Rupert Murdoch’s surprise takedown of Tucker Carlson three days ago reminded me of my favorite Rupert story, about a newspaper story in which I played a role.
The year was 1994. I was living in Washington D.C. though I kept a second home in Monaco, where I had lived full-time in the late 1980s and where I spent most summers.
Mike Powers, an American fixture in Monaco and close friend of Prince Albert, was very upset with Joel Douglas—son of Kirk, brother of Michael—who had, three years earlier, hurriedly (and quietly) relocated from Hollywood to the principality after his business partner, Jon Emr, was shot to death (along with his son) while their car was idling at an intersection in Los Angeles.
Joel and his partner in LA had allegedly been hustling investors in a scam familiar to Hollywood: Raise a lot of money for a movie that never gets made while living high off the money and trying to raise additional funds. When no movie materializes, there is a shrug of shoulders and this explanation: Sorry, your money’s gone, that’s Hollywood for you.
After laying low in Monaco for a time, Joel apparently couldn’t help himself from getting up to his old tricks. And so, cashing in on his family’s name, he offered to co-produce a movie based on a cockamamie treatment about a softball game in Monaco featuring Prince Albert and U.S. Navy sailors, whose ships would occasionally anchor off the principality’s coast.
As Mike Powers told it, he and Joel raised significant key money, which Joel allegedly ran through on first-class airfares to and from LA, luxury hotels and expensive meals.
The money was soon gone with nothing to show for it and the movie project collapsed. Investors were blaming Powers, which left him with egg on his face—and embarrassing his friend, the Prince.
NEWS OF THE WORLD
After researching Joel Douglas and discovering his allegedly shady dealings in LA (along with the murder of his business partner), I took the story to Stuart Kuttner, then executive editor of Rupert Murdoch’s high circulation Sunday tabloid News of the World in London.
Kuttner, who doubled as investigations editor, assigned the story to Roger Insall, a veteran investigative reporter who, like me, specialized in undercover ruses. (We already knew one another from working for Laurie Manifold, the legendary investigations editor at The Sunday People.)
Insall flew to Washington in early March 1994 and we huddled over the best way for him to penetrate Joel Douglas’s orbit.
Some context: Through Mike Powers I possessed Joel Douglas’s contact details. And I had actually run into Douglas at Nice-Cote d’Azur airport, where, having already heard Powers’ complaints, feigned an interest in his Monaco softball game movie. I told Joel I had friends interested in investing and he engaged the notion, presumably believing he could sucker my friends for funds even though he knew full well the project was already dead.
Thus: Roger Insall and I agreed that he should phone Joel posing as a wealthy investor and drop my name.
It worked like a charm. Insall found Douglas in Malta, where he was scouting locations as a production assistant on an upcoming movie shoot for his brother Michael. Douglas invited Insall to come visit him there.
A week later, the two of them met in Malta. Insall was accompanied by a photographer posing as a second would-be investor.
On board a houseboat, Douglas took Insall through what, by then, was a fictitious film project—and made his fraudulent pitch for investment, which the reporter secretly recorded.
Gotcha!
Then the story got even better.
To celebrate their supposed business relationship, Joel produced a baggie of cocaine and laid out lines for everyone present. The importation and use of cocaine in Malta is highly illegal and offenders, if caught, are heavily fined and imprisoned.
So what was supposed to be an exposé about a member of the famous Douglas family attempting to defraud a potential investor on a movie deal turned into the tabloid’s favorite kind of scoop: Celebrities doing illegal drugs.
Insall could not believe his good fortune. He phoned me bubbling over with pride and joy at the duad of exposés he now had in his possession. He then returned to London to write it all up.
Stuart Kuttner confirmed to me it was a “cracker of a story” and would appear in News of the World the following Sunday.
But that’s not what happened.
In Washington I managed to get hold of the paper at an international newsstand.
No Joel Douglas story.
On Tuesday morning I phoned Kuttner (Sunday newspaper staff take Monday off) and asked why the story did not appear, thinking maybe it had been held over until the following weekend for legal reasons or lack of space.
“It was in,” said Kuttner defensively, adding that, as usual, he had helped put the paper to bed on Saturday evening and had, himself, seen it typeset. “Wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said.
“Really?” replied Kuttner, genuinely bewildered. “That’s odd.”
SPIKED!
Here is what presumably happened:
On Saturday evenings before going to press, Rupert Murdoch routinely reads through all copy. He came across the piece exposing Joel Douglas.
And removed it at the last minute.
Or, as they say in the newspaper biz, spiked.
And just so he could avoid the accusation of “editorial interference,” Murdoch would have gone directly to sub-editors who worked late into the evening (thus bypassing both the newspaper’s editor and Stuart Kuttner) and ordered them to quietly eliminate the offending story.
Now, you may ask, why would Rupert Murdoch spike a story exposing Joel Douglas for attempted fraud and cocaine use? After all, that kind of exposé was News of the World’s stock in trade.
Answer: In 1985, Murdoch purchased the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation. One of the biggest stars of Twentieth Century Fox movies (Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile, War of the Roses) was none other than Joel’s brother, Michael Douglas.
Rupert, who also owns HarperCollins book publishers, around the same time cancelled a book by author Rod Lurie about Jon Emr due to several passages that referred to Emr’s partnership with Joel Douglas.
And that is why corporate-newsmedia-entertainment conglomerates cannot be trusted with objective, truthful journalism.
NEWS OF THE WORLD’S DEMISE
Speaking of News of the World and Stuart Kuttner:
Soon after I evolved from investigative journalism into private-sector intelligence in 1990 I went to see Stuart Kuttner (whom I’d first met in 1980 when I sold investigative stories to Fleet Street newspapers) and pitched him an innovative idea: Why not use private investigators in place of journalists to acquire sensitive information?
Kuttner apparently ran with my idea, albeit (fortunately) without me.
Fifteen years later, Kuttner’s use of private eyes to hack into the voicemail accounts of celebrities and British royalty would result in multiple arrests and successful prosecutions—including his own.
As a result of that debacle, Rupert Murdoch ordered the termination of News of the World.
Its final edition was printed on July 10, 2011.