In March 2010, the New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr called Scotland Yard to speak to its director of public affairs, Dick Fedorcio, and assistant commissioner John Yates, about phone-hacking.

He said he wanted to talk about how the case was concluded and maybe even write about their successful investigation. Absolutely not, they replied – not unless you provide fresh evidence of criminal wrong-doing in the case, they added.

He was stunned. “I’ve been a reporter now almost 25 years, and I’ve never had a police agency tell me that the ticket to getting an interview about a closed investigation, that they have proclaimed is successful, is if I come up with fresh evidence of criminal wrong-doing.”

And so began the article that ruptured belief at the Met that the phone-hacking case was safely under wraps from further investigation.

Of course, Don Van Natta Jr (or @DVNJr as he is on Twitter) didn’t break the phone-hacking scandal – that accolade goes to the Guardian’s Nick Davies, who he is full of praise for. But when the NY Times Magazine published the piece in Sept. 2010, ‘Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, And Beyond‘, it blew the whole investigation wide apart and raised deeply uncomfortable questions about Scotland Yard’s conduct itself.

It has a been a remarkable feature of the phone-hacking scandal that an American newspaper has driven so much of a mostly domestic story. I wanted to talk to DVNJr to get a sense of how the NYT’s reporters were able to get so many exclusives.

Transatlantic terrorism
The story starts slightly earlier however. In 2006, Van Natta was part of a team that published an explosive story on the transatlantic-terrorism-plot story, which was blocked to UK readers as it revealed inside information about the inquiry.

Around the same time, phone-hacking claimed its first public victims with the arrests of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman. he saw that Scotland Yard was distracted by concerns over terrorism and ignored the phone-hacking case.

“A light-bulb went off in my head,” he says. “I had a gut feeling that they could have done a much wider investigation.” He says the police could have moved the phone-hacking case to the serious crimes division. Instead, they sat on the evidence.

The NYT in London
Van Natta started his journalism career at the Maimi Herald and was hired by the New York Times at the age of 30. He has now been at the paper for over 17 years. He is no stranger to London, having lived here for years and reported for the paper in 2005 during the Olympics bid win and 7/7 terrorist attacks.

The newspaper has a London bureau with three journalists, headed by John Burns. The office is, ironically, a stone’s throw from Scotland Yard.

After arriving in London in March 2010 with two colleagues (Jo Becker and Graham Bowley), they worked on the story for three months straight, before going back before it was published.

He was back within a week of the Milly Dowler revelations and since then the NYT has been churning out a series of eye-popping stories that have kept the controversy going, including revelations that at least five top Met officers had their phones hacked too.

The nexus
“When I first got here, my goal was to find out as much as I could about why Scotland Yard did the investigation the way they did. And I had a gut feeling that they could have done a much wider investigation.”

He says the story encapsulated what every investigative reporter dreams of doing: exploring the nexus between the police, the press and politicians.

His team made multiple FOI requests specifically focusing on communication between News International and Scotland Yard, but they were repeatedly stone-walled.

“We had nothing but road-blocks all the way through. I was just lucky that in my time here I was able to develop a number of Scotland Yard sources who were not happy about the way the case had been handled,” says Van Natta.

“They [the Met] didn’t do a full catalogue of the initial look at all the evidence. They did not go through all the evidence – they did a very fast summation of what was there for the purposes of the criminal case against Mulcaire and Goodman.”

“I don’t think anyone would have looked at those ‘bin bags’, as John Yates called them (the dismissive reference to vital evidence angered many veterans, he says) until we did our story… They never knew precisely what was there – that is actually what the Sue Akers people are now doing.”

“We mentioned the ‘cosy ties’ [between NI executives and police chiefs] – and that was a fresh line of reporting that in hindsight was a big reason why [former Met Chief] John Yates and Scotland Yard decided to take a new look.”

Where it goes from here
Van Natta says more is to come. More claims against News International are very likely to be made, and some disclosures will be made in some of the existing cases.

“My understanding is that there are names of reporters on the upper-left hand corner, beyond Mulcaire and Goodman. If you just flip through those notebooks, you’ll see other names.”

So could the scandal spread to other tabloids? He has no doubt others were also doing the same thing.

But, he adds: “It’s going to be harder [with other tabloids] to prove because there’s not a big cache of evidence sitting in Scotland Yard that points to it.”

Reader comments

1. Liberal Conspiracy

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2. Liberal Conspiracy

   The NY Times reporter who scooped our press on phone-hacking http://bit.ly/q1dpGk

3. Herbert Pimlott

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4. sunny hundal

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5. pressreform

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9. sunny hundal

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10. Charles Edward Frith

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13. Margaret Hewitt

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