Always Managing: My Autobiography (2 page)

Not that he fancied him. ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘he’s the worst footballer I’ve ever seen in my life. Harry, he’s a basketball player. If you think I’m going to pay a million pounds for this player, this useless player, you must be mad.’

I told Milan he was wrong. ‘He’ll be fantastic,’ I said.

In the end, I persuaded him to take a chance. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but it’s your head that’s on the block.’ I didn’t know then how true those words would prove to be. I was right about Crouch, though. He was outstanding for us. We bought him for £1.25 million and sold him to Aston Villa nine months later for £4.5 million – a profit of £3.25 million. As far as I was concerned I was owed ten per cent of that, except by then my job had changed. I wasn’t director of football any more; I was Portsmouth’s manager.

Instead of ten per cent of the profit on Crouch, I received five per cent. I was probably lucky to get that. Knowing Milan I’m surprised he didn’t take his wages, his digs and every other sundry off the commission price. Even so, I wasn’t happy. I asked Peter Storrie, the chief executive, where the rest of my bonus was. He said my contract had changed when I became manager and if I had a problem I should talk to Milan about it. So I did. ‘You’re wrong, Harry,’ he said. ‘This is a new contract, a manager’s contract. You’re earning better money now. You get us promoted, you get a big bonus; you win a trophy, you get a big bonus; that bonus from when you were director of football no longer applies. Now you get five per cent of any sale, not ten.’

I was not happy. ‘But I bought him and sold him, Milan, and the club made £3.25 million,’ I protested.

He wouldn’t budge. ‘No, that is your new deal: five per cent and no more,’ he insisted. I was furious, I really went into one. But the club was doing well, and Milan did not want us to fall out. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some good investments coming. I’ll make some money for you. I’ll buy some shares – the stake money is my money, and what we make over the top is yours. I’ll look after you, don’t worry.’

I said I didn’t want that, I wanted my Crouch bonus. I had the hump, but he was adamant.

And that was the plan. But in my mind, that was always my bonus money for Peter Crouch. Milan had his own name for it, but to me it was never anything less than what I was entitled to; only later, when the case was going to court, did I find out that Milan was right all along. I had signed a new contract, a changed contract, and hadn’t even noticed. By then, however, that was the least of my problems.

Milan wanted me open an account in Monaco for these investments. He said to use his bank, but I had to go there in person. It sounded like a nice day out. I didn’t really know Monaco, and Sandra had never been. We decided to make a weekend of it. Milan gave me directions to the bank. ‘Walk up the hill and look for it on the right.’ Sandra sat outside in the sun. Milan had told me to ask for the bank’s manager by name, David Cusdin. He said he was an Englishman, a big Fulham supporter, and would look after me. Our meeting went like clockwork. I was in there five minutes at most. The last thing Mr Cusdin said was that I would need a security password for the account, if I ever rang up. It could be a
name or a number, he explained. I can never remember numbers, so I went for a name. I gave the account the name of my dog, the lovely Rosie, and the year of my birth: Rosie47. I walked out of the bank and back to Sandra and I had nothing: no books, no papers, only what was in my memory. Rosie47. There wasn’t even any money in the account at that time. Milan was going to make a deposit and, I’ll be honest, I was sceptical it would ever happen. So much so that I forgot about it.

And that’s the truth. They tried to make it sound so dodgy in court but I couldn’t even remember the name of the bank until it became an issue. I’ve never been back to Monaco, never saw nor spoke to Mr Cusdin again. The weather was nice, we had a lovely weekend, but the Monaco account wasn’t really a part of my life. That was April 2002. I barely gave it another thought until almost two years later.

Portsmouth were in the Premier League by then. It had been a difficult first season, but we were staying up. We put a run together just when it mattered. From March 21 through April we had played six games, won five and drew the other. We beat some decent teams, too: our big rivals Southampton, Blackburn Rovers away, Manchester United, Leeds United at Elland Road. That was the season of the Arsenal Invincibles. They didn’t beat us, though, home or away.

Once we were guaranteed to be staying up, I remembered his promise and seized my chance with Milan. It had been a great first season for us. Teddy Sheringham and Yakubu came good at an important time near the end and everyone was delighted, Milan most of all. We had come from miles back. Only a few months previously, everyone thought we were relegation certainties. Now
we were getting a second Premier League season. Milan was ecstatic at the end of this match. He was cuddling me in the boardroom. ‘I love you, Harry, you are great, Harry.’

No time like the present, I thought. ‘Milan, you know those investments you made for me? How did we get on?’

Instantly, his mood changed. ‘Ah, disaster,’ he said. ‘Disaster. Don’t worry, let’s have a drink.’

‘What do you mean, “disaster”?’ I pressed.

‘I’ve lost millions, Harry,’ he said. ‘Millions. The market crashed.’

‘So we’ve got nothing?’ I asked.

‘There’s a little bit left in there,’ he said. ‘But don’t worry, I’ll have another go. I’ll put some more in and when a good share comes along, we’ll see.’

I went back and told Jim Smith, my assistant, about our conversation. ‘Harry, are you thick or what?’ Jim said. ‘I bet he never put anything in there in the first place.’ We all started laughing. The main thing was we were staying up. It was time to celebrate. The contents or otherwise of Rosie47 could wait for another day.

In court, the prosecutors tried to depict me as some kind of master criminal, moving money around the banks of Europe to escape tax. Some brain I was, if that was the case, because I volunteered the information about my bank account in Monaco to the investigators. Quest, the company commissioned in 2006 to report on corruption in football, were the first to ask about it. Every manager in the Premier League was interviewed by them. Quest asked me where I banked and I volunteered the information about the extra account in Monaco, as well as my accounts in Britain. It wasn’t as if this secret stash had been cleverly unearthed. I told them how it came about, and that they could get further
details about what was in there from Milan because I wasn’t even sure of the bank’s name by then. Now why would I do that, if I had anything to hide? I’d have to be stupid. It would be like a bank robber telling a policeman to search under the floorboards for the loot. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the Rosie47 account. Milan had made an investment for me, the investment was crap, and that’s as far as it went. Milan sent a letter confirming this, too. So without me, none of this would have come to light and Quest’s man, Nigel Layton, said as much in court. He was fantastic for me, as a witness. He just told the truth. Nobody caught me. I informed them, and without that information they would not have known the account existed. I wasn’t bound to disclose everything to Quest – they weren’t the police. I could see Mr Layton set the jury thinking. Why would this man reveal all this if he knew it was dishonest?

Quest, and later the police, were on the trail of a specific transfer involving a midfield player at Portsmouth, called Amdy Faye. They wanted to know about a payment of £100,000 made to Faye by his agent Willie McKay. The suspicion was it had been paid to avoid tax. They were asking who at the club authorised this payment: was it me, Peter Storrie, our chief executive, or Milan? I’m the manager, I told them, I don’t go into that. Managers don’t decide how much the agent gets. That’s the job of the chief executive or chairman. I couldn’t tell you the wages of my players, and even now I couldn’t tell you their arrangements with agents, either. When I was at Tottenham, Daniel Levy, the chairman, dealt with the players over contracts. It was the same at Portsmouth. I wasn’t in that meeting. I couldn’t have told Quest what Portsmouth paid Amdy, or Willie, that day – or if they paid them anything at all for that matter. I
coached the team, I picked the team; I didn’t handle the money. Quest accepted I had nothing to do with the £100,000 and Amdy Faye. But when the police picked up on it, all hell let loose.

It was the morning of Wednesday 28 November 2007. I was returning from Germany where I had been watching Stuttgart’s match with Glasgow Rangers. I liked the look of Stuttgart’s centre-half, a Portuguese player called Fernando Meira. I stayed in the same hotel as Rangers and met up with their manager, Walter Smith, an old friend. Things were going great. My life was good, the Portsmouth team was going fantastic, and I was in a good mood when I arrived back at the airport. I turned on my mobile phone to say good morning to Sandra, and there were so many messages, so many missed calls. I could hear Sandra’s voice, in a terrible state, crying down the phone, hysterical. I couldn’t understand her. I thought someone had been killed.

So did she. It turned out, that she was in the house alone, it was 6 a.m. and pitch black outside. Suddenly, the buzzer went at the front of our gate, and jammed on. Whoever hit it had pushed it so hard that the thing stuck. So there was a terrible screeching noise and that set off our two dogs barking. Sandra came out of a deep sleep, panicked and in the confusion thought the burglar alarm was going off. She was scared. She was trying to turn the alarm off, but the noise wouldn’t stop, and there being no one in the house but her, she immediately thought a burglar was actually inside the property. She didn’t know what to do. She looked outside and could see all these lights beyond the gate, so she pressed the buzzer to let them in because she thought it might be someone to help, and suddenly in stormed a crowd of people and cars, policemen, photographers, flashes going off, all piling through our gate.
Sandra’s next thought was that there had been a plane crash. She thought the plane had gone down and I was dead – because for what other reason would the police and photographers be there?

It wasn’t a burglar, it wasn’t a crash – it was a police raid. At dawn, like I was about to go on the run. The photographers were from the
Sun
newspaper, although the police have always denied tipping them off. I still feel angry about it, all these years later. They didn’t need to do it like that, as if I were some hardened criminal who might need the heavy mob to subdue him. I wasn’t even home. All they did was terrify my poor Sandra. They could have rung me up and asked to interview me. I would have gone down the road to them, or they could have come to me. Search the house, then, do what you want. But instead it was a dozen coppers and my wife, alone and scared to death. Sandra’s not an aggressive person. She’s not like those women that are married to villains, standing there telling the police to piss off. She’s such a gentle person that she ended up making them a cup of tea while they searched our house from top to bottom. Other women would have given them what for, but it’s not in her nature.

And do you know what they took away? A computer. A computer that I had bought for Sandra two years earlier at Christmas. She didn’t know how to work it; I didn’t know how to work it. It was still brand new. I don’t think it had even been turned on. That must have been embarrassing down at the station. An unused computer with no material on it. It didn’t stop them looking for God knows what, though. They searched everywhere – all to do with Amdy Faye, and I had already convinced Quest that I had no part in that.

So when I came home on the day of the raid, the first thing I had to do was report to the police station in Worthing. I drove
down there quite willingly; I didn’t even have a solicitor. Peter Storrie was there as well, so I used his man, from Romford. The police asked all the same questions about Amdy Faye’s transfer, and received all the same answers. Nothing to do with me; I don’t pay the agent’s fee. But as it went on, I gave them the same information about my bank details, including the account in Monaco. And their investigation went from there.

That was my first experience of being in a police cell. It’s scary. This might sound strange but I kept remembering my mum and dad: good East End people, honest people. What would they think if they could see me here? It seemed so unjust. I brought up a good family, I’m a happily married man, I try to help people if I can. If something needs to be done I turn up. If anything, I’m a soft touch. If the League Managers Association or a charity needs a speaker at a function, they always call me. I know other people have turned it down, but I still go. What have I done to deserve this? If I had been crooked I would have held my hand up, took my punishment like a man. But I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I thought about all the people that must have been through the courts over the years, knowing they were innocent yet still found guilty. My mum and dad are dead, but I still wondered what they would say if they knew about this. It felt wrong, and very chilling, to be down in those cells for five hours at a time.

It was just me and a policeman most of the time. Bars and no windows. He makes formal announcements on a tape – the time and the date and the name of the person being interviewed – then he would ask questions matter of factly and I would reply. Meanwhile, there were real crooks coming in, some nasty-looking blokes who had been arrested. I just sat there thinking, ‘How am I in with this
lot? Amdy Faye? What has that got to do with me? What have I done? It’s between the agent and the player. Maybe the agent, the player and the club. It’s certainly not my business.’ I think, after several hours, I managed to convince them that this was not my doing. But I was still furious about the raid on my home, and I took the police to court. My legal advisors said the raid was illegal and a year later a High Court judge agreed. He said the search warrant had been issued unlawfully and there were wholly unacceptable procedural failures in the way the warrant was obtained.