Barry Bennell’s home raided by cops who remove boxes of evidence amid fears coach could be football’s answer to Jimmy Savile
FA chairman Greg Clarke has written to 30,000 football clubs over allegations that four former players were sexually assaulted by coaches as children.
Pledging the FA’s full support to the alleged victims – David White, 49, Paul Stewart, 52, Andy Woodward, 43, and Steve Walters, 44 – Mr Clarke added: “These are heinous crimes and need to be investigated by the police and they will get our support.”
Convicted paedophile Barry Bennell – the former Crewe Alexandra FC youth coach at the heart of the abuse scandal – went into hiding yesterday.
Cops broke down the door of his home last night and were seen leaving with boxes and his dog.
Northumbria Police confirmed they are investigating a claim that a former player was abused as a youngster at Newcastle United by ex-youth coach George Ormond.
When retired footballer Andy Woodward told last week how he was assaulted by coach Barry Bennell as a youth player, he hoped his words would help others speak out.
He believed a paedophile ring was operating within the game, and added: “This will not be a total shock to some people within football.
“I’m convinced there’s a lot more to come out. How many others are there?”
A week on and three more players have spoken out of their abuse — with the scandal now described as “potentially worse than Savile”.
Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) boss Gordon Taylor revealed the number of players to contact the union with similar stories to Andy in the past week had reached double figures. He has now called for a full-scale investigation.
Police are probing at least 11 leads, while a phoneline set up for victims by the NSPCC got 50 phone calls in its first two hours.
He used blackmail and threats of violence
At the heart of the scandal are disturbing claims of a sinister paedophile ring with convicted pervert Bennell at the centre.
Ex-Crewe player Steve Walters and Manchester City’s David White have said they were abused by Bennell.
Meanwhile former England ace Paul Stewart claimed he was assaulted by another person with links to Bennell amid fears the ring could include a “respected manager”.
Paul, who played for Manchester City, Tottenham and Liverpool, said he was abused every day for four years between the ages of 11 and 15 and that the “monster” threatened to kill his family if he told.
He said his abuser, who cannot be named for legal reasons, knew of Bennell’s crimes, adding: “He told me Barry was doing it to kids on a team we played. I was 12 or 13 — he was trying to infer it was normal.”
There are serious questions to answer for the long-serving management of Crewe Alexandra FC.
Did they know about the rumours surrounding Bennell? And can they explain exactly why he was sacked in 1992? The reasons for his departure were never made public. In the late Eighties, Crewe’s Youth Academy, under coach Bennell and Italian manager Dario Gradi, was highly regarded.
But despite a set-up which went on to produce England internationals Danny Murphy, David Platt and Dean Ashton, their success on the pitch masked a sickening side.
Andy Woodward, 43, has told how as a young player with the club Bennell abused him from the age of 11, using blackmail and even threats of violence to ensure he stayed silent.
Talking of being abused by Bennell in his teens, fellow pro Steve Walters, now 44, said this week: “I was a confident, outgoing person but sometimes I just go into a shell. I have nightmares and sleeping problems.”
Two years after Bennell was sacked by Crewe he was finally brought to justice. A 13-year-old Staffordshire boy returned home from a club tour to Florida and told how Bennell had repeatedly abused him.
Bennell was jailed for four years in the US after the authorities described him as having “almost an insatiable appetite” for young boys.
On his return to Britain in 1998, Bennell was jailed for nine years for 27 sexual offences, carried out over a 13-year period, on youngsters aged ten to 14, including at the time he was working at Crewe.
On sentencing Bennell, Judge Huw Daniel told him: “You are a paedophile, that is not in doubt.”
Dario Gradi, 75, is now Crewe’s Director of Football and of the Youth Academy. He was manager at the time of the abuse against Andy and Steve, and was known to be close to Bennell.
Like Bennell, Gradi let players stay over at his home. One of Bennell’s attacks took place there, it was revealed in the 1998 court case. Gradi, who said this week the club is conducting a review, insisted he knew nothing of Bennell’s crimes at the time.
He said: “I would like to express sympathy to the victims of Barry Bennell, not only at Crewe Alexandra but at other clubs in the North West.
“The first I knew of Barry Bennell’s crimes was when he was arrested in the United States in 1994. I knew nothing of his crimes before this time when he was employed by us.
“No one at the football club knew of Bennell’s crimes until his arrest in 1994 and his subsequent prosecution in the United Kingdom.”
Crewe Academy graduate Danny Murphy said he would be “amazed if [Gradi] knew something about it” and said he “went out of his way to behave above board” when players stayed at his house.
But he added: “I’m not shocked by what has come out. We always suspected there was lots that had not been said. There were rumours about Barry.”
One former Academy coach is understood to have quit Crewe when Bennell returned after a period of working elsewhere, over concerns about his behaviour.
It is not known what those concerns were, or whether the management were informed of them.
Once a group of parents concerned about Bennell’s conduct with their children confronted him, but after a bizarre scene during which he began to cry and put his head in his hands they chose not to tell the police.
Founder of child abuse charity NAPAC, Peter Saunders, told The Sun: “It’s hard to believe that the club’s management weren’t aware of these rumours given that a large number of parents clearly were and a confrontation took place.
“It certainly raises questions about how thoroughly they investigated any allegations which had earlier come to light.
“Football clubs are famous for closing ranks to defend their staff.”
Bennell, 62, who now uses the name Richard Jones, has gone to ground. Police last night removed items and a dog from Bennell’s bungalow in Milton Keynes, Bucks.
John Bowler, Crewe’s chairman since 1987 and a director since 1980, told this week how he was “infuriated” and “disappointed” by Bennell’s crimes, which he said came “out of the blue”.
The scandal may go higher than the club’s top brass.
When Deborah Davies made a 1997 documentary for Channel 4 exposing Bennell, the FA refused to comment.
She said: “We knew there was so much more to come out. And not just about Bennell. But football was a man’s game.
"Sexual abuse wasn’t meant to happen. No one in the game wanted to speak.”
A participant in the 1998 legal case against Bennell told The Sun: “Others in the footballing community must have known about the abuse. The abuse was on such a scale, and seemed to have been so widely rumoured, that it seemed impossible that no one in authority had heard these claims and had the opportunity to look into them.”
FA boss Greg Clarke last night pledged his support to victims of historical child sex abuse in football, dubbing the litany of alleged offences “heinous crimes”.
And the PFA’s Gordon Taylor said: “It is up to all of us now to grasp the nettle and make sure we learn from this.”
‘He was a pied piper’
FORMER Oldham player Mark Buckley was repeatedly approached by Bennell as a young man – and saw first-hand how the youth coach groomed his potential victims.
Mark, 53, says he was “never shocked” by the revelations about Bennell’s conduct, thanks to his time at Manchester youth team St Roberts, who played rival side Whitehill – run by Bennell.
Mark, 14 at the time, said the opposition coach tried to win him round by offering to boost his football career.
He said: “Bennell was a Pied Piper type of guy. He always had kids around him.
“When he talked to me about maybe signing for Whitehill or getting trials at Manchester City, he would say, ‘We look after the boys really well.
He’d promise us tickets to see City
“‘We make sure they get steaks, eggs, plenty of milk. We always make sure the boys are well looked after – they get all the right sort of food’. That was a big deal to a young lad.
“Bennell would make promises like he could get us tickets to see the City games, that the parents would be paid if City signed their lad.
“He was always dangling carrots to try and get our interest. But we always said no.
“Even at 14 I thought there was something not quite right about him.
“My parents and I just didn’t take to him and in the end he stopped trying to persuade us to join him.”
Mark, now a financial adviser, added: “I was never shocked by what came out about Bennell.
"All us kids knew there were strange things going on within the Manchester youth football scene.
“A lot of us knew that some of the officials had, shall we say, different agendas – that includes some referees.
“In those days there were no police checks, no background checks. Predators could take their pick.
“Fortunately I never got lured into any of that. But there was stuff going on – no question whatsoever.”