Hack

by Graham Johnson

  But what the fuck? The cat was out of the bag now. Again, in an act of intuitive stoicism that would later come in handy when I eventually went mad, I bit the bullet. There was no point blaming each other. Time for shoulder-to-shoulder and cool heads. Not for cut-throat defences.

  ‘OK, mate. No sweat,’ I said. ‘So where are we now?’

  ‘I told her all about Ray and him putting us up to it.’

  To me, it seemed silly to do that. Why bother blaming Ray? Yes, he did ask me to engineer a pic. But at the end of the day, I was thinking about doing that anyway. And it was me who decided to go along with it once he’d given us a steer. It was me. My fault. No one else.

  But Steve was older than me. I still didn’t trust my own judgement as much as I did his. He was a veteran of News Int. corporate politics. He also had a lot more to lose than me.

  If it was purely down to me, I would have said fuck all. Blamed no one. The peasant’s defence. That our Lords and Masters were above the sea-level shenanigans of their lowly charges. Why tarnish them? It felt like a betrayal. Go quietly. I knew deep down what was expected. Do your duty. Leave the tent, Oates of the Antarctic-style: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ The act of a brave functionary and an English gentleman. That’d all go down well. Self-destructive humility always played out well in a corporation. A six-month lie-down in the regions until everything blew over. Then it just might be possible, with some goodwill that came from not rocking the boat, to slip back down to London and into the game again.

  But I also had to think of Steve. He was putting me under pressure to go to town on Ray. I couldn’t cut him loose. I decided to plot a middle course. Back Steve up. Tell the truth about Ray asking us to engineer a pic. But I’d also take full responsibility and hara-kiri myself at the earliest opportunity. If Steve wanted to take them on then that was his decision. I’d support him but I wasn’t going head-to-head with the Death Star on a sticky wicket.

  My head was wrecked. Then Rebekah came on.

  ‘Listen, Graham, Steve has confessed everything.’

  ‘I know. Yes. It’s true what he’s saying.’

  ‘I want you to come back to London immediately.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. That’s how it sounds when you get terminated with extreme prejudice.

  Then Rebekah told Ray. Ray seemed to think that Rebekah was testing him. He phoned me once again to hear it for himself.

  ‘Are you now saying that the pics were stunted?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ray asked me more questions, slowly and stilted, taping me. So what?

  I lay down like a dead foetus on the bed. The only way you’d know I was alive was the panic. Waiting for the terror to subside. I wanted to speak to someone. But, with all this shame sloshing about, the last thing I felt like doing was facing anyone.

  29

  The Dark Side

  That’s that. Game over. That’s how easy it was for a guy to get whacked. Step out of line, you get whacked. And, by Jove, had I stepped out of line. Steve got sacked for gross misconduct. I resigned. Under a cloud of shame so black it unnerved humans just to hear of it. These were the bad times.

  I went quietly. Exit plan: find a hole, make like a mole. Why kick up a fuss? After all, it’d been me who’d fucked up. No one else. Me. That’s who. Who put this thing together? Me, that’s who. Who do I trust? Me, that’s who. No one else’s fault. I’d taken a big gamble. Like millions of young extremists before me – and lost. I was the man who’d put it all on red. Walking away. Taking it on the chin. On the steps of the casino, as the sun comes up, rubbing his stubble. That’s life. Tomorrow’s another day. Don’t worry – I’ll eat breakfast in the morning.

  Of course, I had to say fair’s fair. I might have cooked all this up. But I also stuck to the line that Ray was the big egger-on-er. That Rebekah was the original tool who’d come up with the brainwave. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have even been led into temptation, would we?

  But my pronouncements were mainly for Steve’s sake. Personally, I’d lost my bottle, shell-shocked into indifference and fear. But, crucially, I was still young. Could walk away from the crash site with my Adidas Gazelles intact. Start anew. Life was cheap.

  But Steve was fifty-odd. Wife. Daughter. Big 1930s kennel with hand-built wardrobes in. Even a celeb-style dressing table with a ring of bulbs around it. A parade of well-stocked shops, just a nip-out-in-the-second-car-away. Bills, duties, expectations to meet. I’d seen it before. What happened to mates’ dads. When the Truman Show illusion had been snatched back from them during alcohol-soft middle-age. Didn’t matter what the reason. Redundancy. Nightmare divorces. Taxman coming through their door for the under-the-mattress nest egg. The outcomes were always the same. Heart attacks. Mental outpatients’ unit. Even suicide. I owed it to Steve because I’d fucked his life as well.

  But no one was listening anyway. A matter of indifference to me. In an early version of the stoicism that would later bring me back from the brink of madness, I rationalised the big picture. Rebekah wasn’t really to blame. I’d been a shit-bag right from the off. I’d been stunting on and off for virtually all my time at the Screws. If it wasn’t the Beast, then I would have probably fallen on my arse over something else. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Ray. It was me. In fact, if you really thought about it, it wasn’t even me. The Beast just happened. Accept your fate and move on.

  I kept my head down. More sickened with worry. By how I was going to pay the big fuck-off mortgage. On my new Dockland’s drum. I’d exchanged. But couldn’t move in until it was done up. I’d already paid the fellers.

  Angela booted me out of her house. Bin-bagged and cash-point ransomed. She got one of her shady mates – a wheeler-dealer coke-head fashion contractor – to rob my car. Hostaged it. Until I paid her back for all the salmon bagel breakfasts she’d bankrolled me for during the course of our life together. Then, when I’d finally moved into my pad near the river, she kept turning up pissed in the early hours. With a Beamer full of Grrl Power mates. Shouting around the flats like a fishwife, that I was bastard and a liar. (True.) Was such a fucking big liar, she screamed, that I’d even lost my job over it. (True.) I just lay there on the bed upstairs. Not answering the door. Even the police turned up. All the other yuppies in the neighbouring flats thought I was a wife-beater. Avoiding eye contact when I put the bins out. Fuck – when Mother Nature pays you back, she really fucking gives it to you.

  Even the papers waded in. Media Guardian ran a story headlined, ‘Trial by Tabloid’, claiming that I’d bullied actor Paul McGann in the aftermath of his affair with Catherine Zeta-Jones. How dare they? A gross intrusion! Invasion of privacy.

  It all dated back to a story a few years before when I was a freelancer before joining the Screws. Paul McGann had accused me of trying to ruin his life. But until now no one had dared run the story. The Guardian roared: ‘A local agency man called persistently, trying to ingratiate himself with Paul by mentioning their joint Scouse background.’

  McGann and his harassed wife Annie had kept tape recordings of my ’80s-style, Rottweiler doorstep drill. When the Scousers-Against-the-World line fell flat, I turned Turk on the no-sell-out Monocled Mutineer with the old swarming.

  ‘He tried various tricks,’ the story went on. ‘If the couple agreed to have their picture taken in the park, he would head off the News of the World “who are on their way”. When that failed he sneered: “We’ll get you one day when you’re out Christmas shopping.”’

  All true, by the way. As I said, the persecution had taken place when I’d been a ruffian-and-scuffian freelancer before joining the Screws.

  The Guardian added: ‘The Liverpudlian agency reporter, who joined the News of the World two years ago, has called at regular intervals ever since and always been rebuffed.’

  For me, this was natural justice. I’d dished it out for years as a nuclear news bully. Now I was getting a taste of my own medicine. Take the pain.

&n
bsp; No one had noticed the article when it was first published a fortnight or so before the Beast. But now the two-page spread was being trumpeted as genuine proof of evil. In addition, the posh, privately educated navel-gazers at the Guardian diary section, some of whom have lived in houses the size of small castles, ran shorts saying that I’d never work again with such a despicable record of employment. Take the pain. I suspected that Rebekah was black-opping me in the background. Her PR was excellent. The ginger ninja’s sixth sense was being lauded all over the place. A kind of Fleet Street miracle for which we should give thanks. A glowing puff in the Evening Standard cast her as the heroine of the Beast drama. Saving the paper at the eleventh hour. The coup even bringing her to the attention of Rupert Murdoch. Not surprising that she’d come up smelling of roses though – Rebekah’s best mate was PR earth-ruler Matthew Freud. Whose ancestor Edward Bernays was the man who had single-handedly founded the PR industry. Full stop. Being part of the matrix is really useful when it comes on top.

  Both Steve and I hired a tin-pot lawyer. Me, to tie up the loose ends. Steve to take the Evil Empire to an industrial tribunal. But the first solicitor was a piss-head and it was going nowhere. I went for a one-to-one telling off from Rebekah. The Screws psyops people set it up nicely. So that I had to do a humiliating walk of shame through the whole office. Snaking past rows of silent reporters. Heads bowed at their desks for the condemned man. Glimpsed the inside of Ray’s office on the way past – still striped by shadows like Jimmy Cagney’s death row cell. No eye contact. So by the time that I got to Rebekah I was a nervous wreck.

  One reporter defied convention. Grinning vengefully from underneath his arm. His name was Ian Edmondson, who went on to great heights at the Screws. His colleagues used to say of him: ‘Yes he is a cunt. But at least he knows that and that you know he’s a Cunt Too. So at least you know where you stand.’ As though that transparency was a grace in itself. I used to call him Cunt Too. Edmondson was later nicked for suspected phone hacking and is alleged to be one of the links that intro’d demon phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire to the paper. Which in turn led to the paper’s collapse. RIP Cunt Too.

  At first, the News of the World had tried to hush it all up. The execs made an offer to Steve: if he would say that he’d gone temporarily insane, then they’d sign him off for six months. Wheel him off to the Priory or whatever, for corporate realignment. Then, if he didn’t make any waves, if the dust settled, they just might be able to sneak him back into the company on the QT. Vintage NI. Steve turned down the offer.

  ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘She’s the one that’s insane and I’m going to fight it.’ What followed was a mini-Enron corporate cluster-fuck of underhand chicanery that half made you think that 9/11 might have been an inside job. Even though it hadn’t happened yet.

  Steve accused Kuttner of knowing about the stunt. But of turning a blind eye using selective questioning to cover his arse. Steve said that during his grilling with Kuttner in the NI canteen, Kuttner had been awfully, awfully careful never to ask whether the photos were of the actual Beast. Suspiciously awful.

  In a statement, Steve said: ‘Mr Kuttner repeated the question that he had asked me earlier. “Were the pictures of a real animal?” I responded that they were pictures of a real animal. At that moment, I had formed the opinion that Mr Kuttner was deliberately phrasing the question in a specific way in order to continue to say truthfully that they were pictures of a real animal. In effect, it was as if Mr Kuttner had himself concluded that the pictures could not really have been those of the Beast of Bodmin Moor. But for as long as he did not specifically ask me that question, he could always say at a later date that he had no knowledge of them being pictures of anything other than that which they purported to be. Indeed of a real animal.’ Kuttner denied Steve’s account as being ‘disingenuous’.

  Steve also accused the Executive chairman Les Hinton of being in the background of some of the phone calls. Trying to make out that he had some knowledge of the Beast story. But there was no evidence and Mr Hinton denied it. In addition, Steve accused Rebekah of going red with embarrassment on the Saturday night after Steve confessed. ‘I accused her of being involved and she blew up crimson.’ Steve said. Rebekah denied this. But Steve also raised some controversial issues: he said: ‘ Why didn’t the executives ever ask for the contact sheets of the photographs of the puma – then they would have seen that they were stunted intermediately? To ask for the contacts was standard procedure and they didn’t follow that. Even when I went to file the contacts in the photographer’s room on the Friday morning, the other photographers were taking the piss shouting “Meouw. Meouw.” Even they knew it was a stunt. You could even see the railings from the cage in the picture. And why did Kuttner appoint Rebekah to investigate the story after I confessed? She was involved, so she should have been an indepedent observer.’ But no matter what Steve said, the NoW denied having any knowledge of the stunt and Rebekah said she hadn’t gone red. Steve was finished. F-U-C-K-E-D. Finished.

  As night follows day, then came the dirty tricks. Basically, if you take on the News of the World in a legal fight, they try and fuck you in the same way that reporters turn punters over. They spread it around the industry that Steve had stunted the Beast because he was getting old. Desperate to prove himself again with a big hit. They said that Steve had become bitterly jealous of his own son-in-law, who Steve had got a job as a Screws snapper a few years before. Because the son-in-law was now the favoured choice on Mazher jobs. That’s how ruthless they are – they even turned his family against him.

  Then, in an orchestrated campaign, NoW cointelpro got all Steve’s ex-mates at work to ring him up. Taping him saying compromising things. Mazher rang him up. The US Editor. The Birth Certificates Puller who taped everyone as a matter of course. They even got Steve’s own son-in-law to entrap him. Low wasn’t in it.

  But Steve was a Jedi Knight as well. He knew the power of the Force. The ways of the Dark Side. So he turned the tables on them. Like when the hero reflects the laser beam back on to the baddies with a mirror. Taping them up. Coaxing his entrappers to say terrible things about Ray, Rebekah and Kuttner. Like the showdown between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan.

  But then the go-around got dirtier. The Screws accused Steve of trying to find out Mazher’s secret address. Saying that the deranged fantasist was plotting to iron the Fake Sheik out in a revenge attack. But Steve laughed it off. Claiming that it was a set-up. Meanwhile Steve’s legal bills were rocketing through the roof.

  Then the NoW trained their sights on me. Though I wasn’t attacking them directly, I’d agreed to be a witness for Steve at his tribunal. Making me fair game for undermining operations or to-get-onside. One day Paul Samrai turned up with my old boss Dan Collins, who’d since left the paper to become a barrister, then a book publisher. Got an odd feeling over the meet. Over a cup of tea, they kept asking if I was sure that Ray had asked me to engineer the pics etc. Amid the pervasive paranoia, I was suss that they’d been sent to tape me up. But I fought the impulse to go dark and stayed nice. Humility was my watchword.

  Under gigapascals of molten pressure, Steve suffered with the effects of stress. Lost his big house when the legal bills reached fifty-odd grand. Lost the plot. Ending up in the gutter – literally. He got a job as a £200-a-week drain-cleaner in Soho. Where the chip fat is a foot thick on the sewer walls and the lice are as big as fifty pence pieces. So that when you look at them, he told me later, it seems as though the whole wall is moving. ‘But you know what,’ he told me. ‘At least down there, you know who the fucking rats are.’

  30

  Look on the Bright Side

  But there I was. Stuck in my new pad. A shit-load of easy-come, easy-go, pre-credit crunch Consolidated Debt Obligation-fuelled Brown Boom mortgage that had somehow been Credit Default Swapped on to my watch. That I now had to step up to. Not to mention the £700 wall-to-wall navy blue carpet which I’d just got laid. But that I’d soon enough have to rip up. To make
way for the wooden floors that were becoming all the rage. But just when I was about to go under, and back onto my mum’s couch, Mother Nature threw me a bone.

  My saviour came in the form of Nick Pisa. A squeaky clean Sunday Mirror reporter of Italian extraction who used to work with me at the agency. Nick was a real-life, church-going Good Samaritan. Feeing pity, Nick asked me to go for a drink with the Sunday Mirror News Editor Andy Burn. Nick later went on to be a big-shot reporter who dominated international coverage of the Amanda Knox case. Making himself a huge amount of dough in the process.

  Andy Burn was a fellow Scouser who’d made his name pulling life-saving Coronation Street exclusives out of the hat on a Saturday afternoon for his editor Bridget Rowe. I told him my tale of Beast woe. He laughed. Everyone in the industry knew I’d been turned over. Over an overpriced beer at Chillies bar in Canary Wharf – then no more than an eerie marblised office block that couldn’t give space away – Andy offered me a six-month contract on the super soaraway Sunday Mirror.

  For Fuck’s Sake! Wow! Thank you, God! I’d just been handed a first-class, round-trip ticket to The Resurrection. Unbelievable! Bend over, Christie! Come on down, Cindy! The kind of miracle you only ever read about in the Bible. In keeping with the spiritual theme, I was determined to change. This time, I’d take the job seriously, I vowed holily. No longer just a job – a career. No more making up stories. No more fucking about. This was the Mirror. The home of John Pilger. The left-leaning, social conscience of Britain. With a mission to educate and enlighten its readers. Of course, I knew it’d be difficult. Knocking the antics on the head. Bit like being an alcy. Twelve steps and all that. I knew there’d be times when I’d fall off the wagon. I knew it’d be hard to go from Mickey Mouse reporter to emulating the World’s Greatest Living journo. Living in the long shadow of Hugh Cudlipp, Paul Foot and the like. But listen. I was being given a second chance. I wanted to give back. What was the alternative? Heading back up the M1 to the City of Infinite Doom. Central heating up. Kecks off. Skin up. Sky on. No, fuck you! I was back in the game.