January Window (7 page)

After finishing his career in football my dad set up his own sports boot and shoe company in Northampton, where I went to school, and in Stuttgart. The shoe company is called Pedila and today it generates almost half a billion dollars a year in net income. I earn a lot of money as a director of that company; it’s how I can afford a flat in Chelsea. My dad says I am the company’s ambassador in the world of professional football. But it wasn’t always like that. Frankly I wasn’t always the ambassador you would have welcomed in your executive toilet, let alone the boardroom.

In 2003, aged twenty-eight, I joined Arsenal from Southampton. The following year I went to prison for a rape I didn’t commit. What happened was this:

Back then I was married to a girl called Anne; she works in fashion and she’s a decent woman but to be honest, we weren’t ever suited. While I like clothes and am happy to drop £2k on a Richard James suit, I’ve never much liked high fashion. Anne thinks that people like Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs are artists. Me, I think that’s only half right. So while we were still living together we were already drifting apart; I was sure she was seeing someone else. I was doing my best to turn a blind eye to that, but it was difficult. We didn’t have any children, which was good since we were headed for a divorce.

Anyway, I’d started seeing a woman called Karen, who was one of Anne’s best friends. That was mistake number one. Karen was the mother of two children and she was married to a sports lawyer who had cancer. At first it was just me being nice to her, taking her out for the odd lunch to cheer her up, and then it got out of hand. I am not proud of that. But there it is. All I can say in my defence is that I was young and stupid. And, yes, lonely. I wasn’t interested in the kind of girls who throw themselves at footballers in nightclubs. Never have been. I don’t even like nightclubs. My idea of a nightmare is an evening out with the lads. I much prefer dinner at The Ivy or The Wolseley. Even when I was at Arsenal the club still had a reputation for some hard drinking – it wasn’t just silverware that the likes of Tony Adams and Paul Merson helped earn for the Gunners – but me, I was always in bed before midnight.

Karen’s house in St Albans was conveniently close to the Arsenal training ground at Shenley, so I’d got into the habit of dropping in to see her on my way home to Hampstead; and sometimes I was seeing a lot more of her than was proper. I suppose I was in love with her. And perhaps she was in love with me. I don’t know what we thought was going to happen. Certainly we could never have imagined what actually did happen.

I remember everything about the day it happened as if it has been etched onto my brain with acid. It was after one post-Shenley visit, a beautiful day near the end of the season. I came out of Karen’s house after a couple of hours to find that my car had been nicked. It was a brand new Porsche Cayenne Turbo that I’d only just taken delivery of, so I was pretty gutted. At the same time I was reluctant to report the car stolen for the simple reason that I guessed my wife, Anne, would recognise Karen’s address if the story got into the newspapers. So I jumped on a train back to my house in Hampstead, thinking I might as well report the car stolen from somewhere in the village. Mistake number two. However, no sooner had I got back home than Karen rang me and said the car was now standing outside her house again. At first I didn’t believe it, but she read out the registration number and it was indeed my car. More than a little puzzled as to what was happening, I got in a taxi and went straight back to St Albans to collect it.

When I arrived there I couldn’t believe my luck. The car wasn’t locked but it didn’t have a scratch on it and, anxious to be away from Karen’s house before her husband came home, I drove off telling myself that perhaps some kids had taken it for a joy-ride and then returned it, having had second thoughts about what they’d done. Oddly enough I’d done something like that as a kid: I stole a scooter and then returned it after a couple of hours. It was naïve of me to think that something similar had happened here, I admit, but I was just happy to be reunited with a car I loved. Mistake number three.

Driving home I noticed a knife on the floor of the car and, not thinking straight, I picked it up. Mistake number four. I should have tossed the knife out of the window; instead I put it in the compartment underneath the armrest. I was so pleased to recover a car I thought had been stolen that perhaps I did exceed the speed limit here and there; then again I wasn’t driving dangerously or under the influence of drink or drugs.

Somewhere near Edgware I noticed a car in my mirror flashing me and ignored it, as you do; London is full of half-wit drivers. I had no idea it was actually an unmarked police car. The next time I looked, near Brent Cross, the same car was still in my mirror only now it had a cherry on top. And still not suspecting that anything very bad had happened, I pulled over. You can imagine my surprise when two police officers accused me of speeding and failing to stop; I was handcuffed, arrested and taken to Willesden Green where to my greater horror I found myself being interviewed about a rape. A man ‘answering my description’ and driving my car – the victim remembered the marque and half the registration number – had picked a woman up at a service station on the A414 and then raped her at knifepoint in nearby Greenwood Park.

There was no doubt my car had been involved; some of the victim’s hairs were found on the headrest, her knickers were in the glove box, and there was other circumstantial evidence, too. Her blood and my fingerprints were on the knife, of course; and in the same glove box as the victim’s knickers the police found a packet of condoms I’d bought at a garage in Shenley. The receipt was still in the ashtray. The sales assistant at the garage remembered me buying them because he’d seen me on
MOTD
mouthing off about some stupid incident in a match against Tottenham. More of that in a moment. Anyway, there were two condoms missing from the packet. The rapist had used one on his victim; I’d put another in my wallet when I’d gone to visit Karen, but I wasn’t about to tell the police this because I was still hoping to spare her and, more importantly, her husband. I figured the last thing he needed was his wife providing me with an adulterous alibi while the poor bastard was having chemo. Mistake number five.

The victim – Helen Fehmiu, who was Turkish – wasn’t at all sure that it was me who’d raped her, however. Her attacker had punched her several times in the face, so hard she had a detached retina, but she thought he was perhaps black or ‘a bit foreign-looking’ which was good coming from her, quite frankly. She was darker than I am. Helpfully the police arranged for Mrs Fehmiu to see my picture on the back pages of the newspapers, where I’d been apologising for my conduct after the Tottenham match. One of their players took a dive when I tackled him and the ref awarded a very dubious penalty that resulted in me shouting in his face, which earned me a well-deserved red card. Arsenal versus Tottenham is always a highly emotional fixture, to put it mildly.

Anyway, Mrs Fehmiu thought it
might
have been me who’d raped her, and what with that and the forensics in my car the cops then interviewed me for sixteen hours, at the end of which they typed up a transcript that bore absolutely no relation to what I had said on the tape. In the typewritten transcript I admitted more or less everything; I even admitted ‘doing an O.J.’ and trying to shake off a police car that was in pursuit of my vehicle. In short they verballed me, confident that the quality of the recording made of the interview was so poor that the jury wouldn’t be able to make out what was said, which proved to be the case. Indeed, the jury was so persuaded by the police transcript that it managed to hear me saying things on the tape that were never even there to hear. Weird but true.

Meanwhile it transpired that the police had managed to ‘lose’ the only piece of evidence that was vital to my defence: a used condom that was found in Greenwood Park on the day of the rape and in the spot where the victim said she’d been attacked. That condom would easily have cleared me.

The newspapers were involved, of course, and before I came to trial the tabloids did their bit for English justice; having already concluded that I was ‘a monster’, and ‘revealing’ that my nickname at Highbury was Norman Bates on account of my psycho-like personality on the park (which was a blatant lie), they managed to rake up the fact that I was already technically a rapist. As usual it wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t say. They managed to find an ex-girlfriend in Northampton with whom I’d had sex a few days before her sixteenth birthday. They neglected to mention that I was just eighteen at the time and that she and I had been going out for more than a year; her father – who was none too keen on someone he described as having ‘more than a touch of the tar-brush’ about him, i.e. me – had found out that we’d slept together and even though he wasn’t living at home with his daughter at the time, he threatened to have me charged with statutory rape. It hardly seemed to matter that this same girl volunteered to be a character witness in my defence.

In spite of this, and after a December trial that lasted two weeks, I was found guilty at St Albans Crown Court on the day before Christmas Eve 2004, and sentenced to eight years in prison.

I was sent to Wandsworth nick. In case you didn’t know, it’s the largest prison in the UK. They’ve had a lot of cricketers in there – for match fixing – not to mention Oscar Wilde, Ronnie Kray and Julian Assange but, surprisingly, I was Wandsworth’s first Premier League footballer. Things went all right for me in the nick – everyone likes talking about football in prison, even the governor – and I made a lot of friends in Wandsworth. There’s all sorts in the nick, not just criminals. Some of those blokes I’d trust more than I’ll ever trust any copper again. It’s one reason why today I’m involved with the Kenward Trust, which assists the resettlement of offenders.

Certainly things went better for me than they did for poor Mrs Fehmiu, who lost the sight in one eye. Three months after the trial she killed herself. I, on the other hand, spent my first year in Wandsworth doing a correspondence course in sports management because I knew eventually that I was going to be cleared.

Eighteen months after I went inside, Karen’s husband died of cancer. But frankly I had no idea that his dying would take quite so long. That’s a pretty fucked-up place to find yourself in, psychologically; hoping that some poor bloke whose wife you’ve been shagging will die so that you can get out of prison, but that’s pretty much how I was feeling at the time. Straight away she contacted the police to explain that on the afternoon of the rape she’d been with me. But the police said the case was closed and told her to go away.

So she took her story to the
Daily Telegraph
, who started to campaign for my release. Almost immediately they discovered that Inspector Twistleton, who had led the inquiry into Mrs Fehmiu’s rape, was facing sixty-five disciplinary charges including an assault on a black police officer. It soon became clear that not only was Twistleton a racist – in view of some of the words he’d used in my cell, this was no surprise to me – he was also a member of the National Front. Incredibly, the condom used in the rape was now ‘found’ by someone in Willesden Police Station and even after eighteen months there was enough DNA there to clear me of any involvement.

Three judges at the Court of Appeal quashed my conviction and I was released from the cells at the Royal Courts of Justice the same day. Subsequently eight newspapers paid libel damages to me totalling almost a million pounds. The police were also ordered to pay half a million pounds in damages for false imprisonment, although on appeal these were reduced to one hundred grand because I had chosen to omit telling the police that Karen could have provided me with an alibi. Not that the money was important. The damage was done. My playing career was over and even without knowing about Karen my wife had divorced me.

On my release I decided I needed to get away from England. For a while I went to live with my grandparents in Germany, and then I went to study at the Johan Cruyff Institute in Barcelona, which opened in 2002. I’d done a BA in Modern Languages at Birmingham University so I spoke a bit of Spanish, and in Barcelona – my favourite European city – I did a one-year course in Sports Management and then an eight-month postgrad in Football Management. In 2010 I obtained my UEFA certificates and accepted a trainee coaching role with Pep Guardiola at FC Barca. In 2011, I became the first team trainee coach at Bayern Munich and worked with Jupp Heynckes, who was an old friend of my dad. He was part of the West German squad in 1974 although, like Dad, Jupp was injured and spent most of the tournament on the bench.

I’ve thought about poor Mrs Fehmiu a lot, however; the only time I ever saw her was in court and I felt her pain. A couple of years ago I got involved with another charity called Rape Crisis; I help to fund a Rape Crisis Centre in Camden, because the way I see it I was a victim of Mrs Fehmiu’s rapist too. Of her rapist, of the newspapers, and of the Metropolitan Police.

I try not to be bitter about what happened. I tell myself that to some extent it was my own fault. And yet I still feel a sense of grievance. I know I should get over it and put it all behind me and perhaps, in time, I will. Of course it’s one thing giving good advice to others in such matters, it’s something else when you try to take that advice yourself. But here’s one truth I have learned that I try to pass on to all my players: when the worst has already happened, nothing can hurt you. That’s as true on the football pitch as it is in life. Because there is always a next time.

I am not a philosopher of football like João Zarco, you understand. To me, managing a football team is just common sense with a scarf on.

The next day I went back to Silvertown Dock and took another look at the hole with Colin Evans and João Zarco. It was cold and the sky above the stadium was a dispiriting shade of January grey. The rain and the police had gone but not the picket of reporters, who’d already gone to town on Drenno’s death and the Sicilian message that had surely been sent to Viktor Sokolnikov. Fortunately I hadn’t had to tell him about it because he’d read the story online and told me he thought the idea of such messages to be preposterous.