I was overcome with a sense of relief as I arrived unscathed at Scratchwood, yet there was still a feeling of foreboding about the contents of the case and what kind of situation I might soon be walking in to.
Cheeseman answered my knock at the door and welcomed me into a room inhabited by two other members of the finance company and three other people who acted as legal representatives and advisers.
As well as being a member of the Dunstable Football Club board, one was also the manager of the finance house. I hadn’t seen him for some time and greeted him warmly. But when I asked if he was well he answered: ‘Oh, I’m terrible. I’ve been out to Keith’s place in Spain and all hell has broken loose.’
Cheeseman broke in here and asked me, ‘Have you got the case?’
‘Oh yes, I forgot. It’s in the boot of my car.’ He asked for the keys and off he went to get it.
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.