Thursday, November 13, 2014 

The downfall.


Ah, Mazher Mahmood.  Time was all we had to identify him were a couple of grainy photos filched from an Albanian newspaper website, obtained by them from who knows where and which also soon disappeared down the memory hole thanks to "Maz's" ever busy legal beavers.  It took a long damn time, but the collapse of the Tulisa Constovalos drug trial finally prompted a media organisation to challenge Mahmood's claims his life would be put in danger should his true countenance be widely publicised.  The last time Maz tried and failed to prevent the media publishing his fizzog, winning a temporary injunction against among others, this blog, only the Graun went ahead and did so anyway.

Panorama and John Sweeney are thankfully more indefatigable beasts.  Twice Mahmood's lawyers forced the BBC to postpone the broadcast, first with the renewed claim he couldn't possibly be unmasked lest those he exposed come after him, always a risible argument considering his victims know his face all too well, and then after that failed with a challenge over the evidence involving John Bryan's procuring, or rather non-procurement of prostitutes.  With this last desperate attempt rejected, BBC1 was at last able to show the documentary last night.

And while for those of us who've followed Mahmood's activities down the years there was little we didn't already know included, the exception being the claims of Mahmood's links to corrupt Met officers, you can more than understand why he and News UK tried everything to stop it from airing.  Apart from identifying Mahmood, his methods were laid bare, vignettes taken from the secret recordings made by his team which he and the News of the World never wanted you to see.  John Alford declaring himself teetotal, with Mahmood then urging him to drink anyway, page 3 model Emma Morgan given cocaine by the person she was then entrapped into "buying" it from to supply to Mahmood, Constovalos made to believe she was being considered for a role in a Hollywood film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio as she was the obvious choice to play a "bad girl"; whoever the source was for the material, and the guess would have to be it came from within News UK, it showed Mahmood in just about the worst possible light.

As contemptible as Mahmood is, this was never about just him.  Mahmood could only work as he did for so long with the support of first the News of the Screws, and then following its sad demise, the Sun on Sunday.  It should be stressed that on occasion, Mahmood's entrapment tactics produced important, genuinely in the public interest stories, such as the corruption he uncovered involving the Pakistani cricket team.  Those kind of targets didn't satisfy either him or his editors though, nor one could say did they NotW readers.  No, instead they had to stitch up foolish but otherwise decent people somewhat in the public eye, such as Emma Morgan, Johnnie Walker or the Earl of Hardwicke.  At his very worst, he and his team concocted entire fictional plots, whether it be the one to kidnap Victoria Beckham, with the trial of those accused collapsing when it become public Mahmood had paid the man who "informed" him of the nefarious deal, or the "red mercury" plot, with those entrapped thankfully found not guilty.

Yet despite these failures, both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service continued to work with him, going ahead with cases such as the one involving Constolvalos when it was an obvious example of entrapment.  They carried on doing so even after the Screws was put out of its misery, and as we now know, 3 further cases have been dropped as Mahmood was to be the key witness.  It's possible other previous cases could now be the subject of appeal, especially if Mahmood is charged with perjury and attempting to pervert the course of justice over the collapse of the Constolvalos trial as many expect.

Indeed, as Roy Greenslade writes, this level of protection seems to be continuing, as the attorney general asked the BBC not to screen the docu.  Presumably on the basis it could make it more difficult for Mahmood to get a fair trial should he be charged, the real objection is more likely "Maz" and his editors still have friends in high places.  Why else would News UK still be providing Mahmood with their largesse for vexatious litigation when he is supposedly on suspension, unless they still have a glimmer of hope that he could still return?

Regardless of that wishful thinking, Mahmood is finished.  The real motivation behind his attempts to stop Panorama was not over his safety, but his ability to carry on as before.  His methods detailed, his visage shown, few will now make the mistake of being drawn in by the image and boasts of a serial offender.  And with him, hopefully, also ends another disgraceful period in British journalism.

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11/13/2014 10:59:00 pm | |

Monday, July 21, 2014 

Complicit in the lies of a serial offender.


Regular readers will know it takes a lot to stagger me.  Cynicism comes easily, because it is so easy.  Think the worst, and then you won't be let down come the inevitable.  There are no heroes only humans, and we are flawed flesh and bone, all with our own prejudices, failings and traits.

Sometimes though you still can't help but be blown away by just how unbelievably stupid supposedly intelligent people are.  In fact, in this instance stupid doesn't cover it.  The only word that even comes close to accurately describing the Crown Prosecution Service's original decision to prosecute Tulisa Contostavlos is fuckwitted.  A lawyer earning no doubt good money looked at the "investigation" carried out by this blog's favourite journalist, hopefully soon to be ex-journalist Mazher Mahmood, and felt, yeah, this isn't the most obvious example I've ever seen of entrapment, and told the CPS there was a realistic chance of conviction.  The CPS then reviewed his decision, and went along with it.  Then the judge, despite the defence making what has to be one of the most compelling applications for the case to be thrown out on the grounds Mahmood is a lying sack of shit, allowed it to proceed.

Only for Alistair McCreath to days later discharge the jury and find Contostavlos and her friend, Michael Coombs, who had already admitted supplying the cocaine after Mahmood asked Contostavlos to get some for him, not guilty.  Why?  Because Mahmood it seems put pressure on his driver, Alan Smith, to change his statement, having first told the police Contostavlos had spoken of her opposition to drugs as a family member was an addict as the pair talked in his car.  At the legal arguments pre-trial Mahmood denied he spoke to the Smith at all, only for Contostavlos's QC, Jeremy Dein, to winkle the truth out of Mahmood under cross-examination last week.  He had indeed discussed the statement with Smith, he just didn't have anything to do with him altering it.

Even now I can't begin to get my head round how Mahmood's latest and clearly for him most disastrous entrapping of a celebrity got to the point of being put before a jury.  Back in June last year the People, whether through speaking to Contostavlos and/or her management or a disgruntled source at the Sun wrote up an almost completely accurate blow-by-blow account of how the former X-Factor judge was enticed by Mahmood, although it didn't explicitly state her arrest and the "hoax" were connected.  They flew her to Las Vegas (either in first class or by private jet, according to whether you believe Mahmood or the People), telling her she was going to star in a Slumdog Millionaire-type film as a "bad girl" making the journey from London to India, possibly alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.  As in previous stings, Contostavlos was plied with alcohol, her defence going so far as to say her drink was spiked on one occasion, before Mahmood then sprang the trap.  Desperate to get the part, having been told Keira Knightley was also being considered for the role, she arranged for Coombs to supply Mahmood with his requested "white sweets".

Regardless of what you think about subterfuge by journalists, and the PCC code makes clear it can only be justified in the public interest, the person in this instance commissioning a crime is the hack, not the celebrity.  Not only that, unlike in other instances where those involved step back at the last minute, the evidence their target is willing to go along with their request acquired, Mahmood's drug stings have nearly always involved the actual supply of the banned substance.  By accepting such a level of skulduggery was permissible, despite the relatively slight nature of the offences committed, both the police and the CPS became complicit in Mahmood's abuse of power, not to forget lies.  Nor is this anything like the first time they've been embarrassed by Mahmood's mendacity and the Murdoch tabloid stable's hyperbolics: the Victoria Beckham "kidnap plot" trial collapsed after it emerged the key witness had been paid, while the "red mercury" case ended with all the defendants acquitted.

Indeed, yet again the court system gave in to Mahmood's bullshit, the myth of the man as tabloid investigator extraordinaire.  He gave his evidence from behind a screen, to both protect him from enemies and so as not to give away his identity to those he might yet seek to stitch up.  No matter that his visage has been available online for years now, or that, err, his victims know all too well what he looks like.  Also irrelevant is just how petty and cliche the drug dealer expose is; it's one thing to try and show corruption in sport, although Mahmood failed to do even that with John Higgins, it's another to get a pop star to show they know someone who can get drugs.  I mean, who knew they got up to such things?  It's not as though most of us have acquaintances whom dabble in illicit substances, and if tempted in the same way as Contostavlos was could just as easily find ourselves helping out a new VIP friend, clearly we're meant to regard this as a terrible indictment of the morals of our heroes.  What will the kids who look up to her think?  Nor do certain sections of the media encourage ambition and aspiration whatever the cost, oh no.

As well as being suspended by the Sun, Mahmood now faces the possibility of a perjury charge, another former News of the Screws hack accused of lying under oath.  This entire affair also gives the lie to the idea Leveson changed anything: still a Murdoch paper was prepared to do whatever it took just to catch out a jumped-up celeb.  How delicious then that someone like Tulisa (and admittedly her legal team) should be the one to finally pin the fake sheikh down.  This time, surely, there can be no way back for Mazher Mahmood.

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7/21/2014 04:54:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 

The more things change.

Look who's back.

It's fair to say that I am not predisposed to like Tulisa Contostavlos.  If you want a handy summation of the musical apocalypse of the past decade, then listening to N-Dubz, Contostavlos's former group, will soon bring you up to speed. Naturally, once N-Dubz split up, Simon Cowell decided that Tulisa would the perfect addition to the X Factor judging panel, having previously given such duties to those other fountains of perpetual talent, Dannii Minogue and Sharon Osbourne.  Getting critiqued by Gary Barlow is one thing; being told that you need a bucket to carry a tune by Cowell and the others has always struck me as just a trifle rich.

Seeing as the X Factor has always been equal parts humiliating the gullible and hyperbolically praising fairly good karaoke singers only for them to be dropped from Cowell's record label a year later, some will have doubtless come to the conclusion that the entrapment of Contostavlos by the News of the World's, sorry, the Sun on Sunday's (®Roy Greenslade) Mazher Mahmood is something of a comeuppance.  This though would be the conclusion of a pretty heartless bastard, especially as it seems we now have something of an insight into just how far the Sun and Mahmood went to gain Contostavlos's trust before then performing the classic sting of asking if she could get some drugs for her new best friends.

Last Sunday's People (yes, I know) carried a report claiming that as well as being caught out in the drug sting, Contostavlos had also been fooled into believing that she was to play the leading role in a Bollywood film charting the journey of a young woman from England to India.  The hoax was so sophisticated that it had gone on for months, involving Contostavlos being flown by private jet to America, where she also met some of her supposed co-stars.  While the People doesn't explicitly say that the hoax and the sting are connected, it most certainly would explain just why it was that Contostavlos came to be so trusting of those who were secretly filming her, and also why she was so inclined to boast about her contacts.  And if it isn't connected, then either the story's horrendously inaccurate, or someone's got hell of a lot of money to burn on trolling a celebrity.

It would also fit in precisely with Mahmood's recent modus operandi.  Before the News of the Screws was sadly sacrificed so that Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton could stay in their jobs for another couple of weeks, Mahmood and his team had carried out a similarly elaborate sting in an effort to prove the snooker player John Higgins was prepared to fix matches.  As revealed by the Sporting Intelligence website, the Screws set up a professional looking website designed to fool Higgins' manager Pat Mooney, who had already been plied with liberal amounts of alcohol, before flying both Higgins and Mooney to Ukraine, where they were swept through customs apparently thanks to the influence of their hosts.  The only problem was that Higgins felt something was wrong, imagining he could have got mixed up with the Russian mafia, and so despite the Screws' best efforts was non-committal to the proposed arrangement, as the independent tribunal later ruled.

Clearly, to fool Contostavlos required even greater extravagance and promises of riches.  Even then she didn't do what Mahmood obviously wanted her to, which was get the drugs and hand them over herself.  Instead she introduced the Sun to a friend who did the deal instead.  Naturally, for this truly heinous offence Contostavlos was promptly arrested by the Met's finest, who have always had a friendly relationship with the reporter who claims to have helped secure the convictions of hundreds of crims thanks to his good works.  If you're thinking there's a certainly irony to how the Sun predicted and then covered the arrest, both with front pages, while it devotes little in the way of space to the court appearances of its own reporters, then clearly you hate our great tradition of press freedom.

If anyone had been under the illusion that things would change after Leveson, then hopefully this will have fully shattered such notions. Subterfuge was only ever deemed permissible under the old PCC code if the material could not be obtained through other means, while fishing expeditions were expressly prohibited. There is no other way to describe Mahmood's methods than as entrapment.

And for what? To boost circulation ever so slightly? To put the jumped up Tulisa back in her place? To show that this "role model" is as hypocritical as all the rest? Pop star in knowing someone who deals drugs shock! It is truly pathetic gotcha journalism that interests the easily amused and bitter for a day, then it's gone. Contostavlos meanwhile is said to be devastated, as you might expect, and hasn't tweeted since the 31st of May. Last year she was praised for the way she responded to the release of a video which showed her performing a sex act on an ex-boyfriend. Despite it making clear that he has a grotty little nob, it was Contostavlos who was widely mocked, including by other celebrities. Last week the Sun headlined a follow-up piece "TULISA BLOWS IT AGAIN". It won't be much of a comfort to her, but it's undoubtedly the case that Mahmood too will mess up again, and hopefully this time he won't be able to carry on just as before.

(The Sun incidentally has denied most of the People's story and said it was false to say it "had spent as much as £100,000" on the investigation. £99,000 then, probably.)

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6/12/2013 10:10:00 pm | |

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