From the late 1930s until the mid-1960s, Percy Hoskins, longtime stalwart of the Daily Express who became its highly influential chief crime correspondent, had a contact list like nobody else in Fleet Street. It was said of him: “If you are in trouble, you should call Percy before your lawyer.” Hoskins had long-term friendships with people as diverse as the film director Alfred Hitchcock and the FBI head J.
Edgar Hoover. He knew everyone, and could get things done, and fast. This facility was certainly initially enabled and then enhanced by Hoskins’s close personal friendship with his newspaper’s proprietor, the formidable and powerful Lord Beaverbrook.
Like all great reporters, Hoskins built his reputation the hard way, producing scoop after scoop on the crime beat, allowing him to send titbits to other reporters in Fleet Street’s ‘Murder Gang’ group of crime reporters, who were given that moniker by Hilde Marchant in her 1947 feature article covering their crime-news-gathering activities in the Picture Post, with photographs by Bert Hardy. It’s long been known that Hoskins and other crime reporters had close working relationships with officers at Scotland Yard and with its Press Bureau, which fed them information to produce their stories to make the front page when circulations ran in millions and the hunt for hard news, especially crime news, was ruthless. That Murder Gang reporters such as Norman ‘Jock’ Rae of the News of the World and Harry Procter of.