The blighted son, p.2
The Blighted Son, page 2
It was just signed “Joshua, Liverpool (originally from Barbados)”.
There were other letters, all of them anonymous, that collectively added up to a conclusive indictment of Fisher’s entrenched hatred of Jews and Blacks. One alluded to the fact that “he only ever allowed Whites to join his gym”. Another referred to him “daubing swastikas on synagogues” and a third included a photocopy of a newspaper article which reported that he and others had been found guilty of throwing a pig’s head into a Jewish delicatessen.
Edwin also took several phone calls, many of them from Black men and women living near Fisher’s gym who reported how he operated a colour bar, restricting membership to White people only and how many of those were racist skinheads. Edwin was also told how, during his days on Merseyside, Fisher led and spoke at far-right rallies and had been photographed giving the Nazi salute.
It was indisputably damning evidence.
But, except for the sundry newspaper cuttings of court hearings and photographs of Fisher taken at rallies sent in by readers, the outpourings of vitriol that landed on Edwin’s desk were unsubstantiated allegations that would need to be carefully checked.
Instinctively, Edwin’s highly-tuned news sense told him that he was amassing a file of information that would eventually culminate in a big news story but, for the time being, would have to remain on hold. He had promised the surgeon and the hospital that as long as Fisher remained in hospital as a patient, his coverage would concentrate solely on the lifesaving transplant – and it was a promise that he had no intention of breaking.
Edwin also knew that any story that he may write would be incomplete without knowing the identity of the donor and, ideally, the donor family’s reaction to knowing that their loved one’s heart was beating inside the tattooed body of a man who championed the vile philosophy of Aryan supremacy.
There was always the risk that other national news outlets would also be tipped off about the unsavoury exploits of James Karl Fisher and run their own stories, but Edwin felt that the risk was minimal. He had been offered exclusivity to witness the transplant first-hand to help promote the pioneering work of the centre and its attendant fundraising appeal – and it was unlikely, he thought, that news desks elsewhere would make the link to the racist who lived on Merseyside many years earlier.
Nonetheless, slim though the risk was, Edwin felt that he needed to discuss his strategy with his news editor, Ross Hetherington.
‘Can you tell me when you’ve got five minutes to spare, Ross?’ Edwin asked. ‘I could do with a word about how we’re going to play this transplant story.’
‘Let’s do it now. What’s the problem?’
Edwin knew that Ross liked short, succinct conversations without any unnecessary waffle. He always remembered him saying that if a reporter could not tell him the gist of a news story in ten seconds, there probably wasn’t a story worth writing.
‘In a nutshell, Ross, this Fisher guy sounds like a pretty nasty piece of work who has done a lot of people a lot of harm. But that’s a side of the story we can’t write while he is still in hospital – I’ve promised the surgeon that – and we could do with finding out who donated the heart. I think there’s a hell of a piece to be written when we’ve got all our ducks in a row.’
‘How do you know that someone else isn’t going to publish it?’ asked Ross.
‘I don’t – there’s a risk, I know – but I think it’s a very small one. Anyone else would have to do a lot of legwork to check everything out and we’ve got a massive head start.’
Ross drew on his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke towards Edwin. ‘When are you likely to get that bedside interview with this Fisher guy?’
‘Very likely in the next few days. The surgeon said that they’d be happy for me to go along to interview him for a human-interest follow-up feature as soon as he’s well enough. That’s if he’s agreeable, of course.’
‘D’you think he will go along with it? If he gets a sniff that you know something of his background, he may refuse.’
‘He might but I think he’ll see it as a chance to promote his gym. As far as I can see he’s not been in trouble with the law since he came over to Greater Manchester and I reckon he thinks people have forgotten all about his activities on Merseyside.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘And, of course, I gather he wants to know the identity of his donor, and he’ll very likely think I know.’
Ross took another drag on his cigarette, pausing in contemplation. ‘OK, Edwin. Check out all these readers’ allegations – we’ve probably got our own cuttings in the library – and, at the same time, see if you can find out the name of the donor. We can then take it from there.’
‘Will do, fine, Ross.’
‘I know you enjoy tracking people down, Edwin, so I’ve no doubt you’ll find him. It’s one of your fortes.’
‘Well, to be honest, Ross, that should not be too difficult. The hospital would not be allowed to tell us but we know the donor’s age, we know he was in intensive care for some weeks and we know he died in a North Manchester hospital. I’m sure we can track him down from that.’
‘Fine, fine. I hope you’re right. But we don’t want to spend days on it.’
‘I’ll get on with it now, Ross – will keep you posted,’ said Edwin, then added before heading off to the cuttings library, ‘And I take it you want me to go along and see him in hospital when we get the go-ahead from the surgeon?’
‘I do, yes. We want to get the measure of this guy, find out what makes him tick without giving any hint that we know all about his nasty activities.’
‘I’m just planning a straight interview with him – nothing controversial. Not proposing to ask him anything about his run-ins with the law or anything like that. Will just be writing a feel-good human-interest story, as agreed with the hospital.’
‘Great – that’s all we want for the time being. Keep everything else up your sleeve.’
‘Ross, even if I know the donor’s name by the time I see him and he asks me if I know who it was, I’ll simply tell him that he needs to go through the official procedure – by writing a letter addressed to the donor family and having it passed on via the transplant coordinators as intermediaries.’
‘Fine, Edwin. Keep me up to speed.’
*
Edwin’s first priority was to check out the allegations that had flooded in by letter and telephone. He grabbed a cup of tea in a plastic cup from the office vending machine and headed up a spiral staircase to the cuttings library.
‘How was it then, watching a live heart transplant? Did you feel that you might faint?’ asked the chief librarian, Vicki, a tall, slim, dark-haired woman who was married to one of the newspaper’s sports reporters.
‘Surprisingly OK. No, I didn’t feel faint at all. I was too busy to think about it, to be honest, and from the side of the operating theatre, you don’t see a lot of the gory stuff. I could have gone out into the corridor if I felt I was going to pass out,’ he said.
‘What can I do for you anyway?’ she asked.
‘I want to know if we have a file on a guy called James Karl Fisher, who used to live in Liverpool but for the past few years has been in Lancashire. We’re told he has a criminal record for racist attacks, stirring up race hatred, all that sort of thing.’
‘Give me a minute – I’ll have a look.’
Edwin made light conversation with the other librarians until Vicki returned a few minutes later, carrying a chunky buff-coloured file.
‘That looks promising,’ Edwin said.
‘Yes, we seem to have a lot about him going back ten years or more.’ Vicki handed over the portfolio.
Edwin signed the library register indicating that he had taken the file and returned to his desk in the newsroom.
*
It didn’t take him long to establish that everything he had been told about Fisher was substantially right. There were a handful of minor discrepancies with respect to dates, precise locations and court sentences, but it was abundantly clear that Fisher was a serial offender with a track record for race-hate crimes dating back ten or more years.
All the clippings from his own newspaper and others, many of them with accompanying photographs, spanned Fisher’s years in Liverpool, where he ran a haulage business with a fleet of trucks that travelled the length and breadth of the country. Several of the earliest cuttings referred to his ex-wife, Karen, a former glamour model, and drink-and-drug-fuelled parties he had had at his home in the affluent neighbourhood of Woolton.
Several of the accounts of Fisher’s racist atrocities made Edwin feel sick in the pit of his stomach. One such account was about how, with the help of his henchmen, he bought a pig’s head from a local butcher and drove several miles to toss it through the door of a newly-opened Jewish delicatessen. Another related how he had personally daubed swastikas on synagogues, desecrated Jewish graves with a sledgehammer and arranged to torch a yeshiva, a Jewish religious school.
One newspaper report of a court hearing, reported how he and three others had beaten up a young Jamaican, who he alleged had been having an affair with his wife which some six months later ended in their divorcing. The Jamaican was left with serious injuries.
In an interview later with a freelance journalist, Fisher was quoted as saying: “I could have maybe forgiven her if she had been fucked by a White man but not by a fucking nigger.”
Edwin quickly came to one indisputable conclusion: that Fisher was a thoroughly unpleasant, ruthless white supremacist who hero-worshipped Adolf Hitler and denied that the Holocaust ever happened. He felt it was grossly unjust that a donor heart had been used to give the chance of a new lease of life to such an undeserving monster.
His trawl through the cuttings also revealed that after he was released from his last prison sentence in Liverpool, Fisher had moved to Greater Manchester where he opened his fitness club and kept a low profile, living a bachelor life in a secluded house in the Lancashire countryside.
For some seven years, he had been off the police radar and out of the public limelight. This, Edwin felt sure, was why no one in the Manchester newsroom had joined the dots when they were given his name by the hospital and invited to witness the transplant operation.
‘It all stands up, Ross. Everything that we’ve been told about this guy is pretty accurate. He was – and probably still is – a pretty nasty character but seems to have kept his nose clean during the time he moved to his place in Rossendale,’ Edwin told his news editor after perusing the file and making a few notes.
‘So, what next? You now need to identify his donor.’
‘I thought, at first, I would check what the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool papers had on him, but I have had second thoughts, Ross. They would probably cotton on to the fact that we are working on a story about Fisher and they would likely start digging around.’
‘You’re right. Don’t ring anyone. Keep it to ourselves. Just concentrate now on finding out the name of the donor.’
Edwin returned the cuttings file to the library, went back to his desk and picked up the phone to call the Greater Manchester Police press office. He was optimistic that they should be able to locate details of a serious RTA in which a forty-nine-year-old man had been admitted to the A&E and then transferred to the Intensive Care Unit, where he was on life support equipment until he died some three weeks after admission.
‘I’m hoping he will be easy to identify,’ Edwin told the press officer.
‘We’ll check it out and give you a call. It will probably be tomorrow now, is that OK?’
‘Yes, tomorrow morning is just fine. Thanks.’ Edwin rang off. He went home, content that news-wise everything was falling into place.
*
Almost before he could boot up his desktop PC the following morning, news editor Ross Hetherington, asked Edwin if he had been able to identify the heart donor.
‘Hoping to hear any minute, Ross,’ Edwin told him. ‘I called the police press office yesterday and they promised to call me back this morning.’
‘Chase them if you don’t hear back soon. We need a name.’
‘I certainly will,’ Edwin said, deciding that he would call them if he had heard nothing in the next half-an-hour.
The thirty minutes passed and no one called him but, as luck had it, it did not matter. Around 10 a.m., one of the newsroom messenger boys brought Edwin his morning post. It contained a few more letters from readers about Fisher’s nefarious activities, but also a more interesting-looking one in a neat handwriting with a fountain pen from an address in Prestwich. It was from a woman who described herself as the donor’s widow.
Edwin read her name, then read it again His pulse quickened. Could what he was thinking be right? He read it for a third time: “Kindest regards, Mrs Leah Lieberman”. Edwin could not believe that she was Jewish and that the anti-Semite James Karl Fisher had been given the heart of a Jew. What’s more, as he read the full text of the letter, the heart of an Orthodox Jew who was an official at his synagogue.
His name was Marcus C. Lieberman, the synagogue cantor who led the congregation in song and prayer.
At first, Edwin thought that his coverage of the transplant operation had somehow caused offence to the donor’s widow and that she was writing a letter of complaint. But it was nothing of the sort. She was writing, in fact, to ask if she and her children could be given the identity of the recipient and if, perhaps at some time in the future, it would be possible to meet him. It read:
Dear Mr Benn,
I hope that you can help. My dear late husband, Marcus Lieberman, recently passed away in hospital and my family and I gave permission for his heart to be donated for a transplant operation. I have read your report of the new heart given to Mr James Fisher and in view of the fact that it took place just a few hours after Marcus died, I feel sure that Mr Fisher must have been the recipient. I would be most interested to know if you could confirm that this is the case and if, at some time in the future, it might be possible for my family and me to meet with Mr Fisher and his family.
Marcus was the cantor at our synagogue and so, when the doctors at the hospital asked my permission to donate his heart, I first called our rabbi, Nathan Goldbladt, to seek his guidance, as we only had a short time in which to make a decision.
Traditionally, the old Jewish religious laws dictated that the body of the deceased should not be desecrated in any way and should be buried intact – a belief that is part of what is known as Techiyat Hameitim – but all that has now changed. The Jewish faith now takes the view that the saving of human life – something we call Pikuach Nefesh in Hebrew – overrides all other considerations and that, if a donor organ can save a life, it is not just permissible, but the right and proper thing to do. When the rabbi explained all this to us we consented right away to donate Marcus’s heart – it is certainly what he would have wanted. It has already helped us to come to terms with our loss, to know that he has given new life to someone else.
I expect that there is a formal hospital procedure for making contact with the recipient and their family and, if you are not able to confirm that Mr Fisher is the recipient, I will formally approach the hospital. I look forward to hearing from you.
Shalom and kindest regards,
Mrs Leah Lieberman
The letter presented Edwin with a raft of interwoven dilemmas. Even if he could be absolutely certain that Marcus Lieberman’s heart was beating inside the chest of Jew-hater James Karl Fisher, he did not believe that it would ethically be right for him to act as an intermediary, passing on information between donor and recipient or vice-versa, unless he had the approval to do so from the hospital.
Edwin became increasingly aware that it was a highly delicate and potentially explosive situation.
He was on the point of seeking advice from his news editor when he took a call on his landline. It was from one of the press officers at police headquarters.
‘Edwin, I’ve got a couple of names for you,’ he began.
‘Excellent, thanks.’
‘There were two men who were involved in RTAs in North Manchester on and around that date, who were both admitted to hospital and ICU. Have you got a pen?’
‘Yes, I’ve always got a pen. Fire away.’
‘Well, one was a Jack Harding, aged fifty-five, from Crumpsall, who I gather has now been transferred from the ICU to a general ward, and the other was a Marcus Lieberman, aged forty-eight, who was on a life support machine until he was pronounced clinically dead and it had to be switched off. I am assuming that this Mr Lieberman must be the man who was the heart donor,’ he said.
‘Brilliant, many thanks. That’s an amazing coincidence.’
Edwin went on to add that he had just received a letter from Mrs Lieberman, explaining that she had given permission for her husband’s heart to be donated and that she had written to the paper seeking to make contact with the donor and family.
‘Glad to help, Edwin. Sounds like an interesting piece you are going to write,’ said the press officer.
‘Possibly. Not sure yet. But, hopefully, yes.’
*
Everything was falling neatly into place, but Edwin still had to be one hundred percent sure that it was Marcus Lieberman’s heart that was given to Fisher. And there was only one way to do that: he would have to call the transplant office and speak to his contacts there.
As luck had it, he managed to speak directly to James McCloud’s PA, the heart surgeon who had recovered the heart.
