In the old days, English soccer fans settled scores with knives and broken bottles. As Texas billionaire Tom Hicks learned this week, the weapons of choice these days — camera phones, Twitter and spam emails — can be almost as scary, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
Hicks, co-owner of England’s hallowed Liverpool soccer club, was on the run from a mob of angry fans who blame him for the team’s tailspin. The 118-year-old club was one of England’s best when he bought it in 2007. Since then, the crippling debt load he took on to buy Liverpool strained the team’s finances and contributed to its woes on the pitch.
Now, the Liverpool faithful are waging a fierce campaign to evict the American owner. Their strategy: scare away banks and other financiers who might throw Hicks a lifeline, starving him of needed cash and forcing him to sell. To do that, they are using the tools of the digital age to track Hicks’ efforts to drum up money then bombard would-be lenders with thousands of irate emails, phone calls and Tweets.
On Tuesday afternoon, Hicks learned firsthand what it was like to be the prey in a digital hunt. Around 3:40pm local time, as Hicks sat on a sidewalk bench in New York’s midtown Manhattan, he was spotted by Liverpool native Paul Wilson. It occurred to Wilson, a 35-year-old financial consultant, the offices of Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. were on the same street. He guessed that Hicks and his son, Tom Hicks Jr., might be visiting the banks to plead for funds.
Wilson whipped out his BlackBerry, snapped some photos and zapped the images to his wife, Erin McCloskey. Then he trailed Hicks walking into the lobby of the building that houses Deutsche. “I didn’t throw my coffee on him, but the thought did cross my mind,” Wilson said Wednesday. McCloskey quickly posted the photos on Twitter and explained the circumstances.
Over in Liverpool the Hicks sighting was like an open-net goal for Alan Kayll, a 40-year-old cab driver who is a ringleader of the anti-Hicks campaign. Kayll quickly penned a form letter to J.P. Morgan and Deutsche officials urging them not to help Hicks refinance roughly $313 million (£200 million) that was owed to Royal Bank of Scotland Group, stemming from his purchase of the team.
He posted the letter online, along with the email addresses of executives at Deutsche and J.P. Morgan. An hour later, a senior J.P. Morgan executive had already received 30 emails from Liverpool fans, with new messages landing every few minutes. Public-relations staff at Deutsche said they received hundreds.
Neither bank was in talks with Hicks, said people familiar with the situation. Through a spokesman, Hicks declined to comment on Tuesday’s events or his stewardship of the team.
