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.’
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