Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (2 page)

I like Wilson. I came to have a
deepening and growing liking for and appreciation of him throughout
the book, an empathy and sympathy for the path he took in the daily
battle for survival, its labyrinthine twists and turns. His
philosophy is perhaps crude but authentic: we are all animals who
will prey off each other when and if necessary. It is hard to dispute
this, even with the highest of moral and altruistic intentions, when
the chips are really down, to use a relevant metaphor. All you have
to do is watch a good programme on animal habits and survival or
listen to or read a professional commentary on the widespread,
depressing state of the world today, the abysmal living conditions of
the great poor, the cynical, hard-nosed indifference of the great
rich, the spiritually impoverished state of religion, under corrupt
politicians and hardened, bureaucratic church leaders, without
exception, almost. Theirs too is a different, much more pernicious
kind of gambling, with far more serious consequences where the
un-named stakes are considerably higher in human terms.

Wilson has opened my eyes and
mind to a different world than the one I envisaged as a child. I
cannot condemn him for what he did, the path he followed. Who am I to
do so. He sets it out with compassion, kindness and gentleness. And
with lucidity and frankness, great self-honesty and awareness, as he
outlines the devious paths he took or life took him on. There is a
joke I once heard from a serious gambler: an Irishman and an
Englishman, friends, who, on their last boozy night in Rome, find out
that the Pope is dead when they trip over his prone body in the
narrow streets around St Peter's. Sworn to secrecy for three days (so
that a 'suitable' death scene can be arranged!) by a cardinal, they
return to London and decide that putting a bet on the Pope's death
won't be breaking their promise. Everyone would simply think they
were crazy. They go their separate ways and meet up again six months
later. Tommy drives up in a chauffeur driven Mercedes and sees a man
he takes to be Paddy sitting by the railings of the fancy hotel. It
is indeed Paddy and he readily admits to be begging 'for a few bob'
to put on a horse that evening. Perplexed, Tommy asks him if he
didn't place the bet on the Pope's death, since it was his idea and
suggestion in the first place. Paddy's reply is classic, "Ah, I
did indeed, but sure didn't I go and do the double on the Archbishop
of Canterbury!"

There is much of Wilson in Paddy
and much of Paddy in Wilson throughout the book. The joke has always
seemed to me to get right to the heart of the gambler's psychology. A
certain bet, a sure thing, doesn't ever have the thrill that the risk
involves. Wilson is a prime character and player in every sense in
this bizarre world that the book portrays and exposes. May the rest
of his strange, perhaps unenviable, yet deeply colourful, life grant
him the peace he would seem (so richly!) to deserve.

Prof. Tony Brophy

La Vela

Trevignano Romano

KELONG KINGS

When they fixed me up in Finland,
they thought it was just going to be a
Wilson-Raj-send-him-back-to-Singapore story; locked up and out of the
picture for five long years. They never realized that match-fixing
was going to be uncovered; it never occurred to them that the police
would check my mobile phone, my laptop and go through all of my
belongings.

I had just landed in Vantaa
airport, Helsinki, Finland, from the small arctic town of Rovaniemi,
when they stopped me. Only me. So I immediately sensed that something
was amiss. It wasn't really a random check; they were already after
me, following my every move. Somehow they had missed me in Rovaniemi;
perhaps they didn't expect me to take the first flight out at six
o'clock in the morning. So when I showed up in Vantaa airport the
police stopped me, checked my passport and escorted me down to the
airport's Police holding bay. Then an officer came in.

"You're traveling under a
false passport", he said.

The officer was holding a picture
of me in his hand; a big picture. I couldn't recognize the T-shirt
that I wore in the photo.

"Where the fuck did I get
that T-shirt from", it looked like an old picture.

The officer examined the photo
carefully, then began scrutinizing me.

"This is not the guy".

Old photo.

He checked for a cut on my
forehead; I have a little scar just below my hairline, but the
officer couldn't spot it.

"No, no, no", he shook
his head. "This is not the guy".

But the police in Rovaniemi
insisted that they hold on to me, so there I was, sitting in the
Vantaa Helsinki airport's holding bay.

On the previous day, the police
had ambushed the wrong Indian guy in a Rovaniemi hotel.

"Hey, are you Wilson Raj
Perumal?"

"I'm Perumal", the man
said as he raised his hands over his head, "but I'm not Wilson
Raj".

Someone had given the Finnish
authorities all of my true details: Singaporean, Indian origin, my
real name, my picture. The police had called all the hotels in town.

"When he checks in",
they demanded, "please contact us immediately".

Somebody had been saving this old
photo of me for this... But who?

The night before my arrest I had
an argument by e-mail with a Singaporean guy from Macao called Benny.

"Maybe it was Benny", I
thought, "he's quite influential".

Our discussion was over money
that I owed him, 1.1 million Singapore dollars, roughly 900 thousand
US dollars. I'd lost the amount while gambling on Premier League
matches and had repaid Benny close to 800 thousand dollars.

"I'll settle the 300
thousand left, you just hang on", I wrote to Benny. "Just
bear with me".

"No", he replied,
"people are chasing me for this money".

"I paid you 800 thousand
already", I wrote. "You think I'm not going to pay the
remaining 300? Just give me a couple of months and I'll clear you".

"I know what name you're
using", he threatened, "and what passport you're using:
Raja Morgan Chelliah".

"Fuck you!" I answered.
"You can do whatever you want".

Now I was thinking: "It must
be this mother-fucker".

But why would he want to do this?
If I get arrested, he's not going to get his money back.

My name is Wilson
Raj Perumal, I'm an Indian Tamil born in Singapore.

Singapore is a
developed country today; it was not in 1965, when I was born. In that
same year, Singapore broke away from Malaysia and obtained its
independence. My father and mother were born Malaysians but, after
the partition, they chose to live in Singapore and eventually became
citizens of the newborn state. We kids were born Singaporeans.

I was the third of
five children: I had an older brother and an older sister; a younger
brother and a younger sister; I was exactly in the middle. As a
child, I was a kampong boy; in Malaysian, the term 'kampong' means
village. My family had a small strip of land in Chua Chu Kang, a
rural area in western Singapore with large pig farms and
cultivations. We didn't live very deep into the farmland; we were on
the outskirts, closer to town, and right next-to the train track that
goes from Malaysia to Tanjong Pagar, the heart of Singapore's Central
Business District.

Ours was a
below-average family. During my childhood, my father struggled to
find a job, then became a contractor; he opened up his own company
and would tender public contracts for streetlight painting, cable
laying and such things. He was not into gambling; he was a straight
man who did voluntary police work. Father was also a black belt in
Judo and a martial arts instructor.

I also had plenty of
relatives in Johor, Malaysia, across the Johor Strait. Most of them
were rubber tappers who had worked for the British during colonial
times. When Malaysia became independent in 1957, my relatives in
Johor began serving the local government and lived in a rubber
estate. They had rubber trees, plenty of them, and collected the
latex that dripped out of the bark to sell. When school was out, I
would travel to Malaysia and help them. Work started at four o'clock
in the morning and ended at one o'clock in the afternoon. then we
would all go home to rest for the remainder of the day.

During the 1970s,
Singapore was an extremely underdeveloped country where people had to
dispose of shit manually. The Chinese were entrusted with the vile
task. You would be sitting in the restroom doing your business when
the tray used to collect the excrement would suddenly disappear from
underneath your ass.

"Fuck. Where's
the tray?"

Then some Chinese
guy would slide a clean tray in and dispose of your shit manually.

There were cars but
we had none for ourselves. We had electricity but no tap water in our
home until 1975. When I was a young boy, my mother would travel five
kilometers just to fetch clean water to drink. Fortunately, we owned
a water well with a pulley just outside the house that we used for
bathing and all other purposes.

As a young boy I
attended the Teck Whye Primary school, which was within walking
distance from my home. During school holidays, my mother would
sometimes call me and say: "Wilson, why don't you go sell some
coconuts?"

We owned a small
garden with jackfruit - a large fruit with smooth thorns that you can
cut in half and sell - rambutan, durian, coconut trees, plantains and
other fruits. We also had curry trees and a long vegetable that goes
by the Tamil name of 'murungai'. Indian women cook murungai because
it's very good for erections. My mother would hire a guy specialized
in climbing coconut trees and he would collect the coconuts for us.
Then my brothers and I would spend the afternoons peeling them and I
would go out into the neighborhood to sell the peeled coconuts and
other fruits to my mother's friends for small amounts of money.
School holidays were also the chance for me to look for small jobs in
the industrial area near my home; I would use the extra money to buy
school books or a new school uniform.

There was a lot of
mud and a lot of water everywhere in Chua Chu Kang. Floods were very
frequent, especially during the rainy season. During flooding, people
would often die electrocuted by the short-circuiting wires from
fallen lamp-posts. When I was seven years old, there was a flood that
covered the entire neighborhood with a thick layer of mud. We kids
went out onto the streets to help people push-start their vehicles
and they paid us small change for the trouble.

Just beside my house
was an old drainage
basin
that would overflow whenever there were
heavy rains. On such days, my mother would not allow us to go
outside, so I would sit in the kitchen with my legs stretched out
onto the ledge of the window and watch the objects that floated by in
the current. I observed the water's surface attentively, looking for
balls or anything else worth keeping. There was a tiny wooden bridge
that spanned across our property and over the drainage basin
which people used as a short-cut to reach the other side
of our neighborhood. The bridge was quite narrow and extremely risky
to cross, especially when the drainage basin was overflowing. When I
was 12 or 13, I saw an umbrella float by in the current; a new
umbrella. It was turned upside down.

"Fuck" I
thought as I made to get up from my seat. "That's a new
umbrella".

Then I saw a head, a
girl's head, pop up and go down again among the foamy ripples. I
called my mother and together we ran outside and chased the umbrella
to see if we could find the girl and help her but the current was
just too strong. She must have slipped and fallen while crossing the
little bridge. On the following day, her lifeless body was found in
the Kranji Reservoir up north.

The train tracks
next to my house were another fatal landmark. When I was a child, one
of my mother
's
friends committed suicide by standing on the tracks before an
oncoming train to escape the abuses of her violent husband. Young
couples that were denied the possibility to marry by their respective
families also took their lives on those deadly tracks, as did our
German Shepherd when I was 17 years old.

In those years we
didn't have a television set so we went to our neighbor's home to
watch Tamil movies on TV. Father also liked to watch football
matches, as many of his friends were top football referees in
Singapore. One night, when I was about 11 years old, he woke me up in
my bed.

"Come", he
said, "sit next to me. Let's watch the football match".

It was the first
football game that I ever watched; an FA Cup final. I cannot remember
distinctly but I think that Manchester United lost the match 1-0.
They attacked and attacked for 80 full minutes; one counter-attack
and they lost. I became a United fan from that day onward; my whole
family supported them. But my all-time favorite football player was
Diego Armando Maradona, who then played for SSC Napoli. To me he will
always be special; the greatest footballer living. I tried not to
miss any of his matches. Save for the World Cup, there was no live
football on TV in Singapore, so I would skip all of my other
activities to watch Maradona's delayed games. He was my idol; a true
football genius. I also admired other prominent footballers like
Gheorghe Hagi, Johan Cruyff, Enzo Francescoli and Eder. I was really
into sports when I was young; apart from footballers, my heroes were
Sebastian Coe, Muhammad Ali and John McEnroe.