& Webb jewellery firm, and recovered his £77,750; Mappin had said he could commission a "well-connected Hollywood film-maker", but Jones had turned out to be a hairdresser. The court ordered Mappin to pay Pell's legal costs and interest on the money he had been given. According to an interview Pell gave at this time, he ended his regular bin-searching activity in February 2001. Damages In 2003, he won damages of £125,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the Sunday Express, which had falsely accused him of providing the IRA with information, and slander against Mark Watts, the journalist who had verbally accused him of the same act. Watts wrote a book about Pell titled The Fleet Street Sewer Rat, published in 2005. He has been prosecuted himself and was only fined £20, due to his claim that he lived off a weekly £10 payment from his father despite the estimated £100,000 a year he was earning from selling documents to newspapers. He has asserted that it was about £25,000. He was mentioned regularly in Private Eye, which nicknamed him 'Benji the Binman'. Later life Pell was regularly found during the 2000s in the Royal Courts of Justice taking notes on libel trials, in which he has a particular interest, and is well known to the King's Bench jurists. From June 2017, following the Grenfell Tower fire he took an active interest in the issue of unsafe cladding on high-rise tower blocks affecting 500,000 residents in the UK, using the tribunal system to complain about issues with the building in Slough where he lives. Death of brother His older brother, Daniel (Dany), was killed in a road accident aged 21. In reference to this, he once said, "Everything I was asked to do, I would have to do double. It was a sort of way of compensating for the loss of my brother". References and sources References Sources Tim Adams. "Benjamin Pell Versus the Rest of the World" , Granta, 87:21 (2004) 1963 births Living people Alumni of University College London British Orthodox Jews Media law Place of birth missing (living people)