Harry's Games (7 page)

Conn went on to explain that the City of London Police also hardly came up smelling of roses. ‘The City of London Police is the UK's lead force for financial crime, a status some experts describe as its justification for remaining independent of Greater London's Metropolitan Police. The force is part-funded by the banks themselves in the City's square mile; £4.9 million in 2010–11 came from its police authority, the Corporation of London. Throughout the serial multi-billion-pound collapses of banks around it, which have cost the taxpayer trillions, the City of London Police has arrested no senior banker for any suspected offence. The force has, though, become expensively involved in horse-racing and football.

‘In December 2007, the trial of former champion jockey Kieren Fallon and five other men for alleged race-fixing collapsed, their lawyers accusing the City of London Police of a flawed investigation.' By then, Conn explained, in 2006, Operation Apprentice had begun and had been broadly reported, following several sensational dawn raids, as targeting ‘corruption' in football. It ran alongside the other inquiry by the investigation company Quest, commissioned in January 2006 by the Premier League itself, into
alleged bungs. These were strongly rumoured to be routine, and would, if proven, constitute a serious corrupting of football's integrity, which relies on managers recruiting players on their sporting merits. When the raid was carried out at Redknapp's house by around 30 police officers at 6.06 a.m. on 29 November 2007, Redknapp bitterly recalled that only his ‘terrified' wife was in and that a photographer from the
Sun
happened to be on hand. The police investigation at the time was assumed to be a forceful follow-up to intelligence about bungs.

In fact, as Redknapp's successful 2008 challenge to the legality of the search warrant later revealed, Operation Apprentice was not related to bungs at all. The offices of Portsmouth, Glasgow Rangers and Newcastle United were also raided, attended by massive publicity; Mandaric was subsequently arrested, as was Peter Storrie, the former Portsmouth chief executive, as well as the football agent Willie McKay (a photographer from the
Sun
had also happened to be at McKay's Doncaster home at 6.00 a.m.), and David Sullivan and Karren Brady, then the owner and managing director respectively of Birmingham City. Two Premier League players – the midfielder Amdy Faye and fullback Pascal Chimbonda, formerly of Portsmouth and Tottenham Hotspur respectively – were also arrested.

The investigation centred not on bungs but on tax, specifically whether Portsmouth had paid Faye a fee when he signed for Portsmouth in 2003, disguised it by routing it through McKay, and therefore evaded PAYE and NI due on it. Neither Faye nor McKay were ultimately charged with any offence, and Sullivan, Brady and Chimbonda were cleared of any wrongdoing. Storrie was prosecuted, charged with cheating the public revenue in relation to that Faye alleged payment, and he and Mandaric were also tried for tax evasion over an alleged termination fee paid to the midfielder Eyal Berkovic via a company, Medellin Enterprises, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Both were found not guilty.

So the net result of ten years of investigations into corruption – at a cost of millions of pounds to the public purse in the case of the prosecution brought against Redknapp – was a big fat zero. Not a single conviction. Not a single allegation proved. And after the humiliation of the Redknapp acquittal, you couldn't really see the CPS or the police initiating proceedings against anyone else. They had given it their best shot with Redknapp and failed. If they had had more compelling evidence against someone else, they would surely have already shown their hand. So, as Conn rightly suggested, the Redknapp case looked likely to be the last word on the matter as the CPS was unlikely to risk another high-profile failure.

This obviously raised questions about the competency of both the Stevens inquiry and the City of London Police; if corruption in football was as endemic as everyone had always claimed, how was it possible that they couldn't come up with one case that would stand up in a court of law? I had my own suspicions – as, no doubt, did everyone else – but I was happy to let others follow that paper trail.

My particular interest was Redknapp himself and it seemed that, far from drawing a line under everything, the case had actually raised many more intriguing areas of discussion; not so much about any illegality – that had been decided – but about his personality, his attitudes and his relationships. What was it about Redknapp that had made the investigators and police go after him not once, not twice, but three times? It was as if he was the modern-day Al Capone of football. Surely he couldn't have been the worst – or indeed only – player, agent or manager in their sights?

Redknapp had always maintained that the authorities had got it in for him because he was an ‘East End, working-class Cockney'. This didn't seem entirely plausible, either; not because the police are above making judgements based on lazy stereotypes,
but because football is full of other characters similar to Redknapp. They may not all be quite as talkative, but they're just as working class and open to regional prejudice.

There again, Redknapp does have an uncanny knack of acting as a magnet for prejudice. Within hours of writing an article supportive of Redknapp's qualities, my inbox was deluged with emails, almost all of which suggested I must be mad. What was fascinating about them was that the most vitriolic came from those who had no interest in or knowledge of football. One from a woman named Helen was a typical example: ‘How could you be so nice about Redknapp?' she wrote. ‘He's obviously a crook. He should be in prison.'

I was surprised, to say the least, because I knew Helen well. She wasn't a Middle England Tory; she was a left-wing, foot-ball-indifferent friend and former National Union of Journalists activist who in the past had always stood up for the underdog and the right of everyone to a fair trial. Yet here she was, having read little more than the headlines of the proceedings and heard none of the evidence, apparently certain there had been a major miscarriage of justice. I was less interested in whether she was right or wrong than in why she cared so much. Redknapp wasn't one of her typical hate figures; he wasn't a David Cameron, Nick Clegg or Rupert Murdoch. He was just a working-class football manager, the sort of person who didn't normally even register on her radar. So why the moral outrage?

It might have been because ‘gobby' people tend to attract extreme responses, and Redknapp is nothing if not gobby, a man not given to using one word when three will do. That made some kind of sense, though not enough. Perhaps she had a gut feeling that Redknapp was being welcomed back all too smoothly into the football family and that his acquittal was going to be used as an excuse to sweep the rest of the game's dirty financial secrets under the carpet. That made even less sense. Redknapp
had hardly been persona non grata in football's inner circle when he was awaiting trial and, if the Football Association did want to use his acquittal to tidy away other – as yet unreported – grubbiness, it was hardly Redknapp's fault. So why blame him? Once again, Redknapp was proving enigmatic. The closer I got to trying to understand him, the more elusive he became.

The trickiness had been apparent in his relationship with money, but neither the prosecution nor the defence had gone into it in any depth as it had no bearing on his innocence or guilt. ‘I'm not a greedy man, Mr Black,' Redknapp had said while being cross-examined by the prosecution. ‘You can ask anyone . . . I'm the least greedy person you could meet.' And there were ample demonstrations of his generosity: his refusal to accept the £140,000 severance payout he was due when he left Portsmouth for the first time; and the many charities and friends he had supported in his spare time.

Redknapp was also at pains to paint himself as someone who is a bit financially naïve. He described how he and Mandaric used to drive to away games together and how the Portsmouth owner's efforts to explain the basics of financial investment used to fall on deaf ears; how almost every investment he had done on his own, either in property or the stock market, had gone wrong; and how he had no real idea what he was doing when he was setting up the Monaco bank account and treated the experience as a fun away-day with the super-rich. ‘Milan told me to fly over and do it, so that's what I did,' he said. ‘All I remember was that the bank was at the top of the hill and Sandra [Redknapp's wife] sat on the wall outside while I went and signed the forms. I was only in there for about five minutes.'

Even the naming of the bank account shrieked of naïvety. If Rosie47 was, as the prosecution alleged, a deliberate attempt to conceal the existence of the account's identity from the tax authorities then it was an extremely feeble one, the link to
Redknapp being so evident it was tantamount to waving a red flag that said, ‘Harry's Secret Stash'. And if Rosie47 was, as the defence claimed, just a security password, then it was one any hacker could have cracked in seconds.

Yet it was clear Redknapp was also a man with a keen sense of his own financial worth. The 2012
Sunday Times
Rich List in Sport ranked him in eighty-fourth place with a salary at Tottenham Hotspur of £4.4 million per year and assets of £11 million, although those who were familiar with Redknapp's financial arrangements considered that to be a very conservative estimate. And for all Redknapp's courtroom protestations that he ‘couldn't really read or write', he seems to have always had a very shrewd idea of what was – and what ought to be – in the contracts his agent negotiated.

The $245,000 that Mandaric placed in the Monaco bank account on Redknapp's behalf may, in reality, have been a generous investment opportunity extended by the Serbian billionaire to his friend and manager, but, on Redknapp's own repeated admission, it was always related to the five per cent of the Crouch transfer he felt he had signed away when he changed jobs from director of football to manager at Portsmouth, and to which he was morally, if not legally, still entitled. No matter that his new contract offered him a substantially higher salary in compensation. Or, to put it another way, that five per cent was a debt of honour. This made Mandaric's efforts to make him a few extra quid via the Monaco bank account less an act of generosity and more a matter of duty. Where did knowing one's precise worth end and greed start?

Then there was Redknapp's home in Sandbanks, a small exclusive peninsula that juts out into Poole Harbour. The house has been valued at £8 million, but decoding what that says about Redknapp is less straightforward. Anyone who had watched Piers Morgan's three-part 2008 ITV documentary about Sandbanks
might well believe the area was – square metre for square metre – one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the planet. The projected image was one of a millionaire's playground of seafront gated palaces and chic wine bars stuffed with Russian oligarchs and their trophy wives.

The reality is a long way from that. ‘To tell you the truth,' says Paul Dredge, who has worked as an estate agent in the area for the past sixteen years, ‘I didn't recognize the place from that TV programme. None of us did. I think Piers Morgan got a bit carried away after talking to a property developer who has long since gone out of business. There are one or two very expensive homes, of which Redknapp's is one, but there are many, many more purpose-built flats available in the £300,000–£450,000 price bracket. Most of the properties are bought as second homes, with families either coming down for the summer or renting them out. Come the autumn, there's not many people around at all.'

A day spent in Sandbanks in late October rather bears this out. There is very little going on, the one wine bar is nearly empty and a drive along the road that loops round the peninsula reveals a great many properties that aren't particularly lovely. A mixture of drab 1930s and bog-standard, new-build architecture. There's even a terminal at the tip of the peninsula – not far from Redknapp's house – where cars line up for the Poole–Swanage car ferry. It's not most people's definition of glamorous and exclusive.

‘I love the area,' Dredge continues, ‘but it's not the sort of place where you buy a property if you're looking to make a big “I've made it” statement. A couple of miles away from here there's an area called Branscombe with large detached properties that are not overlooked and are surrounded by woods, which much more clearly fits that description. That's much more the kind of place I would expect to find a successful football manager.'

Redknapp likes his creature comforts: the sea views, the fine wines, the beach to walk the dogs. But he's not so obsessed with
status that he would go and live somewhere just for the kudos. He has no anonymity and he isn't that bothered. The police aren't the only people who know where he lives. Almost everyone in Sandbanks does, and, on the mornings Redknapp is in the news, there are a dozen or so newspaper reporters and TV crews parked outside his home. More often than not he will come out with a pot of coffee for everyone and a chat. And on those days when there's nothing going on, he'll nip out to the shop for a paper. The
Sun
, usually.

This isn't the lifestyle of someone who values his privacy or uses his wealth to keep the world at arm's length. Redknapp is a part of the Sandbanks furniture, as much of an attraction as the sand dunes. Neither is it the lifestyle of a man who wants to shout his success from the rooftops. If that was what money meant to Redknapp, then there are plenty of other much flashier places he could have chosen. It is, undeniably, though, still the lifestyle of someone who can afford to live in an £8 million house; there's no getting away from that. Making sense of the Redknapp finances is as tricky as making sense of the man himself.

There had also been a great deal of talk about loyalty and friendship at the trial, how Redknapp was a great family man, how his players loved him and how he and Mandaric had been the best of friends, their relationship transcending the normal formal boundaries of club owner and manager. Even his bulldogs adored him. There didn't seem much doubt about Redknapp's closeness to his family and his dogs; his marriage to Sandra has been one of the few in football that has remained rock-solid and his devotion to his sons – and them to him – has always been self-evident.