Prison finally catches up with Chesterfield's crooked Spireite

So Darren Brown, who took over Chesterfield Football Club in the summer of 2000 promising to make the 134-year-old stalwart part of his sporting "empire", has been sentenced to four years in prison for emptying the club of cash and driving it to the edge of ruin in a few hair-raising months. Reporting restrictions were lifted last week, meaning that the whole gory, cautionary tale can now finally be told.

Before Brown's arrival, Chesterfield's history was most notable for spectacular uneventfulness. In some ways that was the whole point: the club's proudest achievement was simply to have kept going since 1866, the fourth oldest League club in the country, behind the two Nottingham clubs and Stoke City. Their high point came in 1997 when 23,000 fans swarmed over to Old Trafford for the FA Cup semi-final against Middlesbrough - said to be the largest peace-time movement of people ever from north Derbyshire.

After that, however, the team stumbled to relegation in 2000 under chairman Norton Lea and longevity curdled into stagnation, with no improvements made to the historic Saltergate ground, which is still a pre-Taylor Report relic, complete with 1932 vintage wooden main stand and home town atmosphere. It is well worth a visit, in fact.

The unpopular Lea was taking abuse from fans and in May 2000 he sold the club to Brown, 29, apparently a dazzling entrepreneur who owned the Sheffield Steelers ice hockey club and the Sheffield Sharks basketball team under his somewhat optimistically named UK Sports Group umbrella, of which Chesterfield soon became part. He could also talk for England, which was, to the fans, a refreshing change from Lea's autocratic style.

Chesterfield suddenly spent big, signing the goalkeeper Mike Pollitt, who is now in the Premiership with Wigan, Luke Beckett, a slick goalscorer, from Chester, and re-signing the fans' cult hero from 1997, David Reeves.

The team danced to the top of the Third Division and few worries seeped round the edges before, in January 2001, the Football Association's compliance officer Graham Bean burst unannounced through Saltergate's front door, launching an inquiry into "certain incidents regarding Chesterfield's financial arrangements".

A week later, three directors who had resigned, Dean Newman, David Wood and Mike Warner, revealed some detail to a packed fans' meeting at the County Hotel: Lea had left the club with plenty of money in the bank, yet now cheques for players' December wages had bounced and bailiffs were at the door.

Lea, they revealed, had agreed to sell Brown the club for £1.2m, payable in instalments. Brown had made a £384,000 downpayment, but £399,000 had gone out of the club to Brown's company. Not all of Chesterfield's fans accepted the message, however, and the meeting turned ugly with Wood and Newman eventually bundled into a car by friends and driven off at speed for their own safety.

"It was like a bad film," Newman grimly recalls. "We were life-long fans of the club, wanting only to protect it. Maybe now people can understand that."

The FA investigation did lead to a Football League tribunal, at which Chesterfield were found guilty of presenting a false contract for Luke Beckett to a transfer tribunal, so that it would set a lower fee, and of not declaring substantial gate receipts.

Charges that the players had been paid improper cash bonuses were found not proven. Chesterfield were fined £20,000 and deducted nine points, which left them still certain to be promoted, leading to complaints of leniency; Brown declared the club vindicated and returned to Saltergate untouched.

His joy ride was running out of gas, though. In March 2001 Brown had transferred the Chesterfield shares to an associate, Andrew Cooke. Cooke made contact with the supporters trust, the Chesterfield Football Supporters Society, which had been formed only days earlier at an emotional meeting attended by 1,000 fans, and offered the now insolvent club to the trust. They bought it, to save it, discovered the ground had been hocked to guarantee a loan and that there were debts of £2m, including £439,000 paid out as a loan to Brown's UK Sports Group, and immediately put the club into administration.

Derbyshire Police had begun to investigate after a complaint from the FA in March 2001 and last week's lifting of reporting restrictions finally unveiled the results: Brown had pleaded guilty to two charges of fraudulent trading, to having taken £800,000 out of Chesterfield for his own purposes - to repay people who had lent him the money for the first instalment to Lea, to pay the Steelers' debts (and others as his companies shipped money), and also to live in style. He had used club money to pay a £55,000 deposit on a smart new house, ordered a Mercedes, Land Rover and BMW club company cars for his personal use, and spent, among other extravagances, £2,500 on a lawnmower.

The Serious Fraud Office took over the investigation, leading to 19 charges including false accounting, furnishing false information and theft. Brown pleaded not guilty to three charges, and 14 have been left to remain on file. Brown's associate Andy Marples was discovered by FA investigators with 12 false invoices in his briefcase, for £470,000 purported management and consultancy services from other Brown companies. Marples was sentenced in 2003 to 240 hours of community service.

To nobody's great surprise now, it turns out that Brown had no money when he talked his way into owning Chesterfield. He had worked in British Gas showrooms for three years, sold photocopiers, then set up a small print-broking business. The Sheffield Steelers, who were going bust, owed him money, so he took the ice hockey club over, and he bought the Sharks from receivers.

After he talked his way into buying Chesterfield with borrowed money, he emptied the club of its cash to repay his own creditors, and keep his whole self-reinvention on the rails.

At Chesterfield the fans look back in anger and with frustration. The League described the Chesterfield affair as a watershed, which led the League to overhaul its disciplinary procedures, appoint an in-house lawyer and finally establish the fit-and-proper-person test for club directors, which they had previously and repeatedly said would be impossible to implement.

However, as Phil Tooley of the CFSS pointed out, the fit-and-proper-person test would still not stop a figure similar to Brown, who had no previous criminal or serious insolvency record, being allowed to take over a football club:

"We need some further protection," he said, "to prevent chancers getting their hands on our much loved clubs. The lessons have to be learned."

Chesterfield's loyal core of supporters have since dragged the club towards a more wholesome future. The CFSS takeover was a landmark for Supporters Direct, and the principle that football clubs should be owned collectively by supporters, not by individual businessmen, could hardly have been bolstered with more graphic evidence.

However, mutual ownership does not pay the bills, and the supporters ceded day-to-day running to two local businessmen, Barrie Hubbard and Mike Warner; Alan Walters, an accountant; and Jason Elliott, a fan who won the lottery. The four have guaranteed the major debts. After initial tensions, the arrangement now runs with mutual respect and CFSS is committed to developing a modern community club with links to health and education initiatives in Chesterfield. Negotiations are proceeding to build a new stadium on the Dema Glassworks site, so catch seasoned old Saltergate while you can.

On the field, with Roy McFarland as manager, Chesterfield have punched above their weight, managed to stayup since Brown's team won promotion, and last Saturday's 3-1 victory over Hartlepool saw them up to eighth in League One. Before the game Chesterfield greeted the news of Brown's sentence with admirable restraint and buttoned up dignity.

"Chesterfield FC nearly went to the wall in 2001, for well-documented reasons which have now been made public," Hubbard remarked. "The club is looking forward to a brighter future with the ultimate goal of a new stadium at the heart of the community. It's time to move on."

But they still played Jailhouse Rock on the Tannoy.

The Whistleblowers

The unsung heroes of the chaos at Chesterfield were Jim Brown, the commercial manager, and three women working in the office, who defied Darren Brown to record all money going out of the club for no obviously valid reason.

Jim Brown, a former Chesterfield goalkeeper who also played for Sheffield United and Scotland, has been the club's commercial manager since 1985. Joan Muir was the bookkeeper, Aimee Miles and Joanne Hadley were young assistants working in the main office at Saltergate.

"We'd worked for the previous board," Jim Brown told me, "so we knew the proper way to run the club. In the very first week, Darren Brown was paying money out with no invoices, so we began to keep a log."

Muir was ultimately able to hand these financial ledgers to the police and SFO, which supported the charges brought against Darren Brown.

All four staff also happily gave evidence to the Football League tribunal, but Jim Brown is still sore about what happened.

"We had to stand up in front of Darren Brown and tell the truth, which we did to get Brown out and save the club," he said. "Afterwards, we were very disappointed that nothing was being done to stop him, and then we had to go to work the following day for him. The girls showed great courage to do the right thing, but to this day, nobody from the League has said 'thank you' or shown appreciation for the risks the staff took."

Muir has since left to work for Norton Lea; the other two women have also left the club.

"Clearly those who gave evidence made a very important contribution," conceded a Football League spokesman, "and, perhaps, it's fair to accuse the League of being too inward-looking in the immediate aftermath of the Chesterfield tribunal."

david.conn@theguardian.com