'Alex had absolutely nothing with him,' Adams assured Hasak later. 'I even disobeyed your advice that he could walk through with his laptop. He did not even have a credit card with him. There would have been absolutely no legitimate grounds for detaining him for a second. Had anyone done so, there was a lawyer ready to get him out of trouble.'
Oliver did not even have a credit card and Adams had two lawyers on standby ready to get him out of trouble. 'There would have been absolutely no legitimate grounds for detaining him for a second. . . Nothing existed technically to connect Alex to the card in either Canada, the USA or Germany.'
So Oliver was home safe. That was the end of it, everyone walked away clean . . . except that Larry Rissler was seething. He knew someone had tipped Oliver off and his list of suspects was very short. He fronted Norris, who denied any link to Oliver. In reality, Norris had made sure he didn't even know Oliver's real name - he was just Alex. Rissler accused Norris of hiding the fact that Oliver worked for NDS. Rissler's chief source in the pirate community claimed to have proof that Oliver worked for NDS and his accusations became more and more insistent. Norris lied straight-faced to him, told him that Oliver had no connection at all with NDS that he knew of.
The row was escalating to the point where the future of the NDS contract with DirecTV could be at stake—and that would mean the future of NDS itself. Five days after Oliver flew out, the pressure grew too much. The Cowboy blinked. Norris told Rissler that he was right - Oliver was one of their people.
Adams was incandescent. 'We discussed this,' he raged, that 'under no circumstances must we tell Larry Rissler that Alex works for us. It was an absolute priority. That decision was made and we all acted on it…Despite whatever table thumping Larry Rissler may indulge in I knew that there was absolutely nothing that LR could do about Alex . . . My frustration is that we went to great lengths to protect Alex and then give away our greatest secret to someone we do not trust.'
That was the problem. It was DirecTV that wasn't trustworthy. It had come to this. A hacker on News Corporation's payroll was on the run from police in two countries. He virtually had to be smuggled out of the United States. If he had been caught, the repercussions for NDS, for News Corporation and for Rupert Murdoch in the glare of publicity were potentially disastrous. The first question would be how News Corporation came to be involved in what looked like criminal piracy directed against NDS's biggest client, DirecTV. Whatever their ultimate intentions, in order to mount this sting operation NDS had been pirating DirecTV—peddling software codes and stealing the signal from their best customer, without even telling them.
None of this troubled Ray Adams in October 1997 as he struggled with a much simpler issue. Why—why—had Norris come clean? It was so simple. 'All we had to do was stick to our story and deny.'
It would become a familiar legal strategy: Deny, deny, deny . . .
But now Alex/Oliver was home safe. That was the end of it, everyone walked away clean . . . except that there was an enduring problem. The question was: what part of News Corporation should have been alerted to what was going on? What part of a modern media business involves hiding people from the police and working out the best way to smuggle them out of the country, betraying the confidence of the customers whom they were paid to protect? And how was it that none of these players were ever called to account?
And the most troubling thing was that this was just the beginning, the first desperate adventure. The drama that followed would trigger four separate major court actions against NDS, in which almost every major satellite broadcaster in the world sued the News Corp arm for billions of dollars in damages from industrial espionage. And yet, in the end, NDS would prove staggeringly profitable for Rupert Murdoch's empire.
The stakes here were very high and the casualties would not just be on the balance sheet. Twelve months later, Alex's offsider in Germany would be dead, and Alex himself would be hiring bodyguards.
Adelaide, October 1997
A little disclosure here. To write about News Corporation means spending a lot of time talking to lawyers. When I was writing Virtual Murdoch in 2001 I received legal threats from half a dozen law firms around the world. It was educational in highlighting the different national legal styles.
Australian lawyers, in my experience, have not distinguished themselves by their tremendous sense of humour - at times they can be a little snippy. American lawyers don't bother with small threats. They have it down to a routine: they press the button and launch an intercontinental ballistic missile, perhaps in their spare moments between elevenses and the next client meeting. When I wrote in 1999, seeking information from Squadron Ellenoff Plesent & Sheinfeld, the New York firm that had represented News since the 1970s, their reply came from Ira Lee Sorkin. These days Ira is better known for his sterling work over the last two decades as Bernie Madoff's lawyer. Ira duly dropped a thermonuclear device on my head, but I could tell he had more important things to do. His response was so impersonal, and I think it lost something from that. But when it comes to causing pain and discomfort—in short when you want a lawyer to club your target somewhere soft and vulnerable with a large pointy stick—it's hard to go past the British. It's that old-world charm.
But law firms are just the side show. For decades the man who manned News Corp's front line of defence, as chief legal counsel (now Rupert Murdoch's personal advisor), was Arthur Siskind. Arthur and I have never really hit it off. One of the first times I met him was in October 1997, the month that Alex had his little imbroglio in Toronto. I was on the opposite side of the world, in South Australia, when Arthur threw me out of the News Corp annual meeting. Actually it was the morning tea for shareholders afterwards. And he was pretty polite about it, which really shows he was a model of restraint.
The annual meeting was a showcase for what the global media empire was doing: from the newspapers in Australia and the fledgling pay-tv operation Foxtel there; to Star TV, the satellite broadcaster that covered all of India and Asia from its base in Hong Kong; to BSkyB in Britain along with the Sun, News of the World and The Times and Sunday Times. Then there were the big bets that Murdoch had recently made on cable channels in the US—Fox Sports, and a maverick operation called Fox News that Roger Ailes hand launched just a year before, at a cost of $1 billion. Would it really work? And the Fox television network and stations, together with Twentieth Century Fox. The meeting ended with a breathtaking trailer for a film that James Cameron had directed, which was due to launch in two months time, called Titanic.
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