An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  ‘Hopefully we could have some success and then extend him again. Rafa and the players have their heads down. They are playing great. We communicate regularly.

  ‘I know he feels comfortable with the way things are going. I think we will continue to have success. I think Rafa has unique skills, he motivates the team and we have some great players who are learning how to play with each other.’

  This from a man who, only months earlier, had told Parry and Gillett ‘shame on us’ for not hiring Klinsmann as Benitez’s successor.

  ‘They’ve stirred the pot of Liverpool to create dissension and it kind of worked because it made the fans think “Gee, Dubai have a lot of money, if they were to buy us we could buy all these players”. But I know for a fact from talking to Dubai that’s not why they approached, they are smart businessmen.

  ‘DIC are masters of British tabloid spin. They have got a girl called Amanda Staveley on point for them and she’s got a consultant called David Bick and going back to December they’ve continually put out disinformation.’

  This from a man who already had PR firm Financial Dynamics and Kekst and Co. working for him and was about to sign up Freud Communications to take on the impossible task of spinning his image in a positive light.

  ‘The fans gave George and me such a heroes’ welcome when we arrived. I think they were so concerned at what’s happened to Liverpool for ten to twenty years and they thought we were going to fix it. We didn’t fix it and I think that’s what’s made them angry. As long as Hicks and Gillett don’t change – and I’m telling you Hicks is going to change – the fans feel like we let them down and I think to that degree we have.

  ‘The fans don’t like the fact that we’ve borrowed too much money on the club but I’m going to fix that. My family loves Liverpool, that’s the only sad thing right now that we don’t feel we can go there as a family until we get this sorted out.

  ‘All six of my kids really love the city, my wife does and I do and I’m really looking forward to this all settling down.’

  And with that we cut to a close-up of him in an LFC casual shirt, clutching a Liverpool mug, which has been so recently taken out of the box you could almost taste the white polystyrene, watching on a big screen Liverpool’s 3–1 win over Blackburn. On the settee next to him sat two of his sons in replica shirts. The younger one, with a scarf round his neck, is so bored he yawns and stares at the floor. As the final whistle sounds on the Liverpool win, he turns to his sons and says: ‘Well, Everton won’t like that,’ and their disinterested faces scream back: ‘Can we take off these stupid clothes you made us wear for the cameras and put The Simpsons back on?’

  On many levels it was the most sickening stunt ever pulled by a Liverpool employee, at a time when fans were hoping for solidarity at the club ahead of another epic Champions League semi-final with Chelsea. Once again he had tried to win the fans over through cynically manipulating the media but all he had done was lose even more of them.

  The Spirit Of Shankly responded: ‘Why should any statement from him have any credibility? It’s time he shut his mouth, took the handsome profit he has been offered and got out of Liverpool. The football club needs a clean sweep, but he has to go first because he has no respect for football or this club. The man cannot be trusted. The situation with Rick Parry is really an irrelevance. He is good for one thing only and that is his vote at board meetings to keep Hicks at bay.’

  Les Lawson, secretary of Official Liverpool Supporters’ Club described it as ‘horrendous’ and ‘a living nightmare’.

  For many fans the betrayal went far deeper, down to a depth you just don’t plumb. At least some of the video had been shot on 15 April 2008, the nineteenth anniversary of the Hills-borough tragedy. To claim that Rick Parry had been a ‘disaster’, even if he was unaware of the weight of that word and his grotesque insensitivity in using it on that day, showed how he would never, ever understand the football club he owned.

  Clearly when the Texan Googled Liverpool, he got bored before the bit about ninety-six fans dying, and switched off. Exactly sixteen years previously, the then Liverpool manager, Graeme Souness, had appeared on the front page of the Sun kissing his girlfriend under the headline ‘LOVERPOOL’ on the third anniversary of Hillsborough, and all hell broke loose.

  That newspaper was still reviled for claiming Liverpudlians had urinated on and stolen from the dead at Hillsborough, and as far as many fans were concerned there was Souness hoovering up blood money to help it win back circulation on Mersey-side, with no regard for the bereaved. On 15 April 1992, Souness instantly became, in the eyes of many fans, a non-person. Sixteen years later so did Hicks.

  Had I been one of his PR gurus I’d have told him to ring Souness for some words of advice. I’m sure he’d have given him a couple based on his own experience. Words beginning and ending with the letter ‘f’.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘When George said, “Trust me, Tom’s a decent guy,” we thought, “Well, you obviously know him far better than we do.” That’s essentially what we relied on’

  – Rick Parry

  There wasn’t a person working on the same floor as Ian Ayre who failed to feel the quake. Not an employee in Liverpool FC’s Old Hall Street offices whose jaw didn’t hit their desk at the tsunami of abuse that exploded from George Gillett’s mouth in the direction of the club’s commercial director:

  ‘You fucking bastard, you’ve been trying to sell my fucking club from under me. This is not the fucking way to do it. I’m going to make sure this is the last fucking day you work for this club …’ and on and on he swore and threatened for three minutes, veins popping out of his skull, sweat dripping from his brow, pasting a man who’d been in his job less than a year, but who was already turning around the club’s finances, all over his office walls.

  Here was a microcosm of the Anfield Civil War. A vicious retaliation blow aimed at Hicks, via Ayre, which would force the Texan to strike back at Gillett by demanding Parry’s ‘disastrous’ head on a platter. The blood-letting really was becoming that public now, the bare-knuckle fighting that out of control, and prisoners no longer being taken.

  Ian Ayre is a lifelong Red from Litherland, who had earned his spurs as a fan through an impressive European awaydays CV, and his right to run the club’s commercial affairs through a hugely successful business career in Asia and, closer to home, as Huddersfield Town’s chief executive and chairman.

  Most Liverpool fans cite Ayre as the only decent thing Hicks and Gillett brought to the club. After headhunting him soon after they arrived he took up his ‘dream job’ in August 2007 and almost immediately pumped life into the flat-lining commercial department. His biggest coup was landing Standard Chartered as the club’s main sponsor in a deal potentially worth £81 million over four years. In other words, he was a sharp, streetwise Scouser, who’d been around the block, proved he could do it, knew his own worth and was nobody’s fool.

  A couple of weeks before Hicks’s infamous video, he summoned Ayre, along with financial director Philip Nash, to do a PowerPoint presentation about the club to a large group of investors at Merrill Lynch’s London HQ. The aim was to persuade the twenty or so moneymen to come in with Hicks to buy out Gillett’s stake.

  Ayre and Nash travelled down, did the job, left without speaking to any of the prospective investors, jumped the train back to Lime Street and thought no more of it. Until two days later when Gillett, along with son Foster, and Parry, stormed into Ayre’s office and unleashed the tirade of profanities.

  Throughout the three-minute attack an embarrassed Parry stared at his shoes while Foster fiddled with the top of a Coke bottle. Ayre took the kicking in his stride and when it was over asked everyone in the room if they had anything to add. When there was silence he told Gillett that when one of the owners, and 50 per cent shareholders in the club, asked him to do something, he felt obliged to do it.

  He didn’t know the exact reason he was doing the presentation, who he was do
ing it to, or whether Hicks had or hadn’t told Gillett he was doing it. Why should he? He was doing his job and he’d have done the same if it had been Gillett who had asked him. So if you’re going to have a go at me, he told Gillett, have a go at me for doing something wrong. Otherwise, if you’ve got nothing else to say to me then I’ve got nothing else to say to you.

  Gillett was tongue-tied as he stood there in trademark suit and walking boots, pulse-rate dropping, breathing slowing, veins ceasing to throb. He was conscious that everyone outside the office had heard the conversation and was unsure where to go, so asked Ayre: ‘OK, anyway, what’s going on in our club?’

  From that day on Gillett viewed Ayre as Tom Hicks’s man and put their relations in deep-freeze. Sources close to Ayre believe Gillett then told Hicks he wanted the commercial director fired for trying to sell his share of the club behind his back but was told ‘no chance’. Hicks then rang Ayre and told him never to give a damn about the Wisconsin Kid because he couldn’t sack him without his approval.

  And then our very own J.R. Ewing decided to serve up a cold dish of Dallas revenge. He’d had Parry in his sights for a while. His refusal to do the whitewash, his siding with Gillett, his inability to squeeze enough money out of the brand, a radio interview in which he’d been critical of Hicks and a demeanour that plainly spoke of making a horrendous mistake the day he advised Moores to sell, had left the Texan waiting to pounce.

  When he’d heard that Parry had accompanied Gillett to the Ian Ayre pasting, he had his moment. According to Parry he didn’t even know why Gillett wanted him with him when he took on Ayre, but the co-owner insisted he accompanied him. From then on his fate was sealed.

  It was a case of tit-for-tat. You try to take out one of my men and I’ll sure as hell take out one of yours. In this ugly civil war Parry was merely collateral damage, but he was also, in Hicks’s eyes, a means of strengthening his power base. It was divide-and-rule time again. If he called for Parry’s head, as many fans had been since the botched DIC sale plus the Athens tickets fiasco, and as Rafa Benitez had been for more than a year over his transfer dithering, he would look informed, decisive, the good guy with Liverpool’s interest at heart.

  Hence the letter and the video and the credibility of a once-proud club gurgling down the drains into an open sewer.

  Tony Barrett, who was still on the Echo at the time, watched the Sky interview with utter disgust: ‘I thought, that’s not an interview, that’s a PR script and I was embarrassed that Hicks was in any way linked with Liverpool FC. I thought what has the club come to when it would do that to someone?

  ‘Some of the things he said about Rick Parry would have chimed with the fans but he was using a club employee who, whatever you think about him, is a Liverpool fan who loves the club. Parry would never have done that to anyone publicly and he didn’t deserve anything like that.

  ‘The thing was, Hicks knew the fans had turned on Parry after Athens. His role with Klinsmann, Rafa’s complaints and the fact he brought them two in didn’t help. So it was an open goal. But he managed to miss it. And Parry saw it as a badge of honour that Hicks thought so badly of him.’

  Gillett responded by saying he was ‘staggered’ by his co-owner’s version of events and accused him of destabilising the club. ‘I am saddened at this latest outburst,’ he said. ‘Here we are, a few days away from a vital Champions League semi-final, and Tom has once again created turmoil with his public comments.

  ‘Tom needs to understand that I will not sell my shares to him. He should stop. He knows that Rick Parry has my support and that airing his comments in this way will not change my position.

  ‘Any decision to remove him would need the approval of the full Liverpool board, which, it should be remembered, consists of six people: myself, Foster, David Moores, Rick himself, Tom Hicks and Tom Jr.’

  Parry stood up for himself publicly, by branding Hicks’s behaviour ‘offensive to the players, the manager and the fans. In the week when we had another great European triumph there’s more dirty linen being washed.’ He reiterated that he had no intention of resigning, while making a plea for ‘leadership at the top’ at a time when there is ‘a severe lack of unity’ at the club. Honorary Life President David Moores took another drag on a ciggie and said nothing.

  Meanwhile, Rafa Benitez, although believing a lot of what Hicks had said about Parry to be true, and enjoying a rare moment of schadenfreude, couldn’t comprehend the very brutal and public way it was delivered. In Rafa’s head, if Hicks didn’t think Parry could do his job then why didn’t he fly over to Liverpool and sack him instead of issuing threats on TV from his Dallas fireside? The answer, of course, was that he couldn’t sack him because of Gillett. It was merely a show of force and bluster.

  This was the most curious dynamic of them all. Here was Benitez, one of the world’s highest-rated coaches, who had won two Spanish leagues, the Champions League, UEFA Cup and FA Cup, forming an alliance with a man who knew nothing about football, who hated him and had tried to sack him. A man he knew was wooing him with the offer of a contract extension to keep him close to him as a sign of credibility in his ongoing battle to take overall control of the club.

  Yet rather than fly back home to Real Madrid, who regularly pestered his agent with offers, he chose to live with the indignity of such a soiled relationship. His critics would say the Machiavellian scenario appealed to his darker tendencies; his supporters would say it showed how deeply he cared for the club. That’s certainly how most fans viewed it, allowing him his alliance with their most detested enemy because he needed the man with the power to back him and allow him to get on with his work.

  Benitez knew Hicks had never forgiven him for the Athens outburst but he also knew he was such a political animal that it wouldn’t matter. He thought at least with Hicks he could have dialogue. There would be angry replies sent to emails, and ugly stand-offs, but he would eventually get a reply which allowed him to plan.

  Once Gillett realised he was in the Hicks camp he ceased contact with his manager, meaning the only way Benitez could get anything out of him was through Rick Parry. But what hair he had left he didn’t feel like pulling out. So he would only recognise Gillett’s presence at the club by cc-ing him into his emails to Tom Hicks.

  Peter Hooton called it ‘a confederacy of fools’ and he was spot on. The club was so utterly dysfunctional that every major player was exploiting everyone else, forming pragmatic alliances with enemies to stay alive. If only Kopites had been enamoured with, rather than repulsed by, the trend to wear jesters’ hats, Anfield would have been a living recreation of a medieval court.

  Ladies and gentlemen, roll up, roll up, for the one and only Anfield Civil War four-a-side tournament. In the Lone Star State corner, Tom Hicks, Tom Jr., Rafa Benitez and Ian Ayre. In the Badger State corner (that’s Wisconsin to all you non-pub quiz bores), George Gillett, Foster Gillett, Rick Parry, David Moores. Nobody a winner.

  As one of the players in the four-a-side tournament admits today: ‘Yes there was civil war. No doubt. But what used to crucify me was how unnecessary it was. Hicks and Gillett could have dealt with their own issues outside the club and not harmed it.

  ‘That was the real tragedy and their downfall. Apart from being a magnificent football club Liverpool was a great business which made a lot of money. They were supposed to be these successful businessmen but they were too busy fighting each other to focus on that.

  ‘Throughout it all, neither of them were thinking like anyone else at Liverpool. There was no recognition that they’d done anything wrong. Both blamed the other right to the end.

  ‘Tom’s problem was that in corporate jousting everything is fair game but when you start messing around with sports clubs you’re dealing with things that affect people’s lives. I don’t think he could ever get his head around that, which was why he totally lost the plot.

  ‘Even after the club had been sold he didn’t believe he’d made a mistake. He thought he’d bought
an absolute gem which he could eventually turn around.’

  Stories like the Great Attempted Ian Ayre Massacre rarely made it outside journalist circles or the rumour factory, but the extent of the fear and loathing that existed within the Anfield hierarchy was visible even to those who crossed roads with labradors.

  Take the directors’ box five days after Hicks’s Diana interview when Chelsea turned up for yet another Champions League semi-final. Tom Hicks took his seat near the front, although it was touch and go whether he would show, after Merseyside Police officially warned him to stay away for his own safety. Four rows behind Hicks, looking distinctly sheepish and isolated were David Moores and Rick Parry. To the extreme right of the box sat Foster Gillett with the Dubai delegation, including Sameer Al Ansari and Amanda Staveley (much to the delight of Sven Goran Eriksson).

  What a splendid show of unity on this great Champions League occasion. I doubt there was another family in Europe, apart from Josef Fritzl’s, which was more screwed up.

  Further to the right of the Dubai gathering, in the press box, national journalists were laughing at the photograph in that night’s Echo, of Spirit Of Shankly members putting spades into Stanley Park. The group had organised an event called The Big Dig, 440 days after fans were told at the takeover press conference that a shovel would be in the ground in sixty days.

  Forty SOS members, wearing high-visibility jackets and hard hats, dug up part of the park with shovels. ‘There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation why the owners have not carried out their promises,’ said organiser Neil Atkinson. ‘They didn’t manage to get the stadium started, so we are doing them a favour.’

  Mental instability was not confined to the directors’ box on that Champions League semi-final night. For ninety-three minutes all was going to plan. Liverpool were 1–0 ahead and looking like taking a crucial lead down to Stamford Bridge where a Torres shimmy-and-poke, or a Gerrard curler, would have left Chelsea needing three goals to win.