The Big Fix

For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM

SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011

The FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing football apart. Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, in the unglamorous dust, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Unlike Dubai, Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of football. Their specialty was illusion, and events in Sharjah were about to give them another lucrative ninety-minute return.

The match set for that day – March 26, 2011 – was an exhibition, or friendly, between the national teams of Kuwait and Jordan. It was the sort of game that took place hundreds of times each year around the world, with limited notice and consequence. National team coaches often looked upon these contests as little more than vigorous practice. Interested criminal groups from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, on the other hand, considered them the cornerstones of an extensive commercial enterprise.

Now Kuwait versus Jordan was forming into the front line in a gathering war. On one side were organized criminal syndicates, which were making hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions, the total amount a drop in the opaque, trillion-dollar pool of football betting – by manipulating game results. On the other side were football administrators, who were beginning to accept that match-fixing was the stunning sports scandal of our time, a fundamental threat to the most popular game in the world.

FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), football’s international governing body, had received information that a collection of known criminals had arranged to manipulate the outcome of the Sharjah match. This was no great surprise, as inflated final scores, questionable penalty calls, and strange betting patterns had been occurring with great frequency in recent seasons. What was novel about this Sharjah match was the fact that FIFA, directed by a newly hired security chief, was operating a clandestine investigation. The time had come to take action.

When the two FIFA investigators entered Khalid Bin Mohammed Stadium, shortly before game time, there was no one else there. It had been a challenge to gather reliable information about the match, even for FIFA, which had sanctioned the competition. The date, the kickoff time, the location – all were in doubt. The websites for the Kuwaiti and Jordanian teams provided conflicting information. Gambling websites did as well. Some sources even listed the match as having been canceled. That’s what it looked like to the two FIFA men as they passed through the wide-open stadium gates. Nobody was selling tickets. The stands were empty. The FIFA investigators took seats in the grandstand, and they noticed that there were no TV cameras or production vehicles present. The match had not been advertised in the local press. In an age of constant coverage and information, it felt like this game was going to take place only in the imagination.

Eventually, the players filtered into the stadium, as did a few fans. Several men milled about on the edge of the playing field, and the FIFA operatives took particular notice of them. They recognized the men, one from an Emirati promotional company, another from a similar firm in Egypt. They had helped arrange the match, though they were ultimately incidental to FIFA’s investigation. Instead, FIFA was interested in the architects of this fix, a notorious group from Singapore, which operated unchecked in dozens of countries across the world. The FIFA investigators noticed two known Singaporean fixers enter the stadium and take seats in the VIP stands. The match was set to begin.

The Sharjah fix had originated in the mind of the most prolific match-fixer in the world, a man of mysterious movements who had manipulated hundreds of matches in more than sixty countries, making untold sums for the syndicate in Asia. But the syndicate had betrayed him. Police had discovered details of the Sharjah fix sketched on a piece of paper lying on his hotel room bed in a Finnish town along the Arctic Circle.

This information had led FIFA’s investigators to Sharjah. They planned, at halftime, to barge in unannounced to the locker rooms of the players and officials, threatening suspension – or prosecution – unless the second half was contested honestly. But although the two FIFA men had attempted to contact officials from the UAE Football Association, their calls and emails had gone unreturned. For now they were relegated to the stands, without the proper credential to visit other areas of the stadium. They speculated that some of the UAE football officials may have knowledge of the upcoming fix. Plenty of national football federations around the world had gone into the lucrative business of fixing with the Singapore syndicate itself.

The purpose of match-fixing was betting fraud. Fixers compromised players, directing them to allow the other team to score. Fixers bribed referees to hand out red cards and penalty kicks, thus influencing the outcomes of matches. The syndicate placed bets based on the timing of these planned events. The fixers defrauded both the bookmaker, who was always one step behind them, and the fan, who believed that what he was watching was real. There was also the player, often coerced into participating. When play began between Kuwait and Jordan, activity on the international betting market revealed that the fix was in.

At some point in the 1990s, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of FIFA, began characterizing the numerous football players and administrators around the world, collectively, in his public comments, as the “football family.” FIFA, headquartered in Zurich, is the organization that is responsible for staging the World Cup every four years. Among the patchwork of federations and confederations that control and administer football, FIFA carries the most weight. It is the organization that most football people petition in order to solve a dispute, or to dispense a handout. But FIFA is hardly the guardian of goodwill that Blatter’s benevolent terminology suggests. FIFA is registered in Switzerland as a charity, yet it does not operate as a traditional nonprofit organization, with its income of $1 billion per year and its multifarious corporate sponsorship deals and TV contracts. Nor does FIFA behave like a modern business, with standard corporate checks and balances. Instead, it resides somewhere in the imprecise middle, and for some of its top executives this has been just fine, ambiguity being the facilitator of exploitation.

In the last decade, the imprecise way that global football is administered has exposed it to crisis. Match-fixing has overtaken the sport. It is not the fault of FIFA that international organized crime has targeted football. But considering the criminal nature of match-fixing, Blatter’s words have assumed a new meaning. This is football’s modern “family”:

Operation Last Bet rocked the Italian Football Federation, as fifteen clubs and twenty-four players, coaches, refs, and officials were implicated in match-fixing. Turkish police arrested nearly one hundred players, while the Turkish Football Federation excluded its club, Fenerbahce, from the UEFA Champions League, questioning how the team managed to win eighteen of its last nineteen games to take the domestic title. The Zimbabwe Football Association banned eighty players from its national team selection based on suspicion of match-fixing. Lu Jun, the first Chinese official to referee a World Cup game, was jailed for five and a half years for taking bribes totaling $128,000, enhancing the meaning of his nickname, the “golden whistle.”

In South Korea, prosecutors charged fifty-seven people with match-fixing; two players subsequently committed suicide, rather than face the shame. Two Brazilian refs were handed prison terms and the Brazilian Football Confederation was fined $8 million for their roles in a series of fixes. As soon as eight Estonians received a one-year ban, a court charged another dozen with fixing. German police recorded Croatian criminals discussing by phone their plans to fix games in Canada. The disgraced head of the Chinese Football Association is currently serving time in a penal colony for match-fixing. Hungarian police arrested more than fifty people for fixing, though before they could apprehend the director of a club under scrutiny, he jumped to his death. The Czechs are prosecuting two referees for fixing.

Macedonia is so corrupt that few bookies will take a bet on a game in its domestic league. The executives at a Bulgarian club, Lokomotiv Plovdiv, ordered their players and coaches to take a lie detector test after a loss. Georgian players, team owners, and bookies are behind bars for match-fixing. In Malaysia, a few dozen players are currently in custody. Kenyan, Lebanese, and Tanzanian refs have worked fixes. Polish authorities have prosecuted a dozen players for fixing. The Russian government has established a committee to eradicate match-fixing from its leagues. The prime minister of Belize ordered a match-fixing probe into the country’s football association.

Chinese and Italian organized crime have targeted the Belgian league for years. Bosnia’s league is targeted by Bosnia’s criminals. Switzerland banned nine players for fixing. Italian prosecutors pinned fixing charges on Gennaro “Rino” Gattuso, a popular, World Cup-winning midfielder and former star for AC Milan. Gattuso said he was prepared “to go into the town square and kill myself in front of everyone if I should be found guilty of such a crime.” Two scandals rocked English football this past fall, one involving Singaporean fixers, the other a former Premier League player. Germany is prosecuting the most famous fixing case of all, in Bochum, which has revealed that a network of criminal match-fixers has been manipulating football in every corner of the world for the better part of the last decade.

Could the state of affairs be this bad? Unequivocally, yes. Today, there are active police investigations into match-fixing in more than sixty countries, which is about one-third of the world. Half of the national and regional associations affiliated with FIFA have reported incidents of fixing. One can only imagine the amount of fixes that have transpired with only the perpetrators in the know. The fixing of international football matches has become as epidemic as drug trafficking, prostitution, and the trade in illegal weapons. This is happening in a sport where the players walk from the locker room to the field hand in hand with small children, as though football were a refuge of innocence and moral purity. Overwhelming evidence presents a contradictory argument: the most popular game in the world is the most corrupt game in the world.

Gambling is to blame. The market in sports betting has ballooned in the last decade, its illegal portion rivaling long-established criminal enterprises. Interpol claims that $1 trillion is bet on football games per year. Asian bookies suggest a much higher figure. The football industry itself – the TV contracts and sponsorship deals that comprise the business of the game – is estimated at an annual value of just $25 billion.

Unpoliced, driven by easy profits, match-fixing has grown out of control. Superior clubs lie down for inferior clubs that are trying to avoid relegation to a lower division of competition. Coaches, players, refs, and government officials collude for the fix. International qualifiers result in outrageous scores: 11–1, 7–0. The opportunity for easy profits drove early, creative attempts to manipulate results. On November 3, 1997, in an English Premier League match against Crystal Palace, West Ham scored to tie the game at two all in the sixty-fifth minute. Abruptly, the stadium lights went out. The same thing happened when Wimbledon played Arsenal a month later. A Chinese-Malaysian gang had paid the technicians at the stadia to cut the power when the game had reached the desired score. Enveloping greed has caused the players themselves to take severe measures to enforce the fix. In a 2010 Italian match, a goalkeeper allegedly drugged his own teammates at halftime so that opponents could easily outrun them.

The players are inconsequential. They are tools of the syndicate bosses who operate in the shadows. For the established criminals, international football has been a free zone of activity, a territory of endless opportunities for manipulation. Each of the nearly two hundred countries that FIFA recognizes has a professional league and a national team, which is classified into several age groups. The total worldwide number of national and professional football teams exceeds ten thousand. Multiply this figure by the number of players per team, then add referees, club officials, and federation administrators, and the entry points for a match-fixer are voluminous and as ever changing as a club roster from season to season. There is no centralized control, no disciplinary commissioner. International football is a loosely administered network of different languages and customs and laws and economies and currencies that connects the world, yet barely hangs together. This variance gives the game its special charm. It also allows dark motivations to flourish. Criminal fixing syndicates have infiltrated the game of football so fundamentally, manipulating the betting market to their advantage, that they have called into question the outcome of every match in the world.

The opening moments of the Kuwait-Jordan match elapsed at a brisk pace. There were several heavy tackles. A man sitting behind the FIFA investigators laughed, remarking that people from Kuwait and Jordan disliked each other. The referee made a questionable penalty call in the game’s twenty-third minute, when the ball ricocheted off the hand of an unwitting Jordanian player. Kuwait converted. The FIFA operatives looked at the Singaporean fixers in the crowd, but their body language revealed nothing. It didn’t have to. The evidence was in the numbers.

There are several ways to fix a match. One of the most popular is to wager on the total number of goals scored. If a bookie lists the over-under at 2.5, and a fixer bets on the over, he will direct his compromised players or referee to make certain that three goals or more are scored in the game. If he bets on the under, then he will order two or fewer goals.

The fixing syndicate operated on the in-game gambling market, which allowed for betting as a match progressed. At the opening of the Sharjah match, 188Bet, one of the largest bookmakers in the world, began taking a preponderance of bets that supported three goals or more. The 188Bet odds for three or more goals started at 2.00, or a 50 percent probability. At the match’s eighteenth minute, the match still scoreless, the odds for three or more goals decreased to 1.88, or a 53 percent chance. These figures revealed a telling detail. At the beginning of the match, with ninety minutes in which to score three goals, 188Bet calculated the chance of three or more goals at 50 percent. Paradoxically, after eighteen minutes had elapsed, the chance of three or more goals was now greater, even though there was less time – only 80 percent of the match remained – in which to score them.

The bookies at 188Bet had not determined that an outcome of three or more goals was now more likely. What they had done was moved the odds in reaction to the overwhelming wagers they were receiving on three or more goals. It is the bookmaker’s goal to level his book, taking equivalent action on either side of a proposition in order to reduce his exposure and profit from his margin. And a bookie knows that his exposure is highest when he is taking a large amount of action on an illogical proposition. He knows that the match is fixed, as the bookies at 188Bet are likely to have understood as they re-calculated in-game odds for the Sharjah match following the bets placed.

As the game neared halftime, only one goal had been scored. In the thirty-eighth minute, the referee called another penalty. This one appeared legitimate, as a Kuwaiti defender tackled a Jordanian forward in the box. The goalkeeper for Kuwait saved the ensuing kick. However, the linesman flagged him for early movement. Jordan scored on the retake. At the half, the match was tied at one all. With forty-five minutes to play, all the syndicate needed to win its bets was one more goal. Easy. But then something happened.

In the grandstand, the FIFA investigators contemplated attempting to bluff their way into the locker rooms to confront the referee and players. As they did so, they watched the man from the Emirati promotional company climb the stairs of the VIP stands. He spoke with the Singaporean fixers. As FIFA suspected, the match referee had received a tip that the match was under observation. The players returned to the field for the second half, and the Singaporeans left the stadium. Midway through the second half, the score was still 1–1.

Suddenly, in the seventy-first minute, the betting action reversed. There was no longer heavy action at 188Bet for more than three goals, although there were nineteen minutes remaining in which to score for the third time. Warned that FIFA investigators were present in the stadium, the syndicate had pulled the fix, pulled its bets. The match finished in a 1–1 draw.

From the chatter that FIFA’s security team subsequently collected in Singapore, syndicate members were confused, wondering who had leaked word of the Sharjah operation. The syndicate had lost roughly $500,000 on the Sharjah match, according to FIFA intelligence. Considering the size of the football betting market, this wasn’t a considerable number. However, the event in Sharjah was significant. No one had ever fought the syndicate before. Sure, there had been traditional prosecutions, investigations conducted after the crime had been committed and the profits earned. But never before had FIFA conducted a counter-fixing operation in real time. Asian fixers and their European partners had operated freely for a decade. Everything was about to change.

CHAPTER 2

SINGAPORE, 1983

The best football players are poor. Wilson Raj Perumal came to this understanding decades ago, sitting in the grandstand of Singapore’s Jalan Besar Stadium. It was the mid-1980s, and the old grounds, near the city-state’s Little India neighborhood, were hosting a domestic league match. Perumal had no rooting interest. For him, it would always be about the odds, the line, the payout.

During the World War II occupation of Singapore, Japanese authorities set up camp at Jalan Besar, where they culled the Chinese from the population, marking them for summary execution. Now, to Perumal, it was the Chinese who stood out most of all. Sipping tea, betting on matches (contrary to local statutes), they orchestrated the action that worked Perumal’s mind toward opportunity.

Perumal had plenty of friends who played organized football. He understood the game. What he didn’t understand was how these old men had been taking his money for the past half year. Perumal had started betting for fun. It was something to do with his friends from school. He didn’t comprehend what was known as hang cheng betting, which was determined not by which team won the game, but by an agreed-upon value of one’s bet. The line dictated the score by which one team had to win, and the odds corresponded to the likelihood of that event coming to pass, establishing the amount of a winning bet. Once he learned this, Perumal easily recognized the pattern of his losses. Each time Perumal placed a bet, the Chinese men changed the odds and the line to suit themselves. They had been manipulating the market depending on which team Perumal chose, which bet he wanted to place. They had been rigging the action all along. Determined on winning back the money he had lost, and more besides, Perumal got an idea.

Theft was the first charge the cops hung on Perumal, for stealing a pair of football cleats. This was in 1983. Eighteen years old, Perumal lived with his family in Choa Chu Kang, a farming area in Singapore’s northwest. His parents traced their roots to Chennai, the capital city of India’s heavily populated Tamil Nadu state, a wellspring of cheap labor to Asia and the Middle East. They were part of a long line of convicts and unskilled workers who had made their way from India to Singapore during the century leading up to World War II, when the two territories existed under British colonial governance. Perumal’s father, a simple laborer who painted street curbs and laid cable, was a black belt in judo. Perumal never took to such discipline. Instead, the lasting impression that his father gave him was how difficult it was to feed five children on honest industry. “Some days we had to make it on one meal,” Perumal says. He was the middle child, the one who gets lost in the shuffle, the one who finds other ways to survive. He attended Teck Whye, the local school where he ran the 800 meters and paid passing attention to his studies, more interested in the dubious extracurricular activities that awaited him after school.

Perumal and the Singaporean state were born the same year, 1965, though their characters instantly diverged. Upon exiting the British realm, Singapore’s leaders placed the country on a path of economic vigor. Shipping, manufacturing, and industrialization transformed Singapore into one of the four Asian Tigers, a center of international business and finance. Underlying this growth was Singapore’s commitment to discipline, its blunt approach to crime. Unlike many of its neighbors, stricken with the chaos of liberalism or the stagnation of autocracy, the Singaporean city-state struck a balance: tough on crime, friendly to business. Singapore became a place where the sinner was punished disproportionately to his sin, so that the innocent could prosper likewise beyond proportion.