Benjamin Pell (also known as Benji the Binman;[1] born December 1963)[citation needed] is a British man who is known for having raked through the dustbins of law firms representing prominent people in search of incriminating or compromising documents that he could sell to the press.
An adherent of Orthodox Judaism[2] who was once a trainee lawyer,[3] he (initially)[4] failed his law exams at University College London in 1986 which he was expected to pass.
[9] Piers Morgan at the Leveson Inquiry in 2011 admitted buying documents for stories from Pell while editor of the Daily Mirror, including Elton John's discarded bank statements, and said that such behaviour was on the "cusp of [the] unethical".
"[14] Pell was the subject of a Channel 4 television documentary Scandal in the Bins (2000)[15] produced by Victor Lewis-Smith.
He has been prosecuted himself and was only fined £20,[22] 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.
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.