Watch the latest episode of the exclusive expose.news interview between actor and comedian John Cleese and private investigator turned whistleblower Daniel “Danno” Hanks.
Danno became global news in November 2021 for coming clean about targeting Meghan Markle and Prince Harry for The Sun and has now detailed other high profiles targets, including John Cleese himself.
In this episode, Danno goes into detail about how the Daily Mail hired him to target former boxer Muhammad Ali while he was ‘dying’, along with his family members and closest associates.
To back up his claims, Hanks has provided expose.news the comprehensive reports he illegally obtained, containing the so-called ‘keys to the kingdom’ for privacy invasion such as blagging. These confidential personal identifiers we then unlawfully sold to the Daily Mail.
Hanks also told John Cleese that he was also hired to target Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. Hanks claims that this was not for a story, but due to Facebook’s growing influence and the dangers it posed the newspaper industry as a whole as it increasingly took advertising revenue away from papers.
TRANSCRIPT
John Cleese: I’m here with Danno again, talking about how the tabloids get their dirty stuff. You were working for the Mail on Muhammad Ali when he was dying?
Danno Hanks: When he was passing. They wanted to get to know all of the possible relatives. When you are on your deathbed and you’re a celebrity, they think that everybody is going to come out of the woodwork and go after your will. You get those kind of celebrities and they want to find out everybody who is in their inner circle.
JC: And there’s no sense, really, that they want to respect the person’s privacy so that they can grieve?
DH: None at all.
JC: They just didn’t care. Was there anything off limits? Or did you ever give them stuff that they didn’t publish? Other than because they were scared of libel?
DH: They asked me to do backgrounds on Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
JC: Did they say what they were after?
DH: No. Just, you know, “Can you tell us everything you can find on Mark Zuckerberg?” And I only recently found out that their motives were that Facebook’s advertising was sucking revenue from the newspapers. Because people were advertising more on Facebook than they were on the Mail or the MailOnline. So that wasn’t really for a story.