The ‘Fake Sheikh’ Who Conned Celebs for Rupert Murdoch
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The London tabloid world has traditionally been a sort of journalism Bizarro World, where entrapment is standard practice and news is manufactured on a profit-driven whim, often at the expense of innocent victims. For two decades, Mazher Mahmood strode over this ethics-starved world like a corrupt colossus, enabled by his employers, chiefly News of the World, to destroy lives as an “undercover reporter.”
Mahmood, dubbed “The Fake Sheikh” for the disguise he used to ensnare many of his unwitting targets, once gathered up a large group of illegal immigrants, delivered them to the police, and called it news, all to please his employer, the recently retired Rupert Murdoch. In his sheikh persona he arranged for actresses and models to procure and consume drugs, then had the details splashed on the front page to serve… the public interest? Claiming that he only targeted those engaged in “moral wrongdoing,” Mahmood was no less a journalistic sociopath than Stephen Glass and other fabulists of his ilk. The big difference: where Glass was drummed out of the industry in shame, Mahmood won awards for his transgressions. As a disgusted FBI agent says after interrogating sleazeball detective Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly, “Somebody open a window.”
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Streaming on Prime, the new three-part docuseries The Fake Sheikh tries to shed some light on Mahmood and his epically long con, depicting him as an ambitious outsider – his father was a Pakistani journalist whose ethnicity was a barrier to breaking into the big time – forever hungry for a good scoop. Elaborate reenactments – so elaborate that an onscreen disclaimer advises the viewer that “some events and characters have been modified or combined” – split-screen designs, and a score you might find in a heist movie create an atmosphere of high intrigue. But through it all, Mahmood, who declined to participate in the series, remains a loathsome cipher, a shadowy cretin hiding behind his dubious self-identification as a journalist. The real character here is the culture in which he thrived, the tabloid world in which editors manufacture scandal with a shrug. One of these editors claims with a straight face that Mahmood was “an excellent journalist.” Sure. If by excellent you mean morally and ethically repugnant.
The streaming world is currently stocked with documentaries and docuseries about crimes, scandals and general wrongdoings of recent history, fragments of which might be lodged in viewers’ memories. For instance, you might remember that Murdoch’s News of the World went down in a blaze of infamy in 2011 amidst a phone-hacking scandal. But Mahmood went right on faking, for Murdoch’s The Sun on Sunday. That was where he was employed when he had his own comeuppance, after entrapping pop star and The X Factor judge Tulisa in a drug “scandal” and being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. To which one might reasonably ask: What took so long? Mahmood essentially got busted on a technicality. The Sun threw him out not because of his egregious methods, which the publication, another Murdoch operation, generally embraced, but because he got caught breaking the law.
The Fake Sheikh could have played all of this with a nod and a wink, or for maximum scorn. Instead, it shoots straight down the middle, a fair approach that results in a pretty bland product. There’s something vaguely mundane and ridiculous about Mahmood and his exploits; one can imagine a mock-serious Steven Soderbergh film about the whole affair. Mahmood’s employers/enablers, generally without remorse, are let off without overt judgment, allowed to quietly dig their own graves with claims of journalistic tenacity and casual, everyone-is-fair-game rationalization. As Murdoch’s crown media jewel might put it, the series is fair and balanced.
But some subjects deserve sharp knives. There is nothing defensible about the kind of journalism Mahmood practiced, and he’s not an interesting enough character, at least not as presented here, to care about as a human being. He’s just another conman, celebrated within a sordid if lucrative corner of his industry, who finally met his maker. If you’re not adding anything fresh to the conversation it might be best to let him remain cowering in some semblance of shame. Then again, that’s a feeling of which he ultimately seems incapable.
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