‘I pretended to be a jockey to con Harry Redknapp out of £10,000 but he caught me’ | Football | Sport

Harry Redknapp was once conned out of £10,000 by a man who posed as a rising jockey and found his way into the ex-Tottenham Hotspur manager’s inner circle. Stephen Corrigan said he spent two years posing as rider Lee Topliss and lived the high life as one of Redknapp’s entourage. In exchange for horse racing tips, he attended expensive dinners, borrowed cash and got VIP tickets to Premier League games. Topliss was a young jockey who had been riding for Richard Fahey at Musley Bank Stables since 2009. According to Redknapp, he was regarded as ‘one of the best apprentices in the game’.

But the former Spurs, QPR and Portsmouth boss was blinded by the reality that the man he had met at Cheltenham wasn’t the budding jockey. Instead, Corrington was a 27-year-old pub worker struggling to make ends meet. Introduced by one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s friends, Corrigan used the ‘Topliss’ fake persona to build a friendly relationship with Redknapp. He managed to get tickets to Spurs matches, as well as getting his hands on Gareth Bale’s shirt and even borrowed £500 from the unsuspecting manager.

Redknapp explained how he was led astray by the impersonator: “I was at a restaurant and Fergie’s best mate, a big gambler who loves a bet, was sitting there with this little guy. He waved me over and said, this is Lee Topliss, the jockey. So I said hello,” he told talkSPORT.

“Anyway, he turns up at Tottenham the next week wanting a ticket, so I get him in, he’s in the dressing room after getting Gareth Bale’s shirt, Modric’s shirt, getting all these shirts signed. For five years he told me he was Lee Topliss the jockey and he’d call me saying, ‘Harry, have a few quid on this today’. And? Nothing! ‘Harry, can you do me a favour? I’ve got to go out to Dubai to work for Godolphin and I’ve got no money, I’ve got my wages coming next week, can you lend me £500?’ Yeah sure, OK Lee’. He’s got me for five years!”

The jig was up for Corrigan when Redknapp and several other Spurs figures took him out to dinner after he watched the London derby against Chelsea in the VIP area. All it took was one call for Redknapp to uncover Corrigan’s ruse as a conman.

“One day we’ve taken him out for dinner after football, he turned up against Chelsea and I got him into a box next to Roman Abramovich,” he said. “Me, Kevin Bond, Joe Jordan and Clive Allen went for dinner with the little Lee and he’s ordering everything he can eat, drinking red wine like it’s water, and I said to him, ‘you’re riding tomorrow, Lee. Are you going to be alright?’

“Anyway, I believe everything! Eventually, I get a call from a mate of mine who told me, he wasn’t Lee Topliss, he works in a pub in Newmarket collecting glasses!”

Corrigan later felt his moral scruples and got in contact with Redknapp to apologise for leading him on for such a long time. But there wasn’t any bad blood between the two, with Redknapp saying in his autobiography: “I just felt sorry for the lad. If he’s that skint I’ll give him some more money.”

Corrigan later confessed to why he used Topliss’ identity, knowing he could use his small stature to his advantage to swindle the football icon out of huge sums of money. “I was in a bad place in my life without any money and I had started using Lee Topliss’s name,” he said.

“When I met Harry I told him I was a jockey. I was small and Irish and he believed me. He said ‘I’ll have race tips off you and I’ll look after you’. I’d say that I got around £10,000 from him. I imagine he made a lot of money initially because he bet a lot of five-figure sums.”