Hack Attack (15 page)

Numerous other blaggers followed the path to Fleet Street (see appendix), including Steve Whittamore, who was a commercial tracer until 1991 when he was approached by the
News of the World
who offered to pay far more than other clients. All of this activity was potentially illegal if it was not necessary for the public interest. Some of it doubtless was lawful. But the reality is that in Fleet Street at this time, nobody was really very worried. There were no rules.

*   *   *

For anybody who wants to understand why things went so wrong in British newspapers, there is a very simple answer which consists of only two words – ‘Kelvin’ and ‘MacKenzie’.

When Rupert Murdoch made him editor of the
Sun
in 1981, MacKenzie effectively took the book of journalistic rules and flushed it down one of the office’s famously horrible toilets. From then, until finally he was removed from his post in 1994, MacKenzie’s world ran on very simple lines: anything goes, nobody cares, nothing can stop us now. Appointed by a man who prided himself on being an outsider and on pushing boundaries, Kelvin MacKenzie was an editor who precisely matched his employer’s approach to life – a journalist uninterested even in the most fundamental rule of all, to try to tell the truth. As he later told a seminar organised by Lord Justice Leveson, MacKenzie had a simple approach to fact-checking: ‘Basically my view was that if it sounded right, it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in.’

This was the editor who referred to the office computers as ‘scamulators’ and who scamulated a long list of phoney stories, including most notoriously the ‘world exclusive interview’ with Marica McKay, widow of a British soldier killed in the Falklands, who, in truth, had given the
Sun
no interview at all; the vicious libel on Liverpool football fans, accused by the
Sun
of pissing on police and picking the pockets of the dead at the Hillsborough stadium disaster; the fictional front page claiming that the comedian Freddie Starr had eaten a live hamster in a sandwich; the completely false story about Elton John paying to have sex with a rent boy. For Lord Justice Leveson, MacKenzie recalled how the
Sun
had paid Elton John £1 million in damages for that particular piece of scamulation and how he had then reflected on the
Sun
’s attempts to check their facts and succeeded in drawing the most perverse of conclusions. ‘So much for checking a story,’ he grumbled. ‘I never did it again.’

The PCC Code of Practice said journalists should not invade people’s privacy. MacKenzie simply and baldly said that he ‘had no regard for it’. As one particularly sensitive example of protected privacy, the law said that newspapers should not publicly identify the victims of rape – MacKenzie went right ahead and published a front-page photograph of a woman who had been raped with special violence.

The rule-breaking was taken to a peak after the coincidence that in the same year that MacKenzie became editor of the
Sun
, the United Kingdom saw the opening chapter of what was to become the biggest human-interest story in the world. In 1981, the royal family acquired a new princess. For better and worse, the Diana story busted straight through the wall of deference which previously had concealed most of the private lives of those who lived in the Palace. MacKenzie’s
Sun
led the way. If that meant publishing photographs of Diana six months pregnant in a bikini, taken on a telephoto lens without her knowledge, then that was fine because he was merely showing ‘a legitimate interest in the royal family as living, breathing people’. If it meant making up stories, that too was no problem. In their brilliant account of life at the
Sun
,
Stick it Up Your Punter!
, Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie describe MacKenzie telling his royal correspondent, Harry Arnold, that he needed a front-page story about the royal family every Monday morning, adding: ‘Don’t worry if it’s not true – so long as there’s not too much of a fuss about it afterwards.’

Once Diana’s life had been dragged into the newsroom and converted into raw material to be exploited without limit, the private lives of other public figures were hauled in behind her. And then the private lives of private figures. There were no boundaries. MacKenzie adopted a crude populist view of the world, designed simply to please an imaginary
Sun
reader, defined in his own words as ‘the bloke you see in the pub, a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house. He’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers.’

MacKenzie not only produced a paper to please this imaginary bigot, he himself was the bigot. Chippindale and Horrie record his habit of referring to gay men as ‘botty burglars’ and ‘pooftahs’. He published a story falsely quoting a psychologist who was supposed to have said ‘All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS.’ He was no better with race, for example dismissing Richard Attenborough’s film about Gandhi as ‘a lot of fucking bollocks about an emaciated coon’.

From this position it followed logically that he abandoned any pretence of fair reporting about the governing of the country. A couple of hundred years ago, British journalists had disgraced their trade by selling their collaboration to politicians – for a fee, these ‘hacks’ would write whatever their paymasters required. In spite of all the twists and turns through which journalism had tried to redeem itself, MacKenzie acted as an unpaid political hack, turning the
Sun
into a weapon to attack all those who might upset his ‘right old fascist’ reader, scamulating as he went.

MacKenzie inflicted his ways on those who worked for him. There probably never was a rule against bullying, but if there was, MacKenzie would have shattered it. He was an Olympic-gold-medal-winning office tyrant. Colin Dunne, a feature writer who had worked on the
Sun
before MacKenzie took over, described the regime of relentless labour which he introduced: ‘Whenever Kelvin saw an empty office, or even an empty chair, he was overcome with the fear that someone somewhere was having a good time. And it was his personal mission to put a stop to it.’ Chippindale and Horrie record the advice which MacKenzie offered to an elderly graphic artist whose presence upset him: ‘Do us all a favour, you useless cunt: cut your throat.’

The infection spread through the
Sun
and was then compounded as those who had served under him moved to rival titles, taking his reckless ways with them. And in newsrooms without rules, why would anybody obey the law?

*   *   *

Rupert Murdoch was right: the business of bribes had been bubbling in the dark gutters of Fleet Street for years. In the 1970s, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Robert Mark, discovered that crime reporters were buying information from serving officers and denounced it as ‘one of the most long-lasting and successful hypocrisies ever to influence public opinion’. The bribery stopped. What Murdoch did not say was that it was one of his own most senior editorial executives in the UK who revived it – Alex Marunchak, a crime reporter who rose to become executive editor of the
News of the World
.

Ukrainian by birth, devious and hard by nature, Marunchak ran a famous double act with Greg Miskiw, who is also Ukrainian. The two of them worked together, spoke Ukrainian together and broke the law together. Marunchak was always the leader. In order to get stories and praise; in order to beat the opposition and pay for his massive alcohol and gambling habits; and finally in order to have himself promoted to the highest ranks of the paper, he bathed in a sea of corruption. He made little secret of it. He didn’t need to.

His former colleagues say that from the mid-1980s, Marunchak was a prime user of the former detective who I had come across when researching
Flat Earth News
, who had been pushed out of the Metropolitan Police after a corruption scandal and reinvented himself as a conduit for bribes from Fleet Street to serving officers. His name – published here for the first time – is John Ross, known to
News of the World
journalists as ‘Rossy’.

Marunchak and the ruddy-faced former cop formed a powerful alliance, drinking together at the Old Rose on The Highway in Wapping; going to police Christmas parties which are said to have been awash with drugs and prostitutes; setting up stories with serving officers; even paying some officers to moonlight for the paper by doing surveillance on targets or appearing as backup when a reporter got into trouble in a crack house. The former colleagues claim that, with Rossy’s help, police officers were being paid ‘left, right and centre’. It was all against the law. But nobody cared. At one point, they say, Marunchak even hired a couple of Flying Squad officers to drive out to Eastern Europe to bring back a load of vodka he wanted to import.

Rossy’s way soon spread into a network of bent police contacts. Word travels in an organisation like the Metropolitan Police, where people move from one station to another, from one squad to another, and so it became well known that if you came across a celebrity breaking the law or as a victim of crime, or if you came across a bit of scandal or a juicy sex crime, you could dip into confidential police files and earn yourself some extra cash by contacting John Ross. This hit a high in February 1994, when police found the dead body of a Conservative MP, Stephen Milligan, who had accidentally suffocated, apparently during a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation. An officer tipped off Ross, who sold the story and pocketed thousands of pounds. One source who knows both Rossy and Marunchak claims that at one point, some serious money was being paid to a very senior officer at Scotland Yard. One of the Yard’s press officers, now dead, was disciplined for selling information to John Ross.

Rossy wasn’t Marunchak’s only way of dealing with dodgy police. In March 1987 – as Marunchak was being promoted to work on the news desk – there was a murder in south London. A private investigator called Daniel Morgan, aged thirty-seven, was found with an axe in his face in the car park of a pub in Sydenham. For some journalists, this was an important story because it soon became clear that the police investigation into the murder had run into a rat’s nest of crime and bent policing and so they set out to expose it. For Marunchak, the evident corruption was an irresistible opportunity, and he set out to take part in it.

Two men sat in the middle of that nest. One was Daniel Morgan’s business partner, a heavy-set, heavy-drinking Yorkshireman named Jonathan Rees, then aged thirty-two. Within days of Morgan’s murder, investigating officers came to see Rees as their prime suspect. As a private investigator, Rees was a man without any special skill: he had been in the merchant navy and then he had worked as a store detective and, in the late 1970s, as a bailiff for an outfit where Morgan also had worked. In 1981, he and Morgan set up their own investigation agency, working for local law firms, serving writs, collecting information. Since all their business, their contacts and their drinking life were embedded in the dreary, red-brick maze of south London, they called themselves Southern Investigations.

The second key figure was a big, burly, bent detective sergeant, who ran the local crime squad in Catford, south London, Sid Fillery, then aged forty. Fillery, according to his former colleagues, often cut corners, bashed prisoners, ‘fitted up’ suspects with false evidence, drank copiously while on duty and kept in an office drawer a stash of photographs of young boys being used for sex. Within days of Morgan’s murder, investigating officers came to the conclusion that their inquiries were being obstructed by Fillery. They discovered that for the last five years, he had been a close friend of Jonathan Rees: both of them were Freemasons, and the two of them had routinely shown up in local pubs buying rounds, slapping backs and talking business, often with other police officers. Rees had been hiring Fillery and police colleagues to do jobs for Southern and paying them for information from the police computer. In fact, Rees had been spending so much time with Fillery and his colleagues that some officers thought he must be a detective and allowed him the run of local stations.

When Jonathan Rees emerged as the prime suspect for the murder of Daniel Morgan, it was Fillery who went to interview him, and Fillery who went to his office to seize crucial paperwork which then disappeared. A year after Morgan’s body was found slashed and bleeding in that car park, it was Fillery who left the police and replaced the dead man as Rees’s business partner in Southern Investigations.

Their activities had caught my eye when I was working on
Flat Earth News
. Far more detail has emerged since then, largely because it turned out that Scotland Yard’s Directorate of Professional Standards, the DPS, finally became so concerned about the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan and the network of corruption around Southern Investigations that they ran a covert operation against Rees and Fillery, uncovering a mass of information, including their links to Fleet Street. In 1997, the DPS approached a retired detective, Derek Haslam, and persuaded him to work as an undercover informant. As a serving officer, Haslam had known Jonathan Rees and seen the corruption of some of the officers who mixed with him. Now, he agreed to renew his connection with Southern and to report back each week to a handler whom he would meet in crowded public places, often airports. To protect him from leaks within Scotland Yard, all his information was recorded under a false name. They called him Joe Poulton. Early in 1999, alarmed by the scale of crime which Haslam was reporting, the DPS planted an electronic listening device in Southern’s office. For months, it sat there undetected, recording hundreds of hours of casual criminality.

Some of the intelligence was connected to pure crime, nothing to do with newspapers – associates of Rees and Fillery importing drugs from Ireland and stashing kilos of cocaine in a London cemetery, laundering cash for a south London drug baron, stealing drugs from a rival dealer, trying to pass information to the police to cause trouble for two other south London drugs families, plotting to plant drugs in the car of a detective who was investigating Morgan’s murder. And always, there were the signs of serious police corruption, as ordinary as oxygen in the world of Southern Investigations. The hidden bug one day caught Rees discussing a bent officer. ‘He’s fucking bent as fuck,’ he said. ‘I love a bent Old Bill.’