“That Arab caper you and Roger pulled off was fantastic. You can claim for the outfit on expenses, and hang onto it. It’ll come in useful again.”
Those were the words uttered by Laurie Manifold, Mazher Mahmood's boss at the Sunday People newspaper, after Mahmood and a colleague, Roger Insall, had exposed the nefarious goings on at a hotel next to the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, where Britain's defunct International Motor Show was being held. The year was 1984. Mahmood was a 21-year-old Pakistani with a Birmingham accent, who also happened to be a quick-thinking freelance investigative journalist, better known as "The Fake Sheikh" or "The King of the Sting". He has since become feared, admired and loathed in equal measure all over the world.
For decades, Mahmood has been exposing famous personalities, politicians, royalty, doctors, high-court judges, police officers, paedophiles and low-life criminals for what they really are, to the delight of millions of readers of the since-closed News of the World. Death threats are one of his life's constant features, but he has seemingly carried on unwaveringly, although not always while wearing the "robes" he bought "for a tenner" at the back of an Islamic book store in Coventry Road just hours before commencing his first undercover "sting" as the alter-ego that gave him his famous nickname.
However, on July 21 this year, the trial of the R&B singer-songwriter and former X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos collapsed. She was being tried on drugs charges after one of Mahmood's infamous operations (this time posing as a Bollywood producer). But during the trial, Contostavlos's defence lawyer accused Mahmood of being actively duplicitous, summoning one of his former colleagues who told the court he had previously helped him "make up stories for the newspaper". The trial judge had seen and heard enough to suspect that Mahmood had lied while giving evidence and called a halt to proceedings.
Suddenly the tables had turned: The Fake Sheikh was the one being scrutinised – and that hasn't let up since. The BBC was, on Monday this week, due to screen an episode of its current-affairs programme Panorama that purported to expose the truth surrounding Mahmood's current visual identity (a closely guarded secret, for obvious reasons), as well as the alleged coercion he uses to get his "victims" to do things they otherwise wouldn't, sometimes landing them in prison.
Mahmood tried to get the courts to stifle the BBC, particularly with regards to his visual identity, claiming that if anyone knew what he looked like then his life would be endangered. He failed and, in a desperate bid to keep the programme from airing, his lawyers supplied "evidence" that supposedly contradicted some of what one of Panorama's interviewees had gone on record to say. Mahmood managed a stay of execution, as the BBC reluctantly shelved the broadcast just 90 minutes before it was due to be shown.
Exactly 48 hours later, on Wednesday night, however, the BBC once again changed its scheduling and went ahead with the broadcast, while Mahmood told anyone prepared to listen that the only people who complained about his methods were those he exposed or former, disgruntled colleagues with axes to grind. The programme turned out to be a classic “hatchet job”, potentially ruining the man who has ruined so many.
In July, he was suspended at The Sun on Sunday newspaper (basically a reborn News of the World), following the collapse of the Contostavlos trial, so this latest debacle will make doubly certain that Mahmood looks back on 2014 as his own personal annus horribilis. He has, by his own account, infiltrated the Taliban, been shot at by Albanian thugs, cursed by an African witch and even run over by an enraged vicar, but Wednesday's broadcast of this Panorama programme will undoubtedly have been his toughest day at work.
These kinds of allegations are hardly new. Eight years ago, writing in The Independent, Roy Greenslade, a professor of journalism and a former editor of the Daily Mirror, was vitriolic in his assessment of The Fake Sheikh's practices. "I want to put an end to his regular use of subterfuge, the most controversial weapon in journalism's armoury," said Greenslade. "I want him to mothball the fake sheikh's robes. And I want his paper, the News of the World, to take a long, hard look at its journalistic ethics and to reconsider its editorial agenda.
“The reason is straightforward: Mahmood’s methods debase journalism. They often amount to entrapment and, on occasion, appear to involve the use of agents provocateurs. People have been encouraged to commit crimes they would not otherwise have conceived.”
He didn’t say that everything Mahmood had done in his career had been questionable – indeed, the actual criminals who spent time behind bars as a result of his work undoubtedly deserved what they got. Hapless celebrities having their buttons pushed by someone they believe to be a wealthy Arab, however, are another matter. On the face of it, the worst thing many of these people did was show that greed clouded their judgement. How many of us could say that, offered millions, we wouldn’t do something out of character to seal the deal?
Nobody is currently in prison as a result of Mahmood's investigations, but it would appear that some of those who have spent time "at Her Majesty's pleasure" are now after blood. But, as Greenslade said in his Independent piece, Mahmood was not always this vilified. "I want Mahmood to clean up his act," he said, "to return to being the good reporter I know he once was. He may get fewer scoops, but they will surely be more worthwhile." Mahmood, we can surmise, wasn't listening.
His interest in journalism came from his parents. He started life in Small Heath, Birmingham, on March 22, 1963; the second of two boys born to Sultan and Shamim Mahmood, who had relocated from Pakistan to Britain in 1960. Sultan had pioneered the first Urdu-language newspaper in the United Kingdom and wanted his two sons to follow in his footsteps, just not for the tabloid press.
Mahmood claims that his "biggest blag had been gatecrashing into Fleet Street in the first place". At the end of the 1970s, after leaving school with a handful of O-Level exam results and zero experience, he was spurred on by rejection from Birmingham's Evening Mail newspaper when he applied for apprenticeships. "It was hugely disappointing," he said of that time, "and I felt that my ethnicity was working against me. But rejection was the best thing that could have happened to me."
A few months later, Mahmood had carved out a busy freelance career, writing for many of Britain’s most widely read newspapers, but his work took a left turn when he carried out his first major exposé for the News of the World. Using information he had gleaned over the dinner table in his family home, Mahmood had exposed the illegal trade of producing VHS video copies of films being screened at cinemas. This was in 1980, when such practices were considered shocking. More shocking to his father, however, was that one of the men collared as a result was a family friend and the son of a respected doctor.
Mahmood was surprised by his father's negative reaction. "While other Asian kids were choosing careers as doctors and engineers, my father pushed us towards a career in the media," he recalled in his autobiography, Confessions of a Fake Sheik (sic). "But he claimed my work at the News of the World had 'blackened the family name'. But the backlash only served to fuel my rebellious streak and strengthened my resolve to expose villains."
He has done that with gusto. Despite earlier misgivings, he found he was able to use his ethnicity to his advantage, gaining access to problem hotspots that white reporters couldn't get anywhere near. A year later, he was recruited to work as a staff reporter for The Sunday Times, which was followed by a three-year stint as a television producer. But hardline reporting was in his blood – in December 1991, he went to work full-time for the News of the World, taking his Fake Sheikh costume with him. His collection has grown significantly, but one has brought him more luck than any other, which he bought at a Dubai souq when he was here on holiday.
Love or loathe the tabloid press, there’s no denying its efficiency when it comes to exposing the wrongs perpetrated by those at the top of society. And nobody has done more to put their embarrassed mugs on the front of those career-destroying Sunday front pages than Mahmood. Perhaps if he’d just stuck to exposing genuine criminals, perverts and social menaces, he would have been hailed a hero rather than a disgrace to his profession. Nobody in his eyes, though, is above the law. Perhaps, in the end, he won’t be either.
khackett@thenational.ae
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