Why Higgins should start his 30th world championship with no stain on his name
Four-time snooker world champion John Higgins was entrapped by the News of the World in 2010 in a plot that sullied his name. In reality it was the paper that was corrupt
At some point during the next few days, numerous people will take to social media and forums such as Reddit to accuse the four-time world snooker champion John Higgins of being a match-fixing cheat.
By the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll probably realise there was never any credible evidence to suggest that was the case, and instead he was a victim of a disgraceful entrapment and massive misrepresentation.
The newspaper that made the allegations, the News of the World (NOTW), is now defunct, shut down by its proprietor Rupert Murdoch in 2011 after it was revealed the NOTW had hacked the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler.
The journalist who entrapped Higgins, Mazher Mahmood, aka ‘The Fake Sheikh’, became infamous for his stings, which secured him umpteen front page splashes in the newspaper (more of which shortly), as well as numerous awards.
Mahmood was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2016 after being found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. This followed a sting on singer Tulisa, which led to a judge voicing concerns Mahmood had committed perjury.
I’m not going to make a case that Higgins was framed simply on the basis of the corrupt behaviour of the news desk of a newspaper and a reporter who was convicted for illegal behaviour.
The story the NOTW ran in early May 2010 - which ruined Higgins’ reputation and caused appalling damage to him and his family - was full of lies and distortions.
The way it was presented was shameful, with video footage manipulated, with captions and headlines completely unrelated to actual events, and a methodology to the sting that was wholly unethical.
I covered the case extensively back in 2010 on Sporting Intelligence - it became the website’s first major investigation, and today, for the first time, I’ll reveal new information about the depths to which the NOTW was willing to go to secure a front-page story that wasn’t true.
Higgins, 48, currently the world No13, starts his attempt to win the 2024 world championship today when he faces Jamie Jones, the world No41, in the first round at the Crucible in Sheffield.
This year marks the 30th consecutive year that Higgins, aka ‘The Wizard of Wishaw’, is playing in snooker’s biggest event. He hasn’t missed a single year since his debut in 1995, aged 19, and he was world champion in 1998, 2007, 2009 and 2011.
He has been a giant of snooker, winning 31 ranking titles, which places him third in the all-time list behind only Ronnie O’Sullivan (40 titles, of which seven have been worlds) and Scottish compatriot Stephen Hendry (36 titles, also seven worlds).
Higgins has hit more than 900 centuries in his career, including 13 maximums, the latest in February when he became the oldest player ever to complete a 147. He has also had four separate spells as the world No1.
And yet to some people he has an irredeemable stain on his reputation, because in 2010 The News of The World published a story claiming he was a match-fixer who had shaken hands “on a disgraceful deal to fix a string of high-profile matches after demanding a £300,000 kickback.”
That story was published on Sunday 2 May 2010, which was, not coincidentally, the first day of the two-day final of the 2010 world championship.
Having a major “corruption” story about one of snooker’s biggest stars on the day of the sport’s biggest final was bound to garner massive attention.
Higgins wasn’t involved in that final, in which Neil Robertson beat Graeme Dott 18-13; he had been beaten by Steve Davis in the 2010 second round on 24 April.
Higgins’ early elimination meant he was free to travel to Kyiv in Ukraine on Thursday and Friday 29-30 April with his manager, Pat Mooney, to talk to potential business partners about a series of exhibition events.
Mooney and Higgins had worked together since 2007 to establish new snooker events in “non-traditional” markets to help “grow the game” in an era when it had suffered badly from a lack of tournaments, sponsors and prize money in the wake of the withdrawal of tobacco advertising.
The potential business partners belonged to a company called Alfa Equity, where the senior negotiator was a man called Marcus D’Souza. Except Alfa Equity was a fake company, established as part of the sting, and Marcus D’Souza was actually Mazher Mahmood.
The sting had been a long time in the planning and one source suggested the NOTW may have spent as much as £200,000 on perpetrating it. It was elaborate to the extent that when Mooney and Higgins arrived in Kyiv, on separate flights, they were met by limousines on the tarmac and fast-tracked through customs. This gave the impression of local high-level backing for the proposed events.
When the NOTW dropped their bombshell story on Sunday 2 May 2010, the paper said it had “sent an undercover reporter to meet Mooney after being tipped off by a sports insider worried that Mooney and Higgins could be involved in match-fixing”.
The identity of this insider was never revealed. The NOTW never provided a scintilla of evidence that Higgins had ever previously been linked to any kind of match-fixing. The sentence about a tip-off was presumably included to attempt to justify the subsequent entrapment.
Mooney had been led to believe that Alfa Equity was a subsidiary firm of a real company, Alfa Bank, which was then the largest private commercial bank in Russia. Alfa Equity wasn’t a subsidiary because it didn’t exist.
Mahmood, posing as Marcus D’Souza, had initially approached Mooney via email saying he worked for Alfa Equity, apparently a rich and successful firm with established links, Mahmood said, to companies including a (real) diamond exploration firm, (real) property developers and a (fake) Chinese clothing firm, and that Alfa wanted to get involved in organising a series of events with Mooney and Higgins.
On this basis Mooney met D’Souza / Mahmood in Edinburgh to talk about specifics. During seven hours of a first meeting, details were discussed for snooker events (involving and backed by Alfa and related fake firms) in Kviv, Warsaw, Prague and Copenhagen. A second meeting in Edinburgh followed, with exchanges of documents and contracts before the trip to Kviv to inspect a potential venue and meet a key senior figure from the Chinese clothing firm that wanted to be a sponsor. He didn’t show up because he didn’t exist.
Unknown to Higgins, “D’Souza” had previously asked Mooney in general terms whether it was possible to manipulate outcomes in the proposed exhibitions; and Mooney apparently said yes. In and of itself, there needn’t have been anything sinister in this. If you’ve ever been to a snooker exhibition event, you might have seen Jimmy White or Alex Higgins or Leicester’s Jester, or whoever, playing trick shots, or watching Dennis Taylor let a 10-year-old beat him.
Exhibitions are just that: they don’t matter. There is no integrity issue.
On Thursday 29 April 2010, Higgins had zero reason to believe anything other than this was a business meeting where a potential promoter and sponsor was going to get involved in new events run by him and Mooney.
The pair of them were wined and dined by Mahmood / D’Souza, and a couple of local colleagues, “Jaroslav” and “Nikail”, both part of the NOTW set-up.
For personal reasons, Higgins drank little at this point in his life, generally avoiding alcohol. But he was encouraged to partake heavily that night, presumably on the basis he would get drunk and start blabbing about his match-fixing exploits. He ended up totally pissed. It should also be stressed he said absolutely nothing untoward, despite being inebriated and despite lots of leading questions.
One well-informed source later alleged to me that late into the night on Thursday 29 April 2010, Mazher Mahmood made a phone call to the NOTW’s then editor, Colin Myler, to tell him that they had “absolutely nothing” on Higgins at that point. There was no hint that he was a match-fixer or would become one, no matter how many leading questions were asked.
It was also alleged to me that Higgins’ bedroom at the posh hotel arranged by Alfa Equity was rigged with hidden cameras. One source claimed that if Mahmood hadn’t got incriminating information from Higgins when Higgins was drunk, then Mahmood could always send prostitutes to Higgins’ bedroom and film him for a sex scandal story instead of a match-fixing story. Except Higgins was so drunk he went back to his room and fell dead asleep. The hookers angle wasn’t going to work. (I did ask the NOTW about multiple aspects of their story back in 2010 and they declined to comment).
So to the morning of Friday 30 April 2010, and one final attempt to get Higgins on camera saying something dodgy. By this point he was massively hungover, suspicious about what was happening and still in the dark about Alfa wanting to know whether exhibitions could be rigged.
Just a few minutes before a final meeting with Mahmood / D’Souza, also accompanied by the two locals, who had now becoming slightly menacing, Mooney told Higgins the subject of rigging exhibitions might come up, and just say whatever felt right and then they’d get out of there, and home.
That Friday morning meeting lasted about 10 minutes, and was covertly filmed. Mooney and Higgins then flew back to Scotland. On the next day, a NOTW reporter turned up at Higgins’ house to say the newspaper had covert footage of him agreeing to fix matches (which he denied), and the following morning the paper published its “exposé”.
So far, so tawdry. Before I explain why the subsequent article was massively flawed, let’s recap some of Mahmood’s other major “scoops”.
In 2006 he posed as the Fake Sheikh to sting the then manager of the England football team, Sven-Göran Eriksson. Mahmood said he was going to buy Aston Villa and wanted Sven to be the manager and lure David Beckham to Villa Park. Sven made all manner of obliging comments which contributed to him losing his job. He then successfully sued the NOTW for hundreds of thousands of pounds for invasion of privacy, a fact never widely reported. I actually introduced Sven, via his agent, to the lawyer who won him that case.
Another victim of Mahmood was actor John Alford, who served a prison sentence for drug dealing after Mahmood entrapped him into buying cocaine for him. This was a Mahmood staple: promise a famous person huge amounts of money for some venture or other, then ask them to get some drugs, and “expose” them as a drug dealer.
In 2003, Mahmood made global headlines reporting on a plot to kidnap Victoria Beckham. Except there was no plot, and it emerged Mahmood had paid £10,000 to his main informant, Florim Gashi, who was an unreliable witness. Another of the “gang” named by the NOTW in the non-existent plot was a man called Alin Turcu, who later sued the NOTW for libel and won damages and costs.
In 2004, Mahmood wrote stories about alleged terrorist plots where the trials and or prosecutions of the supposed terrorists collapsed because his work wasn’t credible.
Back to the Higgins story: I felt on reading it on that Sunday in May 2010 that it just didn’t feel right. It was vague and flawed. There was no credible evidence about its main claim.
I was nominally the snooker correspondent, among other roles, at The Independent, through much of the Noughties. I covered Shaun Murphy beating Matthew Stevens in the 2005 final, and Graeme Dott beating Peter Ebdon in 2006, and Higgins winning against Selby in 2007 and Murphy in 2009. I knew a lot of the players and people on the snooker scene, including administrators and agents, and referees.
A video released to support the NOTW May 2010 story looked highly edited and unconvincing to me, and it completely lacked any context as it jumped from soundbite to soundbite.
There were so many gaping holes in the intro claim that Higgins had shaken hands “on a disgraceful deal to fix a string of high-profile matches after demanding a £300,000 kickback.”
The video purporting to show a handshake was clearly filmed on an entirely separate occasion to footage shown in the same video. This first picture showed Higgins shaking hands and a table set out a certain way.
Another scene within seconds showed four people including Higgins toasting something with vodka. The table was set up differently in these two scenes, and Mahmood was wearing different clothes.
What was a reader / viewer supposed to believe from this? That Higgins shakes hand on this match-fix deal, and then four conspirators toast the deal with vodka? That’s how it looks. This wasn’t even the same meeting.
My initial reporting on the case was on 3 May 2010, where I provided some context for the sting. In the wake of my exposing how Higgins had been set up, Alfa Equity’s fake website was removed from the internet.
One week after their initial story, the NOTW followed up with a second Higgins story, splashed on the front page, claiming “Higgins bet on himself to LOSE.”
This was a lie because (spoiler alert) he hadn’t actually bet on himself to lose, and even the NOTW’s report conceded that their source wasn’t sure of the details.
By mid-May 2010, I had watched the NOTW’s early May video dozens of times, made a full transcript, and identified multiple points where subtitles wholly misrepresented what Higgins was saying. You can read a breakdown of that here. Captions and graphics in the original newspaper article were erroneous.
Later that summer, as an official investigation into the events in Kviv continued to unfold, I employed a forensic musicologist to review the video, and they found that words had been cut and pasted, and in some places appeared to have been voiced later by somebody not in the room.
As for the intro claim about “high-profile matches” and Higgins “demanding a £300,000 kickback”, the proposed matches were fictitious, and exhibitions. They didn’t exist and never happened. Higgins demands nothing in the video. The sum of 300,000 is mentioned by the NOTW people, not Higgins, and in the video they offer 300,000 euros, not pounds. For what precisely is not clear. So Higgins actually doesn’t agree to anything, nor are details of payment talked about. The whole enterprise looks bodged, and was ultimately rushed into print, and video.
By September, an official independent investigation was finished and Ian Mill QC exonerated Higgins of match-fixing but Higgins was banned for six months (back-dated) and fined for failing to report an approach to fix matches. Mill’s full judgement is here.
I wrote a follow-up about why Higgins was cleared, and that was according to David Douglas, the former high-ranking Metropolitan Police officer who investigated the fixing allegations. The evidence, including the full unedited video footage proved Higgins was set up.
In December 2010, I interviewed Higgins, who told me that life would never be the same again and that he felt “raw” and “angry” and “edgy”. His father had cancer, and on the day of Higgins’ exoneration, his dad, John Senior, had been told his illness was terminal. He died in early 2011.
A few months later, during his semi-final win at the 2011 world championship, Higgins was yelled at by an audience member who shouted: "How do you swallow that three hundred thousand, John? ... You're a disgrace to snooker.”
Higgins went on to win that world title.
Some people still doubt his integrity to this day. They really shouldn’t, at least not on the basis of what the NOTW wrote.
Barely a mention of the NOTW’s woeful practices in this case was covered at the time in the mainstream media, although an honourable mention must go the Guardian, who picked up my reporting and credited it numerous times, including here and here and here and here.
The NOTW is no more. Higgins plays on, and today, at the Crucible.
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This is absolutely wild. I had no idea.
Awesome article (which I've retweeted because this dishonestly still isn't well known enough), but could you replace the Russian "Kiev" for "Kyiv"?