Mirror was tipped off a few weeks ago about some sudden and strange activities by certain elements.

We began hearing about hurried trips to Venezuela, even by politicians, and attempts to clean up a criminal and made him presentable to the public.

In addition, we were told about all kinds of clandestine meetings being held, and about old contacts being renewed by disgraced politicians, criminals and others.

Then suddenly, well … not so suddenly after all, the so-called Sunday Guardian exclusive about Vernon Paul, which was, in fact, a sort of flip-side to a Sunday Mirror story printed eight, long months ago on May 15, 2005.

And would you believe it, Mirror’s “old” story and not the Guardian’s “exclusive” became the major story of the day.

But is there a link between the Guardian’s side of the story and the pending arrest?

Since its inception in the 1980s, Mirror has built its reputation on breaking the big stories.

From the Bernadette James murder in 1998, when we were the first to report that the WPC was shot in a bus, printing the picture of the bus with its shattered windscreen and all … while the dailies were painting a totally different picture of the shooting, to the illegal drug trade and all the sins of the notorious Dole Chadee and his henchmen, long before he was arrested for murder, we were first.

We exposed the murder of Muslimeen member Abdul Kareem by a policeman in 1985, even printing a picture of him on the ground after he was knifed.