Scoop! Police want to talk to NotW’s Greg Miskiw

Not many News of the World hacks can compete with their ex-editor Rebekah Brooks in the colourful character stakes. But one man who can is Greg Miskiw. He is currently thought to be somewhere in Florida - and the Met police would very much like to talk to him.

Miskiw has figured in documents taken from the homes of two private detectives at the heart of the phone-hacking scandal – Glenn Mulcaire and Steve Whittamore.

Miskiw was appointed by Brooks a decade ago as the Sunday tabloid's news editor. In this capacity, he hired the services of Mulcaire, famously offering him a £7,500 bonus in 2005 if he could deliver enough transcripts to stand up a story about Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association.

Taylor worked out that his phone had been hacked and put his lawyers onto the News of the World. Soon after, Miskiw was bundled out of Wapping and turned up in Manchester where he opened a news agency.

Since then, he has put even more distance between himself and the News International, taking himself off to Florida.

Last month, according to a report in the Independent on Sunday (above), Miskiw's former girlfriend Terenia Taras was arrested and questioned in West Yorkshire by police officers from the Met. She has been bailed to return to a police station in the autumn.

Miskiw is the source of the delightful quote that decorates the front cover of Peter Burden’s book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings. It reads: "That is what we do - we go out and destroy other people’s lives".

According to Burden, it is based on a comment he once made to a colleague, Charles Begley, who was not so keen on the paper's story-getting tactics.

The First Post can reveal that Miskiw's daredevil spirit can be traced back to one of his earlier jobs, as a news reporter on the long since defunct London Evening News.

It was the 1970s when the Solidarity union movement, led by Lech Walesa, was taking hold in Communist Poland.

The News, realising that it had a reporter of Polish origin who still had some command of the language, put in motion a hush-hush operation to get themselves a scoop: Miskiw would enter Poland in a mail bag, by rail from Vienna, and cover the rise of Solidarity for the News.

Miskiw was duly dispatched to Vienna where a financial arrangement was made with a train guard. After getting through the Iron Curtain without being discovered, Miskiw was released by the guard from his mail bag.

Our man then jumped off the train and intrepidly makes his way into a small Polish town where he sniffed out the local hotel.

So far, so good. But when the hotel clerk made the routine request for his passport, Miskiw, not thinking, handed it over. He was arrested a few minutes later. It took three weeks to get him home. ·