Always Managing: My Autobiography Read online

  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.

  My solicitor, Mark Spragg, called for an inquiry into how the Sun newspaper came to be in on the search, too. One officer had made about ten late-night phone calls to the paper on the eve of the raid. The internal police investigation accepted his explanation. He was calling to issue invites to the Christmas party because he’d got a lot of friends there.

  At first, I was just being interviewed by police officers. Then the tax men from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs got involved. And although the investigation started off being about Amdy Faye, the fact I had mentioned the bank account in Monaco to Quest and the police gave HMRC an excuse to go after me. I always wondered whether pursuing the police over that illegal raid counted against me, whether when the police lost that case they became desperate to get their own back because, out of the blue, the bank account in Monaco became important and Amdy’s £100,000 was forgotten. Peter and Milan were charged over it, but not me, although the police now wouldn’t let their additional case against me go. These were strange times all around, and somebody close to Portsmouth was certainly out to make mischief for me because, in addition to the bad publicity surrounding the HMRC investigation, two stolen letters were being touted around newspapers to place an even greater stain against my character.

  I’ve got my suspicions over who the spiteful informant was, but I will never know for sure. The first stolen letter concerned the Quest investigation. It was Milan’s reply to Quest, explaining the story behind the Monaco bank account. The second was a disciplinary letter
concerning a row I had with Milan during my time at Portsmouth. It was a fuss about nothing, ancient history – not least because by then I had moved from Portsmouth to Tottenham – but it showed that somebody was trying to blacken my name.

  A telephone call from the editor of the Sun alerted me to it. He said that the newspaper had been offered a letter sent by Milan during our time at Portsmouth, threatening to sack me if I spoke to him in a disrespectful manner again. The source wanted payment because the letter was detailed and said that I had sworn at Milan a number of times in the course of our argument. It’s true, I had. I remember the row very clearly. It was early in the season, 2003– 04, one Friday night before a match against Manchester City. We were having dinner and I was telling Milan about a player I had been to watch in Italy, a left-back. He looked fantastic and was coming out of contract. Milan said, ‘Harry, he’s not a left-back, he’s a centre-half.’

  I said, ‘I went to watch him last week, Milan. He’s a left-back. What makes you think he’s a centre-half?’

  Milan replied that Peter Storrie said he was a centre-half.

  I turned to Peter, who was sitting with us. ‘How do you know he’s a centre-half?’ I asked, by now getting quite angry. ‘I watched him play left-back. He’s a left-back.’

  ‘Well, my stepson checked it online,’ Peter explained, ‘and they’ve got him down as centre-half.’

  That was it. I went at the pair of them. ‘Well, why don’t we make your stepson the fucking chief scout?’ I raged. I then turned on Milan. ‘What fucking chance have I got here with you lot?’

  I didn’t stop there. I gave him a lot of grief, using some very colourful language, going on and on. It turned into a proper row.

  The next day at City, Milan wouldn’t even talk to me. I went up to the directors’ box to watch the first half, sat next to him, and he moved up one seat he was that upset. Every time I tried to say something he turned his back. We should have won the match, but drew. The mood was tense. Then we got a big win over Bolton Wanderers, 4–0, to go top of the league, with Sheringham on form again. Now Milan wanted us to be friends once more. The problem was, he’d already sent the letter, warning me over the language I used towards him in Manchester. And so a copy of it sat in his drawer, meaningless, until somebody got hold of it and tried to sell it to the Sun for £10,000 six years later.

  The editor said they had no intention of buying the letter, or publishing it, but he wanted to warn me that someone was trying to trip me up. The next weekend, that person succeeded. I received a call from Rob Beasley, a reporter at the News of the World. It was the eve of the 2009 Carling Cup final, Tottenham versus Manchester United, and he had the letter Milan had sent to Quest about the bank account in Monaco.

  It had been taken, obviously, from a file at Portsmouth. Beasley admitted paying an informant £1,000. The seller had clearly lowered his price after getting no joy from the Sun first time. I cannot think the two calls were a coincidence. It is too far-fetched that a pair of confidential letters go missing, and both end up with newspapers in the same week. Beasley started by asking me questions about the bank account. I’ll admit, I just wanted to get rid of him. He was trying to ruin my preparations for a huge match with Tottenham and I certainly didn’t think he deserved to hear every last private detail. We ended up arguing and the paper printed the story anyway. Considering the letters were stolen it seems remarkable to me that the News of the World investigation would play such a large part in HMRC’s prosecution case, and that Beasley would be a key witness. Nobody seemed to worry about the theft, just about my bank account.

  And, yes, I know some people think it was all an act, me being a mug with money. I know they see the wealth I have accrued from football, my nice house on the south coast, and assume I must know every trick in the book. But it isn’t like that. I’m not smart with money; in fact, I wish half of the things I have read were true. I had an account in Monaco, but I couldn’t remember the name of the bank. When I came across Mr Cusdin’s name in my mobile telephone a year or so later, I couldn’t even recall who he was. I didn’t even notice that the transfer bonus portion of my contract at Portsmouth had changed. When HMRC were going through my personal finances with a fine-tooth comb, and we needed to account for every penny, I received a call from my accountant.

  ‘What are you doing with your Sun money?’ he asked. I didn’t know what he meant. ‘Your money from the Sun newspaper, for your column,’ he explained. ‘Where is it, what have you been doing with it?’ I said it would be in the bank. He said it wasn’t. So we contacted the Sun, and it turned out they hadn’t paid me for eighteen months. I didn’t know.

  Obviously, football managers are well paid, and not having to think about money doesn’t really help a man like me. I go to a hole in the wall, I’ve got a number memorised somewhere, I get £150 out, put it in my pocket and I’m happy. As long as I’ve got £150, I never worry. As for the rest, I’m hopeless. I’m not proud of that – I’m ashamed, really. Sandra does everything, and she was a hairdresser as a young girl not the head of Barclays Bank. Neither of us are really the smartest, financially. For years, my accountant ran my life. He had complete control and I was totally reliant on him, which was not a healthy situation. Now my old secretary from my days at Bournemouth, Jenny, comes around and helps Sandra pay the bills or sorts out a few letters. As for me, I’m nothing to do with any of it. Sandra hides our bank statements most of the time. We’re paying for the grandkids to do this and that, we put some of them through school, and I don’t know the half of it. When a bill comes in that I might not like, Sandra probably pays it, then tears it up. What Harry doesn’t know won’t hurt him – that seems to be the policy.

  My dad wouldn’t have been any different. I think a lot of people, a lot of old East Enders certainly, didn’t go in for anything too complex. My mum kept what she had, which wasn’t a lot – a couple of little rings, maybe – in a tin on the balcony of their old block of flats in Stepney. Any money they had between them went in a biscuit barrel. They didn’t have a bank account; they didn’t go to the bank, they paid their bills in cash and that was how it was. Maybe I haven’t moved on enough from that world. Until earlier this year, I still had the same old Nokia phone. I don’t send emails, I can’t work computers. Every year I insist I’m going to get a smart phone or a laptop. Then another year goes by, and I’ve done nothing.

  The phone call to tell me I would be charged came from my barrister, Mr Kelsey-Fry. ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he began, and I knew. I felt sick, but he sounded absolutely furious. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he kept repeating. ‘I’ve read it and it’s scandalous. This is not right. This should not be going to court.’ I was just in a mess. ‘I’m going to be dragged through the mud every day,’ I told him. ‘I don’t know if I can handle it. Every day in the papers, on the television, my grandkids seeing this.’ He told me I had to handle it, that I had to stay strong, but it definitely had an effect on my health. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I needed to have minor heart surgery around the time the case was due to be heard. They called it a procedure, not even an operation, but the stress was clearly taking its toll. We kept thinking the Crown Prosecution Service would pull the case and it wouldn’t go the distance, but then the day came and I was walking into Southwark Crown Court. Being on the witness stand was the most traumatic experience of my life.

  I tried to remain upbeat, but look back and laugh? It will be a long time before I feel able to do that. The only moment of light relief across the whole fifteen days came before the trial got underway. I’d never been in court before, so I did not know the whole process of picking the jury. A large pool of jurors enters the court and are sworn in; then twelve are picked at random by computer. They all stand as the names are called out. Number one juror takes his seat, then number two. We got to number six and this gentleman was announced as Peter Crouch. He was 6 feet 6 inches and skinny – it could actually have been Crouchy! Everyone in the courtroom started lau
ghing, but there was nothing anyone could do: the computer had spoken and Peter Crouch was on the jury. The rest of the jurors were sworn in and we broke for lunch, ready to start the case that afternoon. You couldn’t make it up. But this alternate Peter Crouch never got to play his part in our trial because a reporter from the Guardian was so excited with his involvement that he put the news on Twitter. For obvious reasons, jurors cannot be named publicly, but Crouch’s details were in the public domain, with the added information that he used to work for Tottenham! So when everyone returned they informed the judge, he had a think about it and concluded the only way forward was for a new jury to be selected. So that was the end of Peter Crouch.

  They tried to get me in the back way to court every day, tried to get me down the stairs and away at night without too many people seeing me, but it was still as frightening as hell. I can remember watching Milan on the witness stand, and he was so clever, so confident and quick-witted. The prosecuting QC, John Black, alleged that Milan had only got me to go over to Monaco so that he could pay me offshore and save the tax. ‘Yes, Mr Black,’ Milan replied. ‘I paid £100 million in income tax up to that period but, I remember it now, I woke up that morning and thought, “Milan, your life is boring, have a bit of excitement today, get Harry involved, do something wrong, break the law. You can save £12,000 in income tax. Send Harry to Monaco, open an account, tell him you’re going to break the law together and have some fun.” I have paid £9 million in income tax this past year, £100 million in my life, I have employed 40,000 people, but this day, this wonderful day, I decided to break the law over £12,000. And that’s what I said to Harry: “If we end up in court, what does it matter?”’