Hawthorn used secret bank accounts to pay premiership stars outside salary cap, Don Scott says

Hawthorn used secret bank accounts to pay premiership stars outside salary cap, Don Scott says

Hawthorn great Don Scott has cast doubt over the club’s historic run of premierships in the late 1980s and early 1990s by claiming the Hawks systematically cheated the salary cap.

Scott said club chiefs used a secret bank account in Tasmania to pay some of team’s biggest stars under the table.

He has cited impeccable sources with full knowledge of the scheme.

The Hawks won flags in 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1991 after the league began to properly police total player payments.

“Hawthorn were breaching the salary cap,” Scott declares in an explosive podcast to be released this week.

“The only reason Hawthorn held all those star players and had success was that they were paying under the lap. They had a bank account down in Tasmania and they were paying the players that way.

“They were contravening the salary cap and that is why those players stayed at Hawthorn because of the money they were receiving.

“So consequently there has got to be a day of reckoning and that came for Hawthorn.

“They were cash strapped.”

The ‘No Merger’ podcast, exploring Hawthorn’s narrowly aborted merger with Melbourne in 1996, introduces Scott’s allegations by declaring: “What doesn’t quite add up is how could Hawthorn attract and retain such quality players with major financial problems and a meagre membership base.”

The Hawks boasted some of the game’s greatest players through the golden era, including Jason Dunstall, Dermott Brereton, Gary Ayres, John Platten, Chris Langford, Darren Jarman, Robert DiPierdomenico, Gary Buckenara, Michael Tuck, Chris Mew and Andrew Collins.

Scott, the Hawthorn Team of the Century ruckman who saved the club from the proposed merger, gave News Corp an expanded account of the salary cap scheme.

“They were paying wives, they were paying girlfriends. They were doing a lot of things back then,” he said.

“It was like the Roman Empire (at Hawthorn). It was decadent. It is (cheating). But everyone cheats. Everyone was doing it. It was rife through the AFL.”

Scott revealed the league’s long-time salary cap officer, Phillip Ryan, president of Hawthorn from 1968-1979, had warned club bosses about their conduct.

Ryan was the league’s player payments commissioner from 1980 until 1992.

“The late Phil Ryan went out to Hawthorn and said, ‘Listen, you blokes are paying over the salary cap. I’m giving you a warning, but you’re doing it’. But nothing ever came out,” Scott said.

“And the way they were doing it was through Tasmania.

“They put money into an account down there. They (the players) would get a cheque from something that was unrelated to the footy club. Back in those days you could do a lot of different things with bank accounts.”

Asked to reveal his source, Scott said: “No. I can’t. But it’s a very reliable source. Not Joey next door. I was friendly with the people who would know. Someone very, very responsible told me.”

He said the scheme was masterminded by multiple “former Hawthorn administrators”, who have since passed away.

“And that’s why I am talking to you, because they are all dead. None of them are alive,” Scott said.

Scott said he was not sure whether the Hawthorn players involved knew they were pocketing money outside the cap.

“I really don’t know. They probably just put a price on their head — ‘I want $100,000’ — and they wouldn’t care where the $100,000 came from,” he said.

In 1992, Brisbane Bears coach Robert Walls described the salary cap as a joke and named Hawthorn as a club which went “beyond the limit”.

Then Hawks’ president Trevor Coote denied that the club had abused the cap.

“Totally untrue, quite out of order,” Coote said at the time.

Coote was Hawthorn president from 1988 to 1993, taking over the role from Ron Cook who led the club from 1980 until 1987.

The VFL/AFL salary cap was enforced for the first time in 1985.

A moratorium 10 years later allowed clubs to come clean and confess past breaches to the league without the threat of punishment.

*Subscribe and listen to No Merger for free on iHeartRadio or on your favourite podcast app. First episode out

I dont think anyone would be surprised to hear about this.

Absolute cheats, just like Carlton and Essendon.

In the NRL you get stripped all your premierships during that period

No way
;)

Hawks and Bombers were cheating, making the 1985 Bulldogs the moral premiers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Testekill

Hawks and Bombers were cheating, making the 1985 Bulldogs the moral premiers.

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Unfortunately the salary cap wasn't introduced until 1986.

Many clubs rorted salary cap, league knew: veteran Hawk official

A veteran Hawthorn official from the 1980s and 1990s says that many clubs were "rorting" the salary cap after it was introduced in 1986 and this was why the AFL had introduced an amnesty on widespread cap cheating in 1994.

John Hook, who was Hawthorn's football manager from 1988 until 2004, having previously worked as recruiting manager at the Hawks, said the suggestion by Don Scott - contained in the 'No Merger' podcast to be released this week - that Hawthorn was paying outside the salary cap in the late '80s and early '90s was not surprising.

The Hawks were the dominant team of that era, winning flags in 1986, 1988, 1989 and 1991.

"It's no surprise to anyone working in the industry at the time," said Hook, one of few ex-Hawthorn officials who can speak of the period covered by Scott's allegations. "There was rorting of the system from a number of clubs. The AFL knew it as well - that's why they brought in the moratorium.

"I'd say most clubs were [rorting the cap].

"The salary cap was new, it started in '86. We were transitioning from a competition that was semi-professional to professional."

Hook confirmed that the Hawks had taken the amnesty on salary cap rorts when it was introduced in 1994.

Carlton, meanwhile, had been able to pay at least four highly-paid star recruits - Stephen Kernahan, Craig Bradley, Peter Motley and Jon Dorotich - outside of the salary cap for three years from 1986 and subsequently joined Hawthorn, Collingwood and other clubs in taking the amnesty in 1994.

Sources familiar with the situation said that the Blues, then led by president John Elliott and chief executive Ian Collins, refused to sign the VFL's club license agreement unless interstate signings from that time were excluded from the cap on player payments - in effect allowing them to pay well over the official limit, with league approval.

Hook said he did not know if Hawthorn had the same arrangement that Carlton had, with players signed from interstate excluded from the cap when it came in. "They could have but I don't know that," he said. Hook added that would have been a matter for the club's chief executive.

Many of the key Hawthorn and league figures from that time are deceased, including Hawks CEO John Lauritz, presidents Ron Cook and Trevor Coote and league payments officials Phil Ryan and Ralph Lane.

Hook said Hawthorn's employment of Sue Jarman, the wife of star midfielder and 1991 premiership player Darren Jarman (later to be an Adelaide Crows premiership hero), by the club - an arrangement that was known throughout the AFL back then - was "signed off" by the AFL.

"She was working in the administration, it was bona fide job," he said.

Hook said he had no had knowledge of a Tasmanian payments system, as described by Scott in the podcast that focuses on the failed Hawthorn merger with Melbourne. "I don't know what the account was or where it was," he said.

Essendon famously did not take the amnesty and was subsequently penalised for rorts in the early to mid-90s.

Gary Ayres, the dual Norm Smith medallist who played in five premierships for the Hawks, told The Age he had no knowledge of an alleged salary cap rort.

"Nope, never. I was always in the position that we never discussed salaries or contracts," Ayres said.

"The line used ... back in the late '70s was: the captain was the highest paid player and outside that you just got on and did the job.

"There wasn't a lot of money going around in those days anyway. It was never openly spoken about what anyone was earning.

"Don obviously has his sources. Maybe someone like Don knows more about it, but I can't shed too much light on it."

The initial salary cap was $1.25 million, less than a tenth of the current limit.

Hmm, so maybe in 1992 we should have been in the Grand Final.