Harry's Games by John Crace Read Free Book Online

London Police formally interviewed Redknapp in connection with this matter for the first time and, early the following year, both he and Mandaric were formally charged with two counts of tax evasion.
    It was to everyone’s relief when the prosecution barrister finally concluded his opening statement and the judge adjourned proceedings. I went outside to get a coffee and wake myself up and fell into conversation with Redknapp’s counsel, John Kelsey-Fry QC.
    Kelsey-Fry was a man with almost as stellar a reputation as his client. Over a meteoric career, he has acted for, among others, Roman Polanski, Sharon Osborne and Steven Gerrard and is considered one of the stars of the bar. It wasn’t hard to see why. In cross-examination he is sharp, succinct, witty and charming; juries love him. Even his wig oozes class. ‘It used to belong to Christmas Humphreys,’ he told me. ‘He was the barrister who prosecuted Ruth Ellis [the last woman to be hanged in this country]. He was also a Buddhist and refused to sit on any capital cases. So he was a curious man . . . someone who was prepared to prosecute a woman to the gallows but not pass sentence.’
    I asked Kelsey-Fry how he thought the case was going so far. Like most lawyers, he responded with a question of his own. ‘How do you think it is going?’ he said.
    â€˜Um . . .’ I hesitated, unsure of the exact protocol for these exchanges. ‘I’m not sure the prosecution is exactly dazzling the jury.’
    Kelsey-Fry smiled and said nothing.
    â€˜But some of the evidence does seem quite compelling,’ I added.
    â€˜Every defendant always looks as guilty as sin after the prosecution’s opening speech. It will all look very different by the end of next week. Just you wait and see.’
    â€˜So you’re confident then?’
    I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I have no memory of him replying to that question.
    It’s often been said of Redknapp that he’s a lucky man, a man with the knack of being in the right place at the right time – although I doubt he would have considered himself that lucky to be standing trial. But it was undoubtedly fortunate that it had taken more than two-and-a-half years for the case to come before a jury as the prosecution’s main witness was a
News of the World
journalist, Rob Beasley. He had interviewed both Mandaric and Redknapp over the phone in February 2009 and had recorded both conversations, the most damning part of which appeared to be Redknapp referring to the monies in his Monaco bank account as his ‘Crouchie bonus’. At the time, this must have felt like gold dust to the CPS as the
News of the World
still had a reputation for investigative reporting alongside its standard celebrity gossip. Indeed, even if the case had been heard just a year earlier, then the newspaper’s evidence might still have looked very strong, especially as it had exposed match-fixing during the Lord’s Test match between England and Pakistan.
    But all that had changed over the course of the previous summer when illegal phone-hacking was shown to have been conducted on an industrial scale by the
News of the World
and the newspaper had been closed in a damage limitation exercise by its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.
    Much to the disappointment of the CPS, it was Beasley’s reliability and reputation that were under scrutiny in court every bit as much as that of the accused. It’s always the duty of thedefence lawyers to try to muddy the waters, but as the first week – and the case for the prosecution – came to a close, it rather felt as if the prosecution had been contributing to the murkiness itself. There had been a few headline-grabbing detours, such as ‘Rosie47’ and ‘Crouchie bonus’, but there had been no conclusive paper trail of who had done what, when and, most importantly, why. Or if there had, Mr Black hadn’t been able