FROM DRUG BARONS TO ROYALS — HOW HE SNARED HIS PREY
TRANSFORMING Mazher Mahmood into the legendary ‘Fake Sheikh’ – who struck fear into a generation of royals, celebrities and crooks – cost exactly £10. That was the price he paid the owner of an Islamic bookstore in Birmingham for his first set of Arab robes, complete with a red-and-white checked headscarf and ‘ghutra’ or black ring, to hold it in place.
The year was 1984 and Mahmood, a 21-year-old freelance reporter, had been asked by the Sunday People newspaper to investigate a high- class vice ring rumoured to be operating out of the Metropole hotel near to the city’s NeC conference centre.
Figuring that a local Asian boy with a thick Brummie accent might struggle to infiltrate this turbo- charged world, he decided to pose as a wealthy Arab attending the NeC’s annual motor show.
From the moment he strolled into the Metropole’s lobby, the disguise worked a treat. ‘ The robes created an amazing impression on hotel staff and guests as I was virtually transformed into royalty,’ Mahmood later recalled.
‘The hotel manager personally checked me in, bypassing the guests waiting at reception. A bellboy and head porter eric Fisher escorted the Sheikh to his room.’ Over the ensuing hours, Fisher would usher a string of people to that room, including several upmarket prostitutes.
These transactions were chronicled on hidden recording equipment, before being reported in breathless detail by Mahmood in the following Sunday’s paper. Versions of this caper would play out countless times, over the three decades that followed, in hotels, yachts, helicopters and luxury villas across the world. Posing as the ‘Fake Sheikh’, or in other guises, Mahmood churned more than 500 newspaper exclusives, becoming one of Britain’s most famed journalists.
his undercover work exposed moneygrubbing royals, match-fixing sportsmen, drug- dealing celebrities and bedhopping politicians, often in spectacular fashion.
Yet there was a dark side to his oeuvre. And thanks to a deeply unedifying series of events – culminating in yesterday’s conviction at the Old Bailey – he ends his Fleet Street career in the gutter, a devious crook whose methods, in the words of Radio 2 presenter Jeremy Vine, represent a ‘taint’ on journalism.
Mahmood’s illegal attempt to alter evidence in the trial of X Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos provides grist to the mill of critics who claim a good portion of his work revolved around dishonest entrapment, with subjects coerced into wrongdoing.
Following the verdict, it was announced that 18 civil claims were being launched against Mahmood which could total £800 million.
It’s a spectacular fall for a man who, at the peak of his powers, earned a rumoured £250,000 a year and kept a storeroom at his London home dedicated to his alter ego.
THE room contained a dozen sets of robes, which he learned to call ‘jellabiya’, a range of loud Versace jackets, several bright shirts, white suits and fake diamond rings – along with a genuine £5,000 Rolex.
It helped that he surrounded himself with phoney manservants, including his co- defendant Alan Smith and a second cousin with diamond teeth called ‘Jaws’ who’d pose as a burly bodyguard.
Blinded by greed, the great and good committed countless indiscretions within sight of the ‘Sheikh’s’ hidden camera and microphones.
Princess Michael, who in 2005 tried to sell him a house, told him that Princess Diana had been a ‘bitter’ and ‘nasty’ woman whose husband was ‘jealous’ of her popularity.
Sophie Wessex, who in 2001 used royal connections to pitch for a fictitious contract for her PR firm with him, dubbed Cherie Blair ‘just horrid’, Tony Blair ‘far too presidential’ and called the Queen ‘the old dear’ in a scandal that killed off her commercial career. Sarah Ferguson attempted to sell access to Prince Andrew to the ‘Fake Sheikh’, for a cool £500,000.
Other scalps included those of Freddy Shepherd and Douglas hall, bosses of Newcastle United Football Club. having taken cocaine and visited a brothel in his company, the duo boasted of ripping off fans with replica kit before dubbing the women of their home city ‘dogs’.
That scoop, which saw the duo relieved of their duties, earned Mahmood the ‘reporter of the year’ award at the 1999 British Press Awards, the industry’s Oscars.
he won the same gong in 2011, following the ‘spot fixing’ scandal in which he persuaded several Pakistani cricketers to bowl ‘no balls’ at an agreed time in a one-day game at Lord’s, purportedly as part of a betting scam.
Mahmood also brought down a string of sex offenders, gangsters, people-smugglers and at least one would-be murderer, and claims to have been responsible for 260 successful prosecutions — although the actual figure is nearer 95.
Such work can be highly dangerous and falls into a grand tradition of crusading public interest journalism. Yet Mahmood often attracted vigorous criticism.
Some came from within the Asian community, home to his journalist parents Sultan (who died in 2005) and Shamim, who founded Mashriq, the UK’s first Urdu-language newspaper after coming to Birmingham from Pakistan in 1960.
To this end, it’s perhaps noteworthy that Mahmood began his Fleet Street career aged 17, selling a story to a Sunday paper about a video pirating ring run by a family friend.
Mahmood’s integrity was first called into doubt in the late 1980s when he was forced to quit the Sunday Times after being caught trying to alter computer records to escape censure for introducing a factual error into a story supplied by a news agency.
After three years working as a producer for David Frost on TV-AM, he joined the News of the World in 1991. his first investigation involved being smuggled into Britain in the back of a lorry from Belgium, alongside Turkish illegal migrants.
his next major hiccup occurred in 2003, with the collapse of the trial of five men he’d accused of plotting to kidnap Victoria Beckham.
The men, who’d spent seven months in jail on remand, were freed after it emerged that Mahmood’s main informant, Florim Gashi, had been paid £10,000 by the News of the World and could not be regarded as a reliable witness.
Three years later, another disaster: three men he’d accused of trying to buy a substance called ‘red mercury’ which they could have used to build a ‘dirty’ bomb, were also acquitted. Again it emerged that a key witness had been paid.
BY 2013, when Tulisa Contostavlos came into Mahmood’s sights, a number of developments had placed him under extreme pressure to claim a noteworthy scalp. The News of the World had collapsed two years earlier, rendering him unemployed. And there were ominous signs that celebrities were growing wise to his methods.
The police, previously allies and at times collaborators, were no longer inclined to be helpful towards the media. Meanwhile, he’d moved to the Sun on Sunday, where he needed to justify his weighty salary.
Mahmood, 53, faces several years in prison, away from his wife, children and family home in Purley, South London.
Several of Mahmood’s former targets will say that with this shoddy end to his Fleet Street career, justice has finally been done.
They are doubtless right. Yet nothing can hide an awkward truth: that many a corrupt and venal politician, match-fixing athlete, bung-taking footballer, drug dealer and crime boss will also be celebrating the ‘Fake Sheikh’s’ demise.