David Gold - Football
FourFourTwo - August 2002
He has, it is estimated, a personal fortune of £410m, sundry businesses, foreign retreats and a lavishly restored Victorian mansion worth £5m in leafy Surrey. The grounds of his mansion include a golf course, a newly constructed runway (he has held a pilots licence for over 30 years, notching up a triumph The Malta Air Rally), floodlit tennis courts and a Wildlife conservation area. So how does the Birmingham City chairman sleep at nights?
"I take absolutely no chances since I received a threat from the neo-Nazi group, Combat 18 a few years ago," he explains darkly from me fortress he calls his bedroom. "I'm a successful Jew and that annoys many of these lunatics. I have to be 2,000 percent safe at night. I'm acutely aware of kidnapping threats and worse. All the doors to my sleeping quarters are steel-reinforced with unbreakable windows."
He points to a security panel just outside the bedroom door which displays 30 buttons. "Once I retire for the night I'm locked in and that's the way it stays until daybreak. I would never venture downstairs, or outside, even if I heard a noise" - unlike the late George Harrison, who confronted an intruder at his home two years ago, sustaining life-threatening injuries. "I really can't understand that," he sighs. "You can get killed, for goodness' sake - madness."
Chairman Gold clearly enjoys guiding people round his acres, through an impressive array of guestrooms, bedrooms, even an indoor swimming pool and snooker room, before descending a spiral staircase to the wine cellar, office, kitchens and utility area. How many rooms are there in the house? "I have
absolutely no idea," admits 'Mr David', as he is known to his domestic staff, "but there are 14 toilets if that helps!" Outside, he peers up the fairway on the. private nine-hole golf course and, without a hint > irony, announces: "I've arrived at last."
By way of serendipitous commentary, from inside his house The Chalet, The Beatles' classic Ticket To Rule tinkles out from a player-piano, drawing a thin smile from the man who, among his 12 companies,
David Gold may now have to build a trophy cabinet heads up Gold Air, a private airline which counts Posh and Becks, Rod Stewart, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta Jones and Jasper Carrott among its clients.see the headline now," he beams. "'Gold has Premiership'..."
DAVID GOLD WAS BORN INTO ABJECT poverty a stone's throw from the ground of his first footballing love, West Ham United, but as a teenager he discovered that sex sells. His first venture into the skin trade was importing US Playboy magazines back in the 1950s, before expanding the daring British Spick and Span pin-up magazines Business flourished. He was on his way towards making his first million through a wholesale business which later developed into publishing. Later he bought out a struggling sex shop and developed it into the Ann Summers chain which now, under daughter Jaqueline, represents his flagship operation.
Gold does not shy away from his involvement in an industry that has regularly seen him dubbed a 'Porn Baron' by the tabloids, but he prefers to give it a veneer of respectability. "These days I'm more often described as an entrepreneur," he says. "I'm part owner of Sport Newspapers which has been very successful, whilst Ann Summers is an exciting business operation. It's not a sex shop - they have to have a licence, we don't!" Subject closed.
Things could have turned out very differently. Gold has been passionate about football since he was six years old and, offered the chance to sign schoolboy forms with the Hammers, made several appearances in the claret and blue, only for his "wayward and philandering father" to put the mockers on his dream
