Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Magda Hassan]

Mmmm....maybe a trainer having a bet each way...... Murdoch should have looked after the hired help much better.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The disgusting murder of Daniel Morgan, with an axe through his head, exposed many times in this thread is to be investigated.

Yet again.

Former Det Chief Supt Dave Cook has no doubts over the importance of the murder:

Cook said the inquiry could be as difficult for the Met over the issue of corruption as the public inquiry in 1998 into the Stephen Lawrence case was on the force's racial failings.

He said: "I consider the Daniel Morgan murder as grave a case for the Metropolitan Police as was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, but instead of race being the issue, this time it is about corruption."

The case also links to corruption at Murdoch's News of the Screws.

We shall see some time down the line what this latest investigation reveals...

Former judge to examine role of police corruption in murder investigation

Review of case of Daniel Morgan will look at links between private investigators, police and News of the World journalists


Vikram Dodd
The Guardian, Friday 10 May 2013 10.30 BST

Daniel Morgan, whose brother said the family had endured 'mental torture' during years of fighting for justice. Photograph: Rex Features

The home secretary has ordered a review by a former senior judge into the role police corruption played in shielding the murderers of a private detective found with an axe embedded in his head.

Daniel Morgan was murdered in a south London pub car park in March 1987, and his killers have never been brought to justice.

His family believe he was silenced as he prepared to expose corruption at the highest ranks of the Metropolitan police.

The Home Office announced on Friday that an independent panel would examine the case, chaired by the former appeals court judge Sir Stanley Burnton.

It will be a painful exercise for Scotland Yard, which in 2011 accepted that police corruption had shielded the killers, in a letter written by the then acting commissioner, Tim Godwin.

The review is also challenging for News International, which owns the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times. In 2002, the News of the World placed under surveillance the head of the Morgan murder investigation, the former detective chief superintendent David Cook allegedly on the orders of an executive. The paper physically followed Cook and his young children, "blagged" his personal details from police databases, and tried to access his voicemail and that of his wife.

Cook, a former Met detective, said the inquiry could be as difficult for the Met over the issue of corruption as the public inquiry in 1998 into the Stephen Lawrence case was on the force's racial failings.

He said: "I consider the Daniel Morgan murder as grave a case for the Metropolitan Police as was the murder of Stephen Lawrence, but instead of race being the issue, this time it is about corruption."

The announcement of the inquiry is a victory for the Morgan family, who have battled powerful institutions for over a quarter of a century. Morgan's brother Alastair said the fight they had been forced to wage amounted to "mental torture" and criticised police chiefs over the years who he said had failed to tackle corruption so serious that it had shielded murderers.The review announced on Friday is the second ordered by the home secretary into allegations that past Met corruption shielded murderers. One is already under way into allegations that officers helped protect the killers of Stephen Lawrence, and is being conducted by a senior prosecutor.

Theresa May said the panel would "shine a light" on the circumstances of Daniel Morgan's murder, its background and the handling of the case since 1987.

Alastair Morgan, Daniel's brother, said: "Through almost three decades of public protests, meetings with police officers at the highest ranks, lobbying of politicians and pleas to the media, we have found ourselves lied to, fobbed off, bullied, degraded and let down time and time again. What we have been required to endure has been nothing less than mental torture.

"The allegations and evidence of serious corruption within the Metropolitan police extending to recent history and the highest ranks remained unaddressed through five police investigations."

He added: "Over most of this period, we witnessed a complete unwillingness by police and successive governments to face up to what was occurring, and ultimately a complete failure by police leadership to deal effectively with serious police criminality."

The Morgan family said the terms of reference for the inquiry panel included:

Police involvement in the murder

The role played by police corruption in protecting those responsible for the murder from being brought to justice and the failure to confront that corruption

The incidence of connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and corruption involved in the linkages between them.

In 2011, the trial of three men accused of Morgan's murder collapsed over legal technicalities and police errors.

The prosecution decided not to offer any evidence because it could not guarantee the police could meet rules protecting the defendants' right to a fair trial. Charges against two other men had been dropped earlier.

One of those acquitted was a former detective, Sid Fillery, who was charged with perverting the course of justice. After the murder he replaced Morgan at Southern Investigations.

The brothers Garry and Glenn Vian were also acquitted, after the prosecutor had to admit police could not be relied upon to ensure the defence had access to any documents detectives may have which could be relevant to resisting the charges.

The case is estimated to have cost between £30m to £50m in investigations and trials over the 26 years since the murder.

[David Guyatt]

Investigating the previous investigation that investigated the investigation prior to that.

Sounds like Elm Guest House and Jimmy Savile doesn't it. But phew! thank goodness the Yorkshire police have been able to exonerate themselves in their prior investigations of Jimmy the Fixer. Justice prevails!!!

Keep the spinning plates spinning in the air is a doddle to the trained juggler, methinks.

[Jan Klimkowski]

In fact, there may even be links to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

See the thread: Stephen Lawrence - justice denied by criminal corruption?

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Independent's take on the axe in the head murder:

The murder of Daniel Morgan: A crime the police wouldn't solve

Former head of counter-terrorism says case of 1987 killing is 'one of the most shameful in Scotland Yard's history'

Paul Cahalan

Sunday 12 May 2013



Successive senior officers at Scotland Yard failed to unearth massive police corruption and allowed the killers of a private detective to remain at large in what may be "the most shameful episode in the Metropolitan Police's history", a former Scotland Yard assistant commissioner has said.

Writing in The Independent on Sunday today, John Yates, the former UK head of counter-terrorism, said Met bosses were guilty of following others' decisions "without proper review or reflection", leaving the family of Daniel Morgan fighting for justice for more than a quarter of a century.

"Successive Met hierarchies were guilty of [group-think] regarding this murder... The result was the further alienation of a family that already thought that the police were guilty of an appalling cover-up," he said. "For more than 25 years they were lied to, fobbed off, patronised and dismissed as crackpots by the very people who should have been helping them the police. The result? A family have been denied justice and guilty men today are walking free. It is one of the most, if not the most shameful episodes in Scotland Yard's history."

Daniel Morgan, a 37-year-old father of two, was found with an axe in his head in a south London pub car park in March 1987. His family believes he was about to expose corruption at the highest levels of the Met, including revealing their close links with sections of the media.

In 2011, the trial of three men accused of the murder collapsed. After five police inquiries, acting Met commissioner Tim Godwin accepted that police corruption had shielded the killers.

On Friday, the Home Secretary ordered an independent panel, chaired by the former appeals court judge Sir Stanley Burnton, to examine the case. Sir Stanley will look at claims that in 2002 the News of the World placed the head of the Morgan murder investigation, former Detective Chief Superintendent David Cook, under surveillance allegedly on the orders of an executive. It is said the now defunct paper followed Mr Cook and his children and "blagged" his personal details from police databases as well as trying to access his, and his then wife's, voicemail.

Speaking earlier this week, Mr Cook said the murder was as serious a case for the Met as that of Stephen Lawrence, which, widely regarded as a watershed moment for the force, led to it being accused of institutionalised racism. "Instead of race being the issue, this time it is about corruption," he said.

Mr Cook's former wife and former Metropolitan Police detective Jacqui Hames, who presented Crimewatch between 1990 and 2006, told The IoS yesterday: "I wholeheartedly agree with John Yates... We police 'by consent' in this country, and the public are in danger of withdrawing their permission if a culture of proper openness and transparency isn't established as a result of this case."

Mr Yates, who had overall responsibility for the case from 2006 until the collapse of the trial in 2011, said the Morgan family had been "treated quite disgracefully... The theory that Daniel was about to expose serious corruption and drug-dealing between police and private investigators, and was murdered because of it, is a theory that will never be tested before a jury."

[Peter Lemkin]

"The Daniel Morgan Murder: An Unsolved Mystery of the Murdoch Hacking Scandal"

By Peter Jukes inShare




Also see: "The murder of Daniel Morgan: A crime the police wouldn't solve," independent.co.uk

May 10, 2013

On Friday, Britain's home secretary opened a judge-led public inquiry into the brutal and mysterious 1987 slaying of Daniel Morgan. Peter Jukes talks to Alastair Morgan, who hopes the decades-long cover-up of his brother's death may finally be revealed.
It is Britain's biggest unsolved murder, and described by a senior police officer as "the pivotal crime of the times."

It plunges into the heart of what former prime minister Gordon Brown called the "criminal-media nexus" exposed by the hacking and bribes scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid titles. Only on this occasion the crimes went well beyond privacy intrusion and corrupt payments, to a brutal killing.
On Friday, home secretary Theresa May announced a judge-led public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe embedded in his head in a South London car park in 1987. The panel of experts will examine not only the police corruption that sabotaged five successive police investigations and caused the subsequent murder trial to collapse, but also the "connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and corruption involved in the linkages between them."
Daniel Morgan ran a successful private investigations agency, Southern Investigations, with Jonathan Rees in the 1980s. However, as explained to The Daily Beastby his brother Alastair, Daniel had become suspicious of his business partner and concerned about police corruption. He was preparing to expose local police officers to the now-shuttered News of the World according to another colleague. But after a meeting with Rees, Daniel was murderedOne of the officers to first investigate the murder, Sid Fillery, left the police and took over Daniel's role at Southern Investigations. Over the next two decades Fillery and Rees formed one of the most prolific private detective agencies working for the British press, and established what the investigative journalists Nick Davies and Vikram Dodd described as an "empire of corruption."
According to the Guardian they provided material, mainly for News of the World, through a variety of illegal means, including paying police officers for confidential records, obtaining phone records, care registration details, banks account details, and allegedly using Trojan Horse' emails to hack computers. According to two sources, the firm "commissioned burglaries to obtain material for journalists."

A senior police source described the Morgan murder and the Rees-Fillery partnership as the origin of the illegal practices exposed by the hacking scandal. "Their relationship with News of the World," the source said "was without question the maternity ward where the Dark Arts were born."

Meanwhile Southern Investigations was still subject to no less than five police investigations at a cost of some $50 million. The police planted an undercover officer in the agency, and had the offices bugged. However, most of the material has never been released.

"Morgan and his partner's relationship with News of the World was without question the maternity ward where the Dark Arts were born."

Further police investigations were deliberately sabotaged by employees of News of the World. David Cook, who led two of inquiries, had his phone hacked by the tabloid, his house watched, and his family followed. As his former wife and police officer Jacqui Hames explained to the Leveson Inquiry Press ethics last year, the surveillance was due to "collusion between people at News of the World and those suspected of the murder."

When confronted about the surveillance, then editor of News of the World Rebekah Brooks claimed it was a legitimate investigation to see if Cook and Hames were having an affair'though they had children and had been married for years.

Rees was sentenced for seven years over a separate crime in 2000, but was promptly rehired upon his release by Andy Coulsonan editor who had taken over from Brooks as editor of News of the World, and would soon move over to become Prime Minister David Cameron's press supremo.

According to Alastair Morgan, the terms of reference of the new inquiry have been under discussion for months. "It was only the hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry which brought this back into the spotlight," he told The Daily Beast. Modelled on the recent Hillsborough Panel, which last year revealed police misconduct and press lies about the death of 96 Liverpool supporters at a football stadium in the 1989, Alastair hopes the inquiry will at least expose the cover-up, although because of the "legal nightmares of previous investigations" he doubted those behind the murder would ever be brought to justice.

David Cook, who ran two of the murder inquiries, compared the Morgan case to another notorious South London murder, the racist killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1996, which also took decades to come to justice "but instead of race being the issue, this time it is about corruption." "This whole saga could best be described as an iceberg," Cook told the Daily Beast. "What you see on the surface is nothing to what lies underneath."

Campaigning Labour MP Tom Watson, a key figure in exposing the phone hacking scandal through Parliament, believes that the new inquirywith power to examine all the police documents going back to 1987could prove historic. "By the end of this process we should know more about a very opaque period in British history when corrupt police, private investigators, and tabloid journalists worked together," he said. Watson told The Daily Beast he was particularly interested in what happened to the material garnered in the late 1990s concerning "the relationship between Southern Investigations and News of the World." He hoped there will be a full investigation of what senior officers really knew back then.

Above all, however, Watson wanted to pay tribute to the Morgan family for their often lonely and unheard campaign. Two decades ago Alastair Morgan made solemn promise to his dead brother that he "would not rest" until the corruption was exposed. As the public inquiry gets under away later this year, his pledge may at last be honoured.

Peter Jukes is an author based in London. His second nonfiction book, Fall of the House of Murdoch, which puts the current scandal against the half-century rise of News Corp., was published by Unbound earlier this year.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...andal.html

[Jan Klimkowski]

More on the part of the iceberg below the waterline:

Before phone-hacking PI Glenn Mulcaire, there was long time News International "fixer", Jonathan Rees, who has been charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Rees was acquitted because, as Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell admitted to victim Daniel Morgan's family: "It is quite apparent that police corruption was a debilitating factor in that investigation. This was wholly unacceptable.'

Police have admitted corruption in the Met was a debilitating factor' in the £50million collapse of one of Britain's most horrific unsolved murder cases.
The latest attempt to gain justice for the killing 24 years ago of private investigator Daniel Morgan fell apart in farce yesterday after evidence from supergrasses was discredited.
Mr Morgan, 37, was hacked to death with an axe outside a pub. There have been five separate investigations at a cost to the taxpayer of £50million.
After prosecutors offered no evidence against three men yesterday, a Scotland Yard officer sincerely' apologised to Mr Morgan's family. He said police corruption during the initial investigation in 1987 was a key reason that no one had ever been convicted.
The first investigation is feared to have seen the real killers shielded by corrupt officers.

(snip)

Police alleged Glenn Vian was the axeman and that Mr Morgan was murdered because he discovered his business partner Jonathan Rees was using their company to launder the proceeds of drug trafficking. Mr Rees was also said to have obtained information from corrupt serving police officers about operations.

Source.

Below is an outline of the criminal and corrupt career of Jonathan Rees, funded in part by News International.

Jonathan Rees worked from a dingy office in south London. He lived in a cramped flat upstairs. He was divorced, overweight and foul-mouthed but his business was golden: he traded information. His sources may have been corrupt. His actions may have been illegal. But the money kept coming from one golden source in particular. As Rees himself put it: "No one pays like the News of the World do."

(snip)

Rees was jailed for a conspiracy to frame an innocent woman and then accused of conspiracy to murder.

And yet the man who became the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, has always maintained in evidence to parliament and on oath in court that he knew nothing of any illegal activity during the seven years he spent at the top of the News of the World. The entire story unfolded without ever catching his eye. In the same way, the prime minister and his deputy were happy to appoint Coulson last May to oversee the communication between the British government and its people, even though they were already fully aware of all the essential facts.

It begins with the bug. It is commonplace for journalists to interview police officers, but the listening device recorded Rees routinely paying cash directly or indirectly to serving officers, a serious criminal offence. By April 1999, Rees had been working for Fleet Street for several years, and he had created a vibrant network of corrupt sources.

The bug recorded the sound of Detective Constable Tom Kingston from the south-east regional crime squad collecting cash for himself and for his mate who was an intelligence officer involved in the protection of the royal family and other VIPs. DC Kingston sold Jonathan Rees a Special Branch report disclosing police knowledge of an Albanian crime gang in London, Police Gazette bulletins which listed suspects who were wanted for arrest, and threat assessments in relation to the terrorist targets his mate was supposed to be protecting. Rees sold them to newspapers primarily the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror.

DC Kingston eventually ended up in prison for selling a huge quantity of amphetamine which he had stolen from a dealer. But Rees had other links to other corrupt officers. His partner, Sid Fillery, was a former officer who had connections all over the force. The bug recorded their relationship with Duncan Hanrahan and Martin King, who had left the Metropolitan police to work as private investigators and who were similarly well connected until both were jailed in relation to police corruption. Hanrahan also admitted conspiring to rob a courier of £1m at Heathrow airport.

Some of what they sold was tittle-tattle: a disparaging remark made by Tony Blair about John Prescott within earshot of a bent officer; gossip about the sex lives of Buckingham Palace servants. But some of it was highly sensitive. When one of Britain's most notorious criminals, Kenneth Noye, was finally arrested, Rees bought and sold details of the secret intelligence which had led to his capture as well as the precise time and route by which he would be driven from prison to court. When the TV journalist Jill Dando was murdered on her doorstep, Rees procured a police source so that he could sell live details of the investigation.

And the corruption did not stop with the police. The listening device caught Rees boasting that he was in touch with: two former police officers working for Customs and Excise who would accept bribes; a corrupt VAT inspector who had access to business records; and two corrupt bank employees who would hand over details of targets' accounts. (One of them had the first name Robert and was wittily referred to as Rob the Bank. The other was simply Fat Bob.)

(snip)

One person who is familiar with Rees's operations claims that he or one of his associates started using Trojan Horse software, which allowed them to email a target's computer and copy the contents of its hard disk. This source claims that they used this tactic when they were hired by the News of the World to gather background on Freddy Scapaticci, a former IRA man who had been exposed as an MI6 informer codenamed Stakeknife.

Two other sources claim that Rees was commissioning burglaries. One is a private investigator who was told directly by Rees's network that they had broken into targets' home on behalf of a Fleet Street newspaper. The other is a lawyer who claims to have evidence that a high-profile client was the target of an attempted burglary by Rees's associates in search of embarrassing information. There is no independent confirmation of this.

The bug betrayed the sheer speed and ease with which Rees was able to penetrate the flimsy fence of privacy that shields the vast reservoir of personal information now held on the databases controlled by the police and the DVLA, the phone companies and banks. On one occasion, he was asked to find out about the owner of a Porsche. Armed with the registration number, it took him a grand total of 34 minutes to come up with the owner's name and home address from the DVLA and his criminal record from the police computer.

When the Daily Mirror wanted the private mortgage details of all the governors of the Bank of England, Rees delivered.

When the Sunday Mirror wanted to get inside the bank accounts of Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex, it was equally easy, as the bug recorded:

Reporter: "Do you remember a couple of months ago, you got me some details on Edward's business and Sophie's business and how well they were doing?"

Rees: "Yeah."

Reporter: "And you did a check on Sophie's bank account."

Rees: "Yeah."

Reporter: "Is it possible to do that again? I'm not exactly sure what they're after but they seem to be under the impression that, you know, she was in the paper the other day for appearing in Hello magazine. They think she's had some kind of payment off them."

Rees: "What? Off Hello?"

Reporter: "Um, yeah."

Rees: "… find out how much."

Reporter: "Well, we just want to see if there's been any change to her bank account. "

This would be a breach of the Data Protection Act unless the courts held there was a clear public interest in establishing the health of the countess's business or her deal with Hello magazine. The payment of bribes would be a criminal offence regardless of any public interest. Rees made no secret of his criminality. At one point the police bug caught Rees telling a Daily Mirror journalist that they must be careful what they wrote down "because what we're doing is illegal, isn't it? I don't want people coming in and nicking us for a criminal offence, you know."

But Rees did get nicked and for a serious criminal offence. The listening device caught him being hired by a man who was getting divorced and wanted to stop his wife getting custody of their children. Rees came up with a plan. Aided and abetted by yet another corrupt police officer, DC Austin Warnes, he arranged to plant cocaine in the car of the unsuspecting woman, so that she could be charged, convicted and smeared as an unreliable parent.

In order to stop that plot, in September 1999, Scotland Yard raided Rees and charged him with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Fifteen months later, he was taken off Fleet Street's payroll when he was sentenced to six years in prison, increased to seven years on appeal. DC Warnes was sentenced to four years.

And none of this was secret. Apart from the case itself, which was held in open court, the Guardian two years later, in September 2002, ran a three-part series on invasion of privacy and devoted some 3,000 words to a detailed account of Rees's dealings with corrupt police officers and of his use generally of illegal methods to acquire information for the News of the World and other papers.

Based on an authorised briefing by Scotland Yard, the Guardian story made repeated references to the News of the World's involvement and quoted an internal police report to the effect that Rees and his network were involved in the long-term penetration of police intelligence and that "their thirst for knowledge is driven by profit to be accrued from the media". The Crown Prosecution Service found that there was no evidence that the reporters involved knew that Rees was acquiring the material by corrupt means.

A year later, in August 2003, Sid Fillery, who was still running the agency and working for Fleet Street, also got himself arrested and charged with 15 counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing indecent images. This was reported in national media. He was later convicted.

All of this extraordinary and well-publicised activity around the News of the World nevertheless apparently escaped the attention of Andy Coulson, even though he had been hired early in 2000 to be deputy editor of the paper under his close friend, Rebekah Wade. And Jonathan Rees was not the only private investigator who was routinely breaking the law for the News of the World without Coulson knowing anything at all about it.

All through the late 1990s, the paper had been hiring an investigator called John Boyall, who, among other services, specialised in acquiring information from confidential databases. He had a wiry young man working as his assistant, named Glenn Mulcaire. In the autumn of 2001, John Boyall fell out with the News of the World's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, who had been responsible for handling him. Miskiw replaced him by poaching Glenn Mulcaire and giving him a full-time contract.

Source.

[Jan Klimkowski]

No rules for Murdoch hacks:

Rebekah knew nothing..... :rofl:

Murdoch must have slipped into senile megalomania if he thinks Wade/Brooks can keep her job.

Or he has some deeply ugly material on senior politicians in his files.

News of the World surveillance of detective: what Rebekah Brooks knew

Brooks summoned to meeting with Scotland Yard to be told her journalists had spied on behalf of murder suspects

Nick Davies guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 6 July 2011 19.47 BST

As editor of the News of the World Rebekah Brooks was confronted with evidence that her paper's resources had been used on behalf of two murder suspects to spy on the senior detective who was investigating their alleged crime.

Brooks was summoned to a meeting at Scotland Yard where she was told that one of her most senior journalists, Alex Marunchak, had apparently agreed to use photographers and vans leased to the paper to run surveillance on behalf of Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery, two private investigators who were suspected of murdering their former partner, Daniel Morgan. The Yard saw this as a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice.

Brooks was also told of evidence that Marunchak had a corrupt relationship with Rees, who had been earning up to £150,000 a year selling confidential data to the News of the World. Police told her that a former employee of Rees had given them a statement alleging that some of these payments were diverted to Marunchak, who had been able to pay off his credit card and pay his child's private school fees.

A Guardian investigation suggests that surveillance of Detective Chief Superintendent David Cook involved the News of the World physically following him and his young children, "blagging" his personal details from police databases, attempting to access his voicemail and that of his wife, and possibly sending a "Trojan horse" email in an attempt to steal information from his computer.

The targeting of Cook began following his appearance on BBC Crimewatch on 26 June 2002, when he appealed for information to solve the murder of Morgan, who had been found dead in south London 15 years earlier. Rees and Fillery were among the suspects. The following day, Cook was warned by the Yard that they had picked up intelligence that Fillery had been in touch with Marunchak and that Marunchak agreed to "sort Cook out".

A few days later, Cook was contacted by Surrey police, where he had worked as a senior detective from 1996 to 2001, and was told that somebody claiming to work for the Inland Revenue had contacted their finance department, asking for Cook's home address so that they could send him a cheque with a tax refund. The finance department had been suspicious and refused to give out the information.

It is now known that at that time, the News of the World's investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, succeeded in obtaining Cook's home address, his internal payroll number at the Metropolitan police, his date of birth and figures for the amount that he and his wife were paying for their mortgage. All of this appears to have been blagged by Mulcaire from confidential databases, apparently including the Met's own records.

Mulcaire obtained the mobile phone number for Cook's wife and the password she used for her mobile phone account.

Paperwork in the possession of the Yard's Operation Weeting is believed to show that Mulcaire did this on the instructions of Greg Miskiw, the paper's assistant editor and a close friend of Marunchak.

About a week later, a van was seen parked outside Cook's home. The following day, two vans were seen there. Both of them attempted to follow Cook as he took his two-year-old son to nursery. Cook alerted Scotland Yard, who sent a uniformed officer to stop one of the vans on the grounds that its rear brake light was broken. The driver proved to be a photojournalist working for the News of the World. Both vans were leased to the paper. During the same week, there were signs of an attempt to open letters which had been left in Cook's external postbox.

Scotland Yard chose not to mount a formal inquiry. Instead a senior press officer contacted Brooks to ask for an explanation. She is understood to have told them they were investigating a report that Cook was having an affair with another officer, Jacqui Hames, the presenter of BBC Crimewatch. Yard sources say they rejected this explanation, because Cook had been married to Hames for some years; the couple had two children, then aged two and five; and they had previously appeared together as a married couple in published stories."The story was complete rubbish," according to one source.

For four months, the Yard took no action, raising questions about whether they were willing to pursue what appeared to be an attempt to interfere with a murder inquiry. However, in November 2002, at a press social event at Scotland Yard, Brooks was asked to come into a side room for a meeting. She was confronted by Cook, his boss, Commander Andre Baker, and Dick Fedorcio, the head of media relations. According to a Yard source, Cook described the surveillance on his home and the apparent involvement of Marunchak, and evidence of Marunchak's suspect financial relationship with Rees. Brooks is said to have defended Marunchak on the grounds that he did his job well.

Scotland Yard took no further action, apparently reflecting the desire of Fedorcio, who has had a close working relationship with Brooks, to avoid unnecessary friction with the News of the World. In March Marunchak was named by BBC Panorama as the News of the World executive who hired a specialist to plant a Trojan on the computer of a former British intelligence officer, Ian Hurst.

Rees and Fillery were eventually arrested and charged in relation to the murder of Morgan. Charges against both men were later dropped, although Rees was convicted of plotting to plant cocaine on a woman so that her ex-husband would get custody of their children, and Fillery was convicted of possessing indecent images of children.

Cook and his wife are believed to be preparing a legal action against the News of the World, Marunchak, Miskiw and Mulcaire. Operation Weeting is also understood to be investigating.

[Jan Klimkowski]

And then there's Fedorcio's role:

Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies on Scotland Yard's PR Chief.

Oh what a tangled web we weave....

Phone-hacking spotlight falls on Met PR man, Dick Fedorcio

Director of public affairs faces heavy scrutiny by MPs at select committee over links between Scotland Yard and NI

Nick Davies The Guardian, Tuesday 19 July 2011

The search for the truth about the ties that bind Scotland Yard to News International is now likely to focus on the role of one man: Dick Fedorcio, director of public affairs for the Metropolitan police.

Normally in the wings, Fedorcio will enter the bright lights of the home affairs select committee on Tuesday to answer questions about his role in the background to the phone-hacking scandal.

Guardian inquiries suggest that his 14 years at the head of the Yard's media operation made him a powerful figure, able to intervene in policy decisions; and that he has a history of particular closeness with the News of the World.

There is no evidence Fedorcio has done anything wrong, but there are troubling questions on which MPs want his help:

Was Scotland Yard's failure to get to the truth in the original investigation in 2006 simply a case of incompetence (which is, in effect, their defence), or did the Yard deliberately cut short that inquiry as a favour to powerful friends at News International? MPs will want to know whether Fedorcio formally or informally had any influence over the decision.

Was Scotland Yard's rapid decision to refuse to reopen the case in July 2009 influenced in any way by its close links with the News of the World? In relation to that controversial decision, was there any form of contact between Fedorcio and anyone at News International?

Did Fedorcio play any role at all in the subsequent police statements to parliament, press and public which, we now know, included falsehoods, half-truths and evasions?

Fedorcio, 58, is a conservative figure, with a rugby player's chest and a businessman's suit, who was given an OBE in 2006. He rose through the ranks of local government PR (at the Greater London council, West Sussex, and Kent) and took over as head of public affairs at the Yard in September 1997, shortly before the arrival as deputy commissioner of John Stevens, who became a close ally. When Stevens became commissioner in 2000, the two men set out to find allies in Fleet Street, particularly among the conservative tabloids and the Daily Mail.

Fedorcio was far less close to Stevens's successor, Ian Blair. Indeed, several Yard sources claim that Fedorcio disliked the new commissioner. But his job gave him power: specifically, a seat on the elite senior management team which oversees major operational decisions and where Fedorcio's voice is said to be highly influential.

The fact of his link to Fleet Street reinforced that power. Like the PR heads of other organisations, he is said to have freely intervened on policy issues, changing strategy in search of better press coverage. One source recalls him sitting in with the July Review Group dealing with the aftermath of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and effectively chairing a meeting, even though he had no operational standing.

Those who have worked closely with Fedorcio all agree he is particularly close to Rebekah Brooks, who was editor of the News of the World and then of the Sun; and to Lucy Panton, the News of the World's crime correspondent. They say Fedorcio sometimes has caused friction with his press officers by providing the News of the World with information in preference to other newspapers.

MPs will want to know whether Fedorcio's close working link with Brooks influenced the Yard's decision to take no action when they discovered that a News of the World executive, Alex Marunchak, had apparently used the paper's resources to mount surveillance on a senior officer, DCS Dave Cook, acting on behalf of two men who were suspects in a murder investigation being led by Cook.

Fedorcio was present at a meeting when DCS Cook and his commander, Andre Baker, confronted Brooks with details of the surveillance, which could have been regarded as an attempt to pervert the course of justice.

The surveillance included following DCS Cook and his children; "blagging" personal data from confidential police databases; and attempting to access his voicemail and that of his wife.

Cook subsequently suspected that "Trojan horse" emails may have been sent to his computer, though no confirmation was ever found.

Fedorcio's personal links with the News of the World are part of a wider picture of close alliance. When John Stevens stepped down as commissioner in 2005 he was given a job as a columnist at the News of the World (a post that was secured, according to Yard sources, by Fedorcio).

When Ian Blair took over as commissioner his son was allowed to go on work experience at News International.

When Andy Hayman, the assistant commissioner in charge of the original phone-hacking inquiry, left under a cloud, he was given a job as a columnist on the Times, who also bought the serial rights to his memoirs.

Fedorcio is believed to have approved the highly controversial decision in September 2009 to hire the News of the World's former deputy editor, Neil Wallis, as a part-time media consultant at the same time as the paper was being publicly accused of crimes committed when Wallis worked there. It is still not clear whether Wallis had any influence over the Yard's handling of the affair.

[Magda Hassan]

[URL="http://cryptome.org/2013/05/lord-stevens-secrets.htm"]http://cryptome.org/2013/05/lord-stevens-secrets.htm

[/URL]The Met gagged Leveson Inquiry over claims that senior police officer sold secrets to News of the World


[B]Campaigning Labour MP calls on May to ensure vital documents were not
[/B]

The Met "gagged" the Leveson Inquiry from revealing intelligence that a very senior former police officer passed on sensitive information to the News of the World, the Standard reveals today.

The force claimed a "public interest immunity certificate" to ban the disclosure of a report that alleged the officer was obtaining highly confidential information on decisions taken by Lord Blair when he was Commissioner.
The classified document, which the Met withheld from the Leveson Inquiry until after it could have been usefully raised in the public hearings, suggested the officer who is not named for legal reasons passed the leak on to the tabloid for money.
When it was finally passed to the inquiry, Scotland Yard claimed "public interest immunity" which prevented Lord Justice Leveson from referring to it in public or considering it for the conclusions in his landmark report into inappropriate relationships between the press and police.
Tom Watson, the campaigning Labour MP, said: "These are remarkably serious events uncovered by the Evening Standard. As the Prime Minster has said, this inquiry was supposed to have left no stone unturned but it now appears to have been gagged by the very force it was set up to investigate.
"I'm sure the current Commissioner would wish to urgently review what happened and I will be writing to the Home Secretary Theresa May to ask that she satisfies herself that all seemingly vital documents from the Yard were not withheld from Lord Justice Leveson."
When the Evening Standard asked counsel to the inquiry Robert Jay QC why he did not raise these matters during the public hearings, he broke a 10-month silence and issued an extra-ordinary public statement.
The senior barrister, who was "gatekeeper" to the inquiry and had a huge influence over what evidence was made public, wanted to "make clear" that he and Lord Justice Leveson were "never shown" the intelligence report until "well after" it could have been used.
He added: "The Met is claiming public interest immunity in relation to any police intelligence report, the contents of which are neither confirmed nor denied.
"I also owe continuing obligations of confidence to the Met and others in relation to information I received during the course of the inquiry. These factors have at all stages limited what I am able to place in the public domain, and continue to do so."
A source close to Lord Justice Leveson told the Standard the intelligence report would have been used by the inquiry if the Met had passed it over before Lord Blair gave evidence.
Unable to refer to the intelligence of police corruption at a very senior level, Lord Justice Leveson was forced to publicly clear the Met and found the force conducted itself with "integrity" at all times.
News that the Met successfully gagged a public inquiry investigating its own conduct has raised serious questions that Lord Justice Leveson was unable to deliver the aims of David Cameron when he established the milestone judicial investigation in July 2011.
After setting up the inquiry in the wake of the Milly Dowler scandal, Mr Cameron told the Commons: "What this country has to confront is an episode that is frankly disgraceful, accusations of widespread law-breaking by parts of our press; alleged corruption by some police officers; a failure of our political system over many, many years to tackle a problem that's been getting worse."
Later, he added: "No one should be in any doubt of our intention to get to the bottom of the truth and learn the lessons for the future."
Bob Quick, Scotland Yard's former head of counter-terrorism operations, said: "The contents of this intelligence report, if true, are disturbing. When it was discovered, it was swiftly and properly handed over to the Met prior to the Leveson hearings and I am surprised its content was not subject of some examination during the inquiry."
The intelligence report, dated 2006 and created by Scotland Yard's anti-corruption command, said a key News of the World hacking suspect, who shall be called Mr Root for legal reasons, was aware of unauthorised disclosures to the former senior officer, who had left the Met.
However, it is understood the alleged breach in Lord Blair's senior management team, which regularly discussed matters of national security, was never passed on to the Commissioner.
The former commissioner first learned of the report when a whistleblower handed it to him in December 2011 at the height of the Leveson Inquiry.
When he learned that Met anti- corruption officers had intelligence to suggest his senior team had been compromised six years earlier yet told him nothing about it, Lord Blair visited Scotland Yard's headquarters in Victoria. He passed the report to detectives working on multiple criminal investigations into corrupt police officers leaking sensitive information to the Murdoch media empire and other newspapers.
Lord Blair, who led the Met between 2005 and 2008, asked his former colleagues to investigate the allegations, find out who knew about the security breach and discover why he was not told.
It is understood the Yard assured him the intelligence report, written by a named detective inside the Met's powerful directorate of professional standards, would be handed to Lord Justice Leveson to evaluate and consider for his report.
The Standard has been told that Lord Blair also discussed the contents of the document with Neil Garnham, a QC leading the Met's interaction with the Leveson Inquiry. However, the former police chief was astonished when he was not questioned over the report's implications during his time in the witness box last March.
Now, it can be disclosed that the Leveson Inquiry was not passed the document until April, six weeks after Lord Blair gave evidence and six months after he handed it to the Met.
The senior former police officer, who shall be called "Zed" for legal reasons, has not been arrested by detectives investigating alleged leaks of information to journalists for payment. However other officers, including the assistant commissioner of City of London police and a Met borough commander, have been seized by detectives investigating unauthorised disclosures to reporters despite, on each occasion, no money changing hands.
Since Lord Justice Leveson effectively cleared Scotland Yard, police across the country have launched a crackdown on the media, arresting whistleblowers who leak journalists information in the public interest and introducing new rules under which the identities of people they arrest will be kept secret from the public.
A Met spokesman said: "The intelligence report referred to dates from 2006. It did not identify an individual as the source of information allegedly being disclosed from the Met management board and it was not considered that it warranted further action.
"Intelligence reports may contain sensitive information and this document was therefore shared with the inquiry on a confidential basis.
"The Met will neither confirm nor deny whether Public Interest Immunity was sought in relation to any material provided to the inquiry. It was not for the Met to determine what was or was not put to any witnesses or used as evidence."
A spokesman for Zed said: "These claims are utter nonsense and the implications are possibly defamatory."[URL="http://cryptome.org/2013/05/lord-stevens-secrets.htm"]
[/URL]http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/the-me...23514.html