The Sunday Mirror illegally bought police reports on Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney that detailed how the footballers were targeted by organised crime gangs, the high court has heard.
Graham Johnson, a former reporter on the newspaper, told the phone-hacking trial that he would often commission private investigators to illegally blag the records of Premier League footballers.
He said in a witness statement that he had bought “sensitive” police intelligence reports on Gerrard and Rooney in the mid-2000s. “This was mainly in connection with their links to organised crime, and stories in connection to them having sex with various women which then became linked to criminal gangs as blackmail plots and professional ‘honey traps’ and so on,” he said.
He was giving evidence on behalf of Prince Harry and more than 100 other alleged phone-hacking victims who say they were illegally targeted by journalists working for the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People. Mirror Group Newspapers is disputing much of the evidence in the trial and argues that Harry and the other claimants have waited too long to bring their cases.
Johnson also told the court:
He hacked the voicemails of the actor Denise Welch, the mother of the 1975 singer Matty Healy, in an attempt to stand up a story that she was in a relationship with a criminal underworld figure.
He was ordered by the top editors at the Sunday Mirror to bug Welch’s hotel room in order to catch her in the alleged relationship.
The Sunday Mirror hacked the voicemails of footballers and football managers including Cristiano Ronaldo, Rio Ferdinand and Avram Grant.
Hugh Grant’s emails were hacked by a private investigator, who then provided them to the Mirror for a story about Grant’s private relationship.
The use of Grant’s hacked emails was carried out with the knowledge of the acting Sunday Mirror editor Richard Wallace, who is now the boss of Rupert Murdoch’s talkTV.
Mirror journalists bought access to celebrities’ flight details through a contact who had access to the computer terminal at the British Airways VIP lounge at Heathrow.
Johnson admitted he had had a lengthy career “destroying lives” while working at the News of the World and Sunday Mirror, and regularly made up stories while a tabloid reporter.
The court heard that while he was at the News of the World he fabricated a 1,500-word story about the Beast of Bodmin Moor, in which he claimed to have found a giant animal on the loose in rural England. In reality, Johnson took long-lens photos of a puma at Exmoor wildlife park and got a photographer to scrape “claw marks” into a tree to suggest an animal was loose.
Johnson said he had had a change of heart about his life and “decided to start telling the truth” after reading a philosophy book by Alain de Botton. When Tina Weaver, his former editor, was arrested on suspicion of phone hacking in 2013, he walked into a police station and confessed to one instance of phone hacking. No charges were brought against Weaver.
Andrew Green KC, the barrister for Mirror Group Newspapers, accused Johnson of being a hypocrite, as he had admitted wiring up microphones at a central London mansion in order to record an “orgy of the ruling elite”.
Johnson argued this was legitimate because it had been carried out with the agreement of the orgy organisers, who were paid £25,000 for their assistance.
Green suggested Johnson was a “self-confessed professional liar bent on self-preservation” who stood to benefit financially from phone-hacking legal cases. The lawyer said Johnson worked closely with the press reform campaign group Hacked Off as well as the legal teams bringing phone-hacking cases against newspapers, paying substantial sums to potential witnesses for their evidence.
Johnson told the court his only interest was in helping “the victims of the organised crime at Mirror Group”. He said his main source of employment was as a freelance journalist investigating tabloid tactics for his website Byline Investigates.
Earlier in the day, the court heard evidence from a retired police officer, Derek Haslam, who said he went undercover at the private investigation firm Southern Investigations in an attempt to find out who murdered its former employee Daniel Morgan.
Haslam said that while undercover he had heard the private investigator Jonathan Rees brag about his illegal work for newspapers include the Daily Mirror. Rees allegedly boasted that he could “get the queen’s medical records”, had access to the police national computer, and employed a corrupt BT engineer who stole a disc containing all the royal family’s private phone numbers.
The trial continues.
