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A meeting between Rafa Benitez and the owners was scheduled for midnight at the Pentelikon hotel in Athens.

The arrangement was that, regardless of whether Liverpool won or lost the 2007 Champions League Final, they would sit down and hammer out plans for the Americans’ first transfer window - aware that their rivals were already doing business.

But then Tom Hicks and George Gillett took a private jet straight back to America after the game, leaving Benitez, already drained and deflated after losing football’s biggest club final, incandescent.

The Spaniard started to walk the streets of Athens alone, a trek which lasted all night, even when the rain began to fall.

He saw no point sitting in the hotel bar with the players talking about what might have been, or with his staff, talking about what might be next season, because he didn’t have the answers.

On he walked, the turmoil growing in his mind, until breakfast.

After a few hours' sleep, he sat before the world’s media and unburdened all the frustrations that had been building in his head.

“I’m tired of talking, talking. We talk and talk but we never finish, I want things to be done,” he said, openly attacking the owners.

The boil had been lanced and nothing would be the same again.

Texan Hicks' first instinct was to throw on his Stetson, pull out a Colt .45 and pump Rafa full of lead.

The problem was, with two European Cup finals reached in three years, he was about as unsackable as a panda in a Chinese zoo with a secret stash of Viagra.

Nevertheless, both Americans agreed that their manager had to go.

Six months later, on a cold December night, I met Benitez in the house of a mutual friend.

Within minutes of staring at his pale, drawn features and listening to him bare his soul, it was clear he was feeling besieged and betrayed.

“The truth is, they’re killing me,” he said, sitting on a couch, a leather briefcase between us, from which he would pull flow-charts and dossiers to back up his arguments.

“I deal in facts. Only facts. I know they’ve talked to Jose Mourinho, Fabio Capello and Jurgen Klinsmann about my job, but what can I do?

“These people need to remember that in a European sense we were the same as Atletico Madrid before we won the Champions League. Without that win we’d be nothing in Europe, nothing.”

He talked of his frustrations working with chief executive Rick Parry:

“I wanted Florent Malouda last summer but Parry wouldn’t pay the signing-on fee, so he went to Chelsea. He brought in Ryan Babel and paid £2million more than we wanted to. He paid too much for Jermaine Pennant and Yossi Benayoun and made a big mistake with Javier Mascherano’s contract because he allowed him a get-out clause, which ended up costing the club more money.”

His frustration was tangible, his paranoia rampant.

He was worried the fans might believe the poison that was being spread about him and lose the faith:

“Some may believe it without knowing the facts. Here is the truth: I am driving an old BMW while Ferguson and Mourinho are driving Ferraris. I have to swerve and cheat to beat them. I can do that, but I need the money and the back-up to beat the Ferraris.”

Meanwhile, all he seemed to be getting from the Americans was flattery, which he saw through instantly:

“I don’t like people telling me: ‘You are brilliant, you are great’. I hate that. I know where I come from. I know my limitations. I wasn’t a great footballer but I worked hard on the technical side. I am proud of what I have done but I know myself. I hate these sweet words. I like actions.”

When asked why he didn’t just walk away from Liverpool if it was so much hassle, and take up one of the regular offers from Real Madrid, he replied: “I love the club too much and my wife loves living here. This is my home.

“Also, if I go, Reina, Arbeloa, Mascherano and Torres would all leave too. Xabi Alonso will go anyway, because he wants to go back to Spain.”

I asked why some of his players said he didn’t show them enough love and he said that most players don’t need it, but some, like Steven Gerrard, did.

He added that throughout his managerial career he played bad cop while his assistant, Paco Ayesteran, was the good cop. It kept them on their toes.

But Paco had gone. Why?

“He needed to go. He betrayed me.”

Benitez’s words simply backed up everything I was seeing, hearing and fearing less than a year into the Americans’ reign…

Anfield was riddled with empire-building, poisonous briefings, distrust, disloyalty and back-stabbing.

It had become a nest of vipers.

***

When Benitez’s job was offered to Klinsmann, Hicks’ PR people claimed the move was all down to Gillett.

Their version was that Gillett had introduced the German to Hicks and was saying “we gotta hire this guy” while the Texan was lukewarm.

But that’s not how a senior Liverpool figure remembers it.

He says that once Hicks met Klinsmann, he was desperate to make him his manager. He invited the German and his wife to a Thanksgiving dinner at his second home in California.

As they talked, Hicks liked what he was hearing and, in typical style, took the bull by the horns.

The idea of working at Anfield was put to Klinsmann, with conditions such as Benitez could still be there for a while but that he shouldn't worry about it.

One Liverpool player’s agent was asked to sound out his client about the prospect of having Klinsmann as his manager. The player couldn’t believe what he was hearing and told him to transmit back words to that effect.

The deal eventually stalled. Klinsmann began to harbour misgivings, lost interest and went back to Germany to be Bayern Munich coach, leaving Hicks furious.

“Shame on us all,” he wrote in an email to Gillett and Parry.

“The idea that Tom Hicks was an innocent party in the Klinsmann saga is a joke,” said the senior figure.

“I know that he kept in touch with him, because when we were doing the deal for Martin Skrtel in the January he emailed Klinsmann to ask if we were spending too much.”

***

Rick Parry does not believe selling Liverpool to the Americans was the major failure during his time as chief executive.

Two bigger regrets are not winning the Premier League or building a new stadium. But surely he’s suffered sleepless nights recalling how he sold the family silver?

“I don't think anyone looks back with anything other than regret at that sale, but hindsight is much easier than foresight,” he said.

“I wish David Moores had decided not to sell because no-one cared more for the club than he did. We could have borrowed the money to build the stadium but if we'd had a bad year on the pitch, there'd have been no headroom to buy players. This wasn't a risk David was prepared to take.”

What about allegations that Parry sold to the Americans purely to feather his own nest?

“I find it pretty offensive that people suggest I favoured Hicks and Gillett because I had a good offer from them, not least because there isn't a shred of evidence to support this.”

So how did you end up selling to a leverage buyout king in Hicks? Did you and Moores take him purely on Gillett's word?

“Effectively, yes. We'd known George for six months and thought we'd got a decent feel for him. So when George said: 'Trust me, Tom's a decent guy', we thought: 'Well, you obviously know him far better than we do, you've decided to give him 50% of the club, so you must have done your checks.' That's essentially what we relied on.”

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