FURY FURORE:
Deafening silence from the Gypsy King speaks volumes
Guy Walters
LAST MONTH, two fire engines rushed to the Desi Nashta Indian restaurant in the Halliwell area of Bolton in Lancashire. Smoke was billowing out of the kitchen, and concerned locals had dialled 999. Fortunately, by the time the fire brigade had arrived, the restaurant staff had extinguished the blaze, which had been caused by a chapati sizzling away for too long.
As onlookers watched the smoke being cleared out of the building, a few will have remembered it in its previous incarnation — as a gym for boxers. Where a sign for the restaurant now swings in the breeze, there used to hang a livid green board that read ‘Team Fury Home of Champions’.
For it was here, in what was originally a solidly-built red-brick pub, that Tyson Fury and his cousin Hughie Fury would regularly train. It seems a very long way from the glamour and neon of Las Vegas, where Tyson Fury last month won the title of WBC world champion in what many have regarded as one of the greatest sporting comebacks of all time.
Last week, The Mail on Sunday revealed how a Lancashire farmer called Martin Carefoot claimed he had been offered £25,000 to lie on behalf of Team Fury, and had misleadingly informed UK Anti Doping (UKAD) that he had supplied wild boar meat and offal to the gym to be eaten by Tyson and Hughie Fury.
It was this apparent lie that had been the cornerstone of the Fury cousins’ defence against a doping charge that had arisen from the detection of excessive nandrolone in their urine — as the consumption of uncastrated wild boar can sometimes bring about high readings of the anabolic steroid.
Our story made headlines around the world, and as a result, UKAD is now reopening its investigation against Tyson Fury. If he is found guilty, then he could face an eight-year ban — a far greater punishment than the backdated two-year suspension that he received in December 2017, and that had left him immediately free to box again.
Today, The Mail on Sunday can now reveal the full account of how the story of the wild boar emerged as part of Tyson Fury’s defence.
With access to scores of confidential emails and documents, it is clear that the issue of wild boar consumption was discussed by those right at the heart of the Fury empire, including Tyson Fury’s uncle and father of Hughie Fury, the convicted former drugs baron Peter Fury, and a local businessman called Ashif Ismail Patel, both of whom corresponded with Tyson Fury’s London lawyers, Morgan Sports Law, which prepared the boxer’s defence against the charges made by UKAD.
On a Tuesday night in November 2016, a friend of Mr Carefoot approached the farmer, who lives near Preston in Lancashire, and asked him to provide a letter that claimed that he had supplied wild boar to Team Fury.
Mr Carefoot wrote a letter that evening, which stated: ‘I have supplied uncastrated wild boar to Team Fury at Bolton on a regular basis from January to October 2015 as and when required. I also supplied rabbits and pheasants and free range chicken from time to time.’
That letter was then passed to Team Fury, and in particular to a local businessman called Ashif Patel, who was until November last year a director of Fury Promotions Limited. Mr Patel, 45, was an important member of Tyson Fury’s entourage, and even attended Fury’s historic victory over Wladimir Klitschko in Dusseldorf in November 2015.
A beaming Mr Patel was photographed in the aftermath of the fight, clutching one of Fury’s title belts, and standing arm-in-arm with none other than Asgar Tair, who was Fury’s coach.
Mr Patel passed the handwritten letter to Morgan Sports Law, which describes itself as a ‘boutique law firm devoted to sports arbitration and litigation’, whose clients have not only included Tyson Fury, but also British No 1 tennis player Dan Evans, who was banned for 12 months for taking cocaine, and Tour de France winner Chris Froome, who was cleared over an alleged adverse analytical finding.
The solicitor who dealt with the letter was Henry Goldschmidt, who had joined the firm in September 2016 and who found himself doing his professional best to find evidence that Mr Carefoot had indeed raised wild boar and had supplied it to Team Fury.
ON 23 November 2016, Mr Goldschmidt emailed Mr Carefoot with a list of 16 questions, during which he stated: ‘I understand that Ashif Patel (a member of Team Fury) was the point of contact with you — and he has provided us with a handwritten letter from you.’
Mr Goldschmidt was explicit that the purpose of the questions was to ‘determine whether there was a possibility that meat provided to the Furys might contain certain metabolites of nandrolone’, and the email was also copied to the firm’s founding partner, Mike Morgan, and partner Richard Martin.
There is no suggestion that Mr Goldschmidt nor any members of the firm — nor indeed Ashif
Patel or Peter Fury — knew or suspected that Mr Carefoot had been lying — as he now claims — about the supply of wild boar.
Within five days and after a lengthy phone call with Mr Carefoot, Mr Goldschmidt had produced the first draft of Mr Carefoot’s witness statement that was intended to be submitted to the National Anti Doping Panel (NADP).
Part of that statement read: ‘In January 2015, I was introduced to Mr Ashif Patel by a friend of a mine. Mr Patel, a member of Team Fury, informed me that he was looking to purchase free range meat on a regular basis for Tyson Fury and Hughie Fury.
‘Mr Patel was always the point of contact when ordering/collecting meat, who was always very strict about the quality of the meat and free range guarantee.’
However, by the time this statement was finalised in January 2017, Mr Patel’s role as a contact had changed, and the friend was named. ‘Mr (Tim) Baker informed me that Mr Patel was looking to purchase large amounts of high quality, fresh meat on a regular basis for Tyson Fury and Hughie Fury — two
Wild boar, a failed drugs test and the ‘lie’ that could bring down Tyson Fury
professional boxers who had very specific diets with high protein requirements.
‘Mr Baker would usually be the point of contact through which Mr Patel ordered the meat. Either Mr Baker would collect the butchered meat from my farm or I would deliver it direct to the Team Fury Gym in Bolton.’ In December 2016, Mr Goldschmidt also requested that Mr Carefoot should provide him with photographs of ‘wild boar roaming on your farm’, ‘the butchery facilities at the farm’ and ‘the packaged/labelled meat once butchered’, and almost comically, ‘the intact (uncastrated) underside of the boar pigs’.
Mr Carefoot provided photographs, but he now claims they were pictures of wild boar on the nearby Bowland Wild Boar Park in Chipping in Lancashire.
Mr Goldschmidt was concerned that the photographs were not quite what he has asked for, and on December 22 in an email to Mr Carefoot, which he copied to Ashif Patel, he asked for more photographs ‘which I understand Ashif has already requested’.
The lawyer requested pictures of ‘the underside (testicles) of the boar’ as well as ‘you yourself with the boar in the background (to evidence that it is your farm)’.
Mr Carefoot found it impossible to provide Mr Goldschmidt with what he asked for, although he did his best by emailing some pictures on 10 January 2017.
Again, these were not what the lawyer was seeking to support the defence and, over an hour later, a clearly frustrated Mr Goldschmidt informed Mr Carefoot that ‘these appear to be of regular pigs/piglets rather than wild boar pigs’.
At the beginning of February, Mr Goldschmidt sent an email to Mr Carefoot that was again copied to Mr Patel. In a section headlined ‘Wild Boar’, the lawyer wrote: ‘I am due to attend the Team Fury Gym in Bolton to meet with Peter Fury and Ashif Patel — most likely next week. Given that I will be in the North West, I would also like to attend your farm at Longridge to take a few photographs — which I understand from Ashif you would be happy for me to do.’ Peter Fury is Tyson Fury’s uncle — and the father of Hughie, who was also accused of doping. At the time he was the sole director of Team Fury Boxing Limited, and along with Ashif Patel had also been a director of Fury Promotions Limited.
Peter Fury was a key figure in his nephew’s entourage, and Tyson Fury regarded him as his mentor. When Fury’s own father was sent to prison for 11 years in February 2011 for gouging out a man’s eye in a brawl, Tyson spent a lot of time with Peter.
PETER FURY, who turns 52 this month, is a former drugs baron who was a key player in Manchester’s gangland for many years. In 1995 he received a 10-year jail sentence for possession and intent to supply drugs, and in 2008 he was convicted of drugrelated money laundering and got two years.
Today, Peter says he has gone straight, and has even paid back some £1million of his ill-gotten gains to the authorities.
At this stage, there was no documentary evidence of wild boar being raised on Mr Carefoot’s farm, and it appeared the defence team was entertaining the possibility that the wild boar may have been supplied to Mr Carefoot from elsewhere, and asked him to provide two local suppliers.
Mr Goldschmidt then stated: ‘In the absence of any licences, invoices or documentary evidence that you had wild boar on your farm, these statements would go a long way to appeasing UKAD’s lines of enquiry.’
The Fury defence was therefore not able to dig up a single piece of documentary evidence to show that Mr Carefoot supplied wild boar to Team Fury. The only evidence was Mr Carefoot’s statement — a statement he now claims was a lie.
By December 2017, the firm was lining up Mr Carefoot to bring oral evidence before the NADP that month. On December 7, Mr Goldschmidt advised Mr Carefoot of the dates of the forthcoming hearing, and added: ‘I have spoken to Ashif (Patel])who will be booking trains and accommodation for you. He will be in touch with you.’
However, the hearing never took place, and later that month, UKAD and Team Fury reached a compromise agreement, which saw the Fury cousins given little more than slaps on the wrist. Since then, while
Tyson Fury has gone on to increasing fame and fortune, he has seemingly left behind some of the members of his entourage.
These even include his uncle Peter. ‘As for Peter,’ Tyson states in his book
Behind the Mask, ‘it’s heartbreaking how our relationship disintegrated because at one point in my life he was like a second father to me.’
While Ashif Patel was unwilling to speak to The Mail on Sunday, he did confirm ‘Team Fury’ no longer existed. Indeed, Fury Promotions Limited was dissolved via voluntary strike-off in November last year. He lives in Bolton — with two smart Land Rovers with personalised number plates on the drive.
Martin Carefoot never received the £25,000 he was promised, and since he has gone public about his role in what some on social media have called ‘#wildboargate’, is now concerned about his safety.
‘I’ve had one or two obscure phone calls,’ he told us. ‘And I’ve had two visits to my home. One was at midnight. There were two of them. I answered the door and got rid of them. They were meddling, really. On Monday night, there was a similar thing. I knew one of them. I told them I had a number for the police and they could round in minutes.’