Evidence supplied by Dario Gradi related to the Barry Bennell scandal can be revealed by the Guardian today and includes an admission that he encouraged the culture at Crewe Alexandra for coaches to invite boys to stay overnight, or even take them on holidays abroad, and that he did not make detailed background checks on the man who has been described as one of the most prolific paedophiles in British criminal history.
Gradi, suspended by the Football Association since December 2016, states that he never had any suspicions about his youth-team coach during seven years as colleagues and indicates that one of the reasons why Crewe did not seek a reference from Manchester City, Bennell’s previous club, was because they were trying to poach him on the quiet.
Bennell’s behaviour at City had led to at least one complaint, as well as attracting concern all the way up to boardroom level, but Crewe apparently took the strategic decision not to ask. “Bennell had a talent for recruiting and keeping good-quality players,” Gradi writes. “No references were checked with Manchester City, who I cannot imagine would have been particularly enamoured at the prospect of me poaching one of their sources of youth-team players.”
In a nine-page statement, Gradi admits that when the first allegations about Bennell surfaced he, as manager, sided with the man who is now serving a 30-year prison sentence for raping and molesting boys from the junior set-ups of both clubs.
He also states that Bennell’s sudden departure from Crewe in 1992 had nothing to do with the relationship between his coach and the boys in his team. “I have only ever sacked one person at Crewe and that was Barry Bennell,” Gradi writes. “I ultimately sacked him for failing to accept specific instructions regarding a coaching session on the pitch before a game.” Gradi does not elaborate on what the instructions were, or seem certain about which game it was, adding that it was “against Liverpool, I think”.
Legal documents seen by the Guardian from a previously unreported 2004 civil hearing also reveal that Crewe had destroyed all their files relating to Bennell. “There are no records available,” the secretary, Gill Palin, one of the key figures in the Football Association’s ongoing independent inquiry, states. “It was my standard practice in those days only to keep documents for a couple of years after a person had left the club. They would then be destroyed to make space.”
Malcolm Hughes, then the club’s educational welfare officer, admits in a two-page statement that “some of Barry Bennell’s actions could have raised suspicions” and the chairman, John Bowler, acknowledges that Crewe did not fully appreciate the dangers of football being used as a means for a paedophile to prey on young boys.
As an insight into how calculated and devious Bennell was, it also transpires he was personally responsible for the appointment of Hughes – almost certainly a ploy by Bennell to make it look as though he and Crewe regarded the welfare of the children as a priority.
Yet Hughes makes the candid admission that in his early years at Crewe he had only a limited understanding of safeguarding issues. “I certainly did not have the level of awareness that I currently have about the opportunities and potential for child sexual abuse and a need to monitor and check members of staff,” he writes.
Bennell was branded “the devil incarnate” and “sheer evil” by a judge after being convicted last year of 50 specimen charges relating to 12 boys from the junior systems of Crewe and Manchester City from 1979 to 1991. It was his fourth prison sentence in the last 25 years and, as the Guardian revealed in September, the man who was described in court as an “industrial-scale child molester” is also facing the possibility of another criminal trial involving nine more complainants alleging child rape. As of January last year, at least 97 people – though the number is now thought to be beyond 100 – had reported Bennell on the back of the interview Andy Woodward, the former Crewe footballer, gave to the Guardian in November 2016, detailing the years of abuse he suffered in the club’s youth system.
As well as Gradi, Bowler, Palin and Hughes, Crewe’s then assistant academy director, Terry McPhillips, now manager of Blackpool, and the then kit-man, John Fleet, state among hundreds of pages of evidence that they had never heard any rumour, innuendo or complaints relating to Bennell.
Others at Crewe did have concerns, however. Many of Bennell’s victims have stated there was persistent talk at Crewe about his relationship with the boys, and the club’s former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has alleged he tried to warn his boardroom colleagues after receiving a complaint. Ken Barnes, formerly Manchester City’s chief scout, told the 1997 Dispatches documentary Soccer’s Foul Play that Bowler’s predecessor, Norman Rowlinson, had rung him on one occasion because Crewe “had one or two reports of him [Bennell] mucking about with kids”. Gradi, whose association with Crewe goes back to 1983, including 24 years and more than 1,200 games as manager, says in his evidence that he can remember only one of Bennell’s players leaving Crewe in “odd circumstances” and defends the club’s policy to let boys stay overnight with their coaches.
As well as his usual salary, Bennell was paid an extra £5 a night per boy in expenses to accommodate them, with up to 12 youngsters sleeping at a house he had turned into a “children’s paradise”. Bennell would show them horror films and had arcade machines, a pool table, a juke box, a monkey, two Pyrenean dogs, an Alsatian named after Zico and even a puma he had bought from Poole zoo.
“The simple fact that Bennell had boys staying with him was not out of ordinary for this club,” Gradi writes. “I had (and still have on occasions) boys staying with me and indeed all my coaches have boys staying with them from time to time. One has to appreciate the nature of this club. We do not have endless resources and our boys are often brought through the ranks and stay with the club out of personal loyalty.”
As one example, Gradi referenced one youth-team player, who later played for Liverpool and England, who would stay at his own house at weekends and “stayed with Crewe for many years” despite other clubs trying to tempt him away. The player in question is understood to be Danny Murphy, who joined Crewe on schoolboy terms and eventually moved to Liverpool, aged 20, for £1.5m. Crewe no longer operate this practice, in line with modern safeguarding rules.
“It has served us well over the years if myself and my coaches build up a rapport with players,” Gradi writes. “I recently heard a story that one of my player’s mothers had been approached by the chief scout of a leading Premiership side, based in London, who started that her son would be better looked after if he went [there]. The boy’s mother queried whether or not the manager would be cooking his tea on a Friday and Saturday night and personally bringing him home on a Sunday? When the answer was in the negative the mother thanked the scout for his interest but stated that her son would be staying with Crewe.”
He adds: “I have a pool table and table football at home but no video games and no special [children’s] bathrobes. I have no horror films and personally can’t stand horror films. I have certainly never watched television with my arms around any boys.”
Palin would not let her own son train with Bennell, according to evidence from one witness to the FA’s ongoing inquiry, and makes it clear in a statement from November 2003 that she was uncomfortable in his presence. “I have to say that at the time I did not like him. I cannot put my finger upon what it was that caused me to dislike him. He was just one of those people who, on occasions, one takes an instantaneous dislike to.”
Gradi, however, was such an admirer of Bennell he supplied a character reference on behalf of his former colleague when the man he appointed in 1985 was arrested during a tour with the Stone Dominoes youth team to Florida nine years later. Gradi’s initial information was that the rape allegation was “sour grapes” from a disgruntled player.
“The first time I believed the allegations was when I went to the local Spa and bumped into the mother of another boy who had been with us. His friend, who had come to us from Manchester City, had apparently told his parents about Bennell, but no complaint had ever been made to either me or this club.” He adds: “Until this case came along I was fairly confident that I knew everything that was going on around the club.”
The only complaint about Bennell, according to Gradi, related to the coach’s “authoritarian streak” and one occasion when the youth team were made to “walk home from the countryside after a poor game”. Bowler also refers to the same incident, believed to relate to a match at Manchester United when Bennell dropped off a minibus of teenagers at Beeston Castle, 15 miles from Crewe, pointed them in the wrong direction and told them to find their own way back. Several hitch-hiked.
“I seem to recall there had been a complaint from a father of one of these boys,” Bowler writes. “I spoke to Dario Gradi about it and Barry Bennell was, to the best of my recollection, reprimanded.”
Bowler, who has been on the board since 1979, adds: “I would prefer to be able to produce written documentation confirming this [reprimand] was the case but the simple fact of the matter is that we are talking about the mid-1980s to early-1990s and the reality is the documented procedures that are now in place for the protection of minors were not in place at that time.
“I do not believe there was the same amount of awareness of the dangers posed by sexual predators such as Barry Bennell. It is fair to say that we, as a club (like the rest of society), did not appreciate many of those dangers at that time, although the general care and safety of the young boys was very important to the club.”
As for Bennell’s departure from the club, Gradi’s explanation that it was purely a football matter is followed by other passages appraising him as one of the best talent-spotters in the business. Bennell, he says, was “almost Brazilian” in terms of having “all the skills of tricks and flicks that would get the kids excited”. He had a talent for recruiting youngsters who seemed devoted and loyal to a man with a “lot of charm and a great hold over the boys he had recruited”. Indeed, Gradi even admits being worried by the possibility that if Bennell ever joined another club the players at Crewe would follow him.
“I accept I was responsible for appointing Barry Bennell to the club,” Gradi, who makes no reference to having coached Bennell in Chelsea’s youth system during the early-1970s, writes. “I made no detailed inquiries as to his background before taking him on. From the inquiries that I did make, I gleaned that Barry Bennell was a well-respected coach in the Manchester area and that was good enough for me. He did not have any specific coaching qualifications but none were required and at the time the FA did not publish any guidance on child protection.”
Gradi’s ongoing suspension is from all football-related matters while the FA’s inquiry, led by Clive Sheldon QC, investigates what happened at Crewe as well as claims that in his coaching days at Chelsea he visited the house of a 15-year-old youth-team player to “smooth over” a complaint of sexual assault against Eddie Heath, the chief scout who has been identified as a repeat offender.
“I don’t think there will be a lot of movement until that [inquiry] is concluded,” Bowler told a fans’ forum in Crewe last week. “It’s tragic for Dario.”