An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  In the February of 2009, ten months after Hicks’s ‘disaster’ video had effectively left Parry limping around Anfield like a wounded soldier, he decided it was impossible to carry on. Transfer deals, like Robbie Keane’s back to Spurs, and meetings with prospective buyers, were going ahead with him more or less out of the loop.

  Drafts of the manager’s new five-year contract made it clear that power was being switched from him to Benitez, and although Gillett was giving him ‘over my dead body’ reassurances about not signing it, he was becoming so marginalised as he sought his own exit, they were an irrelevance.

  Plus it was looking increasingly likely that Hicks was going to ride out the credit crunch and come out the other side with his hands still on Liverpool.

  Rick Parry still tried to do his job but had stopped enjoying it. The negativity had ground him down and as he surveyed a relationship between the owners which was never going to work he realised that neither could he. He had to get out before his professional reputation fell off a cliff.

  The final straw came at a home game when Hicks sat beaming in the middle of the directors’ box while Gillett had been pushed into the overflow. Parry began to suspect that his ally, Gillett, had given up the battle. If he had he knew he was toast because without his support, Hicks would crush him.

  Parry asked Gillett for a favour. If I’m reading this right, he said, and you’re about to disappear, then please get me out of here. A week later Hicks rang his chief executive and told him the owners had decided it was time for a change. Severance terms were agreed on 23 February 2009, Parry’s fifty-fourth birthday. He would remain at the club until the end of the season and he would leave with a £3 million pay-off, thanks to David Moores’ insistence that such a figure was put in writing when the club was sold.

  ‘My position became untenable,’ Parry told me. ‘Hicks and Gillett made efforts to sell in late 2008 but by February 2009 it became clear they would be around for a while. The structure we had was dysfunctional and something had to give. Tom Hicks certainly didn’t want me around. If by leaving it would help the club to progress then I was certainly prepared to go. Although I certainly didn’t want to.’

  In other words, the only job he had ever wanted became impossible, so he walked away while he felt he still had some credibility left.

  Tom Hicks released a short statement saying: ‘We’re very grateful to Rick. He will always be a friend of the club.’ How ironic was that? An enemy of the club who had never heard of Liverpool until three years before, and would never want to hear of it again if someone would pay him enough to walk away, telling a lifelong fan, who as chief executive had over-seen teams win every trophy apart from the league, that he would always be looked on kindly at Anfield.

  It was madness. But it was madness partly of Rick Parry’s own making.

  Few, if any, people who worked with Parry believe he was motivated by greed or power. They just say he took on too much, failed to delegate, and was out of his depth when it came to selling the club. He is not so much in denial today about the catastrophic sale to the Americans, he just refuses to see it as the major failure of his eleven years at Anfield.

  ‘Leaving aside the change of ownership, I have two major regrets. First and foremost, we didn’t win the Premier League. This was the key target when I arrived and we failed. Second places don’t count. I’ll hold my hands up and accept my share of responsibility. And the second is not delivering the new stadium,’ he said.

  Argue that both those failings can be directly linked to the sale to the Americans and he counters that Hicks and Gillett were simply the means who failed to deliver the end. That The Liverpool Way says we only exist to win trophies and that is what we failed to do under them. He asks rhetorically that if Liverpool had won the League and built the stadium, would the fans have been that upset with them?

  That’s a bit of an ‘if my auntie had bollocks she’d be my uncle’ theory, I tell him, because the reality is none of that happened. For that, says Parry, blame no one but Hicks and Gillett because they failed to deliver what they promised.

  Parry’s work these days takes him over to the east coast of America, and ironically he played a part in advising Boston-based NESV to buy the club. He is still a huge Liverpool fan who tries to get to as many games as he can. Away games that is. He hasn’t been back to Anfield since they beat Spurs 3–1 on 24 May 2009, the final game of his final season.

  As he was leaving, the man who was about to replace him, Christian Purslow, looked him in the eyes, shook his hand, and told him he’d always be welcome at the club. So far he hasn’t put that offer to the test.

  He doesn’t want to be in the way, he says. He doesn’t want to walk past a shadow.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Jeez, you’re not very big for all that money we spent on you, are you?’

  – George Gillett to Robbie Keane

  As George Gillett digested the words he was reading on the page in front of him the blood drained slowly from his face. It couldn’t be true, could it? Surely there was a misprint in this report about Steven Gerrard marrying his long-term partner Alex which completely changed its meaning. Maybe it was a practical joke those wacky English liked playing on each other. He read it again and again, but it still came out the same. There was only one option open to him. He had to make the call.

  His hand reached for the phone and he dialled his co-owner’s number – in the May of 2007 Gillett and Hicks were hardly bosom buddies but they were still talking to each other.

  ‘Tom, have you heard the news about Steven Gerrard?’ He hadn’t.

  ‘Well there’s something you need to know.’ He wanted to know it.

  ‘Our team captain is gay.’

  After a silence, a bemused Hicks asked for the evidence and when his co-owner read it to him, in between guffaws, he explained that in England the term ‘partner’ can refer to a member of the opposite sex. Their captain wasn’t tackling for the other side, neither was he taking part in a civil partnership ceremony. Alex was a woman. He could relax.

  Gillett thanked his partner (not in a sexual sense obviously) and as a wave of relief washed over him, he decided to arrange a gift for the happy heterosexual couple.

  So he rang Rick Parry’s secretary and asked for Gerrard’s home address.

  ‘Why?’ he was asked.

  ‘Because I’ve heard he’s getting married and I would like to send him a gift.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, the club will be sending flowers,’ he was told.

  ‘Yes, but I’d like to send him a separate gift on behalf of my family,’ he replied.

  ‘That won’t be necessary as it’s not really the Liverpool Way,’ was the final word on the matter.

  Gillett was left stunned. ‘This is what we’re up against,’ he told a senior club figure. ‘If the owner can’t achieve the simple objective of trying to get his captain’s address, what chance have we got of doing the things that really matter?’

  That story perfectly encapsulates two of the reasons Rafa Benitez spent most of his time at Melwood headbutting the wall. Whenever he tried to sign a player, make changes to the coaching structure or find out how much money he would have to spend, he would come up against a bureaucratic nightmare, dithering, deliberate stonewalling, and that old favourite The Liverpool Way. Plus, for the last two and a half years of his reign he came up against The Madness of King George.

  ‘I’ll give you £50 million, Roffa, plus whatever we get in the draft’ was his favourite response when it came to asking Gillett about his transfer budget. But even that was topped when Benitez emailed the owners a few months before one window, telling them the squad needed strengthening so asking what sort of funds he would be given.

  (Even though at this point Benitez was really only dealing with Hicks, he had to cc Gillett into every email because he had once contacted one of them with a request at a time when they weren’t talking, word of the request got back to the other one who accused
the manager of treason.)

  Hicks’s answer was short and sweet, telling him it was too early to give a figure because there were developments going on with the banks, but as soon as he got one, he’d let him know. In other words shut up and get on with your job.

  Gillett’s was short and mad, telling him he’d seen a new, innovative running machine that was all the rage in America, and perhaps if he got one of these it would help the players improve. In other words: Nurse, the screens!

  As one person Rafa showed his Gillett emails to remarked: ‘They looked like they’d been sent from the funny farm.’ The irony of that was Gillett confided in more than one journalist that he thought Benitez had serious mental problems. He even coined a name to describe his condition. Roffa, he would say, is a ‘serial transactionist’. Thank you, Doctor Dolittle.

  But as the man who gave Snoogy Doogy to the world often showed, there were more symptoms on display to diagnose a madness in King George. A former club official tells how he was on true eccentric form on the trip to Florence in late 2009.

  The singer Sting was at the game as a guest of the Fiorentina board and Gillett couldn’t take his eyes off him at half-time. When he was asked if he was a fan of the former Police lead singer and thus a bit overawed by his presence, he replied, ‘No, no. There’s just one thing that intrigues me about him. How does a guy get to be called Sting?’

  Ten minutes into the second half, Gillett rose from his seat and disappeared inside the stadium. When he was gone for five minutes people started to look at each other, slightly worried in case something had happened to him. And then he reappeared, his arms full of Cornettos, Magnums and choc ices, and proceeded to dish them out to everyone in the directors’ box. At ten p.m. at night with winter around the corner.

  Senior players tell how he would strike up a conversation about skiing, then tell them: ‘I’ve got a great ski resort in Colorado, it’s one of the best in the world. You’ve got to come over with your family and do some skiing.’ Apart from the fact that footballers contractually aren’t allowed to ski, and virtually all of them would rather be on the golf course, they didn’t want to hear he had the best ski resort in the world. They wanted to know how much of its profits would be diverted into that summer’s transfer budget.

  On the morning of the famous 1–0 Premier League victory at Chelsea in October 2008, the players were in their hotel restaurant queuing for food, when Gillett came bouncing through the door shouting, ‘Hi, guys.’

  As he approached the queue he told one of the players he wanted to meet the new £20 million signing. ‘Hey, where’s Keano, where’s Keano? I gotta see this Keano that I’ve heard so much about.’

  Keane, who was in front of him in the queue, turned round and said, ‘Hello, I’m Keano.’ To which Gillett replied: ‘Jeez, you’re not very big for all that money we spent on you, are you?’ Keane just shuffled off looking baffled and embarrassed.

  His interest in Keane may have had something to do with his role in the farcical summer transfer business which heralded the Irishman’s arrival at Anfield. Before the window opened Benitez had told Rick Parry his primary target was Aston Villa’s Gareth Barry.

  Keane was letting it be known he wanted to move to the team he supported as a boy, and Parry told Rafa he could buy both if he wanted them. Benitez agreed but said they had to get Barry first because if they couldn’t sign him, he wouldn’t want Keane. He’d formulated a system in his head and without Barry, Keane wouldn’t fit into it. According to Benitez, Parry said he had to do the Keane deal straight away but told him not to worry as there would be enough left in the kitty to buy Barry. It didn’t quite pan out like that.

  Once Keane was signed the Americans refused to match Aston Villa’s valuation and Benitez was told to forget Barry. An incensed Rafa went public, telling journalists he wouldn’t be signing Barry, even though he was told he could sign him, because the club had no spare money. Gillett, sensing Benitez was trying once again to deflect failure in the transfer market on to the owners, sent him an angry email saying they did have the money, but had decided not to sign Barry because he was too old for the price Villa were asking. As Benitez was fond of pointing out back then, Barry was twenty-seven, Keane was twenty-eight, and Barry would have cost the club less.

  Five months later, when Benitez was trying to sell Keane back to Spurs, Gillett had changed his tune on the little Irishman he was so eager to meet. He breezed into Rafa’s Melwood office one December morning with his usual greeting, ‘Hi, guys, what’s happening?’ to be told they had reached an agreement to sell Keane back to Spurs. ‘No kidding? That’s fantastic business, guys, well done,’ he declared.

  It would be, Gillett was told, if they could get hold of Rick Parry, but he had gone off radar. Without him doing the necessary paperwork there was no deal. With that news Gillett raced out of the room yelling, ‘Where is he, where is he?’ before spotting a secretary and demanding: ‘Get me Rick on the phone now, we need to do this business.’

  A senior figure tells of the comical nature of one of the early board meetings (they ceased to hold any after the autumn of 2007). Halfway through it a bored Gillett stood up and announced: ‘OK, Foster and I are leaving now because we’re going to Melwood to catch the players training.’

  There was an embarrassed silence as the pair left, then a few nods and whispers, and a decision was taken to move the meeting from Anfield to Melwood. So they all climbed into cars and zoomed off in pursuit of the two Gilletts. Which is surreal enough in itself, but was made even more so when they reconvened the meeting in the Melwood dining room, only for Gillett to constantly leap up and wave at players. As the figure put it: ‘If I’d have been smarter and worked out what was happening, I’d have got off there and then.’

  Whenever he was in Vail, Colorado, and heard there was a footballer visiting the clinic of renowned knee-surgeon Richard Steadman, (which was 100 metres from his home) Gillett would go round, get pally with the player and attempt to hang around with them throughout their stay, in order to pick their brains and soak up information, and gossip, about this new sport he’d bought in to. He met Michael Owen there, the summer before he bought Liverpool, and it was in Steadman’s clinic where he struck up his friendship with Klinsmann. When he discovered that Kop legend Robbie Fowler was in town, he was round like a shot.

  At one point, he phoned someone at Anfield, and said, ‘You’ll never guess who I’m with out here in Colorado. Let me put him on to you.’ When Robbie said hello, the Anfield man said, ‘Are you as embarrassed about this as I am?’ Robbie replied: ‘Far more embarrassed’ and was told: ‘OK, just turn the phone off, hand it back to him and pretend you lost me.’

  That same Anfield man has cringeful memories of his conversations with Gillett: ‘George would always big you up, tell you what a great job you were doing, then tell you something about someone else which was really bad. He’d always have dirt on players or former players, and he always had dirt on Tom.’

  ‘He’d say things like, “He’s going bust in three weeks.” He slagged so many people off it made you wonder “what is he going to be saying about me when I walk out the door?” He portrayed himself as warm, sincere and affable, but underneath it all he wasn’t. If he wanted to impress someone he’d be all over them saying, “You should come and work for us, you’re just what we’re looking for.” I’ve seen this first-hand.’

  ‘He once phoned me up and said, “You gotta meet this guy and give him a job.” So I met him, decided he was a complete flake and left it at that. A few weeks later he asked me if I’d met him, I said, “Yeah, and he’s a complete flake,” and he nodded and said, “Yeah, I thought that too.”’

  Businessmen talk of the Gilletts leaving behind a trail of broken dreams. Just as Foster had made noises about buying Wigan Warriors before vanishing, George talked of his great ideas to Phillip Jones, the managing director of Halliwell Jones, the BMW dealership which supplies Liverpool with cars.

  He told him abo
ut the dealerships he had in Canada and proposed they did deals together. He came up with quite a few ambitious plans, which left Jones sceptical but nonetheless keen to hear them through. That was until he could no longer get through to Gillett, his messages went unanswered and his phone seemed permanently off the hook.

  The dynamic between Gillett and his co-owner was the most fractured of all and it did more damage to the club than any of the other false and forced relationships at Anfield. As the first press conference showed, when Hicks told Gillett he was going to speak ahead of him and he caved in to the demand, this was not a partnership of equals. Hicks was in charge; Gillett had power of veto but very little else. It was similar to Britain’s so-called special relationship with the USA. We help them do their killing and their shafting, they take the plaudits and the profits and in return they patronise us by telling us how special we are.

  The difference being Hicks wasn’t telling Gillett how special he was, only how junior he was and how bereft of power he was without the clout of the Texan paper billionaire. Gillett would bad-mouth Hicks to the rest of the Anfield board and come out with big promises to stand up to him and stop him pulling off his latest outrageous stunt, but time after time he would cave in. A classic example came in the spring of 2009 with Rafa Benitez’s proposed new five-year contract. He swore to a senior Liverpool figure who shared his antipathy towards the Spaniard that he would never sign it. Three days later it came back signed.

  Whatever happened, Hicks always seemed to come out on top. That same figure relates a comical story to that effect.

  Seven minutes before the kick-off of the 2007 Champions League game against Barcelona he was standing next to Gillett in the Anfield boardroom, when he suddenly demanded a scarf. He was asked if he was cold and he replied that he wasn’t. He just wanted to show the world how much he loved the club. The senior figure told him, ‘This is Liverpool. You don’t wear big scarves, especially if you’re a director.’