It sounds like something out of Old Hollywood: A supermarket tabloid gets its hands on a juicy piece of celebrity gossip and buries it so that the celebrity owes them a favor.<br /><br />But catch and kill, at least at the National Enquirer, was going on as recently as five years ago.<br /><br />The scheme made headlines days before the 2016 presidential election when the Wall Street Journal revealed the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, paid former Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal $150,000 to keep her alleged former affair with Donald Trump quiet during his campaign.<br /><br />A payoff of $30,000 was also made to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed the real-estate mogul allegedly fathered a child out of wedlock, prosecutors claim.<br /><br />Trump pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to such schemes (including his lawyer Michael Cohen’s 2018 payment of $130,000 for porn star Stormy Daniels’ silence).<br /><br />Manhattan prosecutors allege Trump orchestrated the “catch and kill” strategies with Cohen and David Pecker, former CEO of A360 Media, previously known as American Media Inc. (AMI).<br /><br />But the practice of buying and burying a story as a favor has long been a tabloid technique, former National Enquirer employees told The Post.<br />It was constant practice to get to a celebrity and tell them you had details of his infidelity or some other down point of his life and career — and say you would hold the story back if he would give an interview,” former National Enquirer roving editor Tony Brenna said.<br /><br />Brenna likened the story-suppression method to “bartering and trading.”<br /><br />“It didn’t always work,” he said. “Sometimes what you had [on stars] was better than what they could return. It was also common practice to get one celebrity to rat out another.”<br /><br />The Enquirer’s former publisher, Gene Pope Jr., who died in 1988, had regularly used the tactic with comedian Bob Hope — a “terrible womanizer” who cooperated for legitimate profiles in exchange for the tabloid not exposing his alleged dalliances, Brenna said.<br />Pecker, Trump’s longtime friend who took over the Enquirer in 1999, was determined to make himself into a power broker, Brenna said and took catch and kill to another level.<br /><br />Another former National Enquirer staffer echoed Brenna’s description of the tabloid industry’s underbelly, confirming that “catch and kills” were heavily sought under Peck’s leadership.<br /><br />“They loved doing them,” the ex-Enquirer reporter told The Post. “But sometimes celebrities won’t play ball.”<br /><br />By ensnaring a celebrity in a potentially embarrassing spot, the Enquirer, ironically, hoped to gain more “credence” and legitimacy, the former reporter said.<br /><br />Trump, meanwhile, is far from the only A-lister who brokered deals with AMI to conceal stories that could derail their careers. Here’s an inside look at some of AMI’s biggest “catch and kills”:<br />
