Landing the big fish
Journalist Francisco Garcia on talking to people who don’t much want to talk to him
My working life very often involves inserting myself into places I’m not wanted and have no particular businesses in being. Most weeks, I find myself preparing to send a litany of ingratiating cold emails and texts, to people whose interests would probably be best served by ignoring them. Sometimes I receive a reply and sometimes I don’t. There is no specific formula to success or failure. When possible, I find it better to call unannounced, rather than dash off an easily ignorable message. That way at least, I have the opportunity to stake my intentions person to person, voice to voice. It makes it that much harder, practice has told me, to dismiss the request out of hand.
Truthfully, it usually depends on matters outside my control. Such as the mood or circumstance you happen to catch someone in. As an ambitious and entirely green young reporter, I understood this properly for the first time during a trip to Glasgow in the summer of 2018. I’d just embarked on my first serious attempt to make a go of things as a freelancer, age 26. VICE had sent me to cover a worthy, if slightly thin story about a bout of social unrest in the city. On my first night, I found myself at the pub, striking up a conversation with a florid middle aged drinker who mentioned the looming ‘50th anniversary’ of the Bible John murders, a trio of apparently interlinked and unsolved murders that had transfixed the city in the late 1960s. This caught my attention, not least in that I had never heard someone describe a series of killings in such odd terms. Marriages and monarchs had anniversaries. I had not fully appreciated the same applied for unsolved murders.
Having discussed it with my editor, he agreed that it sounded like the germ of a good idea. The problem lay in tracking down people with a direct link to the story. The scene setting and mood lighting could easily be applied with recourse to existing material. To make the piece stand out, it needed something else. One name kept recurring. During the time of the murders, Joe Jackson was a lowly, if ambitious CID detective on the make. He later rose to head of the Glasgow Murder Squad, one of the toughest policing roles in the UK. Having attended the first Bible John crime scene, he had popped in and out of the city’s tabloids over the intervening decades, offering his own theories and suppositions regarding the spectral killer's identity. Jackson felt like the perfect way into the story. The only issue lay in convincing him to speak.
After a few days of tapping up contacts, a colleague passed on Jackson’s home phone number. Any triumphalism was short lived, as my calls drifted straight to voicemail. Finally, after several attempts spread over a week or so, a sturdy sounding Glaswegian man answered the phone. Yes, Jackson hesitantly agreed, he would be happy for me to visit him at his home in the city's southern outer suburbs. I was to arrive the next morning at 9:30, sharp. He didn’t like tardiness. Our interview surpassed my expectations. Long retired, Jackson was unguarded and full of colourfully expressed opinions and theories surrounding the case. On returning to my budget hotel that afternoon, I remember feeling dazed at my own good fortune, as well as something approaching self satisfaction at the fruits of my perseverance. This reporting business, I reasoned, wasn’t so bad. Perhaps the cliche beloved by school teachers and football pundits was true. That you really do make your own luck.
I can only smile at my youthful naivety. Over the intervening years, I have reported across the world, covering everything from the UK-wide missing persons epidemic, to complex modern slavery cases, international drug trafficking, Calabrian organised crime and desperately controversial Serbian lithium mining projects. The successes are what make it into print, or onto the radio. The failures, of which there have been many, have been consigned to aborted Google Docs and dust covered notebooks. I have learned that if chance isn’t everything, it isn’t to be discounted. The stories that cause the most trouble are seldom those that you’d think. Even through various layers of state and private intermediaries, I found dealing with Emanuele Mancuso, the scion of one of the most powerful and fearsome ‘Ndrangheta clans — the Calabrian mafia who control an estimated 80% of Europe’s cocaine trade — reasonably straightforward. If you asked a question in good faith, then Mancuso, who lives in an undisclosed location, under 24/7 protection, after turning Italian state witness in 2019, would answer with surprising frankness. I found it considerably more difficult getting any answer whatsoever from representatives of East Riding Parish Council during the writing of a recent, rather more lighthearted, essay into a poison pen letter outbreak in the tiny Yorkshire village of Shiptonthorpe.
These sort of admissions are, I think, useful. Surely no one can be expected to bat for a 100% record. Perhaps there have been times where access has been squandered due to my own timidity or laziness, but I like to think these occasions have been few and far between. Sometimes there really is nothing for it, however high one turns the charm dial. During the recent reporting of a piece on the desperately contentious future of Soho — the once seedy, long since gentrified heart of London’s West End — I had not expected the ready collaboration of John James, MD of Soho Estates, major commercial landlord and local ‘stakeholder’. Yet he had enthusiastically assented to an interview, while Westminster Council, with their squadron of press officers and fixers, had disappeared into the ether after a flurry of polite introductory messages.
What I’m trying to say is that there is often simply no telling. This randomness sometimes carries its own creative possibilities. In early January, I spent several consecutive Saturday mornings travelling to Hackney from my home in South East London. The routine was unchanging. I’d wake early, catch the Overground to Haggerston and amble 10 minutes east into the boutique weirdness of De Beauvoir Town. I’d become interested in the saga of the Hackney Moleman during my late teens. In 2006, a jagged sinkhole opened up on the pavement outside 121 Mortimer Road. The house belonged to William Lyttle, a notorious local eccentric with a mysterious origin story. After the press descended, it was revealed that Lyttle — originally from an unspecified corner of Ireland — had been burrowing underneath his home for the best part of 30 years. On finally being evicted after a protracted High Court battle, Lyttle died alone in a Dalston council flat in 2010.
The story of Lyttle’s origins and motivations has never been satisfactorily told. I told my editor at the Financial Times that I thought I was in with a good chance of getting closer than anyone had before. My confidence had grown after I spent an afternoon posting home printed notes through the glossy front doors of the area Lyttle once called home. The responses ranged from silence to cheerful reminiscence. A couple of weeks later, I received a message from a psychotherapist who had once lodged at 121 Mortimer Road for a few brief months in the mid-1980s. It was hard, she told me when we later spoke on the phone, to reconcile the frenzied press attention with the man she’d once known. The ‘Mole Man’ was not a moniker she could ever comfortably associate with Lyttle, a lonely, difficult man who deserved more than to be transfigured into a whimsical urban fairytale. She had never spoken to the press before and had spent some time deliberating whether to respond at all. I told her I was grateful. That I hoped to do the story justice and she wouldn’t regret her decision. The piece eventually received to an excellent response. I never never heard from the woman again, or received affirmation of that second point.
Francisco Garcia is a freelance journalist based in London. His second book, We All Go into the Dark, was published in 2023 by HarperCollins