An Epic Swindle: 44 Months with a Pair of Cowboys

by Brian Reade

  Hicks didn’t like what he heard, muttered ‘gimme a break’ and sauntered away with the noise ringing in his ears.

  The great Texan bluffer took a massive gamble when he went public on the pursuit of Jurgen Klinsmann. He calculated that in playing the honesty card through their local paper, and spinning it so it appeared it was Gillett’s idea which he foolishly went along with before realising his partner was making a terrible mistake, that all would be well.

  He played the odds in his head and believed that fans would view Big Bad Gillett as the enemy and Uncle Tom as the saviour. Which served his ends at this point, because by January 2008 he had broken off all communication with Gillett, who was negotiating with Amanda Staveley to sell his share of the club. By briefing journalists to say he wasn’t interested in selling his share – he was, but he valued the club at a ludicrous £1 billion – and by painting Gillett as the man who stabbed Rafa in the back, he hoped the fans would believe he’d been the good guy all along. The one who was trying to hold it all together.

  It was a classic Hicks tactic. As one man who observed their working relationship at Anfield at close quarters described it: ‘Gillett’s philosophy was: “I’m the owner. I hire the management team and let them do their work.” Hicks had to be in charge. He had to run everything. And he did so through a policy of divide and rule. He constantly played one person off against the other, so he ended up making all the major decisions.’

  This divisive, control-freak strategy was revealed within the first hour of walking into Anfield in February 2007. As preparations were being drawn up for the press conference, the media man who was managing the event, Mike Lee, read out the running order. He told Rick Parry to go first and explain the situation, then introduce George Gillett because he’d been involved in the deal for six months, who would then hand over to the new guy on the scene, Tom Hicks.

  Before Lee had finished his sentence Hicks piped up with: ‘I’m going second.’ All eyes turned to Gillett who just looked at him, shrugged, pulled a face that said ‘OK’ and stared at the floor.

  He was laying down a marker. Pissing on this new territory like an alpha male lion and leaving his scent to warn off rivals. Letting everyone know that he was the one with the cash and thus the one in charge. Gillett was never left in any doubt about the reality of their partnership. The Wisconsin Kid was forced to bring in Hicks because stumping up the cash to buy a club the size of Liverpool was out of his league. Without the Texan’s bankers vouching for his paper wealth Gillett would probably have ended up buying Leicester City.

  It wasn’t just Gillett that Hicks bullied into a corner at Liverpool. Anyone who challenged him was swatted away. Take the proposed new stadium. The New Anfield (insert name of £100 million naming rights sponsor) Bowl was his baby, the one that would lay him a golden egg, and no one messed with it.

  As early as the first week Hicks had decided to ditch the original stadium plans and get his Dallas architects to design him something bigger and better. A meeting was scheduled in Liverpool’s Malmaison Hotel for the Saturday morning where Martin Jennings, the stadium’s project manager, would talk the new owners through the plans.

  Jennings, an unassuming, down-to-earth, non-football man, had heard the promise that a spade would be in the ground in sixty days and that the steel order was about to be placed, so guessed they wanted a detailed briefing on where exactly they were up to. As he opened his comments Hicks interrupted him to announce he was dropping all the assurances he gave the previous board: ‘We ain’t building that stadium,’ he said. ‘It’s not big enough.’

  When he was asked on what criteria it wasn’t big enough he replied: ‘Man United’s is bigger.’

  As it was explained to him that United have always had bigger attendances than Liverpool, he brushed it aside saying: ‘Well, we’re going to have it bigger. I’m going to get new designs done.’

  Jennings told him he wouldn’t need to do that as the current architects had allowed for an option to expand their stadium to a 70,000 capacity and it could be redesigned, not only quickly but relatively inexpensively.

  Hicks snapped back: ‘Are you fucking listening to me?’ Jennings asked what he meant. ‘Are you with us or against us?’ Jennings said he was with him but was merely pointing out that if he wanted a 70,000-seater stadium the plans were in place to build it.

  To which Gillett rode in on cue, adopting the same aggressive language as his partner: ‘Martin, we ain’t building that fucking stadium.’ They didn’t build that stadium. Or the new one.

  Hicks’s divide-and-rule policy may have worked in America, and it may have worked in the Anfield Civil War to isolate first Benitez, then Gillett, then Parry, but it had backfired spectacularly with the fans.

  Many of them didn’t read his sugar-coated Klinsmann quotes in the Echo, they just saw the headline which told them that two men who knew nothing about football had gone behind their Champions League-winning manager’s back to offer the job to a German novice. That was enough. Fans and players now questioned not only the Americans’ wealth and motives but their judgement and decency:

  ‘I didn’t agree with the fans who slagged the owners off for approaching a manager behind the other one’s back,’ said Jamie Carragher, ‘because it always goes on. Do we really believe the club didn’t speak to Rafa before sacking Houllier?

  ‘And although I was totally behind Rafa I could see why the owners were unhappy with him. They’d both undermined each other. But I totally disagreed with their decision. We were near the top of the table, and Rafa’s record was second-to-none, plus Klinsmann was too inexperienced as a manager at club level. Liverpool don’t get rid of managers mid-season. Especially one who has just been to two Champions League finals in three years. It was a big mistake which showed they didn’t understand Liverpool or English football properly.’

  As the bloody civil war spilt from the boardroom, to the dugout and on to the streets around Anfield, the briefing and spinning from all sides made the viciousness of the Westminster media machine look tamer than the Women’s Institute press office.

  Hicks’s PR people were explaining the Klinsmann debacle thus:

  Tom can be a bit of a soft pussy at times and goes with the flow to keep everyone happy [I kid you not]. He’d never heard of Klinsmann but George had met him at Richard Steadman’s clinic in Vail, Colorado, where he has his skiing resort. The German was having an operation, Gillett took him for dinner a few times to pick his brains about football, and they became big buddies. When Rafa’s threats and tantrums were getting out of hand, Gillett rang Hicks and told him to do his research on Klinsmann. Which he did. Purely to find out who he was and what all the fuss was about. Then George suggested he meet him and, purely to keep his partner sweet, Tom said, ‘OK. Sure. What do I know?’

  In the meantime, Gillett and Parry had set up a meeting with Klinsmann in New York which Tom reluctantly flew to. By the time he got there the other two had been speaking to the German for three hours, and he didn’t know what they’d said to each other. Tom spent another couple of hours with him, they had a pleasant chat, he seemed a nice guy, they said they’d keep in touch in case Rafa threw his toys all the way out of his pram to Madrid, and that was that.

  According to Hicks’s PR machine, devious George was pulling the strings, pushing the agenda, saying ‘we gotta hire this guy, we gotta have him on board’ and Tom was still doing a bored teenager impression, making a W for ‘whatever’ with his fingers behind everyone’s back.

  In the end, say the spinners, Tom decided Rafa was going nowhere, Klinsmann went to Bayern Munich, and when the Echo asked him for the truth, as a brother of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, he followed its three guiding principles of ‘virtue, diligence and brotherly love’ and fessed up.

  To summarise: ‘It was Gillett’s idea. I was led astray. I made a mistake, and put it right when I realised, so forgive me.’

  But that’s not how someone very close to the story remembers it. He
reckons once Hicks met Klinsmann the Texan was desperate to make him the next Liverpool manager. And he’s got the documents to back it up. His version is that when he checked out Klinsmann and discovered he lived in California on Newport Beach, Hicks invited him and his wife Debbie to a Thanksgiving dinner at his second home in La Jolla, near San Diego.

  As they talked over turkey, Hicks liked what he was hearing and, in typical style, took the bull by the horns. The idea of working at Anfield was put to Klinsmann – with conditions such as Benitez could still be at Anfield for a while but don’t worry about it – and the German was asked to think it over.

  It’s at this point that the agent of a Liverpool player was asked to sound out his client about the prospect of having Klinsmann as his manager. The player couldn’t believe what he was hearing and told his agent to transmit back words to that effect. Gillett then realised they were getting ahead of themselves and got cold feet. Although he too wanted Benitez out, he wasn’t sure it was the right time to sack him or whether they were going about it the right way. He could sense a horrific backlash awaiting them on the other side of the Atlantic and asked Hicks to slow down.

  This was typical Gillett behaviour. He would take a shine to a stranger, tell them they should be working for him, arrange for that person to see one of his managerial team, then when the manager reports doubts, Gillett agrees and drops him. This was how he expected the Hicks and Klinsmann meeting to go but he was left unpleasantly surprised.

  The deal then stalled. Klinsmann began to harbour misgivings, lost interest and went back to Germany as Bayern Munich coach, leaving Hicks furious.

  ‘Shame on us all,’ he wrote in an email to Gillett and Rick Parry.

  ‘The idea that Tom Hicks was an innocent party in the Klinsmann saga is a joke,’ said a former senior Liverpool figure. ‘The opposite is true. I know for a fact that he kept in touch with him, because when we were doing the deal for Martin Skrtel in the January he emailed Klinsmann to ask if we were spending too much.’

  Gillett was astounded that Hicks had volunteered his version of the Klinsmann saga to the Echo, and any lingering life in the Americans’ relationship was now snuffed out. Gillett’s son Foster, who was installed in Melwood at the start of the season to liaise with Benitez, headed home and was rarely seen again.

  That had been a curious move. Players and staff say Foster was a likeable enough young man, he just didn’t seem to know why he was there or what he was supposed to be doing. His nickname was ‘24/7’ because that’s when he told everyone at the club he would be available. Although no one remembers ever having to disturb him from whatever he was getting up to at night to solve a problem.

  Foster was very much a chip off his father’s block. He went out of his way to make people like him, through flattery, and telling them what he thought they wanted to hear. But the most anyone remembers about him is sitting at lunch and answering all his questions about football.

  One man who remembers slightly more about Foster is the former chairman of Wigan Warriors rugby league club, Maurice Lindsay. Most people at Anfield felt sorry for Foster being stuck thousands of miles away from home and went out of their way to make him feel wanted. Liverpool’s stadium manager, Ged Poynton, a big rugby league fan, took Foster to watch St Helens play Wigan and he was instantly smitten by these muddy monsters and their oval balls. In the boardroom he fell into conversation with Lindsay who told him that Wigan was up for sale at the right price.

  Foster then set his heart on buying the club. He came up with a few proposals and Wigan began to believe they may have had a buyer. However, when he did his disappearing act after the Klinsmann debacle, it wasn’t just Liverpool that ended up being left in the dark.

  Suddenly a senior member of the Anfield set-up was receiving phone calls from Lindsay saying, ‘Where’s Foster gone? I can’t get hold of him because he’s not answering my calls.’ The Anfield figure told Lindsay that if he tracked him down, could he ask him to give someone at Liverpool a ring.

  Hicks’s son, Tommy Jr., was the only other member of the combined clans to make any sort of impression in Liverpool. Like Foster, Tommy was a little rich kid who wanted to be clasped to Scouse bosoms, but who failed spectacularly.

  A week after the Spirit Of Shankly’s call to arms in the Olympia, Tom Jr. committed what was either the bravest act by an American since Rambo wiped out an entire squad of Burmese soldiers just to rescue some happy-clappy missionaries, or the most stupid one since Republican bigwigs mistook a cretinous, moose-hunting MILF called Palin for a potential vice-president.

  Following a 3–2 home win against Middlesbrough, Tom decided to pay a visit to the packed Sandon pub to meet the fans. He jumped out of his silver people carrier, surrounded by a team of burly black-clad minders, had a cigarette and took photos of the historic birthplace of Liverpool FC. He stubbed out the fag and told his bodyguards he was going in for a drink, which made them assume the kind of body language you’d see on CIA agents if President Obama went on walkabout in Kabul.

  He strolled into the packed middle-bar and ordered a pint of lager for himself and soft drinks for his security guards. If a 6ft 4in clean-cut boy in a sharp, handmade suit, surrounded by Men In Black hadn’t already stood out in the Sandon on a match day, the Texan accent did the trick.

  Necks strained, heads turned, word spread quicker than a bush fire through the pub’s rooms and the doors were suddenly jammed with disbelieving fans catching a glimpse of the devil’s spawn.

  At first everything went OK. Maybe it was the shock of seeing him in the flesh in their midst, or an outbreak of respect for having the balls to walk into their manor as though everything was fine between them. Questions were thrown at him about why he was there, what had happened to the stadium, was his dad going to sack Rafa and when would his dad sell to the sheikh?

  One fan gave him a Paxmanesque interrogation for almost five minutes and Tom answered politely, but as more people pushed into the bar, anger replaced shock, and the mood began to turn nasty. Songs about Liverpool Football Club being in the wrong hands started, and grew louder. Venomous insults were hurled in his direction, the minders became increasingly twitchy, and as the bar rocked to the tune of ‘You lying bastard get out of our pub’ Tom wore a look that said: ‘I’ve seen what happens next in every saloon scene in every Western. I just pray they ain’t carrying guns.’

  A pint of lager was thrown over him (Carling, I think, which to be fair isn’t a bad drop in the Sandon) and in an act not seen in Anfield since the days of El Hadji Diouf, a stream of spit flew in his direction. The bodyguards then formed a ring around him and forced themselves, inch by inch, out through the door and into the people carrier. As meet and greets go it wasn’t the most successful one in history. In fact I’ve followed Ian Paisley around Catholic areas of Edinburgh on the morning of a Papal visit, as his followers waved Protestant Bibles and muttered things about the anti-Christ, and seen less hostility.

  Kopite and scriptwriter Roy Boulter, who saw the entire incident, said: ‘It’s just another example of how these people failed to understand English football culture and more specifically Liverpool fan culture. How they just didn’t get how hated they were.

  ‘Coming when it did, after we’d held a mass meeting in that same pub to share our sense of outrage and disgust over what his family were doing to the club, it almost smacked of defiance. To brazenly stroll into a pub packed with die-hard fans surrounded by a team of minders was almost laying down a statement of ‘Come on then, gobshites, let’s see how hard you are.’

  Tony Barrett, who was present throughout and wrote an eyewitness piece in the Echo, took criticism from Evertonian readers for not fully condemning the fan who spat at Hicks. At the time he agreed with them, saying after rereading his piece that he should have been harder with his own fans because that kind of cowardly behaviour is unacceptable. Today he’s not so sure:

  ‘Knowing what I know now, about what they did to the club, I think that’s the l
east he deserved, and he was very lucky that’s all he got. Because these fans were the life-blood of the club. They went everywhere for their team and his family deliberately brought it to its knees for their own ends. And if all he got was spat at that’s the least he deserved. Also, if you’re surrounded by security men there’s no such thing as Queensberry Rules. Looking back I don’t regret not condemning it because I believe he got away lightly.’

  Hicks Jr. released a statement saying he had only wanted to meet the fans, he’d had several conversations with some and he ‘looked forward to following them up the next time I am in Liverpool.’ He never did.

  The Sandon owner, Gemma Hindley, offered a formal invitation for Tom Jr. to return to the pub with his father to have a proper meeting with the fans. They never did.

  But then Tom senior was pretty busy back then plotting a new phase of divide-and-rule having seen Rick Parry side with Gillett. Since Parry and Moores refused to do the whitewash and back his plan to put all the debt on the club, the Texan sharpshooter was merely clicking the spurs on his Liver Bird-encrusted cowboy boots, biding his time before slaying them.

  What he needed though was a fresh, powerful alliance. A major player to hold close to his chest who he could use to destabilise his enemies. Bizarrely, he chose a man he’d despised so much he had been trying to sack him for the past eight months. The stubborn, outspoken, bloody-minded obstacle to his strategy of putting as little money as he could into Liverpool and exiting with the handsomest of profits, Rafa Benitez. Hicks felt that by becoming Rafa’s cheerleader-in-chief, his version of the Klinsmann saga would be believed, and he’d win the fans back onside.