It was a passion that John Ford first cultivated around the kitchen table as a child. He and others in his family were encouraged to try on different accents for fun; a gift for mimicry that set Ford on the path to becoming one of the masters of Fleet Street’s notorious “dark arts”.
He has now come forward for the first time to speak publicly about how he used his skill to obtain by deception the personal financial details of hundreds of targets, from cabinet ministers to publishers, businessmen and celebrities.
In an interview with the Guardian, this self-styled “Beckham of the blaggers” describes in detail his work between 1995 and 2010, the techniques and cons he developed. He worked for private investigators but his principal client, accounting for the bulk of his work, he says, was the Sunday Times.
He tricked call centre staff and company employees, typically using a fake identity, to obtain bank statements, mortgage records, utility bills and ex-directory numbers. He blagged unpublished autobiographies from publishers, emptied the bins of the powerful in pursuit of secrets.
At the time, he did not question the morality of what he was doing. He believed he was exposing stories in the public interest. He still feels pride over some of the stories he was involved in such as terrorism and political funding but is going public out of a sense of remorse over others. “I am ashamed,” he says.
“To my family, I was proudly referred to as John the journalist; the fact that I worked for the Sunday Times was a source of great kudos and respectability. But I was untrained, untutored and I was nothing more than a common thief, even though I tried to dignify my activities as artistry under the catch-all title of blagger,” says Ford, who was first introduced to the Guardian by Byline Media.
Source:
theguardian
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