Watch the latest episode of our exclusive interview between actor and comedian John Cleese and private investigator turned whistleblower Daniel “Danno” Hanks.
Danno recently hit the news for coming clean about targeting Meghan Markle and Prince Harry for the tabloids, and in our exclusive new interview series goes into detail about some of his most high profile targets, including John Cleese himself!
In this episode, Danno describes the extent to which he targeted former American football player and convicted criminal OJ Simpson over decades for the tabloids.
Danno also reveals to John Cleese that he was paid $75,000 to target the jury of the OJ Simpson trial in 1994 by three Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlets.
TRANSCRIPT
JC: What about OJ Simpson?
DH: I had OJ Simpson under surveillance for a long time. When he was on trial everybody wanted to know who those jurors were because they kept their names secret.
JC: The jurors? Of course.
DH: So they asked me, “We want to find out who the jurors are so that we can be on their doorstep the minute the verdict comes in.” So they dismissed one of the jurors for some reason. And I got hold of him and said, “My partner and I feel really bad that you got dismissed. We’d like to take you and your wife to dinner at the House of Blues. We got him drunk and had him give us every name.
JC: You’re a naughty man. Would that have affected the trial?
DH: Well, we made a rule to the people that wanted to buy it. That we would not give them the information until they went out to deliberate, you know?
JC: So it wasn’t interfering with justice?
DH: They weren’t going to interfere with the justice system. But Rupert Murdoch paid me $75,000 for that list through three different sources: The New York Post, The News of the World and Fox.
JC: For that list? So when you say he paid you, is there any question that he knew what was going on? Because we had a Leveson commission investigating the press and he said that he knew nothing about it.
Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry : Well, I think the senior executives were all misinformed and shielded from anything that was going on there.
DH: Murdoch is a very hands-on guy. There’s no way he does not know what his people are doing. I would believe he is lying to Leveson.
JC: Which, you know, is punishable with a year in jail.
DH: Well, it’s doubtful they’re going to ever put somebody that rich in jail. It’s not going to happen.
JC: Exactly. Alright. Thank you, Danno. And we will return to the subject again next time.
Danno Hanks emphasised: ‘It should be made clear that NGN paid me and my partner Fred Valis to obtain the juror list by “any means possible”.
Therefore, we came up with the idea of getting the dismissed juror, Michael Duane Knox, DRUNK, in order to get him to leak the names to us.
‘We didn’t interfere with the trial but we did get him drunk.’
