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His exit allowed a resumption of my chat with the pale-faced money manager.
‘We’ve got some problems. I’ve got to get out of the country.’
I pointed out that he had just been abroad.
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but I’ve got to go again and for longer this time.’
Cheeseman returned with the case, put it on one of the beds and threw it open. Well, I have never seen such money in all my life. It was crammed full of foreign notes amounting to goodness knows how much.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked the chairman nervously.
‘I’ll tell you later. We have just got to look after him now.’
Trying to lift the atmosphere I asked if anyone was having tea or coffee or a beer, but Cheeseman said abruptly: ‘No. You can go back now.’
‘But I thought you wanted to see me?’
‘No, I only wanted this,’ he said pointing to the money.
I left more than a little concerned. I was 28 years old, terribly naive in the ways of the business world, desperate to make an impression in my first job in football management as a player-manager and here I was, witnessing twice within the space of a week, some very suspicious activities involving the very person I should be able to rely upon for all kinds of things, my chairman.
I drove home stony-faced and with my head swimming. I thought about what had gone before with Cheeseman and things slowly began to add up.
There was, for instance, the Jeff Astle fiasco. This man had been a legend in his time at West Bromwich Albion and it was considered a fantastic coup when I signed him for Dunstable. The ultimate professional, he had been working for Cheeseman’s building firm in the Mid-lands and after two months he came to me and said that he didn’t like the situation of living and working such a distance from the club.
Keith urged him to move south, pointing out that he was selling his home in Clophill and moving to a mansion in Houghton Regis. It might be an agreeable solution if Astle were to buy his house.
It was an amicable arrangement for Jeff, too, and he moved in. It was not long, though, before he started to come to see me and say: ‘I still haven’t got the deeds to that house, Baz. What am I going to do?’
At the end of that season and the beginning of the next campaign – Jeff had scored 34 goals for me – I had had my first blazing row with the chairman. Jeff found out that on the property in Clophill there were no fewer than 35 mortgages that had never been paid. He didn’t get the deeds because they were never Cheeseman’s to give. There had been this second mortgage and that second mortgage. How the hell Keith managed it, I don’t know.
Jeff told me this and I said that if that were the case then he could go. Graham Carr, the Weymouth manager, had wanted to buy him and offered £15,000, but I said that if Cheeseman had done him out of any money, then as far as I was concerned he could go for nothing and get himself looked after in terms of a signing-on fee and any other inducements.
The mortgages totalled £200,000 on a house Jeff thought he had bought for £14,000. I let Jeff and his wife Larraine go to Weymouth for talks with the intention of trying to sort out the mortgage situation. But when I mentioned it to Cheeseman he just huffed and puffed and bluffed and blamed it on anybody and everybody else. He told Jeff everything would be all right but the player himself was far from convinced and I sold Jeff to Weymouth so that he could get back at least some of the money that he had forked out. Nowhere near the full amount, but some of it at least.
He went reluctantly because he was happy playing for Dunstable and was a great hero with the fans. No doubt prompted by Jeff’s displeasure at the house situation Cheeseman came to see me one day.
‘This Astle … he ain’t doing this, he ain’t doing that, he ain’t doing f**k all,’ he blasted.
But I stopped him in his tracks.
‘Keith, I’ve sold him.’
‘You’ve what?’ he screamed.
We were on the pitch and he’s a bloody big geezer and we were face-to-face snarling. I’ve never seen a man so consumed with anger. Knowing what I know now, I was bloody lucky to get away with what I said to him next.
‘You don’t f***ing treat my players like that. You’d better treat my players right because if you f**k them up like that, mate, I’m no longer with you. My loyalty is to my players. I’ve sold him, he’s gone and there’s f**k all you can do about it.’
I was sure he would sack me after this tirade, but he didn’t. Yet Jeff had gone, which was heartbreaking. This episode had brought on further inclinations that things were not quite right at the club. Yet Keith was never around. He was always in Australia, America, Tenerife, London, the West Midlands. So rarely in his office in Luton and even more infrequently at the club.
From another perspective, it was great. He would ring every now and then but, by and large, he didn’t bother me. As long as the club was ticking over he remained in the background. He just paid the bills and if I saw him and needed money he would leave me readies, otherwise he would leave a sheaf of cheques, sign the lot and leave it to me to pay what had to be paid. This, at least, was on the playing side. All the other bills went to Betty and Harold in the general office and I never saw them.
It was a deeply worrying time and what I was considering more and more to be the inevitable happened one day when the police arrived on the scene.
I was full time on my own at Dunstable, even running the lotteries. Jeff used to help me sell the tickets and he became a great PR man for the club, but I faced the police alone as one officer began to ask questions like ‘Have you got a second mortgage on your property?’ and ‘Have you ever dealt with this finance company?’
As their line of questioning unfolded I began to put two and two together.
I remembered the last Christmas party. Cheeseman had the generosity to invite not only the players, but their wives, girlfriends, parents, family, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. I could not fathom this, nor his wanting all their names and addresses. It was almost on the scale of the party he threw at Caesar’s Palace, Luton – for the entire Southern League!
All the players had loans. All their parents had loans. The names and addresses were not to be invited to a party, they were to be the subjects of loans. It was a genius idea. Brilliant. A great scam, and it would have worked. Keith had all the money coming in, but he was greedy, always wanting to go off at tangents and bring in this, that and the other. He wanted to go out and buy a nightclub with George Best, for instance. All hell broke loose and he was arrested. I couldn’t find him. Nobody could find him. We didn’t know what was going on, but then everything came out of the woodwork. Every five minutes it seemed there was a knock at the club door.
‘You owe me ten grand.’
‘You owe me fifteen grand …’
‘I did that building work and I haven’t been paid.’
‘I did the floodlight work. You haven’t paid me.’
‘You owe Caesar’s Palace for that big party.’
All of a sudden, a club going along nicely, top of the Southern League, are in deep trouble. Our man, whom we can’t find, owns the club lock, stock and barrel. The only thing I can do is to sell players. I had to sell Lou Adams, George Cleary, Terry Mortimer; Astle had already gone. I had to sell anybody I could. The lads didn’t have any wages and we didn’t have a penny in the bank. Cheeseman always paid us in readies. So in my second year as a manager I had gone from top of the tree to an absolute nightmare. I started with a crowd of 34 people – we used to announce the crowd changes to the team – but with Cheeseman’s arrival in the summer and putting up the money to buy players and us getting promotion, the average gate went up to 1,000. Now we were facing disaster. The taxman was after us, the VAT man was after us, everybody was after us …
All the players and I had to give statements to the police. Cheeseman said to me once: ‘Barry, this was a good thing gone wrong. We were just unlucky. I’ll get out of it, no problem. The finance manager did nothing wrong, he couldn’t get out of it. I blackmailed him. I had him by the bollocks.’
When he got arrested he changed his story. He said that he knew nothing about it. It was the finance manager’s idea and it was down to him. The police came to see me and told me that and I said I had to go with the finance manager because I was once in a room with Cheeseman and he admitted he had done it all. I told them that he wasn’t turning it round like that and I would go to court and say that.
I was in court and Keith came in. It was the first time I had seen him for six months and he threw his arms around me.
‘Hello Basil,’ he greeted me affectionately. ‘How are you doing?’
I told him I was there to give evidence against him.
‘You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do in this world, ain’t you boy!’
He was unbelievable. Never ever down, the geezer.
The police, when interviewing me, had said: ‘Well, you took these loans out and unless you confess you’re in big trouble.’ I said: ‘I can’t confess. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
And I really didn’t, but because everybody thought Keith and I were so close, it appeared to them that I was in on the whole scam. Socially we saw each other now and then at big functions and that’s all. There was never a one-to-one. We were not close – I hardly ever saw him. He was always running down the stairs to jump in his car to go to the airport.
‘You, you bastard,’ he’d say. ‘I didn’t want to see you.’
‘Keith, I’ve got no money,’ I would plead.
With that he’d open his briefcase and pull out a wad of notes.
‘That will do you for now. Stop pestering me.’
He was a dream chairman at first. Then he went inside and you can imagine what happened then. Because I was having to sell all my players before the transfer deadline, we tumbled from top of the league to eventually finish fifth. We would have won it if we had all been able to keep together, but a different issue altogether had emerged. It was no longer about winning. It was about surviving.
I couldn’t pay the players any wages. Because we owed the players so much money, I had to turn to my old mate George Best. I told him that we had floodlights, hadn’t paid for them, were in the shit, the chairman was going to prison and Harry Haslam, manager down the road at Luton, had said he would provide us with opposition in a friendly.
Bestie, good as gold that he is, came and guested for us and pulled such a big crowd that we were able to pay the players the six weeks wages they were owed. George never got a pound note for his friendship, loyalty and generosity and it’s rewarding for me to reveal the other side to his character when all he took for so long was so much criticism.
At the end of the season we were kicked out of the league. We broke our necks to get out of trouble but because our guv’nor, who had all the shares, was inside, and we had debts that we could not possibly honour, we were sent down a division. From there Dunstable Town went into liquidation. They formed a new company but after Cheeseman went I had five or six different chairmen who came in to try to save the club but none of them succeeded.
In the end Bill Kitt, a local man who had made a few bob and who was the latest in the line of possible saviours, said he was going to give all the players a tenner – only the ones who played, not the substitutes – and after this, his first match, away at Bletchley, I was asked by the press what I thought about his generous gesture.
I went up to the boardroom where Bill was having a drink.
‘Do you want a whisky, Barry?’
‘Whisky?’ I huffed and threw it all over him – what a waste of a drink – but I was Jack The Lad and raving, mocked his offer of a tenner and then, I’m afraid, I got hold of him. I should not have. Next morning the club called an emergency board meeting and sacked me. But what was I to do? After all I had been through I could not stand idly by and be told that my players were going to be paid a measley £10 for their efforts. It was a sick joke. Bill and I are the best of friends now but, at the time, I could have knocked his lights out …
There had been a long period of uncertainty before Cheeseman and his crew were all arrested. What Cheeseman had done was this. When he was at the football club he used all the names and addresses of players, officials and supporters – as many names as he could gather – to fund his other businesses to get loans out.
He was paid by the council every month a substantial amount of money. He was a director of a construction company with many contracts, and the beauty of these contracts was that he was being paid by the council so that it was rock solid, gilt-edged money paid on the button. The trouble with Cheeseman was that he was never happy with just a good, going concern like his construction company. He always wanted something else.
He got the finance manager to do a few straight loans and then they became fictitious. The guy just got him the money the next day. It wasn’t a problem. The monthly debits were coming in regularly on a standing order for the straight ones but as the invented ones got bigger and bigger in number, alarm bells must have started to ring everywhere.
At one point the man in the respectable position tried to get out of the mess but Cheeseman told him that if he turned his back on the scam he would stitch him up by saying that it was he, and he alone, who was responsible. Poor bloke. One minute he was getting record sales and pats on the back for doing great business; the next he’s in the deepest shit.
He was a nice guy who simply got in over his head. He couldn’t get out of it. His assistant manager obviously knew about it and it was clear to him and everybody else who knew the fall guy that he was heading for a nervous breakdown.
Cheeseman got him out of the country and into his place in Spain where, after a week, he called to say that he was enjoying it. So Cheeseman would tell him to stay another week, and another week, and of course the manager’s absence from the office meant that paperwork was piling up.
The managing director, the man Cheeseman had had by the throat in my office, arrived at the office one day to find a lot of accounts which had not been paid. So he began telephoning a few people to tell them that they had missed out on the current month’s repayment instalment on their £2,000 loans. A typical conversation would follow.
‘What £2,000 loan?’
‘Well, that £2,000 loan you have had for the past seven months.’
‘But I haven’t got one.’
‘But you must have. You’ve been paying it.’
‘I haven’t been paying it. Not me.’
There were more than a few too many of these. I lived in Tiverton Road, Bedford then and was to discover that there were eight loans in variations of my name, Fry, Friar, Frier and so on.
The beans were spilled when the assistant manager broke down in tears and told his managing director precisely what had been going on.
In 1977 Cheeseman stood trial at Bedford Crown Court for having made bogus loan applications totalling nearly £300,000, using the names of the club’s players and others he got from the phone book. He was jailed for six years.
Soon after his release he was jailed for three years for blackmailing a bank manager into advancing him £38,000 against fraudulent US bonds, an Old Bailey case in which the Duke Of Manchester, Lord Angus Montagu, stood in the dock with him on criminal charges. The Duke was acquitted and left court with the judge’s admonishment that he had been ‘absurdly stupid’ ringing in his ears.
In 1992 Spanish police raided Cheeseman’s villa in Tenerife and arrested him. He was wanted for extradition on charges of laundering £292 million worth of bonds stolen from a City of London messenger in the biggest robbery in history. At the time it was thought the bonds were unusable, but Cheeseman was arrested at the request of the FBI, who were investigating attempts to launder them.
He jumped bail a few days after an associate of his was shot dead in Texas and, two months later, when a headless body was found near a layby in Sussex, it was suspected that Cheeseman might have met a similar fate.
It was at this point – I was by then manager of Maidstone – that I received a bizarre telephone call from the police. The conversation went like this:
‘Barry Fry?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you used to be manager at Dunstable?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was Keith Cheeseman your chairman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman?’
‘Of course I f***ing could.’
‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman with no arms?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you recognise Mr Cheeseman with no legs?’
‘Yes.’
‘But could you recognise Mr Cheeseman without his head on?’
I checked that the calendar was not showing 1 April before replying: ‘Sorry, mate. I didn’t know him that bloody well.’
About a month later I got a call from the same officer.
‘Mr Fry, I am pleased to report that the body we found is not that of Mr Cheeseman. It is of somebody else.’
I obviously had not seen him for ages and I could not resist asking what Mr Cheeseman had been up to. The officer told me: ‘He deals with the wrong kind of people.’
I hadn’t heard from him for years until, three months into my tenure at Peterborough in 1996, I picked up the telephone.
‘Hello my old son,’ came a familiar voice on the other end. ‘How are you doing? You’re in a bit of trouble aren’t you?’
It was Cheeseman again. I said that we hadn’t got any money, if that was what he was referring to.
‘I’ve got plenty for the both of us, Barry.’
I asked what he was doing at that point in time.
