Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (27 page)

"All they need
is a TV", somebody commented, "a cup of tea and a bed to
lie on. That's all".

To designate Qatar
as the host of the 2022 World Cup is one of the dumbest decisions
that a human being could ever make; absolutely absurd. I have a lot
of respect for Zinedine Zidane as a footballer but not for his role
in supporting Qatar's bid. I have nothing against Qatar; Doha is a
beautiful city with well-mannered inhabitants, but I can't help but
wonder what FIFA's Executive Committee was thinking when they awarded
the World Cup to a country with a summer temperature of 50 degrees
Celsius. Did these guys put their brains to sleep during the vote or
what? I've always suspected that there was a mechanism of corruption
at play but have no evidence to prove my hunch.

I always tell my
players: "Do what you have to do but do it intelligently,
without being caught".

I guess that if you
and I need money to survive, so do FIFA officials.

On the day following
the match I flew from Doha to Beirut to pay the Lebanese players for
the World Cup qualifier that they had lost against Singapore.

Beirut was a very
nice city, especially the Corniche, with the cliff-side cafés
that line Avenue du Général de Gaulle in front of the
Pigeon Rock. And the Lebanese women were stunning; very beautiful.
They really made the extra effort to dress up nicely and look pretty.
There were plenty of wealthy Saudi men outside the Verdun Mall trying
to lure them. But Lebanon was also visibly a war-torn country; the
tanks were parked right there, in the corner of the street. People
would sit in small chairs on the sidewalk, really tiny chairs, with a
cup of espresso coffee in their hand and would talk for hours. They
would have incredibly animated conversations while perched on those
tiny chairs; how can one sit for hours on something so small? The
Lebanese are some weird people and their women, I tell you, fuck,
they are exceptionally beautiful. While in Beirut, I met the Lebanese
players to give them their money. Since none of them could speak
English well enough, they brought along a Syrian man named Fadi who
spoke in their stead. Fadi acted as the interpreter; he had a quick
and crafty character, he
was
fluent in English and subsequently became my agent in Lebanon.

After paying the
Lebanese players their share I returned to Singapore with some cash
in hand and began preparing for the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics.
Gambling websites had begun expanding their portfolios and had
started providing fun bets to entice more customers to join the
gamblers' ranks. Trivial things like kick off were now up for odds.
Who's going to kick the ball first and start the match? In the past,
we couldn't bet on such things. How many times will a team hit the
woodwork? How many corner kicks? How many red and yellow cards?
Substitutions? Gambling companies allowed for bets up to 100 thousand
dollars on kick off alone. Even odds: 9-9. For every 100 thousand
dollars that you wagered, you could win 90 thousand; the remaining 10
thousand would, of course, go to the company to pay the agents their
commission.

The Nigerian team
was set to play the Beijing Olympic semi-final against Belgium on
August 19
^th
in
Shanghai, China. We already had links with some of their officials
and players that we had met during the Inter Continental Cup in
Malaysia just a few months before. We decided to take kick off:
Belgium. I could not return to China after trying to fix the Women's
World Cup on the previous year - Sivarajan had tried and had been
refused entrance by the Chinese authorities - so I contacted someone
in the Nigerian delegation who managed to speak to the team's
goalkeeper.

"We will pay
you 20 thousand US dollars if you make sure Nigeria doesn't kick
off", my guy said to the goalie. "You can say whatever you
want to the Belgian captain and to your captain but just make sure
that Belgium starts the match".

Dan Tan was
providing the money for our bets and for the players so he flew to
Beijing and then to Shanghai, where the match was to be played. As
for myself, I sat in a Singapore hotel room with Dan's partner and
friend whose name I do not remember watching the coin toss on
television. We were interested in the kick off alone because we
weren't going to place any bets on any other aspects of the match; we
didn't care about the final result. I don't know what the goalie said
to the captains and I don't know who won the toss because I had left
the room when it happened but, when I walked back in, Dan's friend
shrieked a triumphant: "Good. We won".

Belgium had kicked
off.

Nigeria defeated
Belgium 4-1 and proceeded to the August 23
^rd
final against Juan Roman Riquelme's Argentina. It was
kick off hysteria again for us, only this time we picked Nigeria to
start the match. My guy in the Nigerian delegation called the
goalkeeper again.

"Go to Riquelme
and tell him that you want to kick off", he said. "Tell him
that for Africans it's a good omen or something like that. Say that
you want to start the match if it's OK with him".

I was sitting in
Dan's friend's hotel room again; this time I was glued to the
television screen watching the coin toss. Nigeria's captain was
facing Riquelme, his Argentinian counterpart, for the final act of
the Olympic football tournament; the referee standing between them
flipped the coin high up in the air. He then pointed to Riquelme;
Argentina had won the toss, fuck, our balls were in our throats.

"Now we're
going to find out whether the goalie actually spoke to Riquelme",
I thought with my fingers tightly crossed.

"OK", said
Riquelme, "give Nigeria the kick off".

Riquelme's gestures
clearly showed that the whole thing was arranged. He wasn't involved,
of course, he had been duped, but he waved his hand in the direction
of the Nigerian captain as if to say: "OK, go ahead, take the
kick off if it's so important to you".

Again, we had won
our bet, for which I received a measly five thousand dollars from
Dan; greedy mother-fucker.

The main difference
between European and Asian gambling lies in the betting volumes
offered by the operators. An Asian website like IBCbet, SBObet or
Crown Net can offer up to 35 thousand euro per click for the four
first-tier leagues: England, Spain, Italy and Germany. The volume for
second-class leagues such as the French, Portuguese, Swedish and
Danish leagues is anywhere from 12 to 20 thousand euro per click.
European operators not only offer much lower volumes but they also
take much longer to confirm bets. An Asian website will confirm your
bet within a matter of seconds. It takes them less than ten minutes
to accumulate three million euro's worth of wagers on a match
whereas, if you use a European betting company, you will not be able
to accumulate bets worth 200 thousand euro in the same time frame.
Asian websites have a better performance and offer bets for almost
all the European leagues and many other leagues around the world.
Because of the limitations of European gambling operators, European
punters had trouble making enough money from the bets that they
placed. Then, when we came into the picture with access to an Asian
website, they got carried away. We provided them with a master agent
that could give them up to 400 thousand dollars worth of credit, then
we sat together with them and clicked away on the website. We were
not limited to the major leagues anymore;
we
now had access
to new opportunities
that
had
opened up in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and a wide array
of other minor leagues.

The first
match-fixer who left Singapore and ventured into Europe was Bryan,
Pal's former second-in-command. After Singapore withdrew from the
Malaysia Cup in 1994, Bryan moved to Europe with the objective of
meddling with football overseas. He stayed in England at first, but
wasn't able to do anything there, so he began traveling around Europe
looking for new opportunities. He often flew from Singapore to Milan,
Italy, and from Milan to other neighboring countries, patiently
building up his network.

By that time, a
number of European footballers who had previously played in Singapore
had returned to Europe and Bryan knew many of them from Pal's days.
Even though most of them had hung up their boots by then, they were
still involved in other football-related activities. These former
footballers helped Bryan secure the connections that he needed to
start building his network and to start fixing matches in Europe.

Dan and Bryan were
very close in those days and every time that Bryan flew to Europe,
Dan would trot along as his right-hand man and bookkeeper.

Murugan became part
of Bryan's European network sometime in 2005, when Bryan's group was
already busy fixing matches in Europe. Through Bryan, Murugan met
Dan. Around that time Bryan began manipulating the matches of a Swiss
club called FC Chiasso. He used a company, Stanton Technologies,
which he had founded almost a decade earlier in Malaysia, to offer a
sponsorship to the indebted Swiss club, then moved in to control the
club's players.

It
doesn't take much money to acquire control of a football club. I
recently read about a Dutch club called SC Veendam that went bankrupt
because they could not repay a one million dollar debt. What's one
million dollars for a match-fixer? We can raise that much money in a
single match. All SC Veendam needed
to
do was agree to
fix a single match and they would have made two million; their debt
would have been settled and they would still be playing. They could
have just played their 'total football' and provided a good number of
goals to make millions from every single match that they competed in.

I don't think that
Bryan invested massive amounts of cash to gain control of FC Chiasso,
maybe between one and three hundred thousand euro per year. The money
could be split into ten monthly installments, 10 to 30 thousand euro
per month; it's peanuts for us. If that amount buys you an agreement
with the club and you are allowed to put five or six of your players
in their lineup, then you can dictate the results and raise the money
needed in a single match.

I
don't know if the FC Chiasso ownership was aware of the scam; I don't
think that they were. We match-fixers usually devise some kind of
ploy, like a sponsorship deal, to move in and start doing business.
Stanton Technologies was the official sponsor of FC Chiasso during
the 2007-2008 season. Bryan was funding the team and fixing their
matches through players that he had placed in the club's lineup. In
order to pass the instructions to the players, Bryan needed somebody
in the team's management, so he and Dan tried to approach Michal, who
was back in the Czech Republic, but Michal was not too keen to
collaborate. He
was not a gung-ho kind of
guy like Sandro, the long-haired Croatian goalkeeper that I had
introduced to Pal in the early 90's.
Sandro
had been arrested in Singapore in 1997, following the bust that had
sent the lot of us to prison. He had been suspended from the S-League
and his passport had been impounded. He had escaped by boat through
Indonesia, just like Michal had done a few years before him. Perhaps
he was helped by Bryan in his flight from Singapore, just like Michal
had been assisted by Pal.

Bryan
called Sandro and hired him as a goalkeeper's coach in FC Chiasso,
but according to Dan's account of the events, Sandro was too
temperamental and was causing trouble so he was eventually booted. By
that time,
Bryan's fixing with FC Chiasso
had become so blatant that rumors of it had reached Singapore and the
bookies had begun refusing to accept bets on the Swiss team.

"If you take my
website", they'd say, "don't bet on FC Chiasso. If you do,
we will not pay you. And don't tell me that I didn't warn you".

It was, of course,
none of their concern to let the Interpol or anybody else know that
the club was being manipulated. In those days Singaporeans didn't
bother those who fixed matches; even if they knew, they considered it
to be none of their concern. Once they were informed, many of them
just chose to capitalize on the information. Nowadays things are
different; competition is intense and there is a lot of jealousy
among fixers. These days fixers don't honor the code of conduct
anymore.

In 2008, Bryan's
European adventure came abruptly to an end. Bryan was in business
with two Muslim brothers from Turkey, Hamdo and Saffet, the former a
football agent and the latter the owner of a Turkish football club.
According to Murugan, Bryan borrowed money from the Turkish brothers
then went missing as he had done with Pal in Malaysia. Bryan was
gambling heavily. I was told that, b
efore
boarding a flight, he would throw bets on Manchester Utd for 500
thousand, AS Roma for 300 thousand and so on. By the time his plane
had landed, he would have lost or won one million euro.
The
Turkish brothers had loaned money to Bryan because they trusted him;
after all, he had told them that he was a fellow Muslim. When he
disappeared, they called Murugan.