A man who used to go through the bins of lawyers and other high profile people would sell material he had found discarded by them to newspapers, the Old Bailey has heard.
Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World, explained this to the phone-hacking trial jury on Friday after being asked to explain what the term "binology" meant on an invoice sent to the paper in 2001.
She explained: "There was a particular private detective who worked for various newspapers who would go through bins, lawyers' bins and high profile people['s bins], Benji the Binman. And he would sell that information to the newspapers."
Brooks was shown an invoice from one of the companies used by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who hacked phones for the News of the World, addressed to Greg Miskiw, the paper's head of investigations, dated 4 January 2001 with words including "Dimmock" and "da Silva" on it.
She told the court she had never seen it before. Asked by her counsel, Jonathan Laidlaw QC, how she would have interpreted the invoice had she seen it before, she replied: "[I] probably would have interpreted it as an invoice for a private detective."
She said there wasn't a lot of details on the invoice apart from words such as "paedo, paeodo", which could have related to tracing people for the paper's Sarah's Law campaign in 2000.
Asked whether she would have had "any professional anxiety" about such an invoice, she said "no, not particularly", adding "though the binology one" might have.
Earlier, the jury heard how Brooks wrote a "furious" email to senior colleagues when Clive Milner, the then managing director of News International, had refused a pay rise and promotion to then chief crime reporter Neville Thurlbeck.
"Can someone please explain to me why Neville has been told this? … I will not have decisions taken like this in my absence, I'm always on email, phone," she wrote, adding that the company had a "duty to look after this man".
Brooks argued in an earlier email that Thurlbeck's "career, his family life" had been put on hold for two years by a criminal trial in which he was later acquitted. He was a "self-generating journalist" who had caught the attention of rival newspapers and deserved a pay rise, she said. Brooks added that she won the argument with Milner.
Brooks is being tried on four charges linked to a conspiracy to hack phones, conspiracy to bribe public officials for stories and a conspiracy to conceal material from police investigating phone hacking in 2011.
She denies all charges.
The trial continues.
