But sadly the new-look Daily Mirror was short-lived. The Trinity board lost their bottle during the transition phase. Firstly, over the economics. Then, more seriously, over ideology. They couldn’t handle that the showbiz crowd had disappeared from the circulation figures. But the relaunched paper needed time to build a new readership. The board couldn’t wait. The rug was pulled.
But that was only the cover story. The real threat came when the Mirror started openly criticising US foreign policy. The invasion of Afghanistan. The Iraqi sanctions that killed half-a-million kids in the run-up to ‘Shock and Awe’. Then even more unforgiveable – questioning the role of America’s Middle Eastern hitman, Israel.
Rumours swept the newsroom that US shareholders were ‘uncomfortable’, demanding that the newly-dissenting Editor be tamed or jettisoned. The Mirror’s anti-Iraq War stance was the final straw. A year later, in 2004, Morgan was fitted up. The Mirror published fake pics of British soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees. A murky business which the Mirror described as a ‘calculated and malicious hoax’. Was he black-opped in revenge? That was the newsroom scuttlebutt. Didn’t matter. He was gone. Gone. You step out of line, you get whacked.
35
Hacking
The sizzling Sunday Mirror decided not to follow the Daily experiment. Tina was chaffeur-driven to Labour Party conference – but deep down she was conservative by nature. Staying safe with sex and celebs. The supplement was even rebranded M celebs. More stories about shiny, happy people were poured into the paper. But behind the scenes, the atmosphere turned dark. The new Editor Tina Weaver hired in some ex-Screws ruffians and scuffians to shake down the likes of my good self.
Mark Thomas was a journalistic enigma. He hardly spoke. How could you be a journalist without basic communication skills? As the new Deputy Editor, his job was to build a Death Star-lite at Canary Wharf. His lack of speech was stressful and unnerving. Subordinate functionaries like me – under-confident and under pressure – felt an overwhelming desire to fill the void. A tedious trick dubbed management technique. Fastidious, Mark was a kind of robo-hack super-functionary.
James Weatherup was an old hand who I was friendly with from my Screws days. Now he was being brought into terminate my command. Not that I had much – I didn’t have a budget or staff. Tina Weaver crowned Weatherup Head of Investigations – it seemed to me to be a constructive ploy to undermine my position as Investigations Editor. The bullies were back in town. Once more, my mind was sent into a whirligig. I’d buried the Beast deep within my psyche. Now it was creeping back out.
A few years later James left the Sunday Mirror. Returning to the Death Star proper at Wapping. Then he got nicked on suspicion of phone hacking. I don’t know whether he was ‘at it’ whilst he was at the Sunday Mirror. But I’ll tell you a bit about what I do know.
I first heard of phone hacking going on in Fleet Street around 1999 or 2000. But the term phone hacking was yet to be coined. The latest dark art simply was then called ‘doing the phones’, ‘off the phones’ or ‘listening to messages’. Either way, I thought it was a bit stupid. Not even worth bothering with.
During the early years, phone hacking wasn’t a mainstream activity. More of a cult ritual, confined to a small sect of showbiz reporters. To pick up tittle-tattle from celebs’ phones. The actual beginning can be traced back to a showbiz desk on a newspaper. I know, because I knew people who worked there. The motivation, as always, was ambition, coupled with pressure from above. But indignation was also a catalyst. The showbiz reporters were getting pissed off. One of their main sources of stories was being choked off. An antiquated dark art known as ‘bin-spinning’. As a result, they were losing valuable tips
Rummaging through the bins of famous people and offices connected to them – lawyers, accountants, PR firms – had become a plentiful source of cheap ‘diary’ stories, especially for showbiz reporters during the Brit Pop years. The practice had started off in Hollywood, before moving clip side of the big moist around 1995. Then embraced into the most receptive and lucrative newspaper market in the world.
One day, I was at the home of a high-flying showbiz reporter. The landline went off and my mate asked me to answer it.
‘Hi, it’s Benji here,’ the voice at the other end said. Well-spoken, deep and slightly slow.
‘Sorry, mate,’ I said. ‘He [my showbiz mate] can’t talk at the mo.
‘Can he call you back?’
‘Tell him,’ the man said, ‘that I’ve got a good one on Robbie Williams.’
After putting the phone down I asked my mate who it was.
‘It’s Benji,’ he said.
‘He’s a good contact – he’s the one who rummages through all the bins for us. He’s not on a retainer or nothing, but he makes a fair few quid out of us.’
Fleet Street’s top freelance bin-spinner was an ex-trainee lawyer called Benjamin Pell. Benji the Binman took his job very seriously. Disguising himself as a recycling technician. Complete with hi-vis vest and van. Doing the rounds within the legal, financial and media districts in London. Emptying the contents of their bins into his van. Before taking the bags back to his pad for sorting. Important documents were pieced back together. Tit-bits phoned into the reporters overnight, just like the call made to my mate.
Showbiz reporters embraced garbology for two reasons. Firstly, because documents were good proof that a story was true. Secondly, and more importantly, because someone else was doing all the graft, while the staff journalists took all the glory in conference.
But even before it really took off, the sun was setting on bin-spinning. Like all good start-ups brought to market, the trade eventually went mainstream, which in turn led to it eating itself prematurely. But for a short while, bin-spinning managed to break out of the showbiz niche, penetrating into rival departments within newsrooms. More often with bigger budgets. Such as News Desks, investigation bureaux, politics and even sport. Not only that, but sweeping across Fleet Street into most of the papers, including the broadsheets. The upshot was that showbiz was losing its monopoly on good stories.
In addition, Benji was getting threatened with legal action from unhappy victims – including Richard Branson, Elton John and Mohamed Al-Fayed – eventually being convicted of theft in 2000. The rogue sanitation engineer was fined £5.
With bin-spinning gone, showbiz hacks needed to find a replacement dark art. However, a new innovation was already under research and development. A sleight of hand that proved cheaper, cleaner and lazier: phone hacking.
Fleet Street historians are unsure of how reporters discovered that they could listen to someone else’s messages. By dialling into a remote-access voicemail system and keying in default PIN numbers. But my showbiz mates told me that there were three sources that came together around the same time. Phreaking was an underground hacking movement in 1970s America. Starting out as a cheeky way of cheating free calls out of phone companies, phreaking soon evolved into voicemail taps. In the UK, the petty criminality was copied by paparazzi and private detectives in the 1990s. At the same time, phone hacking also became a schoolboy prank, popular with teenagers rich enough to own mobiles back in the day.
But one reporter told me how showbiz hacks more or less stumbled on the phenomenon. The person told me: ‘I’d first heard of it in 1999. But no one knew how exactly to do it. Then it started by trial and error. I got sent away on a foreign. When I landed abroad, the mobile phone company sent me a text saying: “If you want to access your voicemail back in Britain, ring this long number followed by keying in your PIN number.” Something like that. The photographer, who was with me, started messing about, dialling other people’s numbers and using the default PIN code to get through to their messages. The first person I ever did was another reporter on my own paper, for a joke. That’s because we were on the same network and I knew the PIN code used by our network.
‘Other people were doing it around the same time.’
The breakthrough spread like wil
dfire through showbiz desks for three reasons. Phone hacking was cheap. Showbiz columns don’t have loads of money to spend on stories. Nor do they have budgets for private detectives to work on leads. Phone hacking was also ideal for generating ‘shorts’ – small stories, news-in-briefs and fillers to boost up a diary page quickly before deadline.
But most of all, phone hacking suited the lifestyles of showbiz journalists, generating stories without the reporter ever having to leave the office. Showbiz reporters are often stressed out, tired people. Out all night ‘partying’ at tin-pot VIP parties. Desperate to pick up gossip. Snorting stripes in cold bogs, to keep them awake and sober enough not to fuck up. So the last thing they want to be doing was going out on stories the next day. Too much like hard work – especially with an angry cocaine hangover. Why bother when you can ‘do the phones’ while eating a prawn sandwich at your desk?
Phone hacking became a life-saver – or more accurately a career saver. A job-keeper. Many showbiz reporters were young, harassed women, bullied by angrier, sexually aggressive bosses, many of whom were coked-up or coming down themselves. When screamed at for copy, an underling could pull a story out of the hat by ‘doing’ a soap star’s phone before conference. Life-saver. Salary-guardian. Phone hacking fitted in well with those worried reporters who went around with a hunted look in their eyes.
On a political level, phone hacking quickly became a springboard into management, an ideal base on which showbiz journalists could build little empires within newspapers. As celeb culture grew, so phone hacking increased in importance. As showbiz reporters ascended the greasy pole and became the new powerhouses in newsrooms, phone hacking in turn grew in stature.
One reporter told me: ‘Mediocre reporters were delivering good stories by doing the phones. So I thought: “If he can do it, so can I.” I knew one reporter who couldn’t do his job properly. He used to have crack cocaine biked into the office by the firm’s couriers. He was a disaster waiting to happen. Then the next minute, he suddenly became a golden boy through phone hacking. He broke three or four very big showbiz stories one after the other. Later he was poached on big wages by another paper. He went on to be a 100 grand-a-year-plus executive. His whole career on national newspapers was built on phone hacking. And he hasn’t been nicked yet.’
The rising stars took their magic with them. Soon the newly crowned execs were showing the News Desks, that now worked under them, how to hack phones. Just like bin-spinning, phone hacking went mainstream and all over Fleet Street. But unlike rummaging through rubbish, phone hacking was to endure. Simply because it was less visible and harder to prove.
Even so, I always thought it was a stupid way of getting stories. Practically, it was useless for crime and gun ’n’ drugs investigations. Very few of the drug dealers and gangsters I turned over, or got stories off, ever talked business on the phone. Never mind leaving messages. Many of them had taken to not using phones ‘for work at all. Or, at least, switching them off, taking the batteries out and moving the handsets to faraway tables during meetings. Some had even reverted to extremes, using human carrier pigeons to relay messages between villains. Some drug dealing cartels I know even started paying young gang members to use the network of Easy Jet flights around Europe. To pass word-of-mouth messages between cells in the UK, Spain and The Dam. So listening to their phone messages was a non-runner for me.
But I did know of two occasions when phone hacking was used. On both occasions the mobiles of celebrities were hacked. But I resisted getting dragged into the culture of phone hacking – the systematic tapping of phones on fishing expeditions – for selfish reasons. At the time, I didn’t know whether phone hacking was legal or illegal. But I knew that if I succumbed, I would inevitably get dragged into doing showbiz stories full-time. I already knew that my bosses were unhappy that I was ‘off-message’, in that I was earning loads of money plus expenses and generating massive entourage bills for technicians, bag-carriers and freelance tipsters. The editors weren’t happy that those resources were going into crime stories instead of showbiz. Ironically, to get involved in hacking would have meant giving in to them.
In addition, I already had a very successful model for story-getting, which I was at pains not to give up:
Step 1. Groom good contacts
Step 2. Get story tips off them
Step 3. Stand the tips up by getting independent and corroborating evidence, mainly using video bags
Step 4. Publish the story
Step 5. Pay the tipsters large amounts of money for their information
A model known as chequebook journalism, much criticised but tried and tested. I didn’t need to hack phones like other reporters did – I had more stories than I could possibly work on. The whole point of phone hacking was that it set out to wipe out big tips fees. For me, it would have been self-defeating. I would have lost all my contacts.
On two other occasions computer hacking was also mentioned. One time a senior journalist made it known that he wanted to recruit a computer whiz kid who could hack emails for him. But the hacker turned him down.
On another occasion a private detective approached the paper. The inquiry agent, who had never worked for the Sunday Mirror before, claimed that he knew a third party who’d hacked into a celebrity’s emails. The private detective then claimed that he worked with a group of hackers. That he was their frontman. The hackers weren’t commissioned by the Sunday Mirror to hack emails. But they later provided information to the paper that they claimed had been hacked from a computer. Though there was no way of proving that this was true. Private detectives are notorious for lying about the source of their information. For instance, they might say that a document has been hacked to disguise the fact that it has really been been stolen during a burglary, or given to them by a source with a hidden agenda that they wish to protect. The private detective and the ‘hackers’ claimed their evidence was historic, meaning that it had been hacked from a computer before they had made contact with the Sunday Mirror. The private detectives were never used again.
Phone hacking was increasingly being used by freelance photographers, surveillance experts and paparazzi to find out the location of celebrities. I suspected that a couple of secret squirrel freelancers were constantly phone hacking because they were always coming up with big stories with no obvious source of inside information. I only met them on one occasion. On the job, they claimed that they had bugged a hotel room that we were supposed to be watching. I didn’t know whether phone hacking was illegal or not. But I knew for certain that bugging a hotel room was. I was always using video bags and I had discussed the law several times with the experts that rented the equipment out. We were always careful not to go beyond what was lawful. The law is quite simple. I can put a tape recorder in a room and record the conversation between me and a target. Just as long as one of us in the room knows that they are being recorded – in this case me. But I can’t put a tape in a room and walk out – with the intention of recording a conversation between two other ‘third party’ people in the room, who don’t know they’re being taped. That’s bugging and can only be done with the permission of the authorities. When the secret squirrels said that they had bugged a hotel room that we were supposed to be watching I walked off the job in protest. I left the hotel in the middle of the night. The next day I got a bollocking.
36
The Final Countdown
Never seen such a sight. Hundreds of naked bodies. Writhing like snakes. On a specially-made, steel-reinforced bed. The size of a small swimming pool. Welcome to the VIP Orgy.
Bankers. Lawyers. Celebs. Olympic athletes. Aristocrats. Politicians. Tycoons. New York socialites. Music industry moguls. A rock star’s teenage daughter. Top civil servants. Acclaimed scientists. Russian oligarchy. The ruling elite. Flown in from the four corners. For a once-a-year secret sexathon. In a £15 million mansion, off plush Portland Place. One of those stories that makes you go: David Icke was right after all. Total madness.
Now the pièce-de-résistance. The light from the flickering Louis XIV candelabras wasn’t bright enough for a bold, frontpage picture. I’d have to take a big risk. Of switching on the main lights. For just enough of an instant. To get off a couple of sneaky shots.
Now! I signalled. As a pair of Manhattan twins splayed out in front of me, in full throes with a famously corrupt English toff, my colleague pretended to accidentally fall over, right on to the ornate light fitting, flicking the knob as he went. For one second, all 64 different positions of the Kama Sutra froze. Under the pin-sharp beam of the twinkling chandeliers. Bosh! Bosh! Bosh! Then off into the night.
The hardest thing was going home. Trying to adjust to normal life, hours later. On a Sunday morning in spring. My mind still a whirligig of mad images. One in particular – of two bewitched, ruffled-haired debutantes. Going down on each other, on the dance floor. By now I had two kids. The job was wrecking my head.
My old flatmate and stunt-up fixer Gav got bin-bagged by his girlfriend. Nowhere to stay. No dough. Felt sorry for him when he asked me for help. So I gave him a job as a bag-carrier and news dogsbody. But I found him to be hard work. He wasn’t a grafter, to be fair. He’d failed in his ambition to become a famous writer. I sensed growing bitterness and jealousy with age. Gratitude is a burden. Knew from the off it would all go skew-whiff. But what could I do?
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