An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys Read online

  AN EPIC SWINDLE

  Brian Reade is a Daily Mirror columnist, Kop season ticket holder and author of the book 43 Years With The Same Bird. He lives in Liverpool.

  AN EPIC SWINDLE

  44 MONTHS WITH A PAIR OF COWBOYS

  BRIAN READE

  New York • London

  © 2011 by Brian Reade

  The article quoted from on pp.57–58 is by Mihir Bose and was originally published in the Daily Telegraph on 27 December 2006.

  The article quoted from on pp.76–77 is by David Conn and was originally published in the Guardian on 14 March 2007.

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  e-ISBN 978-1-62365-536-5

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  To The Noise that refused to be dealt with

  ‘This was a valuable asset that was swindled away from me in an epic swindle’

  – Tom Hicks, October 2010, on failing to make a

  profit out of the sale of Liverpool FC

  ‘They have presented a grotesque parody of the truth’

  – Lord Grabiner, QC, October 2010, on Hicks’s

  and George Gillett’s attempts to make that profit

  ‘I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.’

  – John Steinbeck, 1939, on the American

  capitalists who caused the Great Depression

  and inspired The Grapes of Wrath

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  John Aldridge, Tony Barrett, Chris Bascombe, David Bick, Roy Boulter, Owen Brown, Jamie Carragher, Mick Carroll, Tony Evans, Steven Gerrard, Peter Hooton, Steve Horner, Alan Kayll, David Luxton, John Mackin, James McKenna, Richard Milner, Steve Monaghan, Danny Nicolson, Rick Parry, Phil Reade, Paul Rice and everyone who cannot be named. Thank you all.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Give us a little time. We’re gonna have some fun together’

  – George Gillett

  There had been other surreal moments at Anfield.

  Bill Shankly’s and Kenny Dalglish’s resignations spring to mind as does the grim League Cup draw with Chesterfield on a cold autumn night in 1992. There I stood on a half-empty Kop, Graeme Souness’s finest making me want to pour lukewarm tea on my nuts and wire them up to the floodlights, when a stranger in a red Harry Enfield Scouser’s wig, with an East Midlands accent, tried to start an Istvan Kozma chant (‘Iiiiiiiiiiiiist-van’) and accused me of being a plastic tosser for not joining in.

  But nothing in the history of this ‘wonderful, storied club’ (copyright Thomas Ollis Hicks) seemed as foreign as the events of 6 February 2007.

  One snapshot which sums up this most bizarre of afternoons came when the new American owners caressed the This Is Anfield sign, despite being the antithesis of everything it stood for, barely able to comprehend their luck or contain their glee.

  Behind the bank of flashing cameras which captured this Shankly grave-spinning image, their frat-brat sons, new red woollen scarves sitting uneasily on stiff suits, stared gormlessly at photos of Liverpool’s past glories, like men forced to peruse Bella magazines in a dentist’s waiting room.

  Minutes later, the six of them squeezed their all-American frames down the tight players’ tunnel, back-slapping as they went, past the dugouts into the harsh late-winter sun, and formed a line near the centre circle with the Kop as a backdrop.

  There was George with son Foster, Tom, Tom Jr., and his brothers Mack and Alex, all giving out false, nervous laughs at Gillett’s poor man’s Ernie Wise act. They had fixed, white-teethed grins, gleaming vitamin-powered skin and wore red ties under identical pin-striped grey suits which all had a single button done up. You’d have thought it a Seventh Day Adventist Bible-Sellers Convention if it wasn’t for the signed LFC ball Tom Jr., the tallest of them in centre shot, held uncomfortably.

  As the flashbulbs died down and the line broke up I half expected an American version of Michael Knighton’s notorious Old Trafford ball-juggling act. Hicks shouting: ‘22-21-18-32’ as the boys hitched up the flaps on their suit jackets and showed him their butts, while Gillett sprinted on to the pass and did a touchdown by the Kemlyn Road corner flag, threw the ball back over his head and leapt, bicycle-kicking into the Kop.

  That’s how weird it seemed.

  Yet if a suspicion started to grow that something wasn’t quite right about these unknown American strangers taking over Liverpool Football Club, it was drowned out by a primeval scream for change.

  Since Roman Abramovich arrived and pumped millions of petro-dollars into a near-bankrupt Chelsea, it was as clear as the seventeen-year gap on the league-winners’ section of our honours’ board that someone with deep pockets needed to take the keys out of owner David Moores’ hands and make Liverpudlians believe again.

  Many were so relieved that dithering David had been ousted, that the Americans’ promise of the earth just seemed a bonus. And buddy was that earth promised. Revisiting what they vowed at that infamous February 2007 press conference should be compulsory reading for apprentice comedy-writers, because here was the ultimate masterclass in irony.

  Gillett said he loved meeting people. ‘If they want to do me harm, they don’t need to wait until match day. My name is in the phone book. Call me.’ How long would it be before all numbers and email addresses were changed due to harm being pledged?

  ‘When I go to Anfield I’m going to be on the streets in front of the stadium talking to the fans.’ Soon he’d be hustled into Anfield from speeding blacked-out vans for fear the fans wanted more than just a word with him.

  ‘We’re not people to come here and milk the fans.’ We’ll never know how much dairy produce they claimed on their multimillion-pound expense sheets but I’m guessing there was some in there.

  ‘We are passionate about winning and will do everything we can to ensure Liverpool wins plenty of trophies here in England and in Europe.’ They won precisely none during their time in charge.

  ‘This club is not far from being the best in the world.’ True. Back then they were en route to their second Champions League Final in three years. When they left they were in the relegation zone.

  ‘It is not just about spending money.’ True. You never spent any. Of your own anyway.

  ‘I must have an identical evil twin if the rumours I met Everton’s board to discuss a groundshare are true.’ You do. Sitting next to you. Name of Hicks.

  What G
illett unleashed that day wasn’t so much a charm offensive as a fully fledged land-and-sea charm invasion. Code-name: Operation Bullshit. He did most of the schmoozing but when he was flagged up, George W. Bush’s side-kick, Tom Hicks, unleashed Operation Shock and Awe.

  ‘This is not a takeover like the Glazer deal at Manchester United. There is no debt involved.’ Oh yes there was. Every goddam cent.

  ‘We believe that as custodians of this wonderful, storied club we have a duty of care to the tradition and legacies of Liverpool.’ A duty so shamelessly neglected Evertonians raised a flag after they’d left saying ‘Agents Hicks and Gillett: Mission Accomplished.’

  ‘Liverpool is like buying the Boston Red Sox in baseball, they are the biggest and the best.’ When the New England Sports Ventures eventually paid off Hicks’s debt to the banks and took over the club he claimed, ‘There’s better owners than the Boston Red Sox out there.’

  ‘We want to build the greatest stadium facility in world football.’ They didn’t even build the greatest stadium facility in Subbuteo football.

  When asked when this magnificent edifice would rise in nearby Stanley Park Gillett answered: ‘The shovel needs to be in the ground in the next sixty days.’ The shovel still sits, with a ‘reserved’ sticker on, under till three at B&Q’s Speke branch.

  And here’s my favourite from Georgie boy: ‘I want to earn the respect of the fans. My message to them is to give us a few years and we’ll see where it takes us. Give us a little time and we are going to have some fun together.’ I’m sorry but this is way, way past irony now.

  The phone started to throb. It was the Daily Mirror Features desk. I’m guessing that the way the day is panning out they want me to do an I’m Feeling Yankee Doodle Dandy now we’re Beverly Hills Kopped piece.

  Don’t answer. Think this through.

  What’s really nagging away is the memory of Anfield’s last joint press conference, when Roy Evans and Gerard Houllier were thrown before the microphones and ordered to sell us a bright new future. That literally ended in tears (from Evans’ eyes) at another conference four months later.

  Was this also a shotgun marriage of financial, if not footballing, convenience? Watching Foster Gillett refusing to speak a word to the Hicks boys should have told us that the families may both have been from the same country but geographically and culturally they were thousands of miles apart.

  Besides, what did we really know about them?

  Gillett had been sniffing around the Premier League for a while. He may have owned ski-resorts and ice-hockey teams but clearly knew puck-all about football. Plus he couldn’t have a mountain of his own cash or he wouldn’t have had to beg Hicks to wade in with his cheque book.

  Why had the Texan only come in at the last minute? What did we know of him other than he ran a couple of US sports teams, once owned Dr Pepper and gave big bucks to George W. Bush? Yes, that George W. Bush. And the main man in our boardroom bankrolls him? Nice. Where does that leave Shankly’s quote about the socialism he believed in meaning everyone having a share of the rewards? Or was I coming over all studenty? Was I forgetting that if you want the best capitalists to run your club the chances are they’re not going to sell copies of Socialist Worker in their spare time?

  And anyway, didn’t the last manager to win the League, Kenny Dalglish, dress on the right-hand side? Wasn’t the last successful chairman, John Smith, bluer than the broken veins on Churchill’s conk? Hadn’t Rafa Benitez been desperate for a world-class right-winger since he joined?

  The language was grating, though. Who’d have imagined we would one day hear the club’s owners pretending to talk with passion about the ‘Liverpool Reds’, ‘goal-minders’ and ‘defencemen’?

  Having said that, Liverpool had nearly been bought by bent Thai dictator Thaksin Shinawatra, meaning we could have been sitting there hearing him tell Amnesty International why he doesn’t deserve to be fending off homosexual advances in a prison cell doing time for human rights abuses.

  They could have been the Glazers who had piled millions of pounds of debt on Manchester United. But they weren’t, were they? Hadn’t they themselves just told us that? Hadn’t the chief executive Rick Parry confirmed it?

  They’ve met Jamie Carragher, Steven Gerrard and Rafa Benitez who’ve all given the thumbs-up. You have to go with the judgement of those who’ve met them. As Moores and Parry say, you only get to sell the family silver once and you have to get it right. I know they’ve made some calamitous decisions in the past – look at Parry’s perm, look at Moores’ moustache – but surely, surely, they’ve got this right?

  Of course the Yanks were only here for the potential fortunes to be had beaming football into every slum from Caracas to Chongqing. Are we that naive to think they’ve watched black-and-white YouTube footage of the Kop on Panorama singing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and thought ‘Ah love those wacky, sentimental Scousers so much I want to hand them all my lahf savings to make them happy again?’

  Besides, where’s the evidence that says all Yanks are bad? For every Glazer at United there’s Randy Lerner at Aston Villa whom the Brummies love.

  We’re going to have to back them now the deal is done. Think glass half-full. They wouldn’t pay all this cash for a club to not make it successful would they? And where would we be if we hadn’t sold to them? The Dubai crowd have walked off, meaning we’d be stuck with Moores and his empty pockets watching Chelsea and United ride over the hills and far away.

  The phone goes again. It’s getting on for five o’clock. They’re impatient. I answer.

  ‘So what do you think about your new best buddies then?’

  ‘I really don’t know. They look like aliens in suits and the little one keeps calling Liverpool a franchise. Like we’re part of a chain of friggin’ fried chicken shops.’

  ‘That’s how they speak.’

  ‘It’s not how we speak, is it?’

  ‘So you want them doing Dick van Dyke Scouse?’

  ‘They’ve brought their families too. It’s creepy. All they’re doing is flashing their gnashers and giving off lurrr-ve. If Shirley Jones was here we could re-form the Partridge Family.’

  ‘Well they seem to be talking a good game.’

  ‘They’re definitely saying the right things.’

  ‘Well, give them a big welcome then.’

  ‘We can’t be sure though, can we? For all we know this could—’

  ‘Typical Scouser. You spend years saying all you need is someone with serious money and you’ll be winning everything again, and when your sugar daddies come along all you can do is moan and take the piss out of them. Go with the flow, eh? Anyway the editor’s splashing on it under the headline ‘We could not walk alone any more’ and he wants your words with it. So knock out 300 for the front page.’ – click.

  So that’s what I gave them. Three hundred and twenty-six to be precise. Three hundred and twenty-six glass-half-full words that would haunt this Liverpool fan of forty-four years for the next forty-four months.

  Bless me, Shankly, for I have sinned. It is four decades since my last confession, and I accuse myself of … criminal naivety:

  It was surreal watching a pair of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble characters, sitting in Anfield, chuckling at the prospect of Liverpool FC being their new plaything.

  Especially when they thanked the Royal Bank of Scotland for helping them secure ownership of this exciting ‘franchise’. How easy it would be to dismiss them as opportunists and lament that the Liverpool Way had been flogged for a fistful of dollars.

  But that would be to miss the point. Since Bill Shankly’s arrival in 1959, Liverpool had always been about continuity but as with the famous Boot Room the boardroom had reached the end of the line.

  Put simply, in a sport where success equates to cash in the bank, Liverpool didn’t have any. Which is one of the reasons you have to go back seventeen years to last find them champions of England. Something radical needed to be done to make sure the
club had more than a fabulous past.

  They had to find new investors with the clout and vision to compete with Europe’s best, and with no billionaire Scousers able to step in, it had to be outsiders.

  Unparalleled amounts will soon pour into the global game. Gillett and Hicks know the elite will cream it off unless they catapult Liverpool back into that bracket.

  The fans feel vulnerable. But maybe they should remember another pair of Yanks, Rodgers and Hammer-stein, whose song You’ll Never Walk Alone has inspired the club down the ages.

  Or simply remember that at the very least the club’s debt will go, the new stadium will be built, and men with serious money, knowledge of sport and business intent will be in charge. Men who say they understand the club’s traditions and intend to respect them.

  Whether they have the desire and commitment for the long-haul remains to be seen.

  But until they see evidence to the contrary, most Liverpudlians will give them the benefit of the doubt. And dream.’

  Saying a million Hail Marys and a billion Our Fathers could not absolve my sins.

  The only consolation I can take is I wasn’t the only one to be done up like a kipper as the banner headline on the next day’s Liverpool Echo: ‘Rafa: We’re in Good Hands’ confirmed.

  Plus, I could have been the fan who daubed the following words on to a red bedsheet and proudly held it up on the Kop:

  Match ticket … £32

  New Anfield … £220m

  Rafa Benitez … priceless

  For everything else …

  there’s George and Tom

  Indeed, virtually everyone in English football and the English media swallowed it. The logic being the Liverpool board couldn’t be that stupid, even though we had ample proof that they could.

  It was as though we’d all been in the trenches for so long that when the war was over everyone looked up the line assuming that the men a rank above had checked out the terms of the armistice and handed us a peaceful, prosperous future with our paternal American allies.