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LAST Wednesday, three of the happiest people in Pakistan must have been Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Amir, the disgraced trio who were found guilty of spot fixing in the Test match at Lord’s in 2010. The reason for their joy is the conviction of their nemesis, Mazhar Mahmood, aka The Fake Sheikh and the King of the Sting, in a London court. He had persuaded Butt to instruct the two fast bowlers to overstep the crease on predetermined deliveries, and filmed the deal. This evidence sent all three to jail, and derailed their successful careers.
The (now defunct) News of the World reporter had built up a formidable reputation for trapping a wide range of celebrities into committing criminal acts while secretly filming his victims. Photos would be splashed across the tabloid newspaper, and the police would arrest those caught in Mahmood’s net. But a jury recently found the Fake Sheikh guilty of perverting the course of justice, and while a sentence is awaited, Mahmood could face life imprisonment.
Mahmood’s modus operandi consisted of persuading gullible, and often greedy and ambitious, individuals that he could make it possible to meet famous and powerful people, provided they did him a dodgy favour. Often, this consisted of obtaining illegal drugs. In the case that brought about his downfall, Mahmood entrapped the N-Dubz singer, Tulisa Contostavlos, by posing as a movie producer who could get her a role in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. In return, he asked her to arrange for some cocaine. His long-time driver, Alan Smith, initially corroborated this account of events, suppressing the singer’s statement that she neither took nor dealt in drugs.
During her trial, it was revealed that Smith had later retracted his original statement, causing the case to collapse. From here, the spotlight shifted to the shady methods Mahmood had been using all along. It turns out that the Metropolitan Police had been warned of the investigative reporter’s dubious way of twisting facts to entrap victims, among whom were the Duchess of York, the Countess of Wessex and the former England football manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson.
Of Pakistani origin, Mahmood began his journalistic career as a boy in Birmingham where he helped his father produce an Urdu newspaper for the local community. According to Roy Greenslade, writing in The Guardian, when he was 18, Mahmood exposed family friends for selling pirated videos. He was then hired by a gossip weekly, and went on to become a prize-winning investigative reporter.
Mahmood often donned Arab robes for his sting operations, convincing the gullible that he had access to Saudi princes. Many of his targets who were jailed, and their lives ruined, by Mahmood are now exulting in his downfall. One of them is John Alford, a rising young actor making 120,000 pounds a year, but who was convicted and sent to jail for nine months 20 years ago. After that, he never got any acting work, and now makes a living as a labourer. Looking back, Alford said:
“I was never a drug dealer and I am the happiest man alive after yesterday’s verdict. I’m very, very hopeful my case will be heard in court. That man should hang his head in shame… They destroyed my life. I lost everything, my house, my career, the little spark inside me went, I lost my confidence. A part of me died that day, I am very, very lucky to be alive.”
Alford is not alone in wanting a new hearing to clear his name. Apart from demanding justice, there are also victims who plan to bring libel suits against Mahmood and his previous employer, News of the World, as well as The Sun. Both tabloids, notorious for their muck-raking stories, belong to Rupert Murdoch’s news empire.
Already, John Bryan, an American financier, has filed a case for libel and invasion of privacy in a Los Angeles court. He claims that Mahmood had tried to entrap him by offering him an investment opportunity in a casino, and then asked him to supply prostitutes and drugs.
The Met, too, faces litigation and embarrassment when it emerged that despite at least two warnings about Mahmmod’s methods, it continued to use evidence supplied by him to arrest and prosecute people with previously spotless records. No doubt the prospect of high-profile cases with wide media coverage was attractive to police officers, especially when they did not have to dig for facts themselves.
But the whole sleazy affair raises important questions about responsible journalism. The right of the public to know needs to be balanced against an individual’s right to privacy. Above all, to tempt a gullible person to engage in criminal activity he would normally not undertake just to sell more newspapers is clearly beyond the pale. As The Guardian noted in a recent editorial:
“Sometimes pursuit of the truth will lead journalists to deploy subterfuge. When breaching walls of official secrecy, for example, the greater good might even be served by breaking the law. But the decision to embark on that path is, or should be, felt as an acute ethical dilemma requiring examination of conscience and the highest standards of public interest.
“That test was not met by Mazhar Mahmood… This [the entrapment of Ms Constostavlos] is the opposite of pursuing the truth, the antithesis of decent journalism. Inevitably, questions are being asked about other convictions secured on the basis of Mahmood’s evidence and cavalier methodology. The case also invites scrutiny of police who appear to have sought prosecutions based on a standard of investigative rigour below that which they would expect from fellow officers. The glamour attached to a trial with a celebrity defendant appears to have trumped prosecutorial diligence.”
Many of the scores of Mahmood’s victims are likely to claim false arrest and entrapment, as well as loss of livelihood. Murdoch’s News UK, the owner of both tabloids that employed Mahmood, will be facing legal headaches for a long time to come as a result of the Fake Sheikh’s sting operations.
Published in Dawn October 10th, 2016
