Harry's Games (5 page)

‘It was a real wake-up call for Harry. If it could happen to Bobby, it could happen to anyone. And from that point on, I think Harry was determined that he wasn't going to end up as one of the vast number of bitter, ex-footballers who had been spat out and left broke and broken by the game. He was going to keep his wits about him and not let anyone take advantage of him. From then on, whatever career he could make in football was going to be on his own terms as far as possible. And he certainly wasn't going to end up penniless.'

23 January 2012

Southwark Crown Court is a vast, red-brick sprawl on the south bank of the Thames between Tower Bridge and London Bridge. It is the last word in Ronseal functionality, a building designed to process the law with as little fuss as possible. If anything, the interior is even more featureless: windowless, often airless, with slightly grubby, off-white walls with pale wood panels. Court Six, where Harry Redknapp's trial was due to start, had the feel of justice at its most municipal. It all felt wrong somehow. The setting for Redknapp's trial should have had the pomp of a Wembley cup final; instead, it felt like an away game at Millwall.

There was no drama, no fanfare, as Redknapp, Mandaric and their separate entourages entered the courtroom. Harry just gave his son, Jamie, a reassuring pat on the back – you'd have thought it might have been the other way round, but paternal habits die hard – and took his seat next to Mandaric in the dock, a self-contained room within a room with shatter-proof glass for walls. Moments later, the usher entered the court and Judge Anthony Leonard made his first appearance. It took a while to understand what he was saying – not just because he was softly spoken, but because he was extremely posh and pronounced ‘about' as ‘abite'.
The gulf between his world and Redknapp's couldn't have been plainer.

Courts operate in their own space-time continuum, one that is instinctively understood by every member of the legal profession, yet remains a mystery to the uninitiated. ‘The case will last for two weeks,' said Judge Leonard at the start of the trial, apparently able to predict in advance exactly how long everyone was going to speak. He certainly knew how long he needed himself. After hearing a morning of legal argument in the absence of the jury, he announced, ‘I will deliver my judgment in fifteen minutes, at 12.55.' If you didn't know better, you might have thought he'd already decided on the outcome in advance and fancied getting everything conveniently wrapped up in time for lunch.

The first adjournment was the setting for the first of many bravura Redknapp performances. Having just spent the morning listening to various barristers and police officers argue over matters that might affect whether he was going to prison or not, a normal defendant would want to get the hell out of the courtroom as fast as possible to relax with his family and take stock with his legal team. Not Redknapp. He was all smiles, sharing a joke with several football reporters he had known for years and announcing to the galleries, ‘There's absolutely nothing to worry about, I can promise you.'

It was as disconcerting as it was impressive, because whatever he was really feeling he wasn't giving anything away. Many people who have known Redknapp for years joke about what a bad gambler he is, but he could have held his own playing poker with anyone in that court. Sure, he had arrived knowing – as did the press, though it couldn't be reported at the time – that Mandaric and Peter Storrie, the former chief executive of Portsmouth FC, had already been acquitted of similar charges, but, as all barristers warn their clients, juries can be very unpredictable and Redknapp wouldn't have been taking anything for granted.

There was a tactical change at the start of the afternoon's proceedings, with Jamie Redknapp swapping seats in the public gallery with Richard Bevan, chief executive of the League Managers Association, to make sure Jamie was directly in the line of sight of the jurors. Bevan may have many qualities, but celebrity eye-candy isn't one of them. Jamie was to remain in pole position in the gallery throughout the trial. Someone, somewhere, was paying attention to detail.

If anything, time seemed to pass even more slowly over the next day and a half, as barrister John Black QC outlined the case for the prosecution; ninety minutes in the hands of this lawyer was merely the time required to ask one question. In TV courtroom dramas, these opening remarks are invariably a short, snappy, damning resumé of the charges. This was more of a tortuous, soporific, detailed plod, characterized as much by Black saying, ‘If the jury could now turn to page 467 behind divider 8 . . .' as by any startling allegations. It was all so long and convoluted, it was hard to keep track, although Redknapp tried manfully to pick his way through several ring binders full of evidence.

Mandaric preferred just to listen. The guard who sat next to the accused in the dock concentrated on his book of word puzzles while, for many of those in the public gallery, checking their emails on their Blackberries every five minutes or so suddenly became a priority. During one of the breaks, Redknapp joked, ‘This man could put a glass eye to sleep.' I certainly knew how he felt. Even the judge gave the impression proceedings were drifting, from time to time enquiring how much longer Mr Black thought he was likely to be. It was a curious performance from the prosecution. Black is an experienced QC and must have given a lot of thought to how best to play his hand but he can't have failed to realize he had lost his audience's attention for long periods of time.

The essence of the case was this: in March 2002, Portsmouth
had sold Peter Crouch to Aston Villa for £4.5 million, generating a profit of more than £3 million on the £1.25 million the club had paid Queens Park Rangers for the striker the year before. As director of football, Redknapp's contract had specified he was due ten per cent of the net profits of the sale, but, the week before the sale was agreed, Redknapp was appointed manager of the club and the terms of his contract were changed. He now received a much higher basic salary but his share of any profits on the sale of players was reduced to five per cent. And that five per cent of the Crouch transfer was paid to Redknapp, net of PAYE and National Insurance, in April 2002.

It was what happened next that was of most interest to the authorities. Four days after receiving his five per cent of the Crouch bonus, Redknapp flew to Monaco to open a bank account under the name of ‘Rosie47' – Rosie being Redknapp's much-loved pet bulldog and 1947 being the year he was born. Just over a month later, Mandaric paid $145,000 into the Rosie47 account. Thereafter, the Monaco account lay dormant for six months until early January 2003, when Redknapp faxed the bank a request to transfer $100,000 to First Star International Ltd, one of Mandaric's investment companies in America.

Just over a year later, in April 2004, a further $150,000 was paid into Rosie47 by Mandaric and thereafter the account lay dormant for more than two years until November 2006 when Redknapp volunteered the information that he had an offshore bank account in Monaco to the Quest inquiry into illegal payments in football. In January 2008, Redknapp closed Rosie47, transferring the remaining $207,498 to his HSBC account in England, with his accountant sending a cheque to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) for £4,415 in respect of untaxed interest on the Monaco money.

Eight months later, Redknapp's accountant again contacted HMRC, this time indicating the possibility that PAYE and NI had
not been accounted for in respect of Mandaric's two payments to Rosie47 and offering to put this right if necessary. This, the City of London Police concluded, was clear evidence that the monies Mandaric had paid Redknapp via the Rosie47 account were the other five per cent of the bonus Redknapp had been due as part of his original contract with Portsmouth as the club's director of football and that the pair had deliberately set out to avoid paying any tax on it. In June 2009, the City of London Police formally interviewed Redknapp in connection with this matter for the first time and, early the following year, both he and Mandaric were formally charged with two counts of tax evasion.

It was to everyone's relief when the prosecution barrister finally concluded his opening statement and the judge adjourned proceedings. I went outside to get a coffee and wake myself up and fell into conversation with Redknapp's counsel, John Kelsey-Fry QC.

Kelsey-Fry was a man with almost as stellar a reputation as his client. Over a meteoric career, he has acted for, among others, Roman Polanski, Sharon Osborne and Steven Gerrard and is considered one of the stars of the bar. It wasn't hard to see why. In cross-examination he is sharp, succinct, witty and charming; juries love him. Even his wig oozes class. ‘It used to belong to Christmas Humphreys,' he told me. ‘He was the barrister who prosecuted Ruth Ellis [the last woman to be hanged in this country]. He was also a Buddhist and refused to sit on any capital cases. So he was a curious man . . . someone who was prepared to prosecute a woman to the gallows but not pass sentence.'

I asked Kelsey-Fry how he thought the case was going so far. Like most lawyers, he responded with a question of his own. ‘How do you think it is going?' he said.

‘Um . . .' I hesitated, unsure of the exact protocol for these exchanges. ‘I'm not sure the prosecution is exactly dazzling the jury.'

Kelsey-Fry smiled and said nothing.

‘But some of the evidence does seem quite compelling,' I added.

‘Every defendant always looks as guilty as sin after the prosecution's opening speech. It will all look very different by the end of next week. Just you wait and see.'

‘So you're confident then?'

I can't be a hundred per cent certain, but I have no memory of him replying to that question.

It's often been said of Redknapp that he's a lucky man, a man with the knack of being in the right place at the right time – although I doubt he would have considered himself that lucky to be standing trial. But it was undoubtedly fortunate that it had taken more than two-and-a-half years for the case to come before a jury as the prosecution's main witness was a
News of the World
journalist, Rob Beasley. He had interviewed both Mandaric and Redknapp over the phone in February 2009 and had recorded both conversations, the most damning part of which appeared to be Redknapp referring to the monies in his Monaco bank account as his ‘Crouchie bonus'. At the time, this must have felt like gold dust to the CPS as the
News of the World
still had a reputation for investigative reporting alongside its standard celebrity gossip. Indeed, even if the case had been heard just a year earlier, then the newspaper's evidence might still have looked very strong, especially as it had exposed match-fixing during the Lord's Test match between England and Pakistan.

But all that had changed over the course of the previous summer when illegal phone-hacking was shown to have been conducted on an industrial scale by the
News of the World
and the newspaper had been closed in a damage limitation exercise by its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.

Much to the disappointment of the CPS, it was Beasley's reliability and reputation that were under scrutiny in court every bit as much as that of the accused. It's always the duty of the
defence lawyers to try to muddy the waters, but as the first week – and the case for the prosecution – came to a close, it rather felt as if the prosecution had been contributing to the murkiness itself. There had been a few headline-grabbing detours, such as ‘Rosie47' and ‘Crouchie bonus', but there had been no conclusive paper trail of who had done what, when and, most importantly, why. Or if there had, Mr Black hadn't been able to keep everyone in court awake for long enough at the same time to establish it.

It wasn't just Redknapp who was happy for the court to adjourn early on the Friday afternoon as Spurs had an away fourth-round FA Cup tie at Watford for him to go to; the rest of us also needed time off for good behaviour.

‘You coming for more of this punishment next week?' Redknapp joked with me as I bumped into him in the lobby on the way out.

‘Sure am,' I said.

‘You must be a glutton for it. I don't have any choice.'

‘Good luck tonight, Harry.'

‘Thank you very much.'

It wasn't until the second week that things became marginally clearer. No one was disputing the basic facts that Redknapp had opened a bank account in Monaco in 2002, that Mandaric had made two payments, totalling $295,000, into the account and that $100,000 had been transferred from it into a US bank account. It was the interpretation that was in question. The prosecution was alleging that the payments had been a scam to avoid Redknapp having to pay PAYE on a bonus due for the sale of Peter Crouch; the defence was saying that the contractual bonus had been paid through the proper channels and that this payment was a private arrangement between two friends.

Mandaric was first in the witness box. Time and again over the course of more than six hours, Mr Black suggested that the money
was a bonus and, time and again, Mandaric told him he was mistaken. ‘I know I'm sounding like a broken record, Mr Black,' he said at one point, ‘but I can only tell you what happened.'

To Mr Black's credit, he had perfected the barrister's sangfroid of looking as if every answer Mandaric was giving was utterly incriminating and just what he expected, but it was obvious he wasn't really getting anywhere, as Mandaric was the model of consistency and politeness. Yes he, Mandaric, had originally been against buying Crouch: ‘I thought he was more of a basketball player than a footballer.' Yes, Harry had pestered him for the full ten per cent bonus to which he had been entitled under his original contract: ‘Most people want more money if they can get it and Harry is a moaner. But he knew what he was due and accepted it.'

The Monaco money had been entirely unrelated, he said; he and Redknapp had spent many hours together in the car travelling to games, they had become good friends and he wanted to give Redknapp the benefit of his investment expertise and make him some money. So he had told Redknapp to set up the bank account in Monaco – for Mandaric's benefit rather than Redknapp's – as he didn't want to be liable for any tax on monies coming into the UK, and then transferred $145,000 into it as seed money for future investments. A short while later, he got Redknapp to sign a fax, transferring $100,000 of the seed money to his US investment company. ‘I was going to give Harry all the profit on anything I made and he was to return the stake.'