Dubbed "The King of the Sting" or "The Fake Sheikh", Mazher Mahmood was a journalist who posed as a Middle-Eastern prince and exposed the rich and famous.
But it turned out that his methods and fact-checking weren't always as honest as he claimed...
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Mazher Mahmood.
[00:00:27] For years, few people knew his name, or even knew what he looked like.
[00:00:32] They knew him by another name, “The Fake Sheikh”, or “The King of The Sting”.
[00:00:38] See, Mahmood was an undercover journalist who pretended to be a rich Middle Eastern prince in order to trick famous people into doing things, or revealing information, they would later regret.
[00:00:52] For decades his stories would be splashed on the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers, revealing uncomfortable truths about the rich and the famous.
[00:01:02] His is an amazing story, but it would later be revealed that some of these uncomfortable truths weren’t quite as true as the public had been led to believe…
[00:01:14] Ok then, let's get right into it and talk about The Fake Sheikh.
[00:01:22] If you have ever played the British version of the game Monopoly, you’ll know that “Mayfair” is the most expensive property on the board.
[00:01:32] If you happen to land on Mayfair, you’ll pay a minimum of £200 in rent. If your opponent has a hotel, it’s £2,000, enough to bankrupt a player without a healthy bank balance.
[00:01:49] And one day in 2010, in real-life Mayfair, which is to this day the most expensive district of central London, two people were sitting across a glass table.
[00:02:01] One was Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, the now-disgraced younger brother of King Charles. She had been divorced from Prince Andrew for 14 years, but the two had remained close friends.
[00:02:17] Ferguson was drinking red wine, but she was by no means drunk.
[00:02:23] Across the table from her was a man who had been introduced to her as a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh, a prince, someone with deep pockets.
[00:02:34] The sheikh had money, and Ferguson had connections in the form of her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, who was not only in line to the throne, but also the UK special representative for trade and investment. Essentially this was a diplomatic position where he went around the world supposedly promoting the UK as a country to trade with and invest in.
[00:02:59] The pair got down to business.
[00:03:03] Ferguson offered the sheikh access to her husband, saying “Look after me and he'll look after you.”
[00:03:11] Or to translate this into even more plain English, do what I want and he will do what you want.
[00:03:20] And what did she want in exchange for this, in exchange for access to Prince Andrew?
[00:03:27] £400,000, which is around €700,000 in today’s money.
[00:03:34] The problem was, as you have probably guessed from the title of this episode, the sheikh wasn’t a sheikh. This wealthy Middle Eastern prince was a journalist called Mazher Mahmood. He was recording everything with a series of microphones and hidden cameras.
[00:03:53] And weeks later this would be front page news, disgracing Sarah Ferguson and understandably causing questions to be asked about Prince Andrew’s suitability for this diplomatic position.
[00:04:07] As it would later transpire, this would pale in comparison to some of the other accusations against Prince Andrew, but that’s a story for another day.
[00:04:17] Now, this time wasn’t the first, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, that this man, this fake sheikh, would expose and embarrass the rich and famous, and it was only one episode in a four-decade long career as an investigative journalist.
[00:04:36] So, who was this man, this fake sheikh, who did he expose, how did he do it, and what is he up to now?
[00:04:45] He was born in Birmingham in 1963. Both of his parents were journalists who had left their homeland of Pakistan to come and settle in Britain.
[00:04:56] His father had started the first Urdu-language newspaper in Britain, and had encouraged his son to follow in his footsteps.
[00:05:06] Mahmood was only too keen to follow.
[00:05:10] He left school with only a handful of qualifications, and found that breaking into journalism was hard.
[00:05:18] He knocked on doors, sent applications, but found rejection after rejection.
[00:05:24] He would later say that he felt his Pakistani ethnicity held him back in the white-dominated British newsrooms.
[00:05:33] In fact, it would be his Pakistani heritage that would go on to help him later on, allowing him to slip into his trademark Middle Eastern Sheikh disguise without arousing too much suspicion.
[00:05:46] He started as a freelancer, and got his big break with an investigation that would be a blueprint for everything else in his career: it exposed people, it was controversial, and it showed a clear disregard for any kind of personal consequences.
[00:06:05] This was in 1980, when he was only 18. He had learned from conversations with his family over the dinner table that there was a burgeoning trade in illegal videos in Birmingham, where people would make recordings of films that were out in the cinema, then these would be copied and sold, illegally, of course.
[00:06:27] He went undercover and wrote an expose, a story, about this, hitting publish despite knowing he was exposing the son of a close family friend who was involved in the pirate video operation.
[00:06:40] It would be the start of a career that would last four decades, and go on to expose people far better known than pirate video sellers in Birmingham.
[00:06:51] He worked for a variety of different British newspapers, from The Sunday Times to The Sunday People, but he would be most famously associated with a newspaper called The News of The World. If you remember our episodes on British tabloids from a few weeks back, yes this is the same disgraced newspaper that was revealed to have hacked people’s voicemails and was forced to shut down in 2011.
[00:07:17] He joined The News of The World full-time in 1991, and focussed exclusively on investigative journalism.
[00:07:27] And his journalism, his stories, went something like this: He would have a hypothesis, or a tip, that someone was up to something that they shouldn’t be. He would do everything he could to get close to that person and validate that hypothesis. He would record the entire conversation, without that person’s knowledge of course, and then it would be splashed on the front page of The News of The World.
[00:07:55] And vital for this was his disguise, his costume.
[00:08:00] Normally, he would wear flowing white robes, leading the subjects of his investigation to believe that he was a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh.
[00:08:10] He used these robes, it would later transpire, somewhat by accident. There wasn’t some grand plan, he bought them for ten pounds, the equivalent of 20 euros or so, behind an Islamic book store in Birmingham just hours before his first undercover operation.
[00:08:28] But they worked. He was clearly very convincing, people believed that he was who he said he was. He looked like a sheikh, he talked like a sheikh, and he seemed to spend money like a sheikh.
[00:08:42] Now you might think that he was helped by the fact that lots of the subjects of his investigations didn’t really know what a sheikh would look like or how one would talk, and wouldn’t be fooled.
[00:08:55] But, this wasn't always the case.
[00:08:59] Somewhat surprisingly, one of his most famous undercover stings, his investigations, was on Pakistani cricket players.
[00:09:09] This was in 2010, a few months after he had exposed Sarah Ferguson in that Mayfair apartment.
[00:09:17] Mahmood had received information that some of the Pakistani cricket team were accepting money to fix matches, to change the outcome of a cricket match.
[00:09:28] For this expose he didn’t actually pose as a sheikh, perhaps thinking it would be too obvious. Instead, he chose the disguise of a wealthy Indian businessman who was interested in bringing Pakistani cricketers to play in an Indian tournament.
[00:09:45] He managed to arrange a meeting with the players’ agent, in disguise of course. In this meeting the agent agreed to accept a bribe on behalf of his players, which required them to bowl bad balls, essentially to make mistakes, at specified points during a cricket match at London’s most prestigious cricket ground, Lord’s.
[00:10:09] The entire conversation was caught on film, and on Sunday, the 29th of August, 2010, the News of The World front cover had a picture of the cricketing agent with £150,000 in cash sitting in front of him on a coffee table.
[00:10:28] It was a huge story that rocked the cricketing world, and is to-date one of the biggest scandals in cricket history.
[00:10:38] In this case, Mahmood exposed corruption, he shone a light on dodgy dealings. One can criticise his methods, but the result was positive from a public interest point of view.
[00:10:52] This wasn’t always the case.
[00:10:56] Earlier on in his career, back in 2002, Mahmood had exposed a huge story.
[00:11:04] Again, plastered over the front page of The News of The World was the headline “POSH KIDNAP”, and the subheader “We stop crime of the century”.
[00:11:15] The story was that a gang was planning to kidnap Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham.
[00:11:22] The gang, so it was reported, had travelled to Italy to buy a special spray to knock her out, a safe house was earmarked, the gang was about to kidnap one of the country’s most famous pop stars and the wife of its most famous footballer.
[00:11:38] The police were tipped off, they were alerted by Mahmood with only three hours before the kidnap was scheduled to take place, and the criminals were arrested.
[00:11:49] Victoria Beckham had been saved, with a matter of hours to spare.
[00:11:54] It sounds like a great story.
[00:11:56] I mean, it was a great story.
[00:11:59] But the problem was that it simply wasn’t true. There was no plot, and the people arrested by the police would be released shortly after when it became clear that they were innocent.
[00:12:12] It would later be revealed that Mahmood’s information had been bought from a man who would be described as a “serial fantasist with a history of mental health problems. someone who simply invented stories to sell Mahmood in order to get paid.
[00:12:27] He had tried to sell Mahmood various different stories, which had been rejected. And it was only after he came to Mahmood with a story about Beckham that Mahmood accepted, without doing much in terms of due diligence or investigation about whether it was actually true.
[00:12:46] And this was one of the main criticisms of Mahmood, that he was quick to accept stories that fitted a narrative or angle he was looking for, but that he chose to ignore information that might get in the way of a good story.
[00:13:02] He was also criticised for double standards, of expecting people to accept something but not being prepared to accept it himself.
[00:13:12] This is most obvious when seeing his obsession with keeping his own identity secret while his entire career was based on exposing the inner secrets of others. There are very few photos of Mahmood that exist, and even within The News of The World’s offices, very few people knew who he was or what he looked like.
[00:13:35] Of course, keeping his identity secret was an important part of his job - if everyone knew what he looked like or how he talked, then his ability to pretend to be someone else would be seriously jeopardised. But there is still a clear contradiction between his need for the utmost privacy and the stories he built his career on.
[00:13:58] And the other main criticism was about the tactics he used. As you’ve heard, his entire methodology involved tricking people into believing that he was someone he wasn’t. He lied, and tricked. He would try to get people drunk, so that they would reveal truths they wouldn’t reveal when sober. He would pay people large amounts of money to get information, information that would be used to bring them down and in some cases, ruin their careers and result in jail sentences.
[00:14:33] And nowhere were his methods, and their consequences, better illustrated than the last example I want to talk about today.
[00:14:42] This was also The Fake Sheikh’s last story, or at least his last major investigation, and it would go on to cost him his job and career.
[00:14:53] This story wasn’t for The News of The World. That particular tabloid had been forced to shut down in 2011, but Mahmood had moved on to another tabloid newspaper, The Sun, which published similar stories.
[00:15:08] And by this point, in 2013, Mahmood was in his fourth decade of being The Fake Sheikh, he had been investigating and exposing people since 1980.
[00:15:20] He had well-honed techniques and methods, and they weren’t going to change.
[00:15:26] His target this time was a lady called Tulisa Contostavlos, a 25-year-old who had made her name with a hip-hop band called N-Dubz, but had gone on to be a judge on the talent show “X-Factor”.
[00:15:41] Tulisa was on top of the world, she was on one of the country’s most popular TV shows. Life was going well for her.
[00:15:49] Then, on Sunday, June the 2nd, 2013, slapped across the headline of The Sun on Sunday the words read: Tulisa’s cocaine deal shame.
[00:16:02] The article revealed that Tulisa had arranged to sell £800, about €1000, worth of cocaine to Mahmood.
[00:16:12] This was a serious allegation, that this celebrity TV judge was a drug dealer.
[00:16:19] It also didn't seem to make much sense. She was a celebrity, she was making huge amounts of money, why would she be selling a comparatively small amount of drugs?
[00:16:31] She was arrested shortly after, her houses were searched, and she was charged by the police.
[00:16:38] Clearly, being a cocaine dealer is a serious crime, but was there any truth to it?
[00:16:45] Well, as often with Mazher Mahmood, there was some truth to it, but plenty of elaboration and cherry picking of information.
[00:16:55] Mahmood had posed as a wealthy Bollywood film producer who wanted to take Tulisa to India and turn her into a star.
[00:17:05] He had flown her to Hollywood and Las Vegas before returning to London. They went for drinks at a London hotel, and Mahmood tried to get her as drunk as possible.
[00:17:17] Mahmood, of course posing still as this Bollywood producer, asks if Tulisa is able to arrange for someone to sell him cocaine. She was very drunk at this point, but she said she would try to arrange it.
[00:17:32] That evening, Mahmood’s long-time driver, a man called Alan Smith, drove Tulisa back to her house on the outskirts of London.
[00:17:42] Two weeks later a friend of Tulisa’s delivers the drugs to Mahmood at an upmarket London hotel, in exchange for £800, around €1,000.
[00:17:54] And the following Sunday the story was published, and Tulisa’s reputation as a family-friendly TV judge was in tatters, it was ruined.
[00:18:06] Now, what was problematic about this, and why was it the start of the end for “The Fake Sheikh”?
[00:18:13] Well, as part of the police investigation into the matter, the police talked to Mahmood and his driver, Alan Smith.
[00:18:22] Smith told the police that during the car journey back there had been a heated argument about drugs. Tulisa told Smith she never used them, and disapproved of people using drugs, because she had a family member with a drug problem.
[00:18:39] Smith told the police about this, but then later retracted this part from his statement, saying that it never happened.
[00:18:49] It later transpired that Mahmood had told him to remove it, as Tulisa disapproving of people using drugs would get in the way of Mahmood's story, that this young lady was a drug dealer.
[00:19:02] And this was a problem. Not just a problem, it was a crime. The crime was called conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Or in other words, trying to hide information from the police.
[00:19:18] There was a court trial, and the tables were turned. This time it was Mahmood that was in the dock, that was under investigation.
[00:19:28] He was found guilty, and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
[00:19:33] This was back in 2016, so he is now a free man, but is keeping a very low profile, hidden from the public eye.
[00:19:43] Now, this style of journalism, of extreme investigative journalism came under scrutiny during Mahmood’s trial.
[00:19:53] To quote the prosecution: “Over the last 25 years, innumerable lives have been ruined by the dishonest actions of Mazher Mahmood. People have lost their livelihoods, their homes and relationships, with some spending time in prison. When the public used to read ‘Fake Sheikh’ articles in British newspapers, they would know there was a criminal at the heart of the story. Until now, readers didn’t realise that the criminal was the ‘Fake Sheikh’ himself.” End quote.
[00:20:27] Now, it’s certainly true that Mahmood caused people’s reputations and in some cases lives to be ruined. We’ve only talked about a few of them today, but his subjects included football managers, other members of the royal family, TV and pop stars, and sports people.
[00:20:45] And it’s certainly true that Mahmood’s techniques were at best controversial, unorthodox and dishonest and at worst criminal.
[00:20:55] His story raises interesting and important questions about the nature of the public interest, and the right to people’s privacy.
[00:21:04] Do celebrities have the same right to privacy as everyone else, or does going on TV and making money from attention somehow open you up to greater scrutiny?
[00:21:15] Is it a good thing for investigative journalists to pry into the private lives of others and try to expose tendencies of bad, or even, criminal behaviour?
[00:21:25] Is it always a good thing, never or somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:29] Where should the line be drawn?
[00:21:33] Whatever your opinion on the rights and wrongs of the methods of Mazher Mahmood, his legacy is undeniable, and he most certainly deserves his nickname as The King of The Sting.
[00:21:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Rise And Fall of “The Fake Sheikh”.
[00:21:53] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] Do you think that celebrities and famous people deserve the same right to privacy as normal members of society?
[00:22:08] Do you think that sometimes these kinds of undercover methods are justified?
[00:22:13] Had you heard of this “Fake Sheikh” before?
[00:22:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:20] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Mazher Mahmood.
[00:00:27] For years, few people knew his name, or even knew what he looked like.
[00:00:32] They knew him by another name, “The Fake Sheikh”, or “The King of The Sting”.
[00:00:38] See, Mahmood was an undercover journalist who pretended to be a rich Middle Eastern prince in order to trick famous people into doing things, or revealing information, they would later regret.
[00:00:52] For decades his stories would be splashed on the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers, revealing uncomfortable truths about the rich and the famous.
[00:01:02] His is an amazing story, but it would later be revealed that some of these uncomfortable truths weren’t quite as true as the public had been led to believe…
[00:01:14] Ok then, let's get right into it and talk about The Fake Sheikh.
[00:01:22] If you have ever played the British version of the game Monopoly, you’ll know that “Mayfair” is the most expensive property on the board.
[00:01:32] If you happen to land on Mayfair, you’ll pay a minimum of £200 in rent. If your opponent has a hotel, it’s £2,000, enough to bankrupt a player without a healthy bank balance.
[00:01:49] And one day in 2010, in real-life Mayfair, which is to this day the most expensive district of central London, two people were sitting across a glass table.
[00:02:01] One was Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, the now-disgraced younger brother of King Charles. She had been divorced from Prince Andrew for 14 years, but the two had remained close friends.
[00:02:17] Ferguson was drinking red wine, but she was by no means drunk.
[00:02:23] Across the table from her was a man who had been introduced to her as a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh, a prince, someone with deep pockets.
[00:02:34] The sheikh had money, and Ferguson had connections in the form of her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, who was not only in line to the throne, but also the UK special representative for trade and investment. Essentially this was a diplomatic position where he went around the world supposedly promoting the UK as a country to trade with and invest in.
[00:02:59] The pair got down to business.
[00:03:03] Ferguson offered the sheikh access to her husband, saying “Look after me and he'll look after you.”
[00:03:11] Or to translate this into even more plain English, do what I want and he will do what you want.
[00:03:20] And what did she want in exchange for this, in exchange for access to Prince Andrew?
[00:03:27] £400,000, which is around €700,000 in today’s money.
[00:03:34] The problem was, as you have probably guessed from the title of this episode, the sheikh wasn’t a sheikh. This wealthy Middle Eastern prince was a journalist called Mazher Mahmood. He was recording everything with a series of microphones and hidden cameras.
[00:03:53] And weeks later this would be front page news, disgracing Sarah Ferguson and understandably causing questions to be asked about Prince Andrew’s suitability for this diplomatic position.
[00:04:07] As it would later transpire, this would pale in comparison to some of the other accusations against Prince Andrew, but that’s a story for another day.
[00:04:17] Now, this time wasn’t the first, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, that this man, this fake sheikh, would expose and embarrass the rich and famous, and it was only one episode in a four-decade long career as an investigative journalist.
[00:04:36] So, who was this man, this fake sheikh, who did he expose, how did he do it, and what is he up to now?
[00:04:45] He was born in Birmingham in 1963. Both of his parents were journalists who had left their homeland of Pakistan to come and settle in Britain.
[00:04:56] His father had started the first Urdu-language newspaper in Britain, and had encouraged his son to follow in his footsteps.
[00:05:06] Mahmood was only too keen to follow.
[00:05:10] He left school with only a handful of qualifications, and found that breaking into journalism was hard.
[00:05:18] He knocked on doors, sent applications, but found rejection after rejection.
[00:05:24] He would later say that he felt his Pakistani ethnicity held him back in the white-dominated British newsrooms.
[00:05:33] In fact, it would be his Pakistani heritage that would go on to help him later on, allowing him to slip into his trademark Middle Eastern Sheikh disguise without arousing too much suspicion.
[00:05:46] He started as a freelancer, and got his big break with an investigation that would be a blueprint for everything else in his career: it exposed people, it was controversial, and it showed a clear disregard for any kind of personal consequences.
[00:06:05] This was in 1980, when he was only 18. He had learned from conversations with his family over the dinner table that there was a burgeoning trade in illegal videos in Birmingham, where people would make recordings of films that were out in the cinema, then these would be copied and sold, illegally, of course.
[00:06:27] He went undercover and wrote an expose, a story, about this, hitting publish despite knowing he was exposing the son of a close family friend who was involved in the pirate video operation.
[00:06:40] It would be the start of a career that would last four decades, and go on to expose people far better known than pirate video sellers in Birmingham.
[00:06:51] He worked for a variety of different British newspapers, from The Sunday Times to The Sunday People, but he would be most famously associated with a newspaper called The News of The World. If you remember our episodes on British tabloids from a few weeks back, yes this is the same disgraced newspaper that was revealed to have hacked people’s voicemails and was forced to shut down in 2011.
[00:07:17] He joined The News of The World full-time in 1991, and focussed exclusively on investigative journalism.
[00:07:27] And his journalism, his stories, went something like this: He would have a hypothesis, or a tip, that someone was up to something that they shouldn’t be. He would do everything he could to get close to that person and validate that hypothesis. He would record the entire conversation, without that person’s knowledge of course, and then it would be splashed on the front page of The News of The World.
[00:07:55] And vital for this was his disguise, his costume.
[00:08:00] Normally, he would wear flowing white robes, leading the subjects of his investigation to believe that he was a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh.
[00:08:10] He used these robes, it would later transpire, somewhat by accident. There wasn’t some grand plan, he bought them for ten pounds, the equivalent of 20 euros or so, behind an Islamic book store in Birmingham just hours before his first undercover operation.
[00:08:28] But they worked. He was clearly very convincing, people believed that he was who he said he was. He looked like a sheikh, he talked like a sheikh, and he seemed to spend money like a sheikh.
[00:08:42] Now you might think that he was helped by the fact that lots of the subjects of his investigations didn’t really know what a sheikh would look like or how one would talk, and wouldn’t be fooled.
[00:08:55] But, this wasn't always the case.
[00:08:59] Somewhat surprisingly, one of his most famous undercover stings, his investigations, was on Pakistani cricket players.
[00:09:09] This was in 2010, a few months after he had exposed Sarah Ferguson in that Mayfair apartment.
[00:09:17] Mahmood had received information that some of the Pakistani cricket team were accepting money to fix matches, to change the outcome of a cricket match.
[00:09:28] For this expose he didn’t actually pose as a sheikh, perhaps thinking it would be too obvious. Instead, he chose the disguise of a wealthy Indian businessman who was interested in bringing Pakistani cricketers to play in an Indian tournament.
[00:09:45] He managed to arrange a meeting with the players’ agent, in disguise of course. In this meeting the agent agreed to accept a bribe on behalf of his players, which required them to bowl bad balls, essentially to make mistakes, at specified points during a cricket match at London’s most prestigious cricket ground, Lord’s.
[00:10:09] The entire conversation was caught on film, and on Sunday, the 29th of August, 2010, the News of The World front cover had a picture of the cricketing agent with £150,000 in cash sitting in front of him on a coffee table.
[00:10:28] It was a huge story that rocked the cricketing world, and is to-date one of the biggest scandals in cricket history.
[00:10:38] In this case, Mahmood exposed corruption, he shone a light on dodgy dealings. One can criticise his methods, but the result was positive from a public interest point of view.
[00:10:52] This wasn’t always the case.
[00:10:56] Earlier on in his career, back in 2002, Mahmood had exposed a huge story.
[00:11:04] Again, plastered over the front page of The News of The World was the headline “POSH KIDNAP”, and the subheader “We stop crime of the century”.
[00:11:15] The story was that a gang was planning to kidnap Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham.
[00:11:22] The gang, so it was reported, had travelled to Italy to buy a special spray to knock her out, a safe house was earmarked, the gang was about to kidnap one of the country’s most famous pop stars and the wife of its most famous footballer.
[00:11:38] The police were tipped off, they were alerted by Mahmood with only three hours before the kidnap was scheduled to take place, and the criminals were arrested.
[00:11:49] Victoria Beckham had been saved, with a matter of hours to spare.
[00:11:54] It sounds like a great story.
[00:11:56] I mean, it was a great story.
[00:11:59] But the problem was that it simply wasn’t true. There was no plot, and the people arrested by the police would be released shortly after when it became clear that they were innocent.
[00:12:12] It would later be revealed that Mahmood’s information had been bought from a man who would be described as a “serial fantasist with a history of mental health problems. someone who simply invented stories to sell Mahmood in order to get paid.
[00:12:27] He had tried to sell Mahmood various different stories, which had been rejected. And it was only after he came to Mahmood with a story about Beckham that Mahmood accepted, without doing much in terms of due diligence or investigation about whether it was actually true.
[00:12:46] And this was one of the main criticisms of Mahmood, that he was quick to accept stories that fitted a narrative or angle he was looking for, but that he chose to ignore information that might get in the way of a good story.
[00:13:02] He was also criticised for double standards, of expecting people to accept something but not being prepared to accept it himself.
[00:13:12] This is most obvious when seeing his obsession with keeping his own identity secret while his entire career was based on exposing the inner secrets of others. There are very few photos of Mahmood that exist, and even within The News of The World’s offices, very few people knew who he was or what he looked like.
[00:13:35] Of course, keeping his identity secret was an important part of his job - if everyone knew what he looked like or how he talked, then his ability to pretend to be someone else would be seriously jeopardised. But there is still a clear contradiction between his need for the utmost privacy and the stories he built his career on.
[00:13:58] And the other main criticism was about the tactics he used. As you’ve heard, his entire methodology involved tricking people into believing that he was someone he wasn’t. He lied, and tricked. He would try to get people drunk, so that they would reveal truths they wouldn’t reveal when sober. He would pay people large amounts of money to get information, information that would be used to bring them down and in some cases, ruin their careers and result in jail sentences.
[00:14:33] And nowhere were his methods, and their consequences, better illustrated than the last example I want to talk about today.
[00:14:42] This was also The Fake Sheikh’s last story, or at least his last major investigation, and it would go on to cost him his job and career.
[00:14:53] This story wasn’t for The News of The World. That particular tabloid had been forced to shut down in 2011, but Mahmood had moved on to another tabloid newspaper, The Sun, which published similar stories.
[00:15:08] And by this point, in 2013, Mahmood was in his fourth decade of being The Fake Sheikh, he had been investigating and exposing people since 1980.
[00:15:20] He had well-honed techniques and methods, and they weren’t going to change.
[00:15:26] His target this time was a lady called Tulisa Contostavlos, a 25-year-old who had made her name with a hip-hop band called N-Dubz, but had gone on to be a judge on the talent show “X-Factor”.
[00:15:41] Tulisa was on top of the world, she was on one of the country’s most popular TV shows. Life was going well for her.
[00:15:49] Then, on Sunday, June the 2nd, 2013, slapped across the headline of The Sun on Sunday the words read: Tulisa’s cocaine deal shame.
[00:16:02] The article revealed that Tulisa had arranged to sell £800, about €1000, worth of cocaine to Mahmood.
[00:16:12] This was a serious allegation, that this celebrity TV judge was a drug dealer.
[00:16:19] It also didn't seem to make much sense. She was a celebrity, she was making huge amounts of money, why would she be selling a comparatively small amount of drugs?
[00:16:31] She was arrested shortly after, her houses were searched, and she was charged by the police.
[00:16:38] Clearly, being a cocaine dealer is a serious crime, but was there any truth to it?
[00:16:45] Well, as often with Mazher Mahmood, there was some truth to it, but plenty of elaboration and cherry picking of information.
[00:16:55] Mahmood had posed as a wealthy Bollywood film producer who wanted to take Tulisa to India and turn her into a star.
[00:17:05] He had flown her to Hollywood and Las Vegas before returning to London. They went for drinks at a London hotel, and Mahmood tried to get her as drunk as possible.
[00:17:17] Mahmood, of course posing still as this Bollywood producer, asks if Tulisa is able to arrange for someone to sell him cocaine. She was very drunk at this point, but she said she would try to arrange it.
[00:17:32] That evening, Mahmood’s long-time driver, a man called Alan Smith, drove Tulisa back to her house on the outskirts of London.
[00:17:42] Two weeks later a friend of Tulisa’s delivers the drugs to Mahmood at an upmarket London hotel, in exchange for £800, around €1,000.
[00:17:54] And the following Sunday the story was published, and Tulisa’s reputation as a family-friendly TV judge was in tatters, it was ruined.
[00:18:06] Now, what was problematic about this, and why was it the start of the end for “The Fake Sheikh”?
[00:18:13] Well, as part of the police investigation into the matter, the police talked to Mahmood and his driver, Alan Smith.
[00:18:22] Smith told the police that during the car journey back there had been a heated argument about drugs. Tulisa told Smith she never used them, and disapproved of people using drugs, because she had a family member with a drug problem.
[00:18:39] Smith told the police about this, but then later retracted this part from his statement, saying that it never happened.
[00:18:49] It later transpired that Mahmood had told him to remove it, as Tulisa disapproving of people using drugs would get in the way of Mahmood's story, that this young lady was a drug dealer.
[00:19:02] And this was a problem. Not just a problem, it was a crime. The crime was called conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Or in other words, trying to hide information from the police.
[00:19:18] There was a court trial, and the tables were turned. This time it was Mahmood that was in the dock, that was under investigation.
[00:19:28] He was found guilty, and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
[00:19:33] This was back in 2016, so he is now a free man, but is keeping a very low profile, hidden from the public eye.
[00:19:43] Now, this style of journalism, of extreme investigative journalism came under scrutiny during Mahmood’s trial.
[00:19:53] To quote the prosecution: “Over the last 25 years, innumerable lives have been ruined by the dishonest actions of Mazher Mahmood. People have lost their livelihoods, their homes and relationships, with some spending time in prison. When the public used to read ‘Fake Sheikh’ articles in British newspapers, they would know there was a criminal at the heart of the story. Until now, readers didn’t realise that the criminal was the ‘Fake Sheikh’ himself.” End quote.
[00:20:27] Now, it’s certainly true that Mahmood caused people’s reputations and in some cases lives to be ruined. We’ve only talked about a few of them today, but his subjects included football managers, other members of the royal family, TV and pop stars, and sports people.
[00:20:45] And it’s certainly true that Mahmood’s techniques were at best controversial, unorthodox and dishonest and at worst criminal.
[00:20:55] His story raises interesting and important questions about the nature of the public interest, and the right to people’s privacy.
[00:21:04] Do celebrities have the same right to privacy as everyone else, or does going on TV and making money from attention somehow open you up to greater scrutiny?
[00:21:15] Is it a good thing for investigative journalists to pry into the private lives of others and try to expose tendencies of bad, or even, criminal behaviour?
[00:21:25] Is it always a good thing, never or somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:29] Where should the line be drawn?
[00:21:33] Whatever your opinion on the rights and wrongs of the methods of Mazher Mahmood, his legacy is undeniable, and he most certainly deserves his nickname as The King of The Sting.
[00:21:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Rise And Fall of “The Fake Sheikh”.
[00:21:53] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] Do you think that celebrities and famous people deserve the same right to privacy as normal members of society?
[00:22:08] Do you think that sometimes these kinds of undercover methods are justified?
[00:22:13] Had you heard of this “Fake Sheikh” before?
[00:22:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:20] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a man called Mazher Mahmood.
[00:00:27] For years, few people knew his name, or even knew what he looked like.
[00:00:32] They knew him by another name, “The Fake Sheikh”, or “The King of The Sting”.
[00:00:38] See, Mahmood was an undercover journalist who pretended to be a rich Middle Eastern prince in order to trick famous people into doing things, or revealing information, they would later regret.
[00:00:52] For decades his stories would be splashed on the front pages of the British tabloid newspapers, revealing uncomfortable truths about the rich and the famous.
[00:01:02] His is an amazing story, but it would later be revealed that some of these uncomfortable truths weren’t quite as true as the public had been led to believe…
[00:01:14] Ok then, let's get right into it and talk about The Fake Sheikh.
[00:01:22] If you have ever played the British version of the game Monopoly, you’ll know that “Mayfair” is the most expensive property on the board.
[00:01:32] If you happen to land on Mayfair, you’ll pay a minimum of £200 in rent. If your opponent has a hotel, it’s £2,000, enough to bankrupt a player without a healthy bank balance.
[00:01:49] And one day in 2010, in real-life Mayfair, which is to this day the most expensive district of central London, two people were sitting across a glass table.
[00:02:01] One was Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Prince Andrew, the now-disgraced younger brother of King Charles. She had been divorced from Prince Andrew for 14 years, but the two had remained close friends.
[00:02:17] Ferguson was drinking red wine, but she was by no means drunk.
[00:02:23] Across the table from her was a man who had been introduced to her as a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh, a prince, someone with deep pockets.
[00:02:34] The sheikh had money, and Ferguson had connections in the form of her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, who was not only in line to the throne, but also the UK special representative for trade and investment. Essentially this was a diplomatic position where he went around the world supposedly promoting the UK as a country to trade with and invest in.
[00:02:59] The pair got down to business.
[00:03:03] Ferguson offered the sheikh access to her husband, saying “Look after me and he'll look after you.”
[00:03:11] Or to translate this into even more plain English, do what I want and he will do what you want.
[00:03:20] And what did she want in exchange for this, in exchange for access to Prince Andrew?
[00:03:27] £400,000, which is around €700,000 in today’s money.
[00:03:34] The problem was, as you have probably guessed from the title of this episode, the sheikh wasn’t a sheikh. This wealthy Middle Eastern prince was a journalist called Mazher Mahmood. He was recording everything with a series of microphones and hidden cameras.
[00:03:53] And weeks later this would be front page news, disgracing Sarah Ferguson and understandably causing questions to be asked about Prince Andrew’s suitability for this diplomatic position.
[00:04:07] As it would later transpire, this would pale in comparison to some of the other accusations against Prince Andrew, but that’s a story for another day.
[00:04:17] Now, this time wasn’t the first, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, that this man, this fake sheikh, would expose and embarrass the rich and famous, and it was only one episode in a four-decade long career as an investigative journalist.
[00:04:36] So, who was this man, this fake sheikh, who did he expose, how did he do it, and what is he up to now?
[00:04:45] He was born in Birmingham in 1963. Both of his parents were journalists who had left their homeland of Pakistan to come and settle in Britain.
[00:04:56] His father had started the first Urdu-language newspaper in Britain, and had encouraged his son to follow in his footsteps.
[00:05:06] Mahmood was only too keen to follow.
[00:05:10] He left school with only a handful of qualifications, and found that breaking into journalism was hard.
[00:05:18] He knocked on doors, sent applications, but found rejection after rejection.
[00:05:24] He would later say that he felt his Pakistani ethnicity held him back in the white-dominated British newsrooms.
[00:05:33] In fact, it would be his Pakistani heritage that would go on to help him later on, allowing him to slip into his trademark Middle Eastern Sheikh disguise without arousing too much suspicion.
[00:05:46] He started as a freelancer, and got his big break with an investigation that would be a blueprint for everything else in his career: it exposed people, it was controversial, and it showed a clear disregard for any kind of personal consequences.
[00:06:05] This was in 1980, when he was only 18. He had learned from conversations with his family over the dinner table that there was a burgeoning trade in illegal videos in Birmingham, where people would make recordings of films that were out in the cinema, then these would be copied and sold, illegally, of course.
[00:06:27] He went undercover and wrote an expose, a story, about this, hitting publish despite knowing he was exposing the son of a close family friend who was involved in the pirate video operation.
[00:06:40] It would be the start of a career that would last four decades, and go on to expose people far better known than pirate video sellers in Birmingham.
[00:06:51] He worked for a variety of different British newspapers, from The Sunday Times to The Sunday People, but he would be most famously associated with a newspaper called The News of The World. If you remember our episodes on British tabloids from a few weeks back, yes this is the same disgraced newspaper that was revealed to have hacked people’s voicemails and was forced to shut down in 2011.
[00:07:17] He joined The News of The World full-time in 1991, and focussed exclusively on investigative journalism.
[00:07:27] And his journalism, his stories, went something like this: He would have a hypothesis, or a tip, that someone was up to something that they shouldn’t be. He would do everything he could to get close to that person and validate that hypothesis. He would record the entire conversation, without that person’s knowledge of course, and then it would be splashed on the front page of The News of The World.
[00:07:55] And vital for this was his disguise, his costume.
[00:08:00] Normally, he would wear flowing white robes, leading the subjects of his investigation to believe that he was a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheikh.
[00:08:10] He used these robes, it would later transpire, somewhat by accident. There wasn’t some grand plan, he bought them for ten pounds, the equivalent of 20 euros or so, behind an Islamic book store in Birmingham just hours before his first undercover operation.
[00:08:28] But they worked. He was clearly very convincing, people believed that he was who he said he was. He looked like a sheikh, he talked like a sheikh, and he seemed to spend money like a sheikh.
[00:08:42] Now you might think that he was helped by the fact that lots of the subjects of his investigations didn’t really know what a sheikh would look like or how one would talk, and wouldn’t be fooled.
[00:08:55] But, this wasn't always the case.
[00:08:59] Somewhat surprisingly, one of his most famous undercover stings, his investigations, was on Pakistani cricket players.
[00:09:09] This was in 2010, a few months after he had exposed Sarah Ferguson in that Mayfair apartment.
[00:09:17] Mahmood had received information that some of the Pakistani cricket team were accepting money to fix matches, to change the outcome of a cricket match.
[00:09:28] For this expose he didn’t actually pose as a sheikh, perhaps thinking it would be too obvious. Instead, he chose the disguise of a wealthy Indian businessman who was interested in bringing Pakistani cricketers to play in an Indian tournament.
[00:09:45] He managed to arrange a meeting with the players’ agent, in disguise of course. In this meeting the agent agreed to accept a bribe on behalf of his players, which required them to bowl bad balls, essentially to make mistakes, at specified points during a cricket match at London’s most prestigious cricket ground, Lord’s.
[00:10:09] The entire conversation was caught on film, and on Sunday, the 29th of August, 2010, the News of The World front cover had a picture of the cricketing agent with £150,000 in cash sitting in front of him on a coffee table.
[00:10:28] It was a huge story that rocked the cricketing world, and is to-date one of the biggest scandals in cricket history.
[00:10:38] In this case, Mahmood exposed corruption, he shone a light on dodgy dealings. One can criticise his methods, but the result was positive from a public interest point of view.
[00:10:52] This wasn’t always the case.
[00:10:56] Earlier on in his career, back in 2002, Mahmood had exposed a huge story.
[00:11:04] Again, plastered over the front page of The News of The World was the headline “POSH KIDNAP”, and the subheader “We stop crime of the century”.
[00:11:15] The story was that a gang was planning to kidnap Posh Spice, Victoria Beckham.
[00:11:22] The gang, so it was reported, had travelled to Italy to buy a special spray to knock her out, a safe house was earmarked, the gang was about to kidnap one of the country’s most famous pop stars and the wife of its most famous footballer.
[00:11:38] The police were tipped off, they were alerted by Mahmood with only three hours before the kidnap was scheduled to take place, and the criminals were arrested.
[00:11:49] Victoria Beckham had been saved, with a matter of hours to spare.
[00:11:54] It sounds like a great story.
[00:11:56] I mean, it was a great story.
[00:11:59] But the problem was that it simply wasn’t true. There was no plot, and the people arrested by the police would be released shortly after when it became clear that they were innocent.
[00:12:12] It would later be revealed that Mahmood’s information had been bought from a man who would be described as a “serial fantasist with a history of mental health problems. someone who simply invented stories to sell Mahmood in order to get paid.
[00:12:27] He had tried to sell Mahmood various different stories, which had been rejected. And it was only after he came to Mahmood with a story about Beckham that Mahmood accepted, without doing much in terms of due diligence or investigation about whether it was actually true.
[00:12:46] And this was one of the main criticisms of Mahmood, that he was quick to accept stories that fitted a narrative or angle he was looking for, but that he chose to ignore information that might get in the way of a good story.
[00:13:02] He was also criticised for double standards, of expecting people to accept something but not being prepared to accept it himself.
[00:13:12] This is most obvious when seeing his obsession with keeping his own identity secret while his entire career was based on exposing the inner secrets of others. There are very few photos of Mahmood that exist, and even within The News of The World’s offices, very few people knew who he was or what he looked like.
[00:13:35] Of course, keeping his identity secret was an important part of his job - if everyone knew what he looked like or how he talked, then his ability to pretend to be someone else would be seriously jeopardised. But there is still a clear contradiction between his need for the utmost privacy and the stories he built his career on.
[00:13:58] And the other main criticism was about the tactics he used. As you’ve heard, his entire methodology involved tricking people into believing that he was someone he wasn’t. He lied, and tricked. He would try to get people drunk, so that they would reveal truths they wouldn’t reveal when sober. He would pay people large amounts of money to get information, information that would be used to bring them down and in some cases, ruin their careers and result in jail sentences.
[00:14:33] And nowhere were his methods, and their consequences, better illustrated than the last example I want to talk about today.
[00:14:42] This was also The Fake Sheikh’s last story, or at least his last major investigation, and it would go on to cost him his job and career.
[00:14:53] This story wasn’t for The News of The World. That particular tabloid had been forced to shut down in 2011, but Mahmood had moved on to another tabloid newspaper, The Sun, which published similar stories.
[00:15:08] And by this point, in 2013, Mahmood was in his fourth decade of being The Fake Sheikh, he had been investigating and exposing people since 1980.
[00:15:20] He had well-honed techniques and methods, and they weren’t going to change.
[00:15:26] His target this time was a lady called Tulisa Contostavlos, a 25-year-old who had made her name with a hip-hop band called N-Dubz, but had gone on to be a judge on the talent show “X-Factor”.
[00:15:41] Tulisa was on top of the world, she was on one of the country’s most popular TV shows. Life was going well for her.
[00:15:49] Then, on Sunday, June the 2nd, 2013, slapped across the headline of The Sun on Sunday the words read: Tulisa’s cocaine deal shame.
[00:16:02] The article revealed that Tulisa had arranged to sell £800, about €1000, worth of cocaine to Mahmood.
[00:16:12] This was a serious allegation, that this celebrity TV judge was a drug dealer.
[00:16:19] It also didn't seem to make much sense. She was a celebrity, she was making huge amounts of money, why would she be selling a comparatively small amount of drugs?
[00:16:31] She was arrested shortly after, her houses were searched, and she was charged by the police.
[00:16:38] Clearly, being a cocaine dealer is a serious crime, but was there any truth to it?
[00:16:45] Well, as often with Mazher Mahmood, there was some truth to it, but plenty of elaboration and cherry picking of information.
[00:16:55] Mahmood had posed as a wealthy Bollywood film producer who wanted to take Tulisa to India and turn her into a star.
[00:17:05] He had flown her to Hollywood and Las Vegas before returning to London. They went for drinks at a London hotel, and Mahmood tried to get her as drunk as possible.
[00:17:17] Mahmood, of course posing still as this Bollywood producer, asks if Tulisa is able to arrange for someone to sell him cocaine. She was very drunk at this point, but she said she would try to arrange it.
[00:17:32] That evening, Mahmood’s long-time driver, a man called Alan Smith, drove Tulisa back to her house on the outskirts of London.
[00:17:42] Two weeks later a friend of Tulisa’s delivers the drugs to Mahmood at an upmarket London hotel, in exchange for £800, around €1,000.
[00:17:54] And the following Sunday the story was published, and Tulisa’s reputation as a family-friendly TV judge was in tatters, it was ruined.
[00:18:06] Now, what was problematic about this, and why was it the start of the end for “The Fake Sheikh”?
[00:18:13] Well, as part of the police investigation into the matter, the police talked to Mahmood and his driver, Alan Smith.
[00:18:22] Smith told the police that during the car journey back there had been a heated argument about drugs. Tulisa told Smith she never used them, and disapproved of people using drugs, because she had a family member with a drug problem.
[00:18:39] Smith told the police about this, but then later retracted this part from his statement, saying that it never happened.
[00:18:49] It later transpired that Mahmood had told him to remove it, as Tulisa disapproving of people using drugs would get in the way of Mahmood's story, that this young lady was a drug dealer.
[00:19:02] And this was a problem. Not just a problem, it was a crime. The crime was called conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Or in other words, trying to hide information from the police.
[00:19:18] There was a court trial, and the tables were turned. This time it was Mahmood that was in the dock, that was under investigation.
[00:19:28] He was found guilty, and sentenced to 15 months in prison.
[00:19:33] This was back in 2016, so he is now a free man, but is keeping a very low profile, hidden from the public eye.
[00:19:43] Now, this style of journalism, of extreme investigative journalism came under scrutiny during Mahmood’s trial.
[00:19:53] To quote the prosecution: “Over the last 25 years, innumerable lives have been ruined by the dishonest actions of Mazher Mahmood. People have lost their livelihoods, their homes and relationships, with some spending time in prison. When the public used to read ‘Fake Sheikh’ articles in British newspapers, they would know there was a criminal at the heart of the story. Until now, readers didn’t realise that the criminal was the ‘Fake Sheikh’ himself.” End quote.
[00:20:27] Now, it’s certainly true that Mahmood caused people’s reputations and in some cases lives to be ruined. We’ve only talked about a few of them today, but his subjects included football managers, other members of the royal family, TV and pop stars, and sports people.
[00:20:45] And it’s certainly true that Mahmood’s techniques were at best controversial, unorthodox and dishonest and at worst criminal.
[00:20:55] His story raises interesting and important questions about the nature of the public interest, and the right to people’s privacy.
[00:21:04] Do celebrities have the same right to privacy as everyone else, or does going on TV and making money from attention somehow open you up to greater scrutiny?
[00:21:15] Is it a good thing for investigative journalists to pry into the private lives of others and try to expose tendencies of bad, or even, criminal behaviour?
[00:21:25] Is it always a good thing, never or somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:29] Where should the line be drawn?
[00:21:33] Whatever your opinion on the rights and wrongs of the methods of Mazher Mahmood, his legacy is undeniable, and he most certainly deserves his nickname as The King of The Sting.
[00:21:47] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Rise And Fall of “The Fake Sheikh”.
[00:21:53] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:57] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:01] Do you think that celebrities and famous people deserve the same right to privacy as normal members of society?
[00:22:08] Do you think that sometimes these kinds of undercover methods are justified?
[00:22:13] Had you heard of this “Fake Sheikh” before?
[00:22:16] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:20] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:22:29] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:22:34] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
