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A newly pleaded document submitted by Prince Harry’s legal team last month as part of his ongoing case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers for privacy intrusion sheds more light on what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the “criminal-media nexus” of journalists, private investigators and corrupt cops during the heyday of the tabloids.
In an amended claim over alleged unlawful information gathering in the case of HRH Duke of Sussex v News Group Newspapers, the claimants have lodged a notorious News of the World front page, dated 21 August 1994, carrying an exclusive story alleging that Princess Diana was a ‘phone pest’.
The story can only have come from police sources and so implicates both the then Editor of the now defunct News of the World, Piers Morgan, his then Chief Crime Reporter (now Editor of the Express) Gary Jones, and the proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself in the roaring trade between the tabloids and corrupt police officers.
At the centre of it all – and at the centre of many of the ongoing civil claims against both Murdoch’s newspapers, Mirror Group, and the Mail titles – is the role of the infamous detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the murder of its co-founder Daniel Morgan.
Police and Tabloid Corruption
Daniel Morgan was alleged to have been investigating police corruption when he was axed to death in a south London pub car park in March 1987.
His business partner, Jonathan Rees, was the prime suspect. Rees was arrested a few weeks later, along with one of the lead detectives on the initial murder inquiry, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
At the inquest into Morgan’s death in 1988, evidence emerged that Rees and Fillery had colluded in covering up the murder. By this point, Fillery had retired from the Metropolitan Police and taken Morgan’s place at the detective agency.
Southern Investigations was now on its way to becoming a one-stop-shop for the ‘dark arts’ of unlawful newsgathering for the tabloids.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Southern Investigations became the main hub for selling confidential personal and financial information to the press obtained by phone-tapping, burglary, covert surveillance, and computer hacking.
Its major purchaser was Alex Marunchak, News Editor of the News of the World.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in training up a raft of Fleet Street journalists in subterfuge and surveillance – the most notable of which was Mazher Mahmood, the Sunday tabloid’s famous ‘fake sheikh’.
One of the main sources of both this illicit information, and the techniques for gathering it, was a network of corrupt police officers in south-east London. The trade was so extensive the CID in the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’.
Rees and Fillery’s close relationship with organised crime, and the ‘firm within a firm’ of corrupt Met Police officers, saw them engaged in a roaring trade with News International. But, even if the amounts of money siphoned-off to Southern Investigations didn’t attract the attention of the company’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, the political dimensions of their dark arts surely would have.
When the then Culture Secretary David Mellor suggested in 1991 that the “popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon”, Southern Investigations set up the surveillance and bugging devices to expose him in an extramarital affair.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in the brokering of letters stolen from Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor, showing that the Liberal Democrat Leader had also once had an extramarital affair. The information was revealed just before the 1992 General Election.
In effect, Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak were becoming masters of politically targeted kompromat – years before the Russian term was well-known. But where do Piers Morgan and Express Editor Gary Jones fit in? And what did Rupert Murdoch know?
The Phone Pest Story
The following is an edited extract from ‘Who Killed Daniel Morgan?’, which I co-authored with Daniel Morgan’s brother Alastair Morgan
Piers Morgan took over the Editorship of the News of the World at the age of 28 in February 1994, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around the break-up of the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Morgan’s only journalistic experience to date was penning the ‘Bizarre’ celebrity column at The Sun. He appointed an even younger Rebekah Brooks to become Features Editor that spring.
Given his inexperience with reporting, Morgan relied heavily on the older guard at the newspaper, especially his then News Editor, Alex Marunchak, whom he described as having a “deadpan, half-Ukrainian, moustachioed visage”.
Marunchak’s police sources would soon land Morgan in trouble.
In his autobiography The Insider, Morgan explains how, in August 1994, Marunchak and Chief Crime Reporter Gary Jones walked into the Editor’s office in Wapping and explained: “Got rather a big one here, boss. Diana’s a phone pest.” Marunchak went on to elaborate: “The cops are investigating hundreds of calls she has made to a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare.”
Jones backed up his News Editor with “a read-out from the police report” which he then quoted verbatim.
Hoare had received hundreds of silent, anonymous phone calls and reported them to