You'd be hard-pressed to identify a link between Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and three elite members of the Pakistani national cricket team. A love of designer luggage? Huge entourages? Not many ticks in the "win" column?
No, what links Ferguson and (allegedly) the Pakistani cricketers is an inability to recognize that if someone approaches with a cash-laden suitcase in one hand and a crooked proposition in the other, the best option is to run away screaming. The man with the suitcase, the proposition and the glint in his eye is likely to be Mazher Mahmood, "the fake Sheikh," the notorious undercover British reporter who has bagged more misbehaving celebrities than the Royal Family has bagged grouse.
Mahmood's official title at the News of the World - the most tawdry, lively and unapologetic of Britain's tabloids - is "investigations editor," but since scoring two of his biggest coups in recent months, his critics use less flattering labels.
In his highly secret work, Mahmood employs any number of disguises, aliases and sidekicks. For the sting published last Sunday, which allegedly snared some of Pakistan's top cricketers in a match-fixing scandal, Mahmood and his team presented themselves as "front men for a Far East gambling cartel."
When wooing the Duchess of York - she promised access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, in return for a computer bag stuffed with $40,000 and a promise of further cash - he pretended to be a wealthy businessman, and videotaped a wine-sodden Fergie ogling a stack of bills. Her slip-up, which was a Hindenburg moment in a lifetime of bad decisions, ended with a weepy mea culpa on Oprah (Americans have a warmer embrace for fallen royals than the British do).
Does Mahmood care about the lives he throws into chaos when he exposes them to the News of the World's nearly three million Sunday readers? It's hard to know, because he almost never talks. The Birmingham-born reporter, the son of Pakistani immigrants who were themselves journalists, has given only a handful of interviews since he began working at the NOTW in 1991. "I have very few friends…,'' he told fellow journalist Andrew Marr in one of those rare interviews. "You become a pariah."
Even in his 2008 autobiography, Confessions of a Fake Sheikh: The King of the Sting Reveals All, little is revealed beyond his closet of disguises and entourage of drivers, helpers and metal-fanged bodyguards (death threats are apparently an occupational hazard). His budget is undisclosed, but must be vast considering the complexity of the set-ups - good thing that Rupert Murdoch, owner of News of the World, has such deep pockets. The NOTW is currently enduring another unrelated scandal, this one over its reporters hacking the phones of high-profile Brits.
Mahmood says in his book that his investigations have led to more than 200 criminal convictions, and that he's driven to expose "the smugglers and drug-dealers and baby-sellers and paedophiles and hypocrites and crooks."
Really, though, it's the celebrity stings that make people pick up the NOTW, with its lurid headlines and randomly bold-faced passages. There was the time he lured Jerry Springer into a honey trap with a couple of porn stars - just before Springer went on air to piously denounce the poor women's oppression.
On another occasion, posing as a sheikh, he got Prince Edward's wife, the Countess of Wessex, to make a series of embarrassing statements about the Royal Family ("they were very, very keen to put me onto the empty pedestal that had been left by Princess Diana,'' she said, which probably led to a frosty dinner at the palace that night).
Mahmood's got a full slate of critics - not the ones who want to kill him, but the ones who think that setting snares and encouraging illicit behaviour creates a virus of bad journalism. The sneaky, not-entirely-above-board newsgathering operation is nothing new, of course: Crusading Victorian journalist W.T. Stead was thrown into jail when he bought a child for £5 to illustrate a story about sexual exploitation, and more recently Channel 4 and the Sunday Times created a stir when they covertly filmed Labour Party politicians offering up influence for sale.
So is Mahmood acting in the public interest, or for the private purse? Maybe the two don't need to be mutually exclusive. Take the cricket story: Rumours about gambling in certain teams have been rife, says Martin Conboy, author of Tabloid Britain, but no one did the legwork to expose them. "Here you have tabloids doing investigative journalism that the respectable newspapers don't want to touch."
As well, says Conboy, who's a lecturer in the journalism department at Sheffield University, the fact that the Internet is rife with anonymous gossip and that legitimate newspapers now blanket-cover celebrity news means that tabloids are forced further into extremes to claim readers' interest: "One person's slightly reprehensible entrapment is another person's heroic investigative journalism."
In Mahmood's favour, there's also the argument that he's putting excitement back into newspapers - perhaps not in the most savoury way, rather like placing electrodes on a corpse, but it's effective nonetheless.
The Fake Sheikh has written that he's not about to hang up his robes, and until he does celebrities might want to avoid anyone with a bag full of cash and an offer that sounds too good to be true. They'd do well to remember that there's a tale in that sting.