Shameful family secret haunting football’s £86m hunk
by Ruth Sunderland As Welsh wizard Gareth Bale sets out to wreck England’s Euro dreams today
AS A jubilant Wales celebrated their victory over Slovakia on Saturday, one player above all stood out as hero — Gareth Bale. He might be the world’s most expensive player, worth more than the rest of his team put together, but the Real Madrid star’s passion and commitment proved how much he loves leading his national side.
Bale, though, has always been proud of his Welsh roots.
When he entered the hallowed Bernabeu stadium to meet Real Madrid fans for the first time three years ago, he brought with him an extended entourage of family and friends. He was accompanied by Emma Rhys-Jones, his childhood sweetheart. His parents Frank, a former school caretaker, and mum Debbie, who works for a firm of solicitors, were there.
Sister Vicky and her husband Richard, plus their kids Georgia and Max, went along too. Even game old grandad Dennis Pike was there in his best blazer, skew-whiff tie and a pair of casual slacks puddling over his loafers.
Emma’s mum Suzanne was pictured smiling broadly. As well she might, now that Bale’s £86million transfer fee and £13million-a-year earnings had crowned her daughter undisputed Queen of the WAGs. Only one man was missing from the images that were beamed around the world: Emma’s 52-year-old father.
To say that Martin Rhys-Jones is the black sheep of Gareth and Emma’s close-knit families would be an understatement. Rhys-Jones is perhaps the one shadow lurking in the background as Bale is feted in France.
For even as Emma was about to embark on a new life as the consort of one of ‘Los Blancos’ — as the team are known, from their white strip — her dad was festering in a U.S. jail cell.
After being tracked down in Spain, where he had been running a multi-million-pound international share fraud similar to some of those depicted in the film The Wolf Of Wall Street, Rhys-Jones was extradited to the U.S. in 2013.
The balding Welshman earlier this month pleaded guilty in a court in Buffalo, New york, to laundering money obtained in a wire fraud conspiracy.
He faces up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 (£176,000) fine when his sentence is finally meted out. Some 250 investors lost just under £2 million in the scam.
That would be more than enough to create embarrassment for any household in the middle-class suburbs of Whitchurch and Llanishen in Cardiff where Gareth and Emma grew up, and where curtains twitch at any goings-on among the neighbours.
Perhaps it is even more mortifying for Emma because of the huge contrast between golden boy Gareth and the squalid share schemes set up by her dad. Although Rhys-Jones was denied bail last year, partly due to fears that he would tap Bale’s vast wealth to escape American justice, the young couple do not seem to have rushed to his rescue.
According to Bale’s father Frank, who spoke to the Mail last week, Gareth has not helped with Rhys-Jones’s legal expenses and neither he nor Emma has visited her father in prison. Nor has RhysJones met either of his two granddaughters by Emma and Bale, three-year-old Alba Violet and Nava Valentina, who was born this spring.
Even so, the prospect of his partner’s dad being banged up in one of America’s notoriously tough prisons for a ten-year term cannot have helped Bale’s preparations for Euro 2016.
Martin Rhys-Jones set out on the road to a U.S. jail cell when he split from his former wife Suzanne McMurray, 53, more than a decade ago. In 2005 he quit Cardiff for the sunnier climes of Barcelona, though whether that was to flee prosecution in the UK for fraud is the subject of dispute, according to U.S. court papers.
Whatever his motive might have been, he left behind a young family including Emma, now 25, and her four siblings.
Glamorous sister Charlotte, 26, shares a penchant for sportsmen and has been spotted on the arm of Wales rugby international Toby Faletau. The pair, apparently, have double dated with Emma and Gareth.
But while his brood was growing up in Wales, Rhys-Jones was busy setting up his Barcelona ‘boiler room’ scam — an unscrupulous scheme involving cold-calls to gullible investors, often vulnerable elderly people.
Once their prey were on the line, Jones and his associates used ‘highpressure sales techniques and fraudulent statements’ to hook them in. Victims were lured into parting with their life savings to buy shares that turned out to be vastly overpriced, worthless or non-existent.
Rhys-Jones, who operated under his own name and several aliases, including Martin Reece and John Allen, was one of two architects of the multi-million-pound fraud.
His principal partner in crime was an American named Arnold Wrobel, 63, who has also pleaded guilty to the scam, along with another of the ten named defendants.
THEy include British glamour model JamieLee Church, 30, who won a record deal after appearing on reality TV show Popstars: The Rivals, in 2002.
She is alleged to have made tens of thousands of pounds at the expense of unsuspecting investors, whom she reeled in with a carefully scripted sales patter, while using the more upmarket-sounding false name of ‘Charlotte Keys’.
The U.S. Department of Justice said last week that charges against Ms Church are pending and she is not in custody. It is not known how she became acquainted with Martin Rhys-Jones, whose Facebook page featured numerous pouting young women among his online ‘friends’, before his posts abruptly stopped when he was arrested.
Of course, the sins of his girlfriend’s father are nothing to do with Gareth Bale. ‘This is a situation that is very distant from him. Sometimes there are hangers-on, or people the players need to be protected from,’ said one adviser. Melvyn Gandz, Bale’s accountant, said: ‘I have nothing to say. I don’t know him (Rhys-Jones) — never met him, no involvement.’
But while Martin Rhys-Jones was plunging deeper and deeper into fraud in pursuit of a millionaire lifestyle, his daughter and her lover were enjoying their entirely legitimate riches, thanks to Bale’s astounding talent.
After signing for Madrid, Bale moved into a £6.5 million house, costing him £10,000 a month to rent, in La Finca, an elite enclave just outside the Spanish capital popular with footballers and WAGs.
With a six-car garage, indoor pool, gym and several terraces, it is close to the home of team-mate and rival Cristiano Ronaldo.
Despite their vast wealth, he and Emma are said to be down to earth and true to their modest roots.
When Bale offered his parents £1 million to buy a new home, Frank, 59, and Debbie, 56, chose instead to remain in their modest former council house in Whitchurch because they like the neighbours.
Frank and Debbie do, however, have a sizeable share of Gareth’s valuable image rights. He has given them each a 20 per cent stake in Primesearch, the company that looks after his earnings from ‘Brand Bale’. It reported net assets of nearly £2.5million in its most recent accounts.
As for Emma, her reputation for being unassuming and homely is perhaps undermined by her fondness for tiny mini-skirts, shiny mahogany limbs and huge Chanel handbags. In her defence, though, she has been by Bale’s side since long before he was famous.
The pair started dating at Whitchurch High School, where rugby ace Sam Warburton was also a pupil. She would brave the Cardiff cold to cheer her boyfriend on from the touchline at school matches.
For no obvious reason, considering their long-lasting relationship, their two daughters and their obvious belief in family values, the two are not yet married.
If Emma is holding out for her father to be freed from prison to walk her down the aisle, she could be in for a long wait. The three years he has already been in custody will count towards his sentence, but the judge could mete out a penalty of up to a decade behind bars.
Nemesis arrived for Rhys-Jones in September 2012, when he was arrested by Detective Inspector Olga Lizana of the Spanish National Police fugitive squad, a female cop whose speciality is hunting down British gangsters on the Costas.
He lost a year-long battle against extradition to the U.S., where he has
been kicking his heels in jail ever since. A request by Rhys-Jones for $250,000 (£176,000) bail was refused last year, due to fears he might tap Emma and Gareth up for money — then skip the country.
The judge noted that RhysJones’s elderly parents were prepared to post up to $50,000 (£35,000) on his behalf, as was a brother in Australia. There was no mention of any such offers from either Bale or Emma.
Indeed, rather than rushing to his aid, Emma and Gareth may have left her father to his fate at the hands of the U.S. penal system.
His advisers — who routinely counsel footballers to beware of friends and family trying to prey on their wealth — will have been telling Bale to give a known financial fraudster like Rhys-Jones the widest of berths.
Frank Bale, Gareth’s father, told the Mail the family had not seen or heard from the fraudster since he was arrested four years ago. When asked if the Real Madrid star had been out to America to visit RhysJones in prison, the 59-year-old said: ‘No, they have never been there.’
Asked if the fraudster had ever seen his granddaughters, he said: ‘No, he hasn’t. I don’t talk about it, to be honest. They don’t talk about it much. I have met him once and that was a fair few years ago. Never seen him again since.’
He also said he did not think his son had paid any of the legal fees, adding: ‘Not as far as I know anyway. He steers clear of that sort of thing. He has his image, I suppose.’
As for Rhys-Jones, the lengthy maximum term he is facing reflects the seriousness of his crimes and a level of deceit that even the most doting daughter and son-in-law might struggle to overlook.
He and his cohorts spun an elaborate web of lies to fool investors into parting with their cash.
This involved setting up a number of ‘front companies’ in Barcelona, using respectable-sounding names such as Newbridge International, Brecon Global and Strategic Energy Partners.
POTENTIAL investors were given the impression that these were solid businesses being run from international financial centres such as Zurich, London and Wall Street, when in reality they were mere shams.
Jamie-Lee Church’s alleged role in the scam was to act as a ‘fronter’ — someone who lures in investors and sweet-talks them.
Posing as her alter ego Charlotte Keys, she is accused of calling victims, whose numbers would have been obtained from direct mail marketing companies, to warm them to the idea of buying the near-worthless investments.
The shares being flogged were not in legitimate blue-chip firms but were risky shares not traded on any stock exchange — in other words, highly unsuitable for most ordinary small investors of modest means.
Rhys-Jones and his U.S. accomplices, however, duped investors into thinking the shares were valuable and even directed them to fictitious press releases painting a rosy picture of their prospects.
Once the ‘fronters’ had persuaded investors to part with their savings, they would hand over to the ‘closers’, who were Rhys-Jones and Wrobel, to seal the deal, then pocket large amounts of ill-gotten gains.
In the case of Rhys-Jones, more than $406,000 (£286,000) was deposited into accounts he kept at Spanish bank La Caixa, Deutsche Bank and Abbey International in the Channel Islands between 2006 and early 2009.
Prosecutors allege that more than $80,000 (£56,000) was wired to accounts for the benefit of JamieLee Church. Regardless of his crimes, he is of course, still Emma’s father and grandfather to Gareth Bale’s two little girls.
Whatever Emma’s feelings towards him, she was just a young girl when her father abandoned his family and embarked on his heartless fraud on innocent savers.
In the years since his departure, she has built a lovely life for herself. Some might think there is no place in that blissful existence for a criminal father — who has plenty of time on his hands in prison to contemplate how, had he followed an honest course, he could be sharing in his daughter’s good fortune and her partner’s glory.
Family loyalty is clearly important to Gareth Bale. With his wealth, he could easily help his girlfriend’s dad if he so wished. Perhaps, though, he chooses not to — and having heard the sorry story of Martin Rhys-Jones, many would not blame him for that.