It’s an extraordinary quirk of David Gallop’s long reign as chief executive of the NRL that three of the biggest scandals he had to deal with came from one club.

The Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs.

On this week’s edition of Fox League’s Face to Face, available via Kayo Sports, Gallop opened up to Yvonne Sampson about dealing with the Dogs’ 2002 salary cap breaches, 2004 Coffs Harbour scandal, and 2008 Sonny Bill Williams bombshell.

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TEARS AS DOMINANT DOGS ARE DOCKED

Steve Folkes’ Bulldogs were seemingly flying towards a premiership in 2002. They were stacked with stars like Willie Mason and Braith Anasta, played with the club’s famed ‘Dogs of War’ mentality and looked unstoppable.

That is, until they were found to have breached the NRL salary cap by at least $1 million across 2001-02, which made front-page news in August.

For Gallop, there was no option but to effectively remove them from the finals by docking their 37 competition points, dropping them from first to last right before September. The club was also fined $500,000.

While there was some rebuttal to the precise amount by which they had busted the cap, the Bulldogs came to Gallop with their hands in the air. Folkes and his team were left devastated.

“It was brazen but … once we got the information and some of it got dropped to the media by a whistleblower, to their credit they came in and they said, ‘Yep, we did it’; and the size of it just meant we couldn’t have them winning the competition,” Gallop said.

“I remember sitting in my office with just Steve Folkes, the coach, and I think he and I both sort of had a tear at what was about to unfold. They were about to be put from the top of the comp to the bottom.

“It was sort of heartbreaking but it had to be done. There wasn’t really any alternative.

“Incredibly hard for fans to work out … and incredibly hard for the playing group, who thought they were about to play in September for the premierships.

“It probably wasn’t quite what I expected six months into the job, but I knew what we had to do and I knew the penalty was right.

“That evenness of the competition was the absolute pillar of what we were trying to do and enforcing the salary cap hard was very important to that.”

The strong stance came at an ugly personal cost for Gallop, who received death threats and ended up with a security guard stationed outside his home. In a moment of levity, his daughter asked why a homeless man was staying in their front yard.

As for the Bulldogs, their cap-busting squad made a pact to stay together despite pay cuts and won a premiership in 2004, defeating the Roosters 16-13 in the grand final. Mason won the Clive Churchill Medal.

READ MORE: ‘I didn’t hide your contract’: Ex-NRL boss open up on infamous Storm cap scandal… and his one regret

PRE-SEASON SCANDAL IN COFFS HARBOUR

That 2004 season began on the darkest of notes. Canterbury’s pre-season trip to Coffs Harbour is still referred to as an infamous moment in modern rugby league history and its scars run deep.

Six Bulldogs players were questioned after a sexual assault allegation from a 20-year-old woman. The woman had engaged in group sex with the players but they claimed it was consensual.

Insufficient evidence was found to lay charges and Detective Senior Sergeant Gary McEvoy, who managed the investigation, later said that he believed no sexual assault had occurred.

“I would go so far as to say that on Sunday the 22nd of February 2004 there was no woman raped in the pool area of the Pacific Bay Resort,” McEvoy said on radio 2SM in 2006.

“That statement there, what I have given you now, is the complete opposite to what my boss, my commander, was telling the media. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but that is mine.”

Rising star Johnathan Thurston was frequently named as the scandal boiled, but insisted in his autobiography that he was not involved with the woman and was at the time prevented from publicly defending himself. He wrote that the scandal “threatened to end my career before it even got started”.

“I wish I could tell you that I was shocked by the group sex — but I wasn’t,” Thurston wrote.

“Consensual group sex, a girl sleeping with more than one NRL player at the same time, was not unusual.”

He added: “I was not involved in any capacity with the woman who made the accusations.

“I was not involved with her on the Wednesday night and I did not see what happened in the pool area on the Sunday morning.

“However, I was shocked and scared to be interviewed by police for the second time in a year. The press absolutely hammered us and it felt like the public thought we were all guilty even though a charge had not been laid.”

Gallop recalls that the scandal “quickly had a ripple effect across the whole game, which was hard to manage”.

“Incredibly traumatic days, for the club, for the woman, for the players,” he said.

“And it became a bit of a lightning rod for the game because very quickly there became this widespread suggestion that there was no respect for women in the game.

“I look back on that as a very traumatic moment for everybody involved, but also one which hopefully has led to programs that have educated young guys and improved perhaps in areas where attitudes weren’t right.”

SONNY BILL FLEES FOR FRENCH RUGBY

Gallop thought that radio presenter Ray Hadley was joking when he called about Sonny Bill Williams in 2008, with the bombshell news that the young superstar was fleeing the Bulldogs, NRL and Australia to sign with French rugby union club Toulon.

SBW had signed a five-season extension just the previous year — but at $1 million per season, Toulon was offering far more money. The powerhouse forward was also struggling personally.

“Although I was playing some great footy at the time when I took off, I was deeply, deeply unhappy off (the field),” he told Triple M in 2021.

“I wish that I had the mindset that I have now because it wouldn’t have went down the way it went down.

“I would have been more confident to stand up and say, ‘This is how I’m feeling, this it what needs to change’.

“I just felt like I needed to escape but what I found out was that when I ran, the man in the mirror, the problems I was facing, were staring straight back at me in the mirror in France.”

Gallop vividly recalls the moment he found out about the unfolding contract scandal.

“That one was a Saturday, and I remember Ray Hadley rang me and he was on-air at the time; it was sort of 10 past 12 on a Saturday. And he said, ‘You know he’ at the airport’. And I couldn’t believe it, I said, ‘No, he couldn’t be’. But he was, and he went,” Gallop said.

“The whole thing was a bit of a shock, it wasn’t one that I was expecting. He maybe looks back now hopefully and realises walking out mid-contract wasn’t the greatest move, but it was certainly one where I thought it was a gee-up when someone told me.”

The Bulldogs at least got compensation from Toulon for SBW, who was given an indefinite ban of sorts from rugby league. Relations gradually thawed and he returned to win a premiership with the Roosters in 2013.

“I think we said he couldn’t come back straight away but eventually he did – and what an unbelievably good player he turned out to be,” Gallop said.

“I’ve seen him since. We haven’t really talked about the episode.”