All Posts Tagged With: "Kieren Fallon"

Sackings and Hackings at Wapping

January 28th, 2011 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

 The list of Screws hacks and editors apparently involved in illegal telephonic practices is growing. Along with Clive Goodman (sacked and jailed, but paid off), Glenn Mulcaire (jailed and sacked, but paid off), Ian Edmondson (sacked and – who knows? – maybe paid off), Ross Hall (sent packing), Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck (STILL AT WAPPING), Greg Miskiw (moved with assistance), Dan Evans (sacked), the list should include Stuart Kuttner, managing former editor, ringmaster and arch-fixer (sacked by James Murdoch  – the day before the Guardian revealed, in July 2009, that Gordon Taylor had been thrown a big fat purse of hush money by Rupert Rumplechops’ son – and and left to graze in rich East London pastures).

To this list must also be added the name of the Cock of the Wapping dung heap, the Sunday Arse-Wiper’s most notorious liberty-taker and rule-bender, Mazher Mahmood (STILL THERE).

Proud holder of the sobriquet, Fake Sheikh, Mahmood’s primary journalistic aim is to see his by-line on the front page of the paper as often as possible – though not so often these days.

Mahmood is also to be named in two claims against the paper for phone-hacking – by George Galloway, when Mahmood tried set up a sting to bribe him and failed, and by the former champion jockey, Kieren Fallon, once again the subject of a sting that went so wrong the resulting Old Bailey case collapsed through the paucity of evidence presented by the Fake Sheikh (and the City of London Police, this time, by the way) after which Fallon successfully sued the paper for libel and won £100,000+ in damages and costs.

Fallon has only recently – and reluctantly – been informed by the Met that Glenn Mulcaire had listed more than one of his mobile phone numbers, and evidence given by Mahmood and his team in court five years ago suggested that the journalists acquired some information in concocting their story by listening to messages left by Fallon on a friend’s voicemail.

Mahmood has for many years jealously guarded his own ‘investigations’ team (somewhat depleted these days) and most of the IT and technical stuff is carried out by Conrad Brown, son of the late Screws super hack, Gerry Brown. The simple task of voice-mail hacking would be well within his scope.

 What odds would you offer on ‘Onan’ and Mazher being ushered to the Wapping exit (with a sack of hush-dosh over their shoulders) before the summer Solstice?

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Fallon Debunks the Fake Sheikh.

December 17th, 2009 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Watching Kieren Fallon being interviewed by Clare Balding on BBC1 on Sunday evening was a dramatic reminder of how much damage can be and has been done to many prominent individuals by a single rogue reporter on a Sunday tabloid.
Fallon, indisputably one of the world’s finest jockeys, was subjected in 2004 to a humiliating and harrowing attack as a result of a ‘sting’, based on subterfuge, misrepresentation and downright lies perpetrated by Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s notorious and utterly discredited “Investigations Editor”.
Mahmood has never let the truth or a subsequent waste of police time, court time and the public money to pay for them, get in the way of a splash on the front page of the lurid Sunday ShagRag. This was no exception.
     A string of his stories have ended with the disingenuous claim that his “dossier has been passed to the police”. And a number of those where the police – inexplicably sometimes – followed them up, arrested and remanded men in jail before bringing prosecutions which failed through the sheer inadequacy of the ‘evidence’ supplied by Mahmood, like the “Beckham Kidnap” story, and the “Red Mercury Dirty Bomb Scare”, in which three men were improperly imprisoned for two years.
    And so it proved in the case of Mahmood’s 5 page News of the World “exposé” of Kieren Fallon’s activities, headlined, “THE FIXER”.

As a result of a disturbing collaboration between the News of the World, the City of London Police (who took it on after the Met couldn’t see a case) and the Jockey Club (head of security – ex-policeman  Paul Scotney), Fallon was roped in and charged with a group of others of whom the Jockey Club had reason to be suspicious. Paul Scotney is widely on record as having expressed his almost obsessive desire to “get” Fallon. Thus Fallon had to undergo a long, gruelling trial for charges which, if provable, would have seen him in jail and his illustrious career in tatters, purely by association with some of the other parties on trial.
But as it turned out, Mahmood’s evidence against Fallon was so severely tainted by lies and manipulation of teh facts in his efforts to produce a big story, that the judge had little option but to instruct the jury to throw it out along with the somewhat shaky case produced by the Jocjey Club against the other parties.
Once the criminal trial was out of the way, Fallon was free to pursue the News of the World for the horrendous libel they had published about him. The paper settled at once and, not for the first time, Rupert Rumplechops had to watch as his inept newsmen handed out a few hundred thousand more from his coffers in damages and legal costs.

Worth Noting:
This was yet another example of bungling by former Screws editor (AND TORY HEAD SPINNER), Andy Coulson (since disgraced over the royal phone-tapping), and long-time managing editor Stuart Kuttner, sacked this year for his part in the Gordon Taylor phone-hacking debacle.

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