For most legal professionals Mazher Mahmood — the former News of the World investigations editor — is a dim memory.  More than ten years ago he was caught lying on oath at the trial of the singer Tulisa Contostavlos.

It followed one of his celebrated “stings” where he “persuaded” her to obtain cocaine for him. Mahmood was eventually jailed for 15 months in 2016 and, after his release, he vanished from the public eye.

It might be suggested that Mahmood only made one mistake but a detailed examination of his career suggests otherwise.  For me and the media commentator Roy Greenslade, Mahmood was a career criminal who could — and should — have been brought to book decades earlier.

In a new biography we’ve charted the legal alarm bells that began ringing right at the start of his career — and continued to sound all the way up to his final demise.

“Rogue — The Rise And Fall of Mazher ‘Fake Sheikh’ Mahmood” tells the story of a man who was prepared to go to any lengths to see his victims go to prison.

We believe there is evidences that some of these convictions are unsafe and that the Criminal Cases Review whatever should look again at these cases.

Our book shows that

  • at least twelve criminal prosecutions, involving 20 individuals, collapsed after suspect evidence from Mahmood We use the words “at least” because we only know about some of these cases as a result of a single report in a local newspaper. In  one trial, there was no reporting at all and we only know about it because of confidential police records held by the News of the World.
  • eight judges including two lords justices, six crown court judges, and a stipendiary magistrate all criticised his role in these prosecutions.
  • Mahmood lied repeatedly about the number of convictions he’d secured. In the Leveson Inquiry he claimed the figure was over 250 only to be forced to admit that the actual figure was less than 100.
  • he lied to Lord Justice Leveson when he claimed that he’d left the Sunday Times in 1988 as a result of a “disagreement” only to be hauled back to confess that the real reason was “dishonesty”.

We know that the News of the World, Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service were aware that he was willing to lie on oath as early as 1994. During the discovery process in the phone hacking litigation a set of documents from the News of the World’s archive were disclosed. (Police sources tell us that these include confidential internal notes from Scotland Yard detectives. Just how the paper obtained them has never been explained.)

The documents tell how a trial based on a Mahmood “sting” collapsed after he lied in the witness box.  He had denied a defendant’s claim that Mahmood’s source had intimidated him. The next day detectives told the court that Mahmood had lied. Not only was his source the man the defendant said had threatened him, he was also an important police “supergrass”.

One of the ironies of Mahmood’s story that he would have got away with it if he had called it a day after the News of the World closed in 2011.  Two years before he was caught lying in the Tulisa Contostavlos case in 2014, I wrote to Rupert Murdoch’s New York headquarters and warned them that Mahmood was a “serial perjurer”. Although they spent £200m in supposedly cleaning up their. British newspaper stables, senior executives were not interested.  I received no reply.

Despite the obvious significance of our book, we’ve not been able to persuade any mainstream British company to publish it.  So we’ve had to do it ourselves. Roy Greenslade has launched a crowdfunder to help. He says:

“We believe that this is an important book, a textbook study of just how bad journalistic ethics at the Murdoch empire really were.  Right from the start when he betrayed his father, mother and brother he built a career on telling lies, making a mockery out of what journalism is supposed to stand for.”

I’ve written a longer article about the book on the Press Gang website.