But he says he had a change of heart after seeing a video of himself talking about it, describing it as a "desperate cry to be young".
In 1999, after he applied to be chief constable of Merseyside police without including his Hillsborough work on the record of his career, Bettison, when challenged about it, described his involvement as "peripheral".
What makes his case different is that Mr. Cheema has spoken out about it, describing in graphic detail what happened in the early hours of Sept. 4, something rare in a country where victims who suspect that their brutal treatment was at the hands of government agents often choose, out of fear, to keep quiet.
It is a wonderful gift because once someone has read this book, they become addicted to talking about it, describing their shock at the level of darkness and evil and sheer malevolence, as well as innocence, depicted and dramatised in its pages.
But Rossi isn't really much of a secret any more: a customer called Tim Wells even wrote a poem about it, describing a visit by Gilbert and George in which the chef personally delivers a fry-up with "the fried eggs arrayed as eyes, the beans as hair / Black pudding nose and the sausages a beaming grin".
Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed round the world with Magellan and who seems to have been, Nicholl writes in Traces Remain, "probably for the first time on a voyage of this sort, specifically there in order to write about it", described meeting a giant in Patagonia in the 1520s: "He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist".
He still chokes up when he talks about it, describing how he rounded up his friends and "pretty much told them to fuck off, that I wasn't gay, and that they were all gonna burn in hell.
It comes as the Board of Deputies of British Jews has warned against complacency about what it describes as "the re-emergence of anti-Semitism" over the past year.
History is now a more collaborative exercise.'" (53)) It hates just about everyone it describes.
The trouble for Bell is that his song doesn't spin a tale about fictional characters; it describes future violence against specific, real people.
