and finally...


When the light of day shines on grubby tales


Avoid journalists if you’re rich and crooked, advises Chris Proctor I


was tuned into a local radio station when the news broke that Robert Maxwell’s daughter was officially worse


than her dad. The presenter couldn’t keep


repeating the verdict – even if saying ‘guilty, guilty, guilty’ is a satisfactory way to pass an afternoon when you are talking about someone who has groomed and trafficked young people – so the producers had found a US legal expert to speculate about how long Ghislaine could spend in pokey. It sounded like a reverse auction


at first, starting with 40 and edging down to 20 if she told the absolute truth, which I suspect would be a unique experience for her family. There was a little bargaining with the presenter, who didn’t want to drop below 30 and, eventually, the pair settled on 35. “OK,” the presenter said. “We’ll finish there and head over to the newsroom for the rest of today’s top stories.” As he did, he pressed the fill-in music button. To my delight, Bob Marley took to the airwaves, urging, “Don’t worry about a thing/’Cause every little thing gonna be all right.” I just had time to hope Ms Maxwell


wasn’t listening to Radio Norfolk when a trailer came on for an interview with Virginia McKenna. Sure enough, the familiar strains of Born Free filled the airwaves. I like to think the producers were doing it on purpose, even if they didn’t follow it up with Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock. A week after Maxwell Minor began her sedentary decades, we were reporting the conviction of another


26 | theJournalist


woman. She was also guilty of major crime but, instead of being banged up, she was on her way back to her luxury home while her lawyers reached for their tomes on ‘How to put off a court decision for longer than Ghislaine Maxwell spends in jail’. This was Elizabeth Holmes, former head of Theranos, the Silicon Valley start-up she founded in 2003. Her business model was to take just


a few droplets of blood from the tip of a person’s finger, test it for a couple of hundred physical ailments and send a full health report to a mobile phone in 15 minutes. It was an excellent plan and did everything envisaged except actually work. The US media had loved her: she was


young, blonde and feted as the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire. Her face had appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes and the New York Times Style magazine. She was everybody’s friend,


including of former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz – and Rupert Murdoch. Holmes sidled up to Jerry Hall’s squeeze because she wanted to know the best way of keeping a story about Theranos out of the Murdoch- owned Wall Street Journal. She had heard that staffer John Carreyrou was on the point of revealing that the company was as kosher as a pig’s head stroganoff. Remarkably, Rupert refused to


intervene, saying he “trusted the paper’s editors to handle the matter fairly”. Unfortunately though for the $125 million that the Dirty Digger had invested in Theranos, the editors did handle it fairly – and exposed the


“ ”


entire enterprise as a complete scam. These two grubby stories were, I thought, encouraging. They showed that the guilty rich can end up in the dock – and even in the calaboose. To other aspiring criminals, I thought I’d offer a few words of friendly advice. The lesson to be learned from the Holmes case is that the best way to avoid jail is to steal a lot of money. Don’t hold back. If you pinch a few grand, like benefit claimant fraud, you’re up before the beak and behind bars in no time. A bloke from Walsall got six months for fraudulently claiming he’d fallen over a kerbstone. And, just before Christmas, the government found an additional £510 million to help ferret out benefit claim fraudsters. No expense is spared when it comes to hounding the poor. The more you steal, the better, is the


rule. You have a better chance of getting off.


The other advice I’d proffer is to keep


Holmes sidled up to Murdoch because she wanted to keep a story about Theranos out of the Wall Street Journal


out of the limelight. Keep a low profile. Avoid the media. If, for example, you are a dodgy procuress of young women, don’t be a pal of Donald Trump. And don’t show up to Prince Andrew’s daughter Beatrice’s 18th birthday with Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein in tow. The press will then naturally take a keen interest in you, which is the last thing any self-respecting child trafficker wants. Oh, and avoid journalists. We don’t like you and we’re delighted to turn you in. It’s one of the things that makes this job the best in the world.


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