Rocky Ryan
British media hoaxer (1937-2004)
"Rocky Ryan" directs here. For the American football player, see Rocky Ryan (American football).
Michael Joseph "Rocky" Ryan (30 December 1937 – 15 January 2004) was a British media hoaxer, who became known in the UK for providing newspapers with numerous stories that turned out to be fabrications. Earlier in his life, he had been a small-time criminal and film stuntman.
Ryan was born in Tipperary, Ireland, and in his youth served time in borstals. He was involved in film stunt work, and was injured during work in 1975 on The Slipper and the Rose, released the following year. He began his series of hoaxes in the mid-1970s, he said, after one newspaper contacted the police (falsely) claiming he was Donald Neilson, known as the Black Panther, the armed robber and murderer.
Ryan used numerous aliases, showing an ability with accents, when he gave stories to the press, including Major Travis, Peter Bernstein, David Oppenheimer, and Rocco Salvatore. The last name, supposedly a businessman, was used to dupe The Daily Telegraph into believing the contact was involved in a military coup in the Seychelles. Other stories concocted by Ryan included his claim to The Sun that the kidnapped racehorse Shergar was alive and well and living in Jersey, and telling the same newspaper Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was being allowed out of Broadmoor to attend discos.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rocky Ryan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.