Yellow Press

Publishing books from the dark side of media & politics, specialising in True Crime and Investigative Journalism

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Welcome to Yellow Press

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Shaun Smith finds out two of his own gym members are dealing steroids on his floor. What follows is not what you'd expect. A slap, a lot of shouting, then the sit-down where everyone leaves with an agreement, and Shaun three and a half grand lighter. From The Debt Collector, the Vice documentary produced by Graham Johnson and based on his books The Cartel and Young Blood. Yellow Press has just published Graham's new novel Kontrolle, alongside Stuart Griffiths' Pigs' Disco and ParaTripper. Out now.

The Debt Collector followed Shaun Smith, the former Liverpool enforcer turned the UK's scariest debt collector, as he worked the grey zone between the legal economy and the underworld out of his gym in Warrington. The film pulled in more than 32 million views online and remains one of the most watched pieces of British underworld journalism on the internet. Graham has been writing about this world, and the people in it, for thirty years.

Kontrolle is Graham's historical crime novel about MK-ULTRA, the CIA's behavioural conditioning programmes in 1950s America, ending in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 with the JFK assassination. Pigs' Disco is Stuart's memoir of joining the Parachute Regiment at sixteen, serving in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, and falling into the acid house and ecstasy rave scene that followed. ParaTripper picks up after the army, as he tries to become a Fleet Street photographer while PTSD catches up with him. Three different routes into the same question: how violence shapes the people who carry it, and the people who watch.

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The Genocide Quadrilogy by Graham Johnson:

Part 1 - EastRush (2025). Nazi Germany and the science of conditioning.
Part 2 - Kontrolle (2026). Cold War America and the CIA.
Part 3 - For the Coming Man (2027).
Part 4 - New American Holocaust (2028).

A four-part project tracking the same history across a century. The second instalment is out now.

https://t.co/eiuh6TOKPw

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When Stuart Griffiths arrived in Kinshasa on a photography assignment, soldiers surrounded him, grabbed his camera and passport, kicked and punched him down a dirt road, and made him remove his shoes while a civilian hit him on the nose.

That is the opening of ParaTripper. It is not the most dangerous thing that happens in the book.

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There is a scene in Kontrolle where Americans are described as "Happiness Machines," consumers whose hidden desires have been manipulated to the point where they will not object to the crimes committed in their name.

Graham Johnson wrote that line about 1950s America.

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When Pigs' Disco was first published in 2013, 500 copies, launched at a Paris photography book fair, it sold out almost immediately. The Daily Mail ran a piece. The Guardian reviewed it. The BBC covered it.

It was also described by one angry veteran on Facebook as: "You low life pig. Well just remember if I ever bump into you I'm going to fucking hurt you. WANKER."

Stuart Griffiths included that review too.

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In 1945, US intelligence ran Operation PAPERCLIP. Its aim was to bring Nazi scientists to America before the Soviets could recruit them.

Among those taken on was Hubertus Strughold, known as the father of space medicine. His earlier work had involved experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

This is the world Kontrolle begins in.

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Kontrolle ends the way it has to.

After a breakfast of waffles and eggs, two shooters in dogtooth slacks and sports jackets walk through Dealey Plaza. They are checking the field of fire. It is the morning of 22 November 1963. We already know what happens next.

The novel's achievement is making you care anyway.

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Jon Clarke on what actual investigative journalism looks like:

"Banging doors, battering the phones, working your contacts. Digging up a new line, bagging an exclusive, standing up a fresh lead. Reading the cuts, filing clean copy, simplifying the story."

This is the tradecraft Maddie Endgame documents, applied to the biggest missing persons case in recent memory.

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Stuart Griffiths was photographing the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in London when Foto 8 magazine rang him for an interview. The feature was titled 'Out of Line.'

Around the same time, he was trying to get to Baghdad with the Sunday Mirror through a contact running security contractors out there.

ParaTripper is a book about what it takes to become a photographer when everything in your background says you shouldn't be able to.

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JFK's stated intention was to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces."

He was assassinated before he could do it. Kontrolle tells the story of the machinery that made that happen. But the more interesting question the novel raises is not who pulled the trigger. It's who built the conditions in which it was possible.

What is your read on the Kennedy assassination? Official account, or otherwise?

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The CIA psychiatrist who recruited Marilyn Monroe into a behavioural conditioning programme was her real-life therapist, Ralph Greenson. He was present when she died.

This is not in Kontrolle as a conspiracy theory. It is in Kontrolle as history. Graham Johnson's novel draws the line between what is documented and what is imagined, and invites you to keep checking which side of it you're on.

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Madeleine McCann's family MP is calling for Christian Brueckner to be extradited to the UK for trial. Brueckner has been living in woodland in Germany since his release from prison last year and has refused a Metropolitan Police interview.

Jon Clarke was the first journalist on the scene in Praia da Luz in 2007. He hasn't stopped reporting since. Maddie Endgame is the record of those 18 years.

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Conspiracy theory is now as commonplace as pop music.

That line is from Graham Johnson's new novel Kontrolle. It was written to describe America in the 1950s.

Does it fit better now or then?

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"In many ways, Griffiths brought the culture that enveloped him in the Army, and which he now remembers with antipathy, to the Brighton rave scene. Veterans from army days appear throughout the narrative, displaced and angry in the neo-hippy rave culture of the 1990s, but attracted by its chaos, anarchy and drugs, and its undemanding sense of community."

Val Williams, Seaside Photographed, on Stuart Griffiths' Pigs' Disco

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Operation VALHALLA MAIDEN. Operation MONARCH. Operation MOCKINGBIRD.

These aren't the inventions of Kontrolle. They are real CIA programmes, documented, classified, in some cases still contested. Graham Johnson's novel uses them as the architecture of a story that ends in Dallas, 22 November 1963.

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Congress is currently holding hearings to declassify files from Project MK Ultra, the CIA's Cold War programme that ran from 1953 to 1973. LSD, sleep deprivation, hypnosis, unwitting civilians. The agency said the records were destroyed. A whistleblower says they weren't.

Graham Johnson's novel Kontrolle was published before any of this resurfaced in Washington. Its subject matter feels considerably less fictional today.

https://t.co/eiuh6TOKPw

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End of the week. The Brueckner news cycle will move again. The McCann file will keep moving with it.

Maddie Endgame Volume 2 is out from Yellow Press this year.

https://t.co/U6KNfwo2PT

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A teenage gunman hands his pistol and shotgun to a film crew on camera. Graham Johnson produced and narrated the Panorama (Young Gunmen, 2008). Stuart Griffiths shot the stills that ran around the world. Nearly two decades on, both are back on the same territory in print, and Yellow Press has just published all three: Graham's novel Kontrolle, and Stuart's Pigs' Disco and ParaTripper. Out now.

Young Gunmen went inside the armed teenage street gangs taking hold of Liverpool. It found boys barely out of school carrying converted handguns, parents losing sons to turf wars, and whole estates living with the consequences. The access was rare. The footage spoke for itself.

Kontrolle is Graham's historical crime novel about MK-ULTRA, the CIA's behavioural conditioning programmes in 1950s America, ending in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 with the JFK assassination. Pigs' Disco is Stuart's memoir of joining the Parachute Regiment at sixteen, serving in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, and falling into the acid house and ecstasy rave scene that followed. ParaTripper picks up after the army, as he tries to become a Fleet Street photographer while PTSD catches up with him. Three different routes into the same question: how violence shapes the people who carry it, and the people who watch.

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From Pigs' Disco:

"The floor is slick with beer, vomit and piss. Paratroopers ask me things I do not understand; they are too drunk to even care about standing up. But I am filled with a sense of euphoria, like this is a battlefield and I survived the great epic battle."

@PlanetGriff

https://t.co/a9eTcmbGXv

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Helge Busching, key prosecution witness at Brueckner's Braunschweig trial last year, was interviewed by Scotland Yard once for two days in London and four times by the BKA in Germany.

He offered to take a lie detector test. They aren't admissible in Germany. Judge Engemann disregarded his evidence anyway.