Bennell and Sporting Advantage, Club Integrity

[Uilleam 5,960]

There are a couple of pieces in today's Guardian about Barry Bennell, "Star Maker"

 

It seems that Man City ignored warnings because Bennell was a "star maker", and could find them good young players. 

It seems that sporting and financial advantage trumped duty of care, moral and sporting integrity, and even the law of the land.

 

The question surely is, can Man City just throw money at it (as it does with everything else) and walk away?

 

NB This is not pleasant reading.

 

 

Manchester City ‘ignored warnings’ and kept Barry Bennell in youth set-up

• Bennell continued scouting and coaching for City, abusing countless boys
• City youth coach Steve Fleet urged club in 1970s to keep away from Bennell
• Bennell convicted of a total of 50 offences against 12 boys

Daniel Taylor

 @DTguardian

Thu 15 Feb 2018 13.17 GMTLast modified on Thu 15 Feb 2018 14.02 GMT

 

Manchester City, one of the clubs most seriously implicated in the Barry Bennell sexual abuse scandal, have been accused of putting hundreds of boys in danger after it emerged they were warned by one of their own coaches in the late-1970s it was “general knowledge” he was a risk to children.

 

Bennell, who is facing complaints from another 86 former footballers, continued scouting and coaching for City’s junior teams, raping and molesting countless boys in seven years connected to the club, even though high-ranking officials had been warned to keep away from a man who now faces the rest of his life in prison and has been described as having “almost an insatiable appetite” for young boys.

The revelations leave City facing a number of questions now Bennell has been found guilty of 43 counts of sexual abuse against 11 victims. He had previously pleaded guilty to seven counts against a further victim. Bennell, 64, will be sentenced on Monday.

Cries of “yes” came from the public gallery where six complainants sat with family members as the final verdicts were read out and some were in tears. Bennell sat muttering to himself and shaking his head.

The first victim to initiate these proceedings, Gary Cliffe, has waived his anonymity to speak exclusively to the Guardian about the hundreds of occasions when he was abused, aged 11 to 15, in City’s set-up.

Police documents from the 1990s question whether City were later involved in a cover-up, with one of the detectives investigating the case suggesting the club’s priority was to avoid damaging publicity, and the Guardian has seen a written admission from another former employee in which he acknowledges that “suspicions about him [Bennell] were aired on many an occasion.”

An investigation by this newspaper has also led to a taped interview in which Bennell states he had to leave his coaching role at Crewe Alexandra, the club he joined after City, because a complaint had been made against him, raising further questions about why he was not reported at the time. Crewe provided references for his next job and have been the subject of a police investigation as well as being a major focus of the Football Association’s independent inquiry.

However, it can now be revealed that Bennell was identified as a risk long before joining Crewe and that one member of City’s staff, the youth-team coach Steve Fleet, put his own job on the line when the club’s directors wanted to give the man they called “the star-maker” a full-time role as youth development officer.

Bennell was not given the job but, despite those warnings, he remained in City’s set-up, coaching at their old training ground and even abusing boys while sunbathing on the pitch at Maine Road, the club’s former ground, before moving to Crewe in 1985. He is now being identified as potentially the worst paedophile, in terms of the number of boys affected, there has ever been in sport, having preyed on young footballers for almost a quarter of a century before he was arrested on a club tour to Florida in 1994. A second trial is now likely as the police go through the complaints from other former players, mostly from Manchester City and Crewe.

 

People would say he was ‘dodgy’ and if his name was brought up everyone would just shake their heads

Len Davies, who spent many years working for City as a youth-team scout, has admitted one of England’s major football clubs was “beguiled and hoodwinked” and police documents recall a number of senior staff, including the chief scout Ken Barnes, being “quite evasive” and not prepared to explain why Bennell had left the club, other than citing “irregularities”.

Cliffe, now 47, is convinced City ought to have reported Bennell and removed him from the club’s junior system if there were any concerns about his relationship with young boys. “If those in positions of responsibility had challenged Bennell, hundreds of wrecked lives could have been saved,” he said. “They buried their heads. They had a duty of care and they failed dramatically.”

 

City, who are holding a QC-led inquiry and have identified another alleged paedophile – now deceased – with whom they have “potential historic connections”, are facing the possibility of large-scale legal action and Fleet’s evidence shows Bennell continued to work in football for around 15 years after the club were warned to avoid him.

“I was an FA coach at the time and at all the coaches’ meetings, at Everton, the Cliff [Manchester United’s old training ground], City and lots of places, whenever the talk got round to Barry Bennell it was never good,” Fleet said. “People would say he was ‘dodgy’ and if his name was brought up everyone would just shake their heads. It was general knowledge and I could see it with my own eyes. He nauseated me. I just knew – instant intuition – that the rumours were sound, that he wasn’t right and that he wouldn’t be good for the club.

“When Ken Barnes and other people at the club tried to fetch him in I told them I didn’t want anything to do with it. ‘He’s a star-maker,’ Ken said, ‘and he finds good lads,’ and that was true because Bennell was a very good scout. But I also knew he was a risk. In football, like any sport where there’s young people, there are perverts and I wouldn’t even let him into our coaches’ room. I felt so strongly about it I put my job on the line.

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 Gary Cliffe was abused hundreds of times in City’s set-up. ‘If those in positions of responsibility had challenged Bennell, hundreds of wrecked lives could have been saved,’ he says. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

“They fetched the directors and I still said I couldn’t work with him. I had pressure off Ken, I had pressure off the scouts, I had pressure off the directors. They called me to the office and I stood firm. ‘Don’t have me anywhere near that man – I don’t want anything to do with him.’ I had all that pressure but I still wouldn’t give it my OK.

 

“I couldn’t believe anyone would take him on full-time. I don’t understand how more people couldn’t see it and I wasn’t shocked at all when it came out what he had been doing. I was expecting it. What’s happened, I’d predicted for years. He offered these young boys stardom and a place on the ladder, but I knew that wasn’t his main motive.”

Along with Crewe, City are now under intense pressure to explain what they knew, what they did about it and what safeguarding measures they had in place, especially now the current Premier League leaders have confirmed “serious allegations of child sex abuse” against a second individual, who is dead but had links to the club. A number of victims have told the FA’s independent inquiry, led by Clive Sheldon QC, they believe there was no appetite to challenge Bennell because he was so skilled at finding talented young players who could eventually be worth a lot of money.

One parent wrote to City to complain that Bennell had boys in his room late at night on trips away. Yet when one director, Chris Muir, was asked about it on Channel Four’s Dispatches documentary in 1997 he explained that “football allowed him to stay because he was producing the goods”.

Barnes also made it clear on the same programme that he did not see any reason to be alarmed. “What do you call them?” he asked, laughing. “Piddyphiles, is it?”

What they did not disclose to the documentary-makers was that the police had interviewed them, along with Fleet and another member of the youth-team staff, Terry Farrell, when Bennell was first arrested in Florida in 1994.

 

We found they were quite evasive at the club ... We were probing to try to find out why [Bennell] left

Barnes died in 2010 and his daughter, Karen, says it would be wrong to suggest he did not take the matter seriously enough. “I can unequivocally state that my father was absolutely and utterly appalled to hear about the abuse suffered. He also complained bitterly that much of what he said when interviewed for Dispatches had been edited. My father was a considerate and honest man, to which any of the footballers who knew him will attest.”

According to police files, the detectives investigating the 1994 case found Barnes “very cagey” and “played his cards close to his chest”. Muir said he had heard rumours about an incident involving Bennell and volunteered a boy’s name. Barnes, however, would not give a proper explanation about the “irregularities” that meant Bennell leaving for Crewe.

“He [Barnes] wasn’t really prepared to go into them at all,” Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Elvey of Crewe CID says in evidence provided to the Florida police. “We found they were quite evasive at the club. It was quite a lengthy interview. Obviously we were probing to try to find out why he [Bennell] left the club and basically I got the impression that Mr Barnes didn’t want or Mr Farrell really didn’t want to tell us. Bear in mind they are quite a prominent professional club and possibly wouldn’t want any sort of media attention drawn to the club.” Farrell declined to comment to the Guardian.

Davies, who died seven years ago, admits in a 2000 book that whereas Fleet “did not ever accept him [Bennell] as a person or coach” other people at City, including himself and Barnes, drastically misjudged the situation.

“Most of us at Manchester City, including those responsible for the enhancement of junior football, were held in awe at the coaching ability of Barry Bennell. I think the majority of us … were taken in and let down. Hundreds of people, and all the kids who played for him, trusted him. I only hope that the boys and their parents who suffered will forgive us in that we, too, were beguiled and hoodwinked by this terrible person.” Davies adds that “inquiries about his behaviour never revealed his paedophiliac mentality until it was too late”.

 

Crewe are also under intense scrutiny and a number of victims have called for the longstanding chairman, John Bowler, and the director of football, Dario Gradi, a figurehead at the club for more than 30 years, to resign since Andy Woodward and another former player, Steve Walters, told this newspaper what happened to them, instigating what the FA chairman, Greg Clarke, has described as the biggest crisis he can remember in the sport. Gradi has been suspended by the FA, though no official reason has been given.

 

Crewe said in November 2016 they would hold an independent review “at the earliest opportunity” but, 15 months on, have still not started it, claiming an unnamed authority told them to hold off until the criminal case was over. City, in stark contrast, say they received no such advice.

Both clubs have been asked by the Guardian if they want to comment about the new revelations and Crewe will also have to explain why Bennell was allowed to continue in his job when their former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has turned whistle-blower to reveal he instigated top-level talks, involving Bowler and Gradi, in the late-1980s because of an allegation against a man who has since described himself as a “monster.”

Bennell was even paid expenses to take boys home during his seven years with the club and Gradi, the Guardian can reveal, was one of the people who supplied character references - his written on Crewe letter headed paper - when his colleague and friend was awaiting his 1994 court case in Florida.

In a statement, City offered “heartfelt sympathy to all victims for the unimaginably traumatic experiences they have endured. No one can remove their suffering or that of others who suffered sexual abuse as children as a result of their involvement with football. All victims were entitled to expect full protection from the kind of harm they endured.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/feb/15/manchester-city-barry-bennell-warning

 

[Uilleam 5,960]

Here is the 2nd of today's Guardian articles. If anything it is a more uncomfortable read than the 1st.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/feb/15/barry-bennell-abuse-manchester-city-crewe

 

Barry Bennell: the predatory Pied Piper who made stars and shattered lives

The former Manchester City and Crewe coach exploited his status to abuse potentially hundreds of boys, employing gifts, a sheep’s head and haunted houses to subject his victims to unspeakable horrors

Daniel Taylor

 @DTguardian

Thu 15 Feb 2018 13.36 GMTLast modified on Thu 15 Feb 2018 14.30 GMT

 

 

Andy Woodward, one of the boys lost and brutalised during Barry Bennell’s decades of preying on young footballers, can remember one story that probably helps to explain why the detectives investigating the man described as a “child molester on an industrial scale” believe the true number of victims will be incalculable.

Bennell had taken a group of Crewe Alexandra players to Florida in the summer of 1990 to help with a series of junior coaching courses. He had hired jet-skis and was out in the sea at Pensacola beach, with an 11-year-old on the back, when he fell into the water. He was climbing back on board when Craig Hignett, the first-team striker, came past on his own jet-ski and turned to spray him. Except Hignett also lost control of his machine.

Manchester City ‘ignored warnings’ and kept Barry Bennell in youth set-up

 

Woodward, raped several hundred times during Bennell’s years as Crewe’s youth-team coach, was on the beach. “I heard the crack 100 metres away. Craig had hit him full-on and suddenly it was pandemonium. I just sat there, praying Bennell would go under. Everyone was on their feet shouting: ‘Oh my God’ and panicking. But I didn’t move a muscle. ‘Please,’ I thought, ‘let him sink.’ I knew what that man was like, I knew what he was capable of. ‘Please, just let him die – just die, please, please.’”

Bennell had suffered a compound fracture of his femur, leaving his thigh bone protruding through the skin. He returned to England with his leg in a protective cage but even when he was convalescing it did not stop him bringing countless boys to his house, with their dreams of becoming professional footballers, and subjecting them to unspeakable horrors.

According to the latest available figures, 294 suspects had been identified since Woodward’s interview in the Guardian in November 2016 instigated what the Football Association’s chairman, Greg Clarke, has described as the worst scandal he can remember in the sport. A total of 839 alleged victims had come forward by late-December 2017, with 2,094 incidents reported and 334 different clubs named.

 

Nobody, though, was as prolific as the man who has just been convicted of 50 charges relating to 12 of his former players, with the youngest of his victims being eight years old. Bennell started coaching at the age of 16 and the first evidence of his offending goes back to 1972, two years later, when he was involved with Senrab FC, a junior team that had links with Chelsea, the club where he was once a young prospect and first encountered Dario Gradi, the man who later employed him at Crewe.

Now 64, Bennell coached numerous teams in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire and had almost a quarter of a century in the industry, including seven-year associations with Manchester City and Crewe, before he was finally arrested in the US in 1994 and sent to prison for the first time. He has coached in boarding schools, Butlin’s holiday camps, Stoke City’s centre of excellence and lived for two years in Atlanta where he ran teams and organised tournaments. The American authorities have described him as having “almost an insatiable appetite” for young boys. Bennell has called himself a “monster” and, numbers-wise, it is difficult even to contemplate the sheer scale of his offending other than to say Gary Cliffe, the first player to press charges in the case at Liverpool crown court and now a detective for Staffordshire police, is not alone when he says it will be in the hundreds.

 

Bennell is facing a raft of new allegations from 86 former players and there will inevitably be fears that Bennell was operating in a paedophile ring given his previous links with the late Frank Roper, another established coach who preyed on young boys. Roper, like Bennell, eluded the authorities for many years. His victims included the schoolboy Paul Stewart, a future England international, and it was part of Bennell’s grooming process to give his boys free kit from the sports shop Roper ran in Blackpool.

Yet Bennell was also the get-away driver one Sunday afternoon when two of his mates robbed Roper’s warehouse in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The fourth person in Bennell’s green Volvo 740 turbo, with its engine running in one of the side streets near Strangeways prison, was one of the boys, aged 13, he had picked out from Manchester City’s junior set-up. That boy, now in his mid-40s, has given this newspaper a full account of what happened and his shock when he realised what was going on. “All I can think is that Frank Roper had crossed him and this was Barry’s way of getting him back,” he said. Another football coach from that time can also recall a “bitter fall-out” between the two men who previously directed boys to each other’s teams.

What can be said for certain is that it is troubling, to say the least, that Bennell got away with it for so long and that the two clubs at the centre of this scandal are facing serious questions about what they knew, what they did about it and what they make of the victims’ complaints that the people in charge seriously let down the boys in their system.

 

There were virtually always boy staying overnight, in a house that has been described as a 'children’s paradise'

Steve Fleet’s evidence in the Guardian shows that Bennell’s notoriety for being “dodgy” went as far back as the late-1970s and that City’s youth-team coach tried to warn the club off him. Len Davies, formerly City’s youth-team scout, has said “suspicions about him were aired on many occasion” and, in Crewe’s case, there has never been an explanation why Bennell was allowed to continue taking children home when their former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has stated the club received a specific complaint about their coach being a paedophile. Several victims have renewed their calls today for the people at the top of the club to resign. The investigating detectives have been scathing about the regime at Crewe. One said: “I don’t know what colour the door is but it might as well be Tardis blue because you walk through that door and you’re in another world.”

Bennell, described by Norman Rowlinson, Crewe’s late chairman, as a Pied Piper figure with “a magnetic attraction with boys”, had a spare key for Gradi’s house and would take boys there when he knew it was empty. At his own place there were virtually always boys, mostly aged 11 to 14, staying overnight, often three in a bed, in a house that has been described as a “children’s paradise”, featuring arcade machines, a pool table, a juke box and his own mini petting zoo, including a monkey, two Pyrenean dogs, an Alsatian named after the Brazilian footballer Zico and, most bizarre of all, a puma that he walked on a lead until it clawed someone in a local Woolworths.

'There will be hundreds more,' says player Bennell abused on Maine Road pitch

 

Many of his victims suffer from anxiety, depression, panic attacks and flashbacks and have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Some have spiralled into alcohol or drug addictions and the Guardian has learned that one, having waited 40 years before finding the strength to tell the police, died waiting to hear if charges would be pressed. Others have told this newspaper they are too emotionally damaged to come forward or feel compelled to suffer in silence now they have children of their own and elderly parents. Every single person affected seems to have another list of former team-mates who are likely, or definite, victims. It is difficult to keep track of all the names, spanning three decades, let alone comprehend the suffering that has been caused, or the kind of guilt and regret their parents have had to endure.

Some of those parents, Fleet suspects, were swayed by Bennell’s reputation as a star-maker. “Barry Bennell was very good at finding boys, playing them in his team and offering them things to get his own way with them. He was in cahoots with Frank Roper and the kit he [Bennell] was giving to his kids was better than the kit I was giving to youth-team players at City. He bought them gifts. He paid for them to go on overnight trips.

 

“I could see it wasn’t healthy. In fact, I’d think: ‘How can other people not see what he is?’ But a lot of people are blinded by fame and fortune. The kids, of course, were young and naive. The parents were all so desperate for success and the boys were starry-eyed because of his background at Chelsea. He was a circus act, juggling with the ball, and he fascinated young people. But he fascinated their parents, too.”

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Bennell was cynical, controlling and predatory but he was nothing like the stereotype of the dirty old man. One mother recalls her first impression being that he was “gorgeous – bronzed, handsome, with bouncing curly hair”. Bennell wore designer labels, drove expensive cars – he once bought a Porsche in cash - and liked to be known as Bené, insisting it was spelt with the accent because that was how Pelé had it.

 

The parents of some boys went on holiday with him and one group of mums even used to clean his house – “to surprise him,” one recalls – on the frequent occasions he arranged trips to Spain, the United States and countless other football tours where his real motive was to be alone with the boys.

Others parents talked about joining him in Atlanta when he moved there in the early-1990s. There was even a “Friends of Barry Bennell” fund to raise money for his legal costs when he was first arrested in Florida in 1994, enabling him to pay a $100,000 bond. Bennell wrote to parents asking them to remortgage their houses. One boy’s grandparents gave up £6,000 of life savings then lost the lot when Bennell broke the conditions and was put in prison. Bennell, under orders to keep away from children, had been caught coaching, and filming, a team of under-11s in Jacksonville.

Bennell had such a hold over his victims and their parents he persuaded many of them to give him character references before the 1994 court case and, after finally admitting the offences and receiving a four-year sentence, prisoner 94-24843-9 continued to send letters asking boys he had raped and molested if they would be good enough to remember their old coach and send whatever money they could spare.

He was imprisoned for a further nine years after being extradited to England to face 45 charges in 1998 – Bennell admitted 25 offences committed against six boys, as young as nine, and the remainder stayed on file – and when he was released in 2004 he moved to Milton Keynes and took a new identity as Richard Jones.

 

Bennell bought a Pyrenean dog, Sonny, and a golden labrador, Sky, sent Facebook friend requests to several victims from an account in the name of “Richard Barry” and signed off YouTube videos of holidays with his new girlfriend with “Happy Days”. He became known locally as a laptop repairs doctor and earned money on the side by burning off DVDs to sell at car-boot sales until another case from the 1980s, this time involving a 12-year-old, led to a further two-year sentence in May 2015. He served half of it before returning to Milton Keynes with a story that he had spent the previous year recovering from cancer in Cornwall. Neighbours recall one of his addresses being a “hive of children” and being taken aback that a man of his age had so many different games consoles lined up in his front room. Nothing, however, was known about his past until Gary Speed’s death in 2011 brought journalists asking questions to his estate.

Bennell denied abusing the schoolboy Speed, another of the boys who used to stay at his house, but said that even if he had he would not admit it. Speed’s family have always said they do not believe he was abused. At least two other players – Alan Davies, formerly of Manchester United, being one – were coached by Bennell and killed themselves.

Mark Williams, another of Bennell’s boys, was the captain at Milton Keynes Dons when his old coach was released midway through his nine-year sentence. Williams, a former Northern Ireland international, had no idea Bennell was living in the town until one day, walking to his car outside the training ground, he saw a familiar figure. “I just froze. I couldn’t believe he was in front of me. He’d had an operation on his throat so he had a croaky voice and it was hard understanding everything he was saying. But I remember him saying he didn’t see any of the lads any more. He told me he’d been following my career, he’d seen me ‘on the box’ and that I’d done really well for myself.

“I didn’t know what to say. I was a big centre-half and I battled a lot of people in my career but in that moment all that horrendous childhood fear came back. I was 33 but it was like being 11 again. ‘Thank you for not saying anything,’ he said. I was absolutely petrified. I just wanted him gone.”

That weekend, Milton Keynes Dons were preparing for their first home game of the season. “I came in from the warm-up at 2.45pm, put on my pads and the players’ lounge steward knocked on the door. ‘There’s a guy outside asking for a ticket,’ he said. ‘He says his name’s Barry Bennell.’ I couldn’t believe he had actually turned up again. I went out to play and tried to block it out of my mind but I knew that if he came back one more time I would have to tell the club.”

 

Williams recalls Bennell being regarded as a “god” not just by the youngsters by also their families. “All the mums fancied him, all the sisters fancied him, all the dads wanted to be around him. He was the star-maker, a Pied Piper figure. He had a hold over everybody.”

Not everyone was taken in, though. Fleet recalls it being “general knowledge” in coaching circles that Bennell was not to be trusted and a number of parents have confirmed they removed boys, or would not let them join his teams, because of their own suspicions.

Ray Hinett, a former scout and coach for City, is among those who believe the club should have done more. “Parents heard rumblings and went to Bennell to ask him face-to-face why people were saying it about him. ‘Oh they’re just jealous,’ he’d say. ‘They’ll put anything out about me.’ He was a clever man. And if you look at it from [the chief scout] Ken Barnes’s point of view, Bennell was doing Ken’s job for him. He was finding City really good players.”

 

In the late-1980s Bennell’s reputation was so bad one junior league in Manchester had banned him from watching games and instructed the relevant clubs to ring the police if he refused to leave. One game at Cheadle Town had to be held up while the manager, helped by one of the dads, frogmarched Bennell to his car. Bennell would often take Crewe’s boys on scouting missions and arguments, even violence, became commonplace when people saw him. On one occasion he knocked out someone with an elbow to the face. Another time, he ended up exchanging punches with someone behind one of the goals. One row flared up after Bennell saw Roper and started shouting abuse. One father, siding with Roper, turned on Bennell and left him in a bloodied heap.

Bennell had been offered a job as Port Vale’s youth-team coach before his first arrest and previously worked as a care worker, with his own accommodation, at the Taxal Edge children’s home in Derbyshire’s peak district, giving him access to yet more children and another place to satisfy his fantasies. Taxal Edge, run by the Boys And Girls’ Welfare Society, closed down in 2004 and has a chequered past of its own.

He was so close to joining Manchester United at one point he tried to persuade some of City’s more talented youngsters to switch clubs, just as he did when he moved from Crewe to Stoke, ending a letter to one of the better prospects with the words “I love you”. Yet his visits to United’s training ground, where he claimed to be close friends with “Butch” Ray Wilkins from their days at Chelsea, stopped after Alex Ferguson took over. “Barry turned up to watch a United game,” one parent with close United links recalls. “Mr Ferguson noticed him: ‘Security, get that man off this property.’ And credit to him.”

 

He got us out of the minibus and drove off. Then we had to walk down this country lane which was absolutely pitch black

In a 1989 programme column for Crewe, “The Finding of a Player”, Bennell listed some of the players he had brought through. “I believe you need to know the boy a lot more than ‘the number six with the curly hair’. I’ve been coaching for 19 years and I think I’ve gained enough experience, including seven years at Manchester City where I surfaced players such as Nicky Reid (Blackburn), Darron McDonough (Luton), John Sheridan (Leeds), Steve Kinsey (ex-Man City), Jon Hallworth and Mike Milligan (Oldham) and many more, plus of course the youngsters who are there now.”

The CV he wrote for potential employers, seen by this newspaper, also included Rob Jones (Liverpool), Roger Palmer (Oldham), Ian Butterworth (Norwich), Gary Blissett (Wimbledon), Paul Warhurst (Blackburn) and Paul Gerrard (Oldham) and boasted how he started “the now-famous coaching School of Excellence” that gave Crewe a reputation for having one of the more envied youth systems in the country. “No one would believe you,” he once told a boy he had molested. “I have had loads of players who are now professionals, who would believe you?”

 

David White, a future England international, was among the boys Bennell coached at City, along with Paul Lake, Andy Hinchcliffe, Steve Redmond and the Brightwell brothers. White was one of Bennell’s victims and has described him as “an adult who was prepared to play mind games with a kid … a sly, scheming master of disguise who’d become an expert in hiding his true nature behind a cloak of respectability and responsibility. People like my dad were so blinded by the lure of professional football, and so in awe of ‘The King’ and his promises, Bennell could dupe and deceive them with ease.”

Yet Hallworth, contrary to what Bennell says, was actually taken out of City’s set-up because the youngster’s father, Geoff, was so suspicious. Bennell visited their house in an attempt to talk them around but he was told to clear off. “I thought that would be the last time I ever saw him,” Geoff says. “But we went into Stockport one afternoon and there was a gang of boys, all about 10 years old, outside one of the stores on Princes Street. Who was in the middle of them? Barry Bennell. I said to these boys: ‘Get away from this fellow, clear off for your own good and don’t have anything more to do with him.’ He looked at me but he didn’t say anything.”

 

One of Bennell’s favourite tricks, especially on trips away, was to take the boys into woods late at night and deliberately frighten them. He loved to scare them and would play tapes of ghoulish noises when they were trying to sleep. On at least two occasions a team of 11-year-olds woke to find a severed sheep’s head at the end of their bunk beds.

 

Hallworth, eternally grateful that he was not among Bennell’s victims, remembers a 1976 trip to Barry Island. “He took us on a minibus into the sticks in south Wales, got us out and the minibus drove off. Then he told us we had to walk down this country lane which was absolutely pitch black. ‘I’ll see you the other side,’ he said. We couldn’t see anything apart from a house by the side of the road. All the windows had been knocked out and there was a fire in the front room. The house was filled with people in hoods, chanting and dancing around, like a druid ceremony. They were all dressed like the grim reaper. We were kids, scared out of our wits, and we just ran as fast as we could.”

Jason Dunford, another boy from City’s junior system, remembers a similar trip to Dunham Massey in Cheshire. “We were walking down this dark country lane and Barry was telling us to link arms and stay close because ‘I’ve got to show you this, boys, there’s a house down here where many years ago an old man died and every now and then, if we’re in touch with the spirits, they come out’. I don’t know who he had in there but when we got to the house the light flickered on and this silhouette appeared. We were terrified.”

Bennell’s thinking was that if the boys were scared there was more chance of them agreeing to share his bed and cuddle up rather than being alone. Another trick was for him to turn the lights off and put on the horror and snuff films he kept under the floorboards of his video shop. “Everything was calculated,” Dunford says. “‘It scared me as well,’ he’d say. Then he’d pick out the lads he wanted. ‘I tell you what guys, come upstairs and you can sleep with me if you like.’”

Bennell had a sinister hand game with the children called “follow me” and would sometimes put a pillow over their faces when he was raping them. He made boys style their hair to his liking and even when they were asleep they were not safe. Bennell often sneaked in to abuse them in the dead of night.

 

On one trip to Orlando he smuggled a .357 Magnum revolver back to England in the suitcase of a 13-year-old from Crewe

“The child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ... did it with cherry pie and lollipops,” prosecutors at his trial said, adding that Bennell was “a child molester on an industrial scale”. One victim described himself as “just a bus that came along, he wasn’t picky”. Quizzed about his crimes as part of the biggest operation of its kind ever undertaken by Cheshire police, Bennell said: “I wish I could have sex for two to three hours ... I last two or three minutes.” 

He could also be sadistic and reckless in other ways. On one trip to Orlando he smuggled a .357 Magnum revolver back to England in the suitcase of one of the 13-year-olds from Crewe he has just been convicted of molesting. Bennell told his players he had been stabbed when he was younger, showing them a scar on his back. He was a martial arts expert and regularly let them know he was capable of inflicting hurt. Boys would be ordered to line up while he threw ninja stars against the wall by their heads. At other times they would be made to hold out a piece of paper while he split it into two with nunchucks.

 

Crewe’s youngsters had an annual trip to Blackpool and on one occasion he tried to persuade one of the boys to share his bed. The boy refused and, as punishment, Bennell woke the entire team at 6am and made them run through sand dunes for two hours, with no water or breakfast, until many of them were physically sick. Bennell told them his minibus would be waiting outside Blackpool tower, at the other end of the seafront, but if they did not run there in a certain time it would drive away. When they arrived, exhausted and bewildered, he had gone and they had to walk, or hitch-hike, the five miles back to their hotel, still wearing their kit.

Other players remember the trips to Butlin’s in Pwllheli when he would take them on to rocks, either in groups or alone, and let huge waves crash over them until they were “crying in fear”, terrified they were going to be washed away.

Then there is the story Steve Walters, the youngest player in Crewe’s history, tells of the time the club’s youth team lost at Manchester United and on the way home Bennell dumped everyone at Beeston Castle, 15 miles away. “He told us to run round the castle three or four times and then he pointed us one way and said: ‘Home’s that way, you can make your own way back.’ Except he’d pointed us towards Chester. It took us eight or nine hours to get back to Crewe. We were kids and we didn’t have phones or anything in those days to show us the route. In the end, we had to hitch-hike.”

 

That incident became the subject of conversation between a number of concerned first-team players but there is no evidence of Crewe doing anything to discipline their coach. One mother has since said she wrote, anonymously, to Gradi to complain that on one trip the boys were told there not enough beds and someone would have to share with a member of staff.

Hamilton Smith’s account is damaging in the extreme given he was previously the club’s managing director – “I’m incredibly angry the club continue to refute that they knew anything about suspicions of Bennell’s activities,” he told the Guardian in November – and there is a specific allegation from a number of victims that the club should have recognised Bennell was a serious risk anyway. All of them remember the club being filled with rumour and innuendo. Bennell’s reputation was such opposition players and fans – sometimes even the managers in the case of Harry McNally, for example, at Chester City – were often known to shout abuse.

Rowlinson was concerned enough to contact Manchester City and ask what they knew but Crewe, the Guardian have learned, actually paid Bennell extra for arranging the stopovers. A copy of Bennell’s expenses, seen by this newspaper, claims £5 a night per boy as well other payments for trips to London, Norwich, Plymouth, Wales and Scotland. “It is a rough guess but I accommodate 3/4 boys every weekend,” Bennell writes. Often, it was more. Bennell says he had bunk beds and sleeping space, including a caravan in the garden, to accommodate 11 children.

All of which probably explains why on that summer day in 1990 one of the boys who had endured years of his own abuse sat alone on Pensacola beach and silently prayed that the helicopter that had come to pull Bennell out of the sea did not get there on time. Bennell had continued abusing the teenage Woodward even after he started dating his sister, Lynda, and married her the following year.

“I had to visit him in hospital that night,” Woodward says of that sea rescue. “I didn’t feel any emotion – just sadness, I suppose, that he’d been wearing a lifejacket that stopped him from drowning. I was 17 and he had moved on to younger boys, like a conveyor belt. I knew what would happen when he was back. I knew there were so many other kids who would have to suffer like I did.”

Two of Bennell’s victims were later diagnosed with a blood condition that can be brought about by sexual contact. Bennell claimed at one point he had studied child psychology. Boys who turned him down were dropped from the team – ostracised, bullied and told they were in danger of losing their dream and letting down their families. None of his victims came forward for years out of shame, fear and embarrassment and, in many cases, because they thought it would ruin their chances of becoming footballers. Then a 13-year-old boy, terrified he might have Aids, told his parents what had happened to him on a trip to Florida and, finally, Bennell’s luck ran out.

He was the £18,000-a-year head coach of Stone Dominoes, a Staffordshire youth team, at the time – in tandem with his work with Stoke’s under-13s – and the club’s former chairman Bob Bowers has described Bennell’s time in football as “the con-job of all con-jobs”. Bennell, the Guardian has learned, has subsequently said he had to leave Crewe because a complaint had been made against him. Yet Bowers remembers Crewe supplied a reference for their former employee and this, perhaps, sums up a story that shames the entire sport. That reference, he says, came back “squeaky clean”.

[Uilleam 5,960]

...and there's more, as The Guardian really goes to town:

 

'There will be hundreds more,' says player Bennell abused on Maine Road pitch

Former Manchester City youth player Gary Cliffe, waiving his anonymity after the Barry Bennell trial, tells the Guardian how countless instances of abuse shaped his life and of his anger towards the club

Daniel Taylor

 @DTguardian

Thu 15 Feb 2018 13.33 GMTLast modified on Thu 15 Feb 2018 13.53 GM

 

It is when Gary Cliffe, speaking with remarkable composure after everything he has endured, tries to give a rough idea about how many times he was sexually abused by Barry Bennell that you get a better understanding of the horrors that have distorted his childhood and shaped his life.

Cliffe, waiving his right to anonymity to speak publicly about his ordeal for the first time, cannot even begin to put a precise figure on it. “It would be impossible,” he explains. “But over a four-year period, virtually every weekend, every school holiday – and I’d even miss school on some occasions – we’d be talking about hundreds of times. Hundreds. At a conservative estimate.”

Manchester City ‘ignored warnings’ and kept Barry Bennell in youth set-up

 

It is the same kind of answer when Cliffe, having spent 30 years trying to make sense to everything that happened to him with Manchester City’s affiliated junior teams, attempts to put some context around Bennell’s crimes. Again, he says, there is no way of determining the exact number. “It’s documented that he’s been abusing since the 1970s all the way through until he was arrested in the 1990s. It straddles three decades and he’s been involved in football all that time. So you have to say there will be hundreds of boys affected.”

Cliffe, in short, suspects Bennell might be one of the worst paedophiles, numbers-wise, there has ever been and there is an enormous amount of relief, interspersed with raw emotion, that the man who subjected him all to those years of unspeakable horrors is now facing the rest of his life in prison.

Bennell has now been convicted of 50 offences, as well as facing further allegations from another 86 former footballers, and when he returns to court for sentencing on Monday Cliffe intends to be there to read a 1,000-word victim statement and see the man who wrecked his life – now 64, in remission from cancer and described by the prosecution as a “predatory and determined paedophile” – standing in the dock for the first time. Yet whatever satisfaction there is will always be accompanied by almost immeasurable hurt and suffering. Cliffe can still remember the sense of absolute dread every Thursday evening when it was time to ring Bennell to arrange being picked up the following day. Bennell, then in his late 20s, would sometimes force him to perform a sex act on him while he was driving. He has molested Cliffe at the schoolboy’s home. There were trips to Butlin’s and countless other overnight stays when Cliffe, with his dreams of becoming a professional footballer, turned up knowing what he would have to endure.

Then there was the time Bennell took him and another boy on the pitch at Maine Road, City’s old ground, and found a quiet spot near one of the goals. Bennell fancied half an hour of sunbathing and took a bottle of coconut oil with them. “It was pre-season and nobody else would have been around except maybe the grass-cutter,” Cliffe says. “We were one end of the pitch, we had our tracksuit bottoms on and he spied his opportunity. It just shows the arrogance of the man and his confidence that he could do what he liked, and never thought he would be caught. But he had the run of the place.”

 

Even when Bennell left City to coach in Crewe Alexandra’s junior system, where he raped and molested countless boys during seven years at the club, Cliffe could not get away from him. Cliffe had grown up in Nantwich, just a few miles from Bennell’s new workplace. “My parents were so taken in by him, as all the mums and dads were, they offered to let him to stay at first. They fed him. He sat at our table. Then he’d stay the night. He was in my bed and I was supposed to be on a sofa-bed, but obviously once the lights were out he’d abuse me in my own room, and next door were my parents.”

It isn’t easy telling these stories but Cliffe, now 47, is finding therapy from finally being able to talk about it, empowered by everything that has happened since Andy Woodward’s interview in the Guardian, and looking forward to the rest of his life now seven charges relating to his own childhood abuse have led to convictions. Bennell admitted one and Cliffe was at Liverpool crown court to hear the jury return guilty verdicts on the other six.

He was 11, growing up as a Manchester United supporter, when he was invited to join one of City’s junior teams, having attracted the attention of various scouts because of his performances for Crewe and District Schools. “I’d seen Bennell around. Then, within six months in Manchester, word came that he was going to be our new coach and he wanted to meet and greet us, which required us staying at his house to form that bond. He had set it up and the whole team was invited, two by two, to stay with him over the coming weeks.

 

I didn’t look forward to school holidays. I just look back on my childhood with total regret and sadness

“I went with another boy and the abuse started on the very first occasion. ‘There’s the bedroom,’ he said, ‘you are staying in there.’ There was no choice, no other room to go to. He just told us where we were sleeping and you went with it because he was this big, immense, powerful figure.”

On the surface, Bennell could be so charming and so popular with his victims’ families that when he opened a video shop on Gresty Road, opposite Crewe’s ground, Cliffe’s mother worked behind the counter. At Christmas one year, Bennell bought the schoolboy skates for their visits to the ice rink in Altrincham. Bennell would take him to watch Manchester United train. He gave him free tickets to City’s first-team games and Cliffe remembers being there, aged 12, on the day in May 1983 they were relegated against Luton Town, infamous for the opposition manager, David Pleat, running across the pitch at the final whistle.

 

On shopping trips into Manchester, Cliffe was always struck by how many people would stop “Bené” (Bennell spelled it like Pelé) or how City’s star-maker seemed to know everyone in the shops selling the most expensive clothes. He also remembers Bennell as “probably the best footballer I’ve ever seen in terms of skills. He was immense. He had the charisma, the clothes, the flashy car. He would treat us to fast-food, take you to the pictures, buy you presents. It was all about control.

“None of that, however, impressed me. I was different because the abuse was instantaneous with me – before the grooming, rather than after it. It was horrific and, looking back at my childhood, I hated it. I didn’t enjoy weekends, and which schoolboy doesn’t enjoy weekends? I didn’t enjoy Christmas because I would stay there on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I didn’t look forward to school holidays. I just look back on my childhood with total regret and sadness.”

Cliffe did not tell anyone until 1994, aged 23, when it came out that Bennell had been arrested for sexually abusing a 13-year-old British boy on one of his training camps in Florida. “I remember seeing it on the local news and then all the mothers, who adored Bennell and were completely taken in, started ringing each other, saying it must be a set-up, that it couldn’t be true and that they should raise money for him. That’s when I said enough’s enough and, stop, it’s all correct. I didn’t have the strength or stomach to make an official complaint. But I told the police everything. It was immensely hard but it was also a watershed moment because I’d found the strength to say it, finally.

“I’d buried it all until then and, as a kid, I didn’t have the vocabulary or knowhow to say anything. I knew it was wrong but I wanted to be a professional footballer and I had the opportunity that many kids hadn’t. I was at a big club. We used to travel all over the country beating teams. City were seen at that time as the youth-production centre of the football world because of the kids they produced through their own ranks.

 

“It was a brilliant opportunity and the alternative was that it would all be over if I said anything and the bubble would have burst before it even began. ‘Is this what you’ve got to go through to get on?’ – that’s how I thought. I just didn’t have the words. I was quite shy, I suppose, but it was totally taboo. None of the boys mentioned it between themselves. And if the other boys weren’t saying anything, why would I put my hand up?”

Cliffe was still talented enough to be offered schoolboy forms at City, from the age of 14 to 16. “I then had to endure another ordeal because a member of staff at that time would call me names, in front of the other lads, by alluding to the fact I was ‘Bennell’s bumboy’. It was absolutely horrific and whatever confidence I had left was destroyed. I’d turn up at Platt Lane [City’s old training ground] to play a game and it was: ‘Oh here’s Bennell’s bumboy.’ Embarrassment, shame – all those emotions. That person, if he had a shred of decency, might have realised he was making my life a misery.”

Released by City, Cliffe went to college and started a job at Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council, working in the region’s leisure centres and swimming pools, but still haunted by the possibility of a chance encounter with Bennell. “He came in one day with the Crewe Alex boys. He saw me and waved. It turned my stomach. I tried to ignore him and get on with my work as if I hadn’t seen. All the emotions, the shame, the embarrassment, all that mental baggage – which I know is ridiculous because it should have been him feeling that – came flooding back.”

 

He also remembers the time, with Bennell awaiting trial in Florida, that the phone rang at his parents’ house. “My mother answered and by that stage she knew so, as you can imagine, she gave him suitable advice to clear off and never contact us again. He’d rung because he wanted a character witness statement – and, again, the arrogance of the man to ring our house, of all places, asking for that. He also wanted money.”

 

Cliffe now works as a detective constable in Stoke-on-Trent, having decided on a change of career in 2002, and wrote his own police statement in September 2015 when he decided he could not let Bennell get away with it any longer. Colleagues would hear sometimes that Cliffe had once been on City’s books and he would find himself desperately trying to change the conversation. “Massive anxiety would come. I’d feel panic and stumble over my words – all those mental emotions and irrational thoughts. ‘Are they challenging me? Do they know?’”

Not any longer, though. Cliffe’s approach changed after Woodward’s interview and since then he has been able to inform all the relevant people about the side of his life he previously kept hidden away.

“Everyone’s been so supportive and it’s actually been good for me to talk about it because to carry that burden, and that weight, all those years was not healthy. It’s better out, than in, and I can see that now but it is fair to say that if it wasn’t for all the initial coverage, since the Guardian story went global, I might have gone under the radar and carried on as I was – because in that situation you do think you are on your own.

 

I had totally irrational thoughts, as if I had a big sign – ‘victim’ – pointing to my head

“A lot of my issues used to be around what other people might think about me. I had totally irrational thoughts, as if I had a big sign – ‘victim’ – pointing to my head. This is part of the recovery process, speaking to you, and I know it is better to speak about it. You can’t bottle it up, you have to get it out – and you shouldn’t bottle it up, because you’ve done nothing wrong. And there are loads of decent folk out there who will support you.”

He expects he will be on medication for the rest of his life to help with the anxiety, depression and nerves that so many of Bennell’s victims, many diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, have encountered. He wants to pay tribute to his wife – “it is only down to Emma that I am here at all” – and all the “very brave and special people” who have already spoken about what Bennell put them through. But he also wants some accountability and he is convinced Bennell should have been stopped before he even reached Crewe.

Cliffe is aware of many others who are too damaged to tell their stories, or who are no longer with us, and he has seen, close-up, the way it has wrecked countless lives. “Thankfully, safeguarding in football now has changed immensely. However, it’s the 1980s we’re talking about – not the 18th century – and they [City] had a duty of care. Unfortunately, all the evidence I’ve seen, through the Dispatches documentary [aired on Channel 4 in 1997] and written words, has convinced me that City – and later Crewe – knew enough about Barry Bennell to put their hands up.

“It’s a documented fact that City had complaints, and that issues were raised, about Bennell and that they did nothing, so I feel a lot of anger and hurt towards that club for not safeguarding the boys who were under their care. They didn’t want to put their hands up, yet these were people in positions of responsibility. They shirked their responsibilities by not putting their hands up. They didn’t challenge his behaviour and he got away with it for decades.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/feb/15/barry-bennell-gary-cliffe-manchester-city

[ian1964 10,761]

Barry Bennell: Neil Lennon 'angry' and 'sad' for friends who were victims

Neil Lennon says he feels "angry" and "sad" that two friends and former team-mates were sexually abused by former football coach Barry Bennell.

Bennell has been jailed for 31 years for 50 counts of child sexual abuse.

Lennon played alongside Andy Woodward and Steve Walters, two of Bennell's victims, at Crewe Alexandria.

"I feel sorry, and I feel angry, that my team-mates and my friends went through that," Lennon told BBC Scotland.

"I also feel sad that they couldn't confide in anyone, that this guy had such a magnetic hold over them that Andy couldn't even tell his parents.

"We had no idea. I was best man at Andy's first wedding, we were friends, we used to travel from Manchester to Crewe in the car every day and I had no inkling whatsoever.

"You almost feel that I've let them down, because Woody was a good friend of mine at that time."
Lennon joined Crewe in 1990, after leaving Manchester City, while Woodward and Walters came through the youth ranks at the club.

Bennell, a junior football coach and youth scout, worked at the club in the 1980s and the 1990s.

"He was very well thought of as a coach," Lennon said. "He had a good reputation in terms of working with young players and bringing them on.

"Crewe were churning out players at the time. I was a first-team player, so I didn't really have a lot to do with him.

"I was staying at Steve Walters' grandparents' house in digs and there was a little caravan at the back that Bennell would use maybe once or twice a month, or he'd maybe come in for a cup of tea and chat.

"Obviously he was very good at what he did, he could put on a very good front. There was a real touch of arrogance about him as well. He was very sure of himself.

"It's horrific, the industrial scale that has gone on. This guy has ruined lives, ruined careers. It's heartbreaking.

"We all just hope he never s
"The Bennell issue is something that's very raw for me because I knew these guys very well. I have spoken to the police on a couple of occasions regarding it.

"There were four of us who used to travel from Manchester to Crewe every day and we'd take turns driving. We'd see each other every day, we played every day, I was best man at Woody's first wedding and he never cracked a light on it, never an inkling.

"It's easy for us to say, speak about it, but [there's the] machismo thing, the self-awareness thing, that self-pride thing and the hurt that he must have been going through.

"Steve was my team-mate for three or four years and never saw it.

"[They showed] incredible strength to go on and have a career, but there's no doubt that it damaged their careers. Steve Walters was a superb player at 16, 17, 18, 19 and I've no question now looking back that it would have had a huge effect on his life."

Lennon recalls Woodward fainting and tell him about panic attacks, after he left Crewe for Bury, but was never aware of any abuse.

Woodward spoke publicly to the Guardian newspaper, in 2016 about the abuse he had suffered, then Walters Chris Unsworth and Jason Dunford came forward, speaking of abuse they had suffered.

"I spoke to Steve, I was trying to get down to play in a charity game in July, but I couldn't make it," Lennon added.

"I spoke to Woody. I'm really proud of the way that they've come out of this and the way that they've handled it."

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/43114431