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Hidden in today’s voluminous High Court judgment of the case of Prince Harry against Mirror Group Newspapers is a finding which breaks open what Gordon Brown called the “criminal media nexus” of corrupt cops, tabloid journalists and private investigators and the “dark arts” that came to dominate the British press.
The evidence of one important witness, Derek Haslam, will be key to cases against the Murdoch and Mail newspapers due for trial next year.
Derek Haslam, a former Met detective, was tasked to go undercover in 1997 for the Met’s internal ‘Ghost Squad’ inquiry into police corruption to investigate the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator who many believed had discovered a major story of police corruption he was pitching to newspapers before being axed to death in the South London pub car park.
Haslam’s target was Daniel Morgan’s old private detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the two men there originally arrested on suspicion of involvement in his murder: the firm’s co-founder Jonathan Rees and a former Met Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
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Justice Fancourt’s ruling in the high Court lays out Haslam’s evidence.
“Mr Derek Haslam, who operated as an undercover surveillance officer, was instructed to watch Jonathan Rees (the joint owner and operator of Southern Investigations, with Sid Fillery) with regard to activities with corrupt police officers and an investigation into the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan.
“Mr Haslam said that Rees boasted of obtaining information by phone tapping and computer and phone hacking, and admitted to him that he had supplied phone hacked information to MGN. He said that Rees had employed BT engineers to tap landlines. However, it is clear from Mr Haslam’s evidence that the majority of Rees’s information was obtained by other illegal means.
“Mr Haslam said that Rees frequently met with journalists and corrupt police officers in pubs, bragged about working for the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, and that he had been introduced by Rees to Gary Jones of the Mirror and Doug Kempster of the Sunday Mirror.
“He said that both were clearly good customers of Rees and that he spoke about them often, and in particular boasted about having supplied information about Prince Michael of Kent’s bank account, which was unlawfully obtained.
“In cross examination, Mr Haslam was able to recall in which pubs meetings with Rees and Fillery would take place, and said that Jones and Kempster would come on occasions. On occasions there was a bank manager called Rob there, as well as policemen, and he was known as ‘Rob the Bank’.”
The Gary Jones mentioned is currently the editor of the Express newspaper. He was a crime reporter at News of the World in the 90s when the Sunday tabloid was under the editorship of Piers Morgan and the main employer of Rees and Fillery. When Morgan moved to the Mirror group he took Gary Jones with him.
But by then the police had installed a bug in the premises of the private detective agency. On 6 July 1999, when Jones was a senior reporter at the Daily Mirror, he was caught on tape querying invoices totalling £16,991 that Southern Investigations had billed the Mirror.
“This is tiresome, fucking tiresome,” Ress told Jones. “We are not going to put the numbers in there because what we are doing is illegal, isn’t it? I don’t want people coming in and nicking us for a criminal offence, you know.”
Today’s judgment, among other things, vindicates this suppressed evidence. Justice Fancourt accepted Haslam’s evidence in broad terms and called his testimony “clear and compelling”.
But this is only the beginning of the story because Haslam’s evidence is also a key testimony in more trials due next year brought by several claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John and Hugh Grant over unlawful information gathering against the Mail group and Murdoch’s publications.
And this opens up the whole issue of police and press corruption around the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan
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The Murdoch Connection to Corrupt Policing
It’s no coincidence that two of the most notorious murders of the last half-century occurred within a few miles of each other in south-east London: the assassination of private investigator Daniel Morgan in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham in 1987, and the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in Eltham in 1993.
Back in the 1980s and 90s, the proximity between those corrupt police officers and the national press was so extensive the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’. The senior luminary to come out of the area, Commander Ray Adams, was described at the time as Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Yard Man’ (he went on to become deputy head of security for NDS – the global security arm for Murdoch’s News Corp).
In the meantime, over the past three decades, the murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence were subject to a dozen or more partial and problematic police investigations.
The 1998 Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder concluded that the Metropolitan Police was guilty of “institutional racism”. An independent review by Mark Ellison KC in 2014 – around the phone-hacking scandal – established police corruption was a factor too.
Read the full story
To get the full story of the Criminal Media Nexus, with new information and exclusive to print articles by Jake Arnott, Duncan Campbell and Dan Evans, buy the current edition of Byline Times, onsale now