Mazher Mahmood is set to spend seven or so months in jail and some will say justice has been done. In fact, it is only a partial justice.
As he starts his 15-month sentence, deeper questions should now be asked of an employer that enabled him to wreck so many people’s lives.
News International (since rebranded as News UK) spent years ignoring every warning sign about Mahmood’s dodgy form of investigative journalism.
For the self-styled Fake Sheikh was in fact a fake journalist. He invented stories, lured unsuspecting people into his traps and then “exposed” them as wrongdoers.
Yet his editors could not be other than aware that many of his exclusives turned out to be anything but as straightforward as his copy suggested.
On several occasions, when his stories were examined in courtrooms, jurors realised the truth: he had induced people to commit crimes they would never have done without his encouragement.
Some were fragile, especially the many immigrants who formed so many of his targets. Some were offered disproportionate inducements. Some were innocents easily bamboozled by his cunning plans.
What is so baffling is that in the course of the 20-plus years he worked for three News International titles - News of the World, Sunday Times and Sun on Sunday - the editors and managers failed to appreciate that fact.
Did they not have pause for thought when a jury asked to convict the Earl of Hardwicke on a drugs charge in 1999 sent a note to the judge saying they wouldn’t have convicted him had they been allowed to take Mahmood’s extreme provocation into account?
Were their suspicions not aroused by high-profile courtroom reverses? There was the collapse of one involving five men accused of plotting to kidnap Victoria Beckham in 2002. One of the men later successfully sued the paper for libel. Did that not give News International pause for thought?
Another case involved three men prosecuted in 2006 for buying a non-existent substance, “red mercury”, in order to build a non-existent “dirty bomb”. They were cleared.
In both cases, there were complaints from lawyers about Mahmood’s investigative methodology, which included the use of agents provocateur.
But these cases came relatively late in Mahmood’s employment by News International. What is truly extraordinary is that he worked for the company at all after his first spell as a Sunday Times reporter in the late 1980s, when he left under a cloud after tampering with the main-frame computer in order to cover up a mistake.
It amazed Sunday Times executives that, after such an act of dishonesty, he was able to return to the Wapping complex after just a couple of years to take up a job with the News of the World.
In his new post, he quickly set about creating a special position for himself, working outside of the normal chain of command. A succession of editors turned a blind eye to his unorthodox methods because he provided the paper with a string of scoops.
He was allowed to build his own team of helpers and to spend lavishly in order to invent scenarios that helped him to entrap people. He was able to fly people across the world, book luxury hotels, ply people with champagne and create fake websites.
To do so, he drew on the vast resources of one of the world’s major media companies, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. When judges and lawyers complained about his activities, that company defended him at every turn.
It spared no funds in providing him with his legal defence following the collapse of the Tulisa Contostavlos case and his prosecution for conspiring to pervert the cause of justice. It also kept him on full pay when he was remanded before trial.
But News Corp has not not been Mahmood’s only defender. The Metropolitan police have a lot to answer for down the years.
They have often worked hand in glove with Mahmood, especially over the Beckham kidnap and red mercury cases. When one of Mahmood’s “assistants”, Florim Gashi, decided to tell the truth about Mahmood’s methods, police officers flew to Croatia to interview him.
It appeared that, at last, Scotland Yard was taking complaints about Mahmood seriously, as the Guardian reported in 2005. That investigation came to nothing because officers decided there was insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations.
Even so, it should have been a warning that there was something nasty in the News of the World woodshed. Instead, as with the phone-hacking scandal, the link between News International and Scotland Yard remained tight.
Note also how Mahmood’s relationship with his employers survived the closure of the News of the World after the hacking scandal broke in 2011.
By that time he had broken the story of the Pakistani cricketers involved in so-called “spot fixing” during matches. It was regarded as his greatest public interest story.
Although the overwhelming majority of the paper’s staff were fired, Mahmood was retained and placed back on the Sunday Times, to the intense irritation of several staff members who knew the circumstances of his 1988 departure.
It was only a brief return. Once Murdoch launched the Sun on Sunday, Mahmood was transferred to that title and it was there he delivered the Contostavlos story that was to prove his downfall.
When he was convicted, a News UK spokesperson said the company was “disappointed by the news”. You bet it was. Disappointed to have been found out, yet again, as employing a law-breaking journalist.