Sleuth says tabloid spied on him with impunity

Murdochs News of the World remains the target of several criminal investigations

Detective Superintendent David Cook, the lead investigator in a gruesome cold-case killing of a man found with an axe in his head, confronted Wade with a worrying accusation: He and his family were being followed and photographed, he said, by people hired by her newspaper.

Cook said the police had evidence that one of News of the World’s senior editors, Alex Marunchak, had ordered the illegal surveillance as a favour to two suspects in the case – Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, private investigators whose firm had done work for the paper. The lawyer for Cook, Mark Lewis, said in an interview that the detective believed that Fillery and Rees were seeking help in gathering evidence about Cook to derail the murder inquiry.

What happened at the meeting, a less detailed account of which appeared in The Guardian, provides a window into the extraordinary coziness that long existed between the British police and News of The World, as well as the relationship between the paper and unsavoury characters in the criminal world.

None of the parties to this alliance has escaped the stain. The paper, at the centre of a widening scandal over phone hacking and corruption, was shut last week by News International, its parent company, in an effort to limit the already extensive damage done to the reputation and business interests of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp.

Scotland Yard has admitted that it accepted News International’s explanation that the hacking was the work of one rogue reporter, and that some police officers had accepted substantial payments in exchange for confidential information.

News of the World remains the target of several criminal investigations. A number of its former editors and reporters have been arrested, including Andy Coulson, who most recently worked as the chief spokesman for prime minister David Cameron, but no one has yet been formally charged. And Cameron has announced he will appoint a judge to examine both the tabloid’s hacking and its close relationship with the police.

Also present for the meeting that day in 2003, said a spokesman for Scotland Yard, were Commander Andy Baker, who was Cook’s boss, and Dick Fedorcio, Scotland Yard’s chief public relations officer.

According to an account Cook provided to Lewis and others, Wade excused the surveillance by saying that the paper’s action had been “in the public interest” – the argument British newspapers typically make to justify using underhanded or illegal methods to, say, expose affairs by public officials. Wade said that the paper was tailing Cook because it suspected him of having an affair with Jackie Haines, host of the Crimewatch television program on which he had recently appeared. In fact, the two were married to each other, as had been mentioned prominently in an article about them in the popular gossip magazine “Hello!”

Scotland Yard seems to have been satisfied with the explanation of Wade, now known as Rebekah Brooks and the chief executive of News International. Her paper’s editors and reporters had a long history with the police – paying for tips and sometimes even serving as quasi-police investigators themselves, in return for confidential information (many News of the World stories about criminal matters used to include a reference to the paper’s handing “a dossier” of its findings to Scotland Yard).

It is the closeness between the paper and the police that, it seems, led Scotland Yard to what officials have retrospectively admitted was a major misstep: the decision not to adequately pursue the initial phone-hacking investigation in 2006 and again in 2009.

It was in 2006 that members of the royal household notified the police that they believed their cellphone messages were being intercepted by News of the World. The subsequent police “raid” at the paper consisted of rummaging through a single reporter’s desk and failing to question any other reporters or editors. Two people were subsequently jailed: Clive Goodman, News of the World’s royal reporter, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator hired by the paper. Even when The Guardian reported that the hacking had extended far beyond the pair, and that thousands of victims might be involved, the police and the newspaper insisted repeatedly that the wrongdoing had been limited to a single “rogue” reporter.

This weekend, assistant commissioner John Yates, who was in charge of the initial inquiry and who in 2009 declined to reopen it, said that the police response had been inadequate. “I have regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “Clearly, now it looks very different.”

After the meeting at Scotland Yard, Cook left “with the impression that the meeting was arranged to placate him and let him get it off his chest, but that nothing else was going to happen,” Lewis said. “And nothing did.”

A spokesman for Scotland Yard said that “the matter was raised at the meeting at a senior level with the relevant people, and it was dealt with.” When asked how it was dealt with, the spokesman added: “The response to those concerns was the meeting.”

Full-scale inquiry
But a former senior Scotland Yard official said that the tailing of Cook should have prompted a full-scale inquiry. “I’m amazed that wasn’t done,” said the official, who was not authorised to speak publicly. A spokeswoman for News Corp., the parent company of News International, said the company “had not been previously made aware of the allegation that Brooks had known about the matter but done nothing, but that they will investigate any allegations that are put to them.”

Rees and Fillery could not be reached for comment because their locations are unknown. Through his lawyer, Paul Jonson, Marunchak denied any wrongdoing. Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Tom Watson, a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, said that the meeting showed the extent of the corrupt relationship between News of the World on the one hand, and the police and the shady underworld of private investigators with criminal connections on the other.

“News International was paying people to interfere with police officers and was doing so on behalf of known criminals,” he said. (Fillery was convicted in 2003 of making indecent images of children; Rees of planting cocaine in a woman’s car to discredit her a child-custody case.) Speaking of Brooks, he said: “Rebekah Brooks cannot deny being present at that meeting when the actions of people whom she paid were exposed. She cannot deny now being warned that under her auspices unlawful tactics were used for the purpose of interfering with the pursuit of justice.”

As for Cook, it appears that he, too, was a victim of phone hacking around the same time that the paper had his house under surveillance. But Scotland Yard notified Cook only eight weeks ago that his name had been found among the papers seized in 2006 in Mulcaire’s home.