Phil Rostron - Big Fry - Barry Fry - The Autobiography

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.

‘A bit of this and a bit of that but I won’t talk over the phone, I’ll come and see you.’