by Brian Reade
Fifteen minutes later, a woman usher in a black gown called the press forward, followed by the first block of public witnesses, showing Mick and Ben to the middle of a bench at the back of the court. They couldn’t believe their luck as they were directly in line with the judge’s chair and in the row behind the Liverpool delegation of Christian Purslow, Ian Ayre, Martin Broughton and their legal team. It felt like they’d been given free tickets for a European Cup Final only to discover they’d surfaced right behind the directors’ box.
Purslow turned round, shook their hands, thanked them for making the effort and asked if the Spirit Of Shankly coach had arrived. They told him it was on its way. Ben nudged Mick and asked if he’d spotted the name on the courtroom clock face. He hadn’t. When he looked he could make out, beautifully written in a curve just above the bottom set of numerals, the words ‘Gillett & Co.’
It freaked him. He began to feel sick and scared by the enemy’s name staring back at him as the pendulum swung. ‘Lose this case,’ he said to Ben, ‘and we may as well go home and bulldoze Anfield to the ground.’ Ben too felt the fear kicking in. It was the fear that all courtrooms stir, even in the stomachs of the non-participants, but also the fear that someone’s freedom is about to be taken away by one stern old man’s words.
At 9.50 a.m. the worried usher called a colleague over and pointed up at the gallery: ‘How did you lot manage to get up there?’ she yelled. There was an uncomfortable silence until a Scouse voice rasped back: ‘We, er, told the security guard we were from the RBS and he let us in.’
‘Well you’ll all have to come down from there immediately,’ she told them.
‘Why?’ asked the defiant Scouser.
‘Because nobody is allowed up there, it’s a health and safety risk.’
‘Can we appeal?’ was the reply which sent the packed courtroom into fits of laughter.
At ten on the dot Mr Justice Floyd entered, bowed, sat down and began talking to the legal teams for the best part of an hour. There was a tap on the window behind Mick, who turned to see that the corridor had filled up. The SOS coach had arrived. He lip-read a fan’s words ‘What’s happening?’ but not having a clue what was going on, just shrugged back.
As Mick turned to face the judge, Christian Purslow swivelled around in his seat, gave a thumbs up and said: ‘One nil to us.’
Mick looked over at Broughton, but saw not a blink or a twitch. Cool as ice. He turned round to the corridor window and gave a thumbs up. The judge started to talk again, to which Purslow turned and said: ‘Two nil to us.’ Mick relayed the score to the corridor.
By 10.40 a.m. Purslow had turned, winked and raised his thumb a further three times and a Press Association journalist nudged Mick and told him, ‘You’ve won this hands down, mate’, before shaking his hand and leaving court to file his story.
By eleven a.m. court costs were being argued, with that, too, going against Hicks and Gillett, whose barrister looked like he’d been pummelled around all four corners of the court with a mace. Purslow turned to Mick and Ben for the final time, with fist clenched and a beaming smile, and announced: ‘Seven nil.’
The humiliation for the Americans could not have been more complete, with Mr Justice Floyd coming down categorically on the side of RBS, Broughton and the directors. He said he could find ‘no basis’ that what Hicks and Gillett did ‘was justified’.
‘The true position is that in order to ensure additional loans, they had released absolute control of the sale that they are now seeking to regain,’ he said.
‘When it became clear that it was proceeding on a basis unpalatable to them, they sought to renege on an agreement.
‘I do not see that the evidence even begins to establish a case of repudiation,’ he said. ‘They ceased of their own volition to take any part. I fail to see how any of which occurred could be the substance of complaint by the owners.
‘I see no justification for interfering further in the running of the company. That’s a matter for the newly reconstituted board.’
The damning verdict on Hicks and Gillett left them with no right to appeal, facing a legal bill of £500,000, and being told Broughton could continue with a sale which would see them make a loss. As slaps in the face go, this must have felt like coming from Grace Jones on steroids.
Back in court, Mick Carroll pulled out some photocopied posters. He’d superimposed Broughton’s head on a famous photo of Al Capone holding up a post-prohibition Chicago newspaper bearing the headline ‘We Win.’ As it was passed along the Liverpool bench Broughton snapped out of his deep focus and gave a huge guffaw. The court emptied out onto steps which basked in autumnal sun, to be met by the world’s media. There were handshakes, hugging, back-slapping plus the belting-out of a really bad, tuneless version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.
Ben and Mick had microphones waved at them for quotes, but pushed through the scrum towards the George pub, across The Strand, to celebrate this famous victory. The last alcoholic drink to pass Mick’s lips had been on 5 March 2008. As he stared at the pint of Guinness Ben pushed in front of him, he knew there was no turning it down. The victory he had just witnessed eclipsed anything he’d seen on football pitches across Europe, and that pint was beckoning him in: ‘It’s had my name written on it since the day David Moores fucked up his “homework,”’ he told his mate. Then proceeded to get bladdered.
More Liverpool fans headed into the pub, and well-wishers popped in to congratulate the fans on their victory. A party of pensioners poured off a coach and filed past towards the food tables. A finely dressed lady in her eighties spotted the red shirts and stopped: ‘How did we get on, lads?’ she asked. ‘We won,’ they told her, and she almost burst into a jig of joy.
Obviously, the jigging, singing and cork-popping turned out to be a tad premature. This being Hicks and Gillett there was always going to be another sick trick to be played. Their death-grip was never going to be released, not while there was still time to take the club with them down the chute to hell.
Shortly before eight p.m. that night, as Liverpool directors were about to sign over the club to NESV, a restraining order from a Texan court, banning the sale, landed in the offices of Slaughter and May. It was risible, casting RBS as bully-boys who had forced the directors to sell against their will, and attempting, through some powerless little judge in Dallas, to overturn the will of the British High Court.
‘The Director Defendants were acting merely as pawns of RBS, wholly abdicating the fiduciary responsibilities that they owed in the sale,’ read the legal suit.
‘RBS has been complicit in this scheme with the Director Defendants. RBS has informed investors that it will approve of a deal only if there is no economic return to equity for Messrs Hicks and Gillett.’ This is, they said, ‘a grand conspiracy’.
It was a pathetic, cack-handed rehashing of the argument they had just so soundly lost before the highest court in Britain. Hicks’s lawyers bizarrely claimed that the Texan jurisdiction was valid because it was based on damage done to an American Corporation. Broughton and RBS could have ignored it and proceeded, but decided to use the two days before the re-financing deadline to kill the order, and in doing so, the Americans. So back to the High Court they went, this time to face an almost apoplectic Mr Justice Floyd.
During more than two hours of evidence, he heard that Hicks and Gillett’s Texas injunction was ‘oppressive, offensive and grotesque’ and that they had misled the Dallas judge by not disclosing that they had had a similar action rejected in the UK court the previous day.
David Chivers, QC, for NESV, said: ‘The owners, from beyond the grave, are seeking to exercise with their dead hand a continuing grip on this company. This is simply not acceptable.’
Mr Justice Floyd labelled them guilty of ‘unconscionable conduct’, said their behaviour ‘conclusively demonstrates just how incorrigible they are’, and ordered them to withdraw their injunction by four p.m. the next day or face contempt of court charges. Me
anwhile, over in Dallas, the judge was hearing a demand from Hicks and Gillett that Martin Broughton should be jailed.
It had clearly descended into farce and the Americans had chosen to go out with minimum dignity and maximum contempt. Right to the end they gambled recklessly, caring nothing about the effect their actions were having on the football club they had claimed to be custodians of.
At one p.m. on Friday, 15 October, the Dallas court lifted the restraining order, and Hicks and Gillett were forced to drop their £1 billion damages claim. With four hours remaining Liverpool was free to be sold, thus clearing their debt to RBS, and being allowed to continue functioning as a Premier League football club.
Fittingly, I heard about it from the man who, with some justification, is called King of the Kop. I was sitting at my desk, just about to send my Saturday football column, when a text came through from Steve ‘Mono’ Monaghan. It said, ‘Happy Xmas War is Over.’
In another south-Liverpool house, a couple of miles away from mine, John Aldridge felt a wave of relief wash over him: ‘I just felt so utterly elated. My first thought was “At least we’re not going to become another Leeds United.” That could have happened. We were losing £110,000 a day through interest on our debt. Once that was gone we knew we had stability and therefore a chance. We could start again. In the end, Hicks and Gillett were drowning men and they were pulling the club under with them. That afternoon it felt like we’d been given a lifebelt to get us to the shore.’
The three-year-and-eight-month ownership from hell had ended. The seven-headed hydra had finally been stabbed through the brain, unable to rise and spew its poison for another day. But as the corpse lay there twitching, the final drops of ugly pus seeped from its septic wounds. Hicks threatened to pursue ‘every legal avenue possible’, vowing to mire Liverpool in litigation for years to come, and, of course, he called in his loyal Sky Sports News crew to deliver his uncensored message to the world.
There he sat in his Dallas mansion, the plans of the New Anfield stadium framed behind his head (probably the most costly drawing hanging in his house, and let’s not forget he owns a Matisse), looking tired, hurt and broken. As he choked back the crocodile tears, he blamed Rafa Benitez for losing the club, the internet terrorists for driving away investors, the players for not playing as well as they could, the British media for using ‘inaccurate numbers’ and an organised conspiracy between RBS and Broughton, which, he said, had left him feeling shocked and devastated because ‘this was a valuable asset that was swindled away from me in an epic swindle’.
Not since The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker turned to junior immigration minister Ben Swain after he’d been grilled on Newsnight and told him: ‘I’ve never seen anyone look so fucking ugly with just one head. Who did your media training? Myra Hindley? You were like a sweaty octopus trying to unhook a bra,’ has a TV interview made me laugh so long and so loud.
The phone started to throb. It was the Daily Mirror Features desk. I guessed that the way the day was panning out they wanted me to do an I’m Feeling Yankee Doodle Dandy now we’ve been Beverly Hills Kopped by new owners, piece. Twice in the past six months I’d refused to do a ‘praise the Lord’ type article to celebrate the demise of Hicks and Gillett on the grounds that I didn’t believe they were history until I saw stakes sticking out of their hearts. The stakes had been served.
‘You finally happy now it’s all over then?’ I was asked, but clearly the happy tones weren’t coming through in my voice.
‘Typical bloody Scouser. You’ve spent three years whining about how these horrible Yanks are screwing you into the ground and when you get rid of them you’re still not happy.’
How do you begin to clarify just how much the past forty-four months, encapsulated in the final traumatic fortnight, had left you mentally scarred and physically exhausted? How do you explain, as you look at a league table that sees your team in the relegation zone, that you’re more angry and embarrassed than euphoric? How can you measure in words your shame and disgust at watching the club you’ve loved all of your life dragged through courts in two continents as it flirted with extinction?
How do you get across how the backbiting and bitching, the spinning and the briefing (by all sides) made you fall out of love with football because you realised it was all a horrible lie?
How do you express your gratitude for the one positive to emerge from the mess: the radicalising of the fans. The noise that started in the back room of the Sandon, as the Sons Of Shankly, which grew into the 50,000-strong organisation Share Liverpool-SOS, determined one day to buy the club they emotionally own.
How do you point out just how much these cowboys stole from you? How they actually managed, on certain days, to make you hate going to Anfield? How, instead of talking about teams and tactics you spoke of bank loans and PIK rates. Instead of holding flags and singing songs in support of your players, you devoted all your efforts to getting rid of the owners.
How do you portray a civil war in which brother fell on brother over the right to protest and fans turned on fellow fans for doing too much or too little? A war which made us stop laughing during after-games drinks in the Albert, the Salisbury, the Sandon and the Park, and just argue, argue, argue.
How do you explain to outsiders that there is a little part of every Liverpudlian which those Americans will keep for ever?
How can you even begin to portray the cynicism you have towards the fine promises of the new American owners, when you still cringe at your naive acceptance of the last ones?
You bang out 300 words for the front of the paper that employs you, that’s what you do, and you hope to Christ those words don’t come back to haunt you:
There’s a derby game taking place on Merseyside tomorrow, [I wrote for Saturday’s Daily Mirror]. This week has been the first time in the 44 years I’ve been going to these celebrated tribal battles between Everton and Liverpool when half the city hasn’t given it a thought.
Because to be a Liverpudlian this week was to be a student of court proceedings from London to Dallas, and company spreadsheets from Singapore to Boston, as you willed the deeds to Anfield out of the clutches of asset-stripping vultures.
It was to be sad and disillusioned, ashamed and bemused, afraid and angry that your precious club had become a devalued corporate entity in a war between high-earning men in wigs and buck-turning sharks in suits.
And all the time the clock ticked down towards bank repossession and possible administration.
That leverage buyout merchants Tom Hicks and George Gillett were allowed to stroll unchecked into English football, and drag one of the world’s most iconic clubs to the edge of the abyss, shames the men who run our game.
That they have finally gone brings heart-thumping relief. That they may lose £140 million brings air-punching delirium. How beautifully ironic they now whinge about an ‘epic swindle’ being perpetrated against them when that was precisely what they hoped to pull off at Anfield?
The thought of them never darkening that famous door again (save to peddle a pointless writ) means a huge weight has been lifted from everyone’s shoulders, along with the huge debt the new American owners have settled.
New owners who will be cautiously welcomed simply because they cannot be any worse than the last lot, but whose actions very quickly need to speak louder than words. But sod all that.
There’s a derby on Merseyside tomorrow. And I am finally looking forward to it.
The Yanks are dead. Long live the Yanks.
EPILOGUE
In February 2011 Tom Hicks and George Gillett asked the High Court to lift the ban on them pursuing claims for damages in America, against RBS, NESV and (the now) Sir Martin Broughton.
On February 17 Mr Justice Floyd effectively ruled that out by saying they could only make claims in the USA if they first went through an English court.
In his 17-page judgement he severely criticised Hicks and Gillett for taking their case to Dallas when the sale was going
through in October. Describing that attempt as ‘vexatious’ and ‘unconscionable’, he said the pair had ‘misled’ their own lawyer in Texas, who in turn misled the Dallas court.
‘I still find it difficult to imagine what possible real connection such a claim would have with any jurisdiction in the United States,’ said Justice Floyd.
‘I think the time has come when they need to state their case or accept that they do not have one.’
The following day Sir Martin Broughton announced he would be suing the pair for defamation over claims he had facilitated an epic swindle.
Back on the field of play, in the four months since Hicks and Gillett had left Anfield, Liverpool had risen from 19th in the Premier League to sixth.