  Summer of Discontent

  A few weeks later I was sat in a cramped London flat with the secret gay lover of the right honourable member for Harlow, Essex. The News of the World’s single best contact Max Clifford had declared war on the Tories. He blamed them for destroying the NHS. To spearhead his crusade, Max had offered the Screws a big buy-up story about an affair between curly-haired Tory-boy Jerry Hayes and his 18-year-old ex-Commons’ researcher Paul Stone. If the story panned out, then Max would be paid approximately £100,000 for the tip, a percentage of which would go to his client.

  My job was to baby-sit Stone, until I got the order to put in the usual taped call. That meant getting Stone to slyly call Jerry up unawares. Then to script a conversation in which they would reminisce about their 18-month affair. An involuntary confession by Hayes which I would tape for evidential purposes. A simple task but a lot of pressure.

  Being part of one of these big Screws set-pieces was like being involved in the build-up to the Gulf War. Rebekah was our Stormin’ Norman Operational Commander. Ray was her Chief of Staff. For the first time, I was having to report directly to Rebekah, obviously a great honour. So I was on my best behaviour. For the first time also, she seemed to be handling the story day-to-day instead of the Editor. Obviously a step up the ladder for her as well. Surveillance vans were scattered all over London at various addresses. Reporters making covert inquiries at key locations. A team back in the office, secretly bringing together various bits of copy, backgrounders and pics. Inquiry agents pulling records, phone bills and other data.

  Then the phone rang. It was Ray: ‘OK, put the call in now.’

  I picked up Stone’s landline phone from the coffee table. Placed it on a rug in the centre of his living-room floor. I summoned the gay lover to kneel down next to it. Looking him in the eyes, I instructed him carefully: ‘I want you to ring Jerry up and get him talking about how much you like each other and get him talking about all the dates you’ve been on and all the times you’ve had sex.’ I pulled out a memo, that we’d got off Max Clifford, detailing all the info on their various liaisons, to prompt Stone if he began to fuck up. Slide the record button. TP3 on. Earpiece in.

  The blag worked like a dream. Jerry didn’t suspect a thing, coughing to loads on tape, proving that they were lovers. The next day it was front-up Friday. My job was to watch Jerry’s constituency home in Essex all day so that I could warn the desk when he left for his surgery meetings with the locals. Getting out of bed had been a nightmare. A foggy cold morning. Plus, my head was blown with pain. An abscess had exploded under a rotting molar, decayed by too many years of Mars Bar breakfasts on the road. My mouth was drenched in brown tooth tincture. I battled to plug a hole in the stinking enamel, the edges blackened, with a sodden ball of cotton wool. Crunching Anadins three at a time. But taking the pain because Rebekah was the emir and if she asked me to run into Jerry’s and blow myself up, I would have.

  I was determined not to show-out in Jerry’s leafy road so I hung well back from the house, a large detached where he stowed his wife and three kids. I was parked up over the road, next to a garage. The nosey-bastard owner, a Little Englander meddler-type, kept clocking me. So I edged further down the road. So far back, that I ended up watching the wrong house for eight hours. What a fucking bell-end? But the pain was driving me nuts.

  I could have fucked the whole job up if Jerry had slipped out that afternoon without me knowing. Luckily, he turned up at his surgery nearby. And guess who was there with a problem for him to solve? None other than Rebekah Brooks. Rebekah fronted him with the allegations. He coughed. She slimed him up massively with her legendary charm. Expressing her sympathy. Talking him round into making a confession. Instead of fucking her off as he should have done, Jerry later rang the office to thank them for the way she had handled the story. Can you believe that? The NoW destroys his marriage and outs him in front of his kids – and he thanks them. He said: ‘. . . she came to see me at my surgery in Harlow to tell me of the story that the News of the World was breaking about me the next day. It was a terrible moment for both of us. And she was amazingly kind, offering to fly me and my family abroad and arranging blocking cars to stop unwanted pictures by the paps. I declined both.’

  Let’s be clear about this. This was not an offer to protect him. This was not an offer of kindness in his interests. These are standard buy-up tactics to protect our story. No one, especially Rebekah, could give a fuck about him. She wanted to get him and his family into a hotel in Spain or wherever, so that a rival paper could not get to them. Simultaneously, teeing the whole thing up, for what’s known as a ‘week two’. An exclusive follow-up the week after, in which the NoW would get Jerry to do a sit-down, talking about the ordeal, giving his side of the story. All that Rebekah was doing was trying to persuade the target to give her a second story before the first had even be published – for nothing. You’ve got to hand it to her. She was cute – she probably reckoned that it was better to get into him for a second story before the first story came out because afterwards he was likely to be fuming. There was no amazing kindness about it. And Jerry didn’t see this. Even him, a clever politician who plots and schemes for a living. All that bollocks about blocking cars, that’s not for his benefit – once again that’s for our benefit. In the run-up to the story the NoW has shelled out thousands of pounds on surveillance vans getting pics of Jerry, as well as buying any photo material that Stone had. The blocking cars would have been to stop rival papers getting pics that would spoil ours. Jerry and her became mates and he’s still sucking up to her to this day for trying to destroy his life. But that’s the thing with people like Jerry. Members of the political class who crave power and status, they are especially vulnerable to tabloid Stockholm Syndrome. Even when Rebekah was giving it to him. Even after the headline ‘Tory MP Two-Timed Wife with Underage Gay Lover’ appeared that Sunday. All he wanted to do was praise the powerful. Mad but true.

  Spring turned into summer like a montage in The Graduate. Tinged with melancholy and foreboding. I went through the motions on autopilot. Telling lies and destroying lives. Like a Shakespearian portent, the clouds on the horizon wouldn’t shift. The stress levels rising like the sap in my suburban back garden. My girlfriend Angela told me that she’d had an abortion because I wouldn’t commit to getting a mortgage. I wanted to move out. At work, I was getting bigger and more complex jobs. My body was cracking under the strain because I never had time to go the doctors. An abscess on my tooth one week. The shits the next. Can’t breathe through my broken nose, the result of a playground accident and several fights afterwards. Sinuses on fire. Life in the big bad city. No time to go to the News Int. private hospital because I’m stuck on a watch in the middle of nowhere.

  A few weeks later we did a big number on Jonathan Aitken who was about to fall on his sword for perjury. We got the dominatrix that spanked him to a hotel in Watford. Headline: ‘Four in a Bed, Whips and Orgy in a Gothic Mill.’ It wasn’t my job, but I got called out because the Hilton was just around the corner from Angela’s place. I was stressed out and handled it badly. I got annoyed with the buy-up for taking the piss with the room service. She took a disliking to me, so I got pulled off the job. Nothing like that had ever happened before – it was a bad omen.

  Tony Blair got swept to power but we still kept the pressure up on the Tories. Murdoch must have had it in for them for some reason. On the next job, the paper assigned its best big-shot photographer. I was going up in the world. Steve Grayson was a former plumber. Turned disco DJ. Turned senior investigative photographer. Steve could turn his boxer’s hands to anything – and turn you over as soon as look at you. His blags were legendary. A fast-moving combination of bluff and bluster, like an Ali shuffle on fast-forward. So incredible it made you laugh out loud. But backed up with action so hard-edged and unpredictable, it made your balls suck-up into themselves with pain, in sympathy with the mark who’d been on the end of them. In the context o
f the NoTW, He made me look like a child who’d lied about his homework.

  Steve was the Fake Sheik’s personal photographer. Or, rather, equal partner. A position of great status and freedom in a hierarchy of shit-eating and oppression. He and Investigations Editor Mazher Mahmood flew around the world. Five-star hotels. The best spook gadgets money could buy. Unlimited budgets. Like Vegas magicians, they created illusions of such glittering grandeur, they suckered in the great and the good, one after the other. And on Sunday left them dripping tears over their tea and toast crying, ‘What the fuck happened there?’

  I’d first clocked Steve about a year before, when he walked into the Features department.

  Without daring to look up too much, I observed his mannerisms through a gap in the monitors – and it was a fascinating mixture of contradictions. It was as though Roy Keane had wandered into the dressing room of a Sunday League side by accident. A team of shit-kickers and amateurs that he was being forced to play in an FA Cup round. Steve looked down on us or so it seemed to me. Like we were jokers. Playing-at-it, £400-a-week shifters and six-month contract merchants who couldn’t stand up a flower in a vase, never mind a world exclusive. Later, when I spoke to him about it, Steve was horrified to learn that I thought he was arrogant. ‘I would would never think that,’ he said. Genuinely hurt. But that was the contradiction – Steve could be overwhelmingly humble and kind at the same time. Steve worked mainly for the News department, which was considered a much more mature and professional outfit. To him, or so I thought, we were cheap-suited chancers who couldn’t even afford a real Rolex, an essential prop on the kind of high-roller jobs that he and Mazher specialised in. That was my first impression anyway. I guess the tough exterior was just a way of coping with the unnatural atmosphere at the Screws.

  Then we found ourselves working together. On another big News of the World set-piece where everybody gets turned over – and my role in it was proof that I was moving up. Married Tory MP Nigel Waterson was carrying on with a prissy-looking academic at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The Editor Phil Hall had been tipped off by a couple of unsigned poison pen letters. But we had to get the proof. And there was only one way to do that – snatched pictures of the couple together. Preferably backed up with surveillance logs and videos of Waterson’s late-night trysts at his mistress’s London pad.

  Steve pulled up at Warren Street in his Scooby Doo hi-tech surveillance van. He got out and showed me a doubled-up bin bag, with a big knot flowering out of the top of it.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a bin bag.’

  ‘Very funny – but do you know what’s inside?’

  ‘Rubbish?’ I guessed. ‘That’s what I use them for, mate.’

  ‘OK, well, if you’re going to be a smart arse, I’ll tell you what’s inside.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s inside. It’s a bag of shit. A big bag of my shit.’

  Steve walked across the pavement and put the bag of shit in a bin on the street. I laughed.

  Steve had been watching the woman’s house all night. Instead of pulling off to use the bog somewhere, he’d shit in a bin bag, like the SAS do in Northern Ireland. In fact, it’s pretty much standard operating procedure for Who Dares Wins-types, even if they’re in the middle of the desert. They defecate in bin bags and store them up in their Bergens, until they get back. So as to leave as little trace as possible for the enemy to go on. When on watches, Steve didn’t like to move the van so as not to arouse suspicion, never mind getting in and out for a piss break. Once he was on the plot, he was on the plot.

  Steve gave me a little tour of his van. Showed me the mini makeshift bog by the sliding side door – no more than a waste paper bin, lined with a bin bag for the use of.

  ‘Very good,’ I said. He laughed.

  Steve was a serious operator and I was determined to impress him. On surveillance jobs, it was common practice for reporters to skive. Reporters and photographers would make a cut-throat pact to go home rather than spend hours and hours staring at a brass knob on a door they were supposed to be watching. If the bosses phoned either of them to check in, both parties would say they were with the other at the address and back each other up. I wasn’t big on skiving as the Force inside me was too strong. The fear of losing my job was still overwhelming. But on the odd occasion that I was late for a job, I opened the window of my bedroom, stuck my head out and checked in with Ray on the mobile, pretending that I was on the plot somewhere.

  I could always tell that Ray was trying to catch me out – listening to the birds tweet in the background when it should have been six-lane motorways or a nightclub instead – the soundscape of that particular job. But on other occasions he went much further. Jumping on to his motorbike and racing down to the job, to catch reporters out. My colleague Dominic Mohan was turned over for this. After suspecting Dominic was blagging him from home, Ray zoomed around to Dom’s flat. In his leathers, like a man on a mission. Parked up outside. Called Dominic on his mobile and smiled as he observed Dom stick his head out of the window to answer the call. Bang to rights. A sackable offence.

  Increasingly, Ray and Dom weren’t seeing eye-to-eye. Ray was trying to edge him out. Panning his stories in conference. Giving him shitty jobs. More and more, Dom was looking like a loser in a thick-weave suit and unpolished shoes. Tombstones in his eyes and no one wanted to talk to him. But Rebekah had a soft spot for the bowl-headed friend-to-the-stars. When he asked for a transfer, he was shipped off to the Sun to be a showbiz reporter. I thought it was a demotion and his career was fucked. But what do I know? Showbiz became the new currency of power. He went on to be Editor of the richest and most powerful newspaper in Europe. Now it was his time to hunt down the skivers.

  Anyway I didn’t skive once for three weeks on the MP Waterson watch. It wasn’t boring, sitting off in the cafés in a nice part of London, sipping cappuccinos. Perving off the students on a summer’s day. Steve regaling me with tabloid tales of derring-do. And we made sure that the mistress was followed at all times. It was on watches like this that the ability to spin car regs came in very handy. This was incredibly important in identifying who was coming and going from the MP’s London pad, his home in Eastbourne and his mistress’s flat. If I had to follow them in a car, or any visitor for that matter, I could find out who owned the car and where they lived. Both Steve Whittamore, and another inquiry agent called Skinner who was on the firm, could spin car regs. (£150 to £200). I used to ring Steve with the reg and the make and model. He would ring a couple of his mates in a regional office of the DVLA who then sold him the address and DOB of any registered car owner. They billed Steve £70 per reg. Despite being illegal, spinning regs was widespread. Most of the time there was no public interest, and they were bonking MPs like Waterson, celebs, or people who were shagging celebs, or selling them drugs.

  Eventually we got enough pics of Waterson and his mistress together that we were able to splash on the story. ‘Top Tory Dumps His Wife for Lover – Poison Pen Letters That Shamed Hague’s New Whip.’ After I monstered him on his doorstep for being a degenerate, the MP was forced to announce that he was divorcing his wife. I was the tabloid evangelist.

  ‘See you on the next one,’ I said, as Steve packed up and got into his van.

  ‘Yes, it’s been good working with you,’ he replied. I knew we would work together and the next one would be a big one.

  But for now, it was back to the grindstone. Week after week, I kept banging out stories all summer. A Paul Samrai job about a paedophile who had been released from prison – and was now living on the same street as his victims. I turned over a church in Birmingham for being a den of sin – the congregation were hookers and drug-dealers. Easy-peasy – I disguised myself as a smack-head and got into them by going around selling faux-shoplifted universal bag-head fare – cheap batteries and razor blades. I exposed a straw man afte
r fashion icon Gianni Versace was killed in Miami. Samrai found a man selling fake Versace jeans on the day that he was gunned down. Or, after the details had been fed into the scamulator, a ghoulish rag trade boss raking in blood money on the back of the great designer’s death. Another paedophile story – a pre-emptive strike for Sarah’s Law that would later make Rebekah’s name in the tabloid world, about parents who declared a poster war on a local pervert. As summer was drawing to a close, I exposed Britain’s biggest video pirate for churning out hundreds of thousands of counterfeit blockbusters and porno movies. When I got home I went straight to bed, exhausted.

  The light had barely faded when the phone rang: ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘What?’ I was crashed out on Angela’s cast-iron bed. She was out clubbing with some doorman she’d met.

  ‘Princess Di’s dead.’ Someone from work was giving me a heads-up.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I was pissed off. Even though I was shattered, I’d at least have to show willing by calling Ray and offering to come in. Surprisingly, he was calm. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’re going to change up obviously, but there’s not much Features can do now.’ The story was well covered by the night team on news.

  ‘Great!’ I said. Turned over and went back to sleep.

  It was a good job that I snatched the rest, though. From that day on, for weeks afterwards everything went Di-ballistic. When I got in on Tuesday morning, three or four monitors on the Picture Desk were taped off with scene-of-the-crime ribbon. Apparently, the police were investigating whether the paper had been sent gory pap pictures on the night, showing Di’s last moments in Dodi’s totalled Merc SL under the Pont de l’Alma underpass. A hot potato because the paps that had been chasing her at the time were now getting the blame. I gave all that a wide berth and didn’t ask too many questions – it was at times like that even little comments got people whacked off the floor. Of course, I was shown the unauthorised pics later in secret. The paper then phonily announced that it was no longer going to run any pap pictures as part of a new code of practice – yes, as if.