Harry's Games (6 page)

Except there was no profit as Mandaric lost the lot. So, feeling embarrassed, he transferred a further $150,000 into the Rosie47 account to make up the shortfall, with a view to investing that money instead. Then he and Redknapp fell out – Redknapp left Portsmouth and took over as manager of nearby rivals, Southampton – and everyone forgot about the arrangement and the account until Redknapp remembered and declared it during the Quest inquiry.

Redknapp looked on intently, though it became clear his mind wasn't wholly on the case. The second Tuesday of the trial was 31 January, transfer deadline day. It was a day Redknapp as an inveterate buyer and seller of players would normally spend with his mobile phone clamped to his ear.

‘What's going on?' he asked the football hacks during a break.

‘Apparently, you've bought Louis Saha,' someone told him.

‘Really?' Redknapp replied. ‘That's news to me.'

It couldn't have been, of course. The idea he would have had no idea that Spurs were in the market for the Everton striker and the chairman had gone ahead and bought the player without even bothering to consult the manager was laughable. Rather it was just an endearing Harryism, a perfectly harmless, if not quite true, quote to lift the football pages out of the banality of the run-of-the-mill transfer speak – ‘The boy will give the squad a real lift' – that might guarantee him top billing the following day.

Redknapp was on equally good form later that night as his Spurs side took on Wigan in a Premier League fixture at White Hart Lane. He had every excuse to give the game a miss and leave the team in the hands of his deputies, Kevin Bond and Joe Jordan, as he was due to give evidence himself the next day. A night in at the London hotel where he had been staying throughout the trial to gather his thoughts and rehearse his answers might not have gone amiss.

Not a bit of it. Redknapp led the team from the dugout and waved happily to acknowledge the support of the crowd who chanted his name appreciatively throughout much of the game. Whether he heard all the chants was another matter. ‘
He pays what he wants . . . he pays what he wa-a-ants . . . He
'
s Harry Redknapp . . . he pays what he wants . . .
' wasn't quite the ringing endorsement of the belief in his innocence Redknapp might have wanted, but there was no mistaking the affection. His Spurs side
even seemed to have read the script, cruising to an easy win to go a long way clear in third place in the league table.

Football was also clearly on Redknapp's mind first thing the next morning. When he took his place in the dock before the judge and jury arrived, he gave a big grin and made a 3-1 sign with his fingers, a reference to the scoreline the night before. You couldn't help but admire him – here was a man with the focus to engineer a comfortable league win and still have a laugh when he was due to give what could turn out to be the most important performance of his life later in the day. Even Mandaric, who had remained polite if reserved throughout the trial, seemed to be infected by the party spirit. When he returned to the dock, his cross-examination complete, he pretended to throttle Redknapp. Redknapp slapped him on the back and grinned.

There were more laughs – albeit muted – from the press gallery, when Kelsey-Fry called Redknapp to the stand.

‘Why were you all laughing when my dad was called?' Jamie Redknapp whispered to me.

‘Because Mr Black had told us all in the adjournment that the defence wouldn't call your dad to give evidence,' I whispered back.

‘Why wouldn't he?' replied Jamie, genuinely perplexed.

Why indeed? It didn't feel like quite the right time to explain to Jamie that the laughter was all directed at Mr Black, a man who may well have been an extremely competent barrister, but who appeared to have read almost every nuance of the trial rather differently to everyone else in court.

Once in the witness box, Redknapp didn't disappoint for a minute, delivering a one-man show rich in both comedy and stream-of-consciousness passion. In response to Mandaric's barrister, Lord Macdonald, describing Redknapp as an average footballer, the chirpy defendant kicked off in fine style, saying, ‘He would say that – he's an Arsenal supporter.'

When asked why he had called the Monaco bank account
Rosie47, Redknapp replied, ‘Because Rosie was my dog . . . she was a lovely dog . . . you would be a lucky man to have a wife as lovely as Rosie . . . and 1947 is the year of my birth. It was like a security code. Like I have to say my mother's name, Violet Brown, to get access to my HSBC account over here.' Oops – that was another security code that would now need to be changed.

Had he thought he was due a ten per cent bonus for the sale of Peter Crouch? ‘Well, morally, yes, because Mr Mandaric had said Crouchie was a basketball player and I'd be owing him ten per cent on the money Portsmouth lost. But my new contract said five per cent so that's what I got.'

Did he remember signing the form allowing Mandaric to transfer money out of his account to America? ‘No. He must have typed it up and I just signed it. Everyone will tell you, I can barely read or write. To be honest, we were playing Man United later that day and I was more worried about marking David Beckham.'

Did he ever ask Mr Mandaric how the investment was doing? ‘Once, after we won at Blackburn. Disaster! He told me it had been a total disaster. Everything had been lost and he'd try again. The lads thought it was really funny when I told them; they said that would be the last I ever saw of the money. To be honest, I never thought about the account again until years later.'

Why had he lied to Rob Beasley? ‘Why should I tell a
News of the World
reporter the truth? He didn't tell me the truth. All I was interested in was getting him off my back. We were playing Manchester United in the Carling Cup Final the next day and I could do without a whole load of distractions in the paper on the morning of the game. I was more interested in telling him that it wasn't a story, that the money wasn't a bung. Explaining the legal difference between a loan and a bonus was the last thing on my mind.' And so it continued.

The only time Redknapp cracked was when he snapped at the police officer who had led the dawn raids on his house – along
with a photographer from the
Sun
– and was sitting with the prosecution team. ‘Mr Manley, will you stop staring at me,' Redknapp said. ‘I know you are trying to cause me a problem.'

How a photographer from the
Sun
came to be tipped off about the exact time of the raid was just one of the questions that went unanswered during the trial. But whatever the problem Redknapp thought the police were trying to cause, it was soon dealt with as Detective Manley was nowhere to be seen in court the following day.

The picture that emerged of Mandaric and Redknapp wasn't just of a happy-go-lucky, disorganized business arrangement between friends; it was of another world, the world of professional football, where large sums of money are the norm for the very successful. This wasn't a particularly easy defence to sell to a jury – many of whom may have been struggling to get by on £20,000 or less a year – and so this point was never once laboured or spelled out. But it was implicit throughout the proceedings. Mandaric was worth £2 billion, Redknapp earned more than £5 million per year and £100,000 was a relatively inconsequential amount that can be easily forgotten. In the year Mandaric had invested and lost the money for Redknapp, he had lost £17 million in other deals. In other failed transactions, Redknapp had suffered an £8 million loss on a property development and had lost his son a considerable amount of money on a dodgy stock market tip.

This idea of attempting to avoid paying an ‘inconsequential' sum was the unspoken essence of the defence closing speeches. Why on earth would either man go to all that risk and effort just to save about £30,000 in tax? Mandaric had paid £100 million in taxes over the previous ten years and had paid much more than he had needed to for Leicester City and Sheffield Wednesday. They'd been bought after he'd sold Portsmouth, but before, rather than after, they had gone into administration.

Redknapp himself had paid more than £8 million in tax and, if he was really so financially opportunistic, why had he given the £140,000 compensation he was due on leaving Portsmouth in 2004 to a football youth development scheme?

None of these arguments was conclusive one way or the other, as a number of wealthy individuals over the years have been found to have fiddled the equivalent of loose change to them. But they were still relevant questions to ask in response to the prosecution's closing remarks that the
News of the World
tape was ‘perhaps the most important and compelling evidence in this case'.

Judge Leonard had missed the mark with his pre-trial prediction of the proceedings being wrapped up inside two weeks – he probably hadn't counted on the pedestrian style of the prosecution case – and it was well into the third week that the jury were asked to retire to consider their verdict.

During the day or so they were out, the media played the usual game of trying to appear professional and resist second-guessing the result, while doing precisely that among themselves. Some were convinced Mandaric and Redknapp would be found guilty; others dreamed up a nice sideline in conspiracy theories. ‘A London jury will never convict a London manager who is tipped to be next England manager,' one reporter told me. He may even have been right, but to me it all seemed rather more straightforward. While I couldn't have put my hand on my heart and sworn I believed they were both definitely innocent, nothing I had heard in court would have enabled me to find them guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.

The jury had been asked to consider four separate counts – two each of tax evasion against Mandaric and Redknapp – but it was all over after the first. The judge had said in his summing up that it wasn't an option for the jury to find Mandaric not guilty
and Redknapp guilty, so when the first charge against Mandaric received a clear ‘Not guilty' from the foreman, then the other three verdicts were a formality; if the first payment by Mandaric into Redknapp's Monaco bank account wasn't an attempt to avoid tax on a ‘Crouchie bonus', then the second could hardly be either.

As the first verdict was announced, Jamie Redknapp's eyes reddened as he struggled to hold back his emotions. But Redknapp gave little away. A hug with Mandaric, a shake of the hand with the guard sitting next to him in the dock, a mouthed ‘Thank you' to his defence team and the jury and he was out of the court. On the steps outside, surrounded by a phalanx of reporters, cameras and microphones, Redknapp said the whole ordeal had been a nightmare and a terrible strain on his family, but you wouldn't necessarily have guessed it just by looking at him. He was a little more subdued out of deference to the occasion – strictly no one-liners for this lunchtime press conference – but it was another brilliant Redknapp performance. Despite a probable mixture of relief, anger, ecstasy and exhaustion, he held it all together perfectly. ‘That's all I want to say for now,' he concluded. ‘I just want to go home and relax with my family.' And with that, he got into the back seat of a taxi and was off.

As the crowd dissipated and the journalists scuttled away to file their reports, it occurred to me that this was the end of a very long story about corruption in football, one that had begun as whispers over twenty years ago and had developed into concrete charges just over a decade ago. One of the benefits of a ringside seat at the trial had been the privilege of sitting next to my friend and colleague David Conn, the
Guardian
's award-winning sports reporter, who probably knows as much about the murkier recesses of the finances of English professional football as anyone. He was the first to point out just how much of a disaster the trial had been for both those tasked with ‘cleaning up football' and the
police. ‘Stories have swirled for years that bungs were commonplace in a national sport drowning in cash since the breakaway by the First Division clubs from the Football League to form the Premier League in 1992,' he said. ‘The Premier League set up the Quest inquiry in 2006 after agents themselves, including Jon Holmes, one of the first and most respected, described football's player transfer business as “like the wild west”. Mike Newell, then Luton Town's manager, said publicly that bungs were rife. The former England manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, was also caught in a
News of the World
“fake sheikh” sting on a yacht, saying, among several other indiscretions, that Premier League managers “put money in their pockets”.

‘The claims had credence, because even before the billions from Sky TV and the Premier League's commercial revolution, bungs were indeed proven to have been paid. A previous, much more dogged Premier League inquiry – ultimately signed off in 1997 by Robert Reid QC and the league's then chief executive, Rick Parry – found that after Arsenal signed the Danish midfield international John Jensen, and the Norwegian full-back Pal Lydersen in 1991 and 1992, Arsenal's manager, George Graham, was paid £425,000 in kickbacks or ‘bungs' (payments to football managers from agents as ‘thank-yous' for signing their players) by the players' Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge. They also concluded that £50,000 in cash had been handed to Ronnie Fenton, assistant to Brian Clough, one of English football's greatest managers, after Clough sold the striker Teddy Sheringham to Tottenham Hotspur in August 1992. Graham was sacked as Arsenal's manager and suspended from football for a year. Clough and Fenton were charged by the Football Association with misconduct for other alleged transfer kickbacks, but Clough was spared due to his deteriorating health, and Fenton retired to Malta.'

That practice – of managers wanting a bung out of transfer fees – is often explained by football managers having always been
insecure and not well paid in pre-Premier League days; it might now be termed ‘old school'. Quest was tasked with examining all 362 transfers of players in and out of Premier League clubs between January 2004–06, ‘specifically to identify . . . unauthorized or fraudulent payments'. Its investigators produced a report in June 2007 which named some high-profile football agents for alleged lack of cooperation and said seventeen of the deals could not be ‘signed off'. But on close reading, the Premier League's report exonerated every manager and club official in the Premier League of taking bungs. Redknapp's revelation in court that ‘quite a few' managers did not volunteer their bank details to Quest, as he had done – including, fatefully, his Monaco account – cast the rigour of the Premier League's self-inquiry in a new light.