Hack Attack (14 page)

Some claim that, whatever he knew, he was responsible because he imposed on his editors such a ruthless drive for sales; and that, although he might not have known of specific offences, he always understood in general terms that his journalists might break the law to deliver results. This idea was given some traction in March 2013, when one of his own reporters secretly recorded him declaring that the bribing of police by journalists had been ‘going on a hundred years’. Furthermore, there is an interesting pattern which became clear as the truth finally emerged about the epidemic of crime in British newspapers. Whether the offence was blagging, or hacking phones or computers, or tapping live phone calls, or paying bribes to police, the new evidence suggests that, with every kind of crime, the trouble began in the Murdoch papers.

*   *   *

Ian Withers is possibly the best-known and longest-surviving private investigator in the UK. He is old style: been around since 1960, used to be a police officer, has had a few run-ins with the law. By sheer fluke, the dusty archives of the
Guardian
hold a memo, written on 26 April 1971, in which an experienced reporter summarised an interview with him.

According to the memo, all those years ago Withers was saying that it was ‘easy and very common’ to make a phone call to extract sensitive personal information from the Inland Revenue, the Department of Social Services, police and other government agencies: ‘No trouble at all in the majority of cases,’ he said. ‘One can usually adopt a fairly effective cover story, pretending to be someone in another branch of the same department.’

The memo described Withers’ work for foreign embassies, US and UK corporations and the Liberal Party, who allegedly asked him to check out the anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain (who years later became a Labour Cabinet minister). It presented Withers as a man who was not too worried about breaking the law, recording his bland admission that he was awaiting trial under the Wireless Telegraphy Act, which then banned bugging and phone-tapping: ‘The case has not yet come to court, but it will end in a fine when it does.’ In the same year, 1971, he and three others were prosecuted for blagging, using the antique common-law charge that they had conspired to effect public mischief. They were convicted although they won an appeal to the House of Lords, which said effectively that it was not a crime to tell a lie.

From the mid-1980s, Ian Withers sold his services to the
Sunday Times
, which had been the property of Rupert Murdoch’s company since 1981. He worked in particular for the paper’s investigative specialist, Barrie Penrose. By this time, the 1984 Data Protection Act had passed into law, making it a crime to take information from a confidential database unless it was necessary in the public interest.

Withers was the beginning. In the end, there were several dozen specialists following in his footsteps, digging out confidential information for newspapers by fair means or foul. Forty-two of them are named, many for the first time, in the appendix to this book. The link between them and Withers’ early work was forged by one man who became involved in the strangest development in Fleet Street crime.

In the early 1980s, this man was a young stage manager, bored with his work in small London theatres. One day he was reading his local paper, the
Richmond and Twickenham Times
, when he saw an advertisement offering jobs in a private-investigation agency. It so happened that, for no clear reason, the respectable suburbs of Richmond and Twickenham had attracted a cluster of private investigators who had become involved in the fast-growing industry of ‘tracing’.

Some private investigators – commonly known as ‘PIs’ – blame Margaret Thatcher. They say that there had always been a small number of specialists who traced people who had disappeared without paying their debts. These tracers were expert at mining public records for information, but they also blagged, calling up people and organisations to trick them into disclosing information about the target’s current whereabouts. The 1980s saw Mrs Thatcher engineer a credit boom with millions borrowing for mortgages, bank loans, hire purchase. This, in turn, generated a debt boom as a mass of these new borrowers took the money and ran. The demand for tracers went through the roof. Dozens of new staff were hired by the existing specialists, including Ian Withers’ company, Nationwide. Other PIs joined in, creating new tracing agencies. It was one of these new agencies – based over a sandwich shop in Twickenham – whose advertisement caught the young stage manager’s eye.

He was hired and, for professional purposes, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Al Green’. He was quite unlike most PIs, who tended to be ex-cops like Ian Withers. Al Green had never been in the police and generally despised them as thugs. He was highly strung, highly intelligent, instinctively left wing. And there was one other thing about Green which was most unusual in his new profession, and which was to have a decisive impact: he was addicted to heroin.

Green quickly discovered that he was oddly adept at tracing. He used to tell friends that the job suited him because he had always felt inadequate and this was a rare chance for him to take on a challenge and win. He also recognised that when it came to blagging, a heroin addict develops a horribly effective skill at deceiving all those around him, including himself, and he would tell the joke about the difference between an alcoholic and a drug addict: ‘The alcoholic will steal your wallet. The heroin addict will steal your wallet and then help you to look for it.’

Soon, he learned how to trick police into disclosing information from their confidential records (known as making a ‘club call’); and how to trick British Telecom into handing over the itemised bills which they started to produce in 1987 (known as rocs, ‘records of calls’). Other tracers were calling banks and blagging the new home address of an account holder; Green started to blag their bank statements as well. When Barclays Bank proved difficult to penetrate, he posed as a postgraduate student researching a thesis about computer systems and spent a day as a guest of one of the companies who supplied the bank’s software.

Green quickly rose through the ranks and became a trainer for one of the older tracing outfits, run by an Italian called Dick Rinaldi in Ealing, west London. There he passed on his skills to dozens, possibly hundreds of others; and then, in 1987, he moved to the Streatham branch of Nationwide. It was here for the first time that he connected with Fleet Street, picking up on Withers’ connection with the
Sunday Times
, for example blagging military sources for the personal details of the special-forces soldiers who had controversially shot dead three IRA terrorists in Gibraltar in March 1988. Then the heroin played its part.

By 1988, Green had reached a point where, according to one source who worked with him, he was ‘off his face’ all day and having to stop his car to vomit on the way to see clients. Realising the trouble he was in, he started going to meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. And, during those meetings – by the kind of chance that often lies behind game-changing events – he heard of another tracer with a heroin history who also was going to NA meetings. He is entitled to keep his past addiction private, so I will call him ‘Blue’.

Like Al Green, Blue was one of the few PIs then who was not an ex-cop, and he too had been working as a tracer, for an agency in Fulham. He had a natural charm and he had found ways to blag the three government agencies for sickness, unemployment and supplementary benefits. People might leave their partners without paying their alimony or abandon their businesses without paying their suppliers, but very few of them cut themselves off from the benefits of the welfare state. Blue discovered the numeric codes by which local offices identified themselves when they called in to the centre, he learned their internal jargon and then he would call up and, with a few minutes’ work, he would uncover the whereabouts of his target. ‘The trick,’ he used to say, ‘is to pick the lock nice and carefully, not leave any mark, lock it up and leave it so that nobody knows you’ve had the information.’

In 1986, Blue had struck out on his own, running a specialist tracing business in south London, with an offshore sideline which specialised in blagging international banks. Although he had been clean for some years, he still went to London meetings of Narcotics Anonymous – where Al Green found him. In 1988, they started working together. They formed a perfect partnership. Both knew the trade. Both had had enough of earning money for other people. Al Green could train new recruits. Blue could find those recruits and a steady cluster of good clients at NA meetings (Chelsea meetings delivered some particularly wealthy ones). So it was that his south London base became a kind of blagging factory, populated by a steady flow of recovering addicts.

Their finest recruit was Michael Boddy, known as ‘Micky the Mouse’, a public schoolboy who had become addicted to heroin and spent years sleeping rough and living off the streets. He had developed septicaemia, probably through using dirty needles, and surgeons had amputated one of his arms. As he recovered his health, with the help of Narcotics Anonymous, he returned to a more stable life, gardening, joining the Orchid Society of Great Britain and collecting antique prints of plants. Under Al Green’s expert tuition, he also became a specialist in blagging British Telecom and mobile phone companies, from whom he extracted ex-directory numbers, lists of Friends and Family numbers, and rocs. He claimed that his thousands of victims included the Queen, Princess Diana and David Beckham. He became widely regarded in his profession as the UK’s premier blagger of phone companies – or, as he himself put it, he was ‘the ace trace from outer space’. He was also known to be emotionally highly volatile and was dispatched from Blue’s base to work from his own flat.

Members of the network claim they really didn’t know that some of what they were doing was against the law. One says he knew it was ‘naughty’ but since they were often tracing fraudsters and debtors, he believed it was acceptable. Operating quite separately from mainstream PI agencies, this highly skilled group rose on the tide of debtor-tracing, working regularly for the mortgage outfits of Lloyds Bank and National Westminster Bank. And also for Rupert Murdoch’s papers.

Al Green kept up his link to the
Sunday Times
and did jobs for the paper’s investigative team, Insight. Now, Blue started working for them too. By one means or another, he was able to help them find a way through the banking labyrinth of Polly Peck, the giant textile company which collapsed in debt and scandal in 1990, and to trace cash that had been laundered by some of London’s leading gangsters.

It was through this network that the former actor John Ford learned his skills before going on to become a full-time blagger for the
Sunday Times
. Ford had been struggling, his career reaching a low peak in a TV advertisement for McDonald’s. He became a brilliant generalist, blagging any target he chose. Numerous reporters on the
Sunday Times
had his number. He worked on serious stories – exposing corruption and alleged sexual abuse in sport – and on pure gossip, succeeding, for example, in extracting personal data about the then Labour minister Peter Mandelson in an attempt to prove that he was in a gay relationship.

Along the way, other newspapers started to use the group. One member of the NA network says that in 2000, Andy Coulson, as deputy editor of the
News of the World
, was dealing direct with them. Blue developed a relationship with the
Mail on Sunday
. One
Mail on Sunday
journalist recalls his network blagging records of calls made by the former prime minister’s son, Mark Thatcher, and by the Indian steel billionaire, Lakshmi Mittal, who was accused of buying influence in Tony Blair’s government.

But the main link from the Narcotics Anonymous group to the rest of Fleet Street was forged by a middleman, a stocky former soldier from south London called Gary Lowe, occasionally known as The Corporal. Lowe ran his own investigation company, Chimera, from his home in Croydon and was also a partner in Blue’s offshore venture. When clients needed tracing, Lowe subcontracted the work to Al Green and Blue and their network. At first, Lowe was involved with commercial clients but, according to some of those who worked in this field, Lowe became the most prolific of all the private investigators who worked for Fleet Street – and, as ever, it appears he began with a Murdoch paper, the mid-market daily
Today
, which News International bought in 1987 and closed in 1995.

One of the NA network recalls that this started as a hostile move. A journalist from
Today
contacted Lowe and asked him to do some tracing. Lowe relayed the job to Al Green who was told to do the work at top speed. Green did so, and twenty-four hours later, the result was splashed across
Today
– as part of an exposé of the hidden world of private investigators. A disaster for the secretive blaggers. But then, in a dazzling display of double standards, the Murdoch paper appreciated the value of a man like Lowe and started to hire him. Lowe picked up more work from the Murdoch titles, particularly the
News of the World
and the
Sunday Times
.

And in the classic shape of Fleet Street crime, the infection then spread from the Murdoch papers outwards to their competitors. By his own account to friends, Lowe went on to work for fifty different national newspaper journalists including those at the Mirror Group, frequently subcontracting work back to the NA group. For example, when the
Daily Mirror
in 1990 investigated the financial affairs of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, according to one source, it was that alliance which blagged Scargill’s bank accounts.

Lowe had his problems with the law. He has told friends that, at one point, he was charged with corruption for allegedly buying confidential information which came from an employee of the DVLA in Swansea, but, he has said, the charge against him was dropped before trial. He continued working for newspapers until 2010.