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Whatever the outcome of the civil trial between various claimants and Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the newspaper group behind the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, the legal claims shed light again on what former prime minister Gordon Brown called “the criminal media nexus” — a circle of dodgy journalists and corrupt police officers circulating around the hub of the private detective agency Southern Investigations.
These horrific murders may seem like ancient history, but they are at the centre of astonishing legal claims against the UK’s largest newspaper publisher and owner of one of the world’s most-read online news websites, which is currently bidding to increase its hold on the British media by buying the Telegraph group.
The Daniel Morgan Murder
The murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence took place six years apart, but only a few miles away from each other in south-east London. And they are connected by more than just geographical proximity.
Both murder investigations were stymied by the same cartel of corrupt police officers with gangland affiliations, and ready access to the British popular press.
Anyone who saw the recent TV drama The Hack, or has followed the podcast Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder that I hosted and produced with Deeivya Meir ten years ago, will understand the centrality of Southern Investigations to the spread of the dark arts of “unlawful information gathering” (UIG) after one of its founders, Daniel Morgan, was slain with an axe in the car park of a Sydenham pub in 1987.
After Daniel’s murder, his co-founder Jonathan Rees, and the man who took Daniel’s place, former “King of Catford” Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, went on to turn Southern Investigations into the hub of the dark arts — bribing police officers, hacking phones and computers, blagging financial and medical records, impersonation, surveillance and intimidation.
Press and Police Corruption: Mail Hearing Reveals More Connections between Murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence
Witness statements on behalf of the claimants against Associated News plunge us straight back into what Gordon Brown once described as the ‘criminal media nexus’
Peter Jukes
They trained some of Britain’s most feted journalists, like the “Fake Sheikh” Mazher Mahmood, who was convicted of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in 2016.
As well as billing for hundreds of thousands of pounds a year the now-shuttered News of the World, they worked for Piers Morgan’s Mirror Group and (as laid out in my book with Alastair Morgan, Who Killed Daniel Morgan?) claimed to work for other newspapers, including the Daily Mail.
Though Rees and Fillery were both arrested on suspicion of conspiracy in Daniel’s murder (Rees three times and Fillery twice), the multiple investigations finally came to a close at the Old Bailey in 2011 when the prosecution collapsed due to multiple flaws in disclosure. No further investigation was possible due to a quarter of a century of police corruption that made the evidence totally unreliable.
Technically, Daniel’s murder remains “unsolved”, but the details amassed by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, which reported in 2021, make it clear that the police are not looking for any further suspects.
Included in the panel report is a detailed account of how the original murder inquiry was stymied by the presence in the incident room, on the night before Rees and Fillery were arrested, of a former disgraced police officer, Jonathan Ross.
According to another police officer, Derek Haslam, who worked undercover for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) for nine years gathering information on Southern Investigations and its network of connections with corrupt police officers, journalists and the underworld, Ross was a “corrupt policeman” who specialised in “selling information to the Mail and othe…