Phil Rostron - Big Fry - Barry Fry - The Autobiography

We arranged that he should come to our home match the following Saturday and that he would bring his lady for lunch. He looked good, but always had done. He was invariably immaculately dressed in a designer suit, crisp shirt and eye-catching tie and always wore shades.

He said he had been in America and last weekend had been with Gloria.

‘Gloria who?

‘Estefan, of course.’

Then they had gone on to a party and Frank said this and Frank said that.

‘Frank who?’

‘Sinatra.’

Of course. Now he had become a great namedropper. He gave me his business card, which prompted me to ask what he was currently doing. He said that he was making fortunes through setting up venues for pop concerts and that was why he had been anxious to meet up with me at Peterborough.

‘You want some money, don’t you?’ he asked, rather needlessly.

I told him that we were desperate for cash.

‘We’ll hire out the ground. I’ll bring some top people over,’ he said.

‘Keith, I’m not being funny but it might be a flop.’

He assured me that everything would be all right because he would pay the money up front and he proceeded to stay in Peterborough for two months. He made it clear that he wanted to buy the club and I arranged meetings with all the directors. He came to league games and youth games and talked to this person and that within the club. He liked the fact that we owned the freehold on the ground and that we had several promising young players who would ensure progression on the playing side.

He got really into it, bringing his accountant into things and acting as though it was a foregone conclusion that he would own the place. One or two people were getting a bit hot under the collar and then one night he invited us all out for a meal. He talked freely and openly about the City of London heist, asserting that he got on with all the coppers because he knew them so well, claiming kinship with the mafia bosses and asking if we had seen the television documentary about him.

Nobody had seen it, but I later viewed a video copy that he had given to me. I, in turn, showed it to all the directors of the club and to anybody who is squeamish or a bit nervous it is very frightening. It centres on the world’s biggest robbery and, after they had seen it, there was no way the board wanted him in their club.

The round-up to the piece is an interview with him in which he is asked: ‘Well, that’s the world’s biggest robbery. Is that you finished with crime now?’ He smirks and says: ‘No. I want to top that.’

Well how do you top it?

The atmosphere in the boardroom when they came to discuss the proposal was icy. It was dead in the water and Keith knew that. He had had his card marked and when he called me to ask what had happened I told him.

‘Keith, you frightened them to death.’

He said that he had to go to Luton and would pay a social visit to me at home on the way back to his hotel before I set off for my day’s work at the club.

As he was nearing my place he called on his mobile phone to check my exact location and I asked my great pal Gordon Ogbourne, who has been with me for 20 years as kit manager at various clubs and whom I trust implicitly, to go to the end of the drive and just wave him in.

We had tea and sandwiches and he said that he was not prepared just to accept what had happened. He was not giving it up that easily. He wanted the club and was going to get it.

After half an hour of reinforcing his ambition we both decided that it was time to go our separate ways for the day ahead and I said that I would follow him out. We reach the main road from my drive and he turns left, I turn left. We get to the lights and he goes straight on, I go straight on. At the next lights he turns left, I turn left. Then as he goes straight on to pick up the A6 to Luton, I turn left to get on the A421 to Northampton. I had no sooner reached this main highway through a little village than my mobile phone rang. It was my wife, Kirstine.

‘Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back at the neighbour’s house over the road,’ she said with some urgency.

I protested and said that whatever she had to say she should just say it.

But she insisted. ‘Barry, I ain’t being funny. Stop at the nearest phone box and ring me back. Immediately.’

Realising that something strange was happening, I did as she said.

What’s going on?’ I asked from the phone booth.

‘You ain’t going to believe this, Barry. I’ve got our neighbour over here. I think you’d better come home. She has had people with guns with telescopic sights in her garden. They are following you.’

‘Following me? I’m in a phone box. There’s nobody here.’

‘I don’t mean you,’ she said. ‘I mean Keith.’

So I put the phone down on Kirstine and called Keith on his mobile. I relayed the message that when he pulled into my driveway a white van turned up in the drive of the house opposite and that there were men with guns.

Understandably, the neighbour was petrified because she could see what they were tackled up with. They even knocked on the door and she didn’t know whether to answer it or not. She decided not to, but they said they were police and that she should ring the station to verify their presence.

She did this and the officer who answered the phone said that he knew nothing about it. Well, she was in a panic now and didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, with two men with rifles on the other side of the door and her quivering, her phone rang and it was a return call from the police to say that, contrary to the information previously given to her, they did know about the situation. It was nothing to do with them, said the caller, it was Interpol.

Armed with this information, she opened the door to them and they presented their badges with the reassurance that they were just observing somebody.

In my conversation with Cheeseman I continued.

‘They’re following you.’

‘Not me, mate,’ he replied with typical bravado. ‘You must have been up to no good Barry.’

That’s the way he plays it. So bloody cool.

I met him the next night at the home of Rinaldo, an Italian gentleman who lived in Peterborough and owned a night club of the same name. Cheeseman wanted to buy his property which was on the market for £750,000. That was the last I saw of him for some time.

A couple of months after that I had a phone call, again from the police in London, to ask if I had a phone number at which they could get hold of him, but I could not help them. The officer said there had been a few complaints about Keith and they were searching for his whereabouts. Did I have a previous address for him? All I could tell them was that he had stayed at The Butterfly Hotel, and that I had a mobile phone number for him which was no longer applicable.

Then I had the manager of The Butterfly phone up.

‘You know Keith Cheeseman, don’t you?’

I said I did (only too well, by now).

‘He’s left an unpaid bill of £3,500 here.’

I could not help but laugh. Uncontrollably. Then a finance company (ho-ho) called with an all-too-familiar opening line. ‘Do you know Keith Cheeseman?’ Apparently he hadn’t paid the last five instalments on a car loan.

Keith Cheeseman is the greatest conman I have ever known; possibly the world has ever known. When you were out with him he always had loads of readies and he was the most generous man with tips you could wish to meet. One day at The Dorchester Hotel in London he gave the porter £20 just for taking the bags to his room. A waiter brought an ice bucket and he gave him £20. Then he gave a taxi driver a £20 tip when he took us less than a mile round the corner.

He was such good company that you would have thought butter would not melt in his mouth. Yet in a roll-call of 20th Century villains he would have to be near the top of the league.