Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (28 page)

"Bryan is
nowhere to be found. Are you sure he's a Muslim?" they asked.

"No way, he's
not a Muslim", answered Murugan.

"Mother-fucker".

Bryan had fucked the
Turks up and was gambling their money away. But these were dangerous
guys, if you fucked with them and came back to their part of the
world, you'd be a dead man. So Bryan had to leave Europe and couldn't
come back; he gave up on football and moved to Malaysia, where he
changed his line of work. He was recently acquitted for bank fraud:
instead of making 500 thousand dollars on a fixed match, he allegedly
found a way to make 10 or 20 million dollars from bank loans.

When Bryan left
Europe, Dan took over his business. He contacted Bryan's old partners
and started to settle Bryan's debts by gradually paying by
installments. Little by little, Dan took over Bryan's business and
contacts, then began building on his network by venturing into
yet
other countries.
In this business you
can't just sit on your ass and wait for the apple to drop from the
tree; you have to dig deeper and deeper to achieve results. But
Dan
had a problem: he needed to offer higher betting volumes to his
European partners but had neither a master agent nor access to a
master agent website.

All
the Asian punters with a reputation have access to a master agent
website; it gives them
anywhere from two
to ten million dollars worth of credit. In other words, their
credibility is worth that much money.

Senior master agents
have their own special web page on mainstream gambling websites. The
head of the betting company will award the senior master agent, say,
five million dollars worth of credit because he is deemed to be a
trusted agent. The senior master agent will then break down the five
million among five of his most trusted master agents. The five
trusted master agents will in turn break down their share into 100
thousand dollar shares assigned to ten of their most trusted agents.
These agents will split their 100 thousand into 10 thousand dollar
shares and so on. This is a business based on turnover and
commission. For every punter that an agent gets to gamble, there is a
turnover for the betting company, and out of that turnover comes the
agent's commission. All of these agents survive on the commissions
that they rake in.

Only the highest
ranking agent deals directly with the betting company and it is only
the senior master agent who decides the maximum line of credit that
each sub-agent is allowed. He holds the keys to the website and
provides one with a user-name and a password worth, say, 200 thousand
Singapore dollars. Then, if one wants to bet one million dollars,
they have to log out and log in with another user ID and password
granting them another 200 thousand dollar credit line and so on.
Nobody but the senior master agent knows who the actual punter is, to
all the other agents down the line he is just another ID and
password. That's how it works.

Not everybody pays
up, of course. There are fuck-ups, but the agents will usually give a
punter enough time to come up with the money to settle his debt.

"You can pay me
monthly", they'll say, "You need time? How much time do you
need?"

Agents are also
specifically told never to gamble. If you're a gambler, you're not
going anywhere. The betting company instructs their senior master
agents and they instruct their subordinates: "Mother-fuckers.
Don't gamble your credit away".

If an agent were to
gamble, it would be like a drug dealer doing drugs; exactly the same.
At the end of the day, it is the senior master agent's problem if
people fuck him over; he is responsible, at least in part, for the
money credited to him by the gambling company.

There
are two different kinds of gambling websites that are popular in
Asia, one uses the Hong Kong dollar while the other uses the
Singapore dollar. Singapore dollar websites usually allow the senior
master agent to negotiate with the betting company's HQ on what
percentage of his credit line he is willing to fight for.

"OK,
I'm fighting 20 percent and the remaining 80 percent goes to HQ".

Let's
say you take Tottenham Hotspur to win against West Ham. With this
mechanism, the agent is only fighting 20 dollars out of every 100
dollars that he places on the Spurs for you. If he loses, the
gambling company will cover 80 dollars out of his 100 dollar loss. In
exchange for this guarantee, the company will impose smaller volumes
per click, which will make bigger bets much slower to place.

Hong
Kong dollar gambling websites, on the other hand, can adjust their
betting volumes. One click can go up to ten thousand dollars for any
league: Premier League, Serie A or even the lowest class Indian
league. With the Hong Kong dollar, the senior master agent fights
against his punters. If he loses, he pays: the betting company won't
cover his loss; it's just you against me, locked against each other,
and no one else will take your loss.

The
senior master agents are able to see what matches the punter is
hitting. If you play Manchester Utd vs Liverpool, they'll say: "OK,
you win, come pick up your money and come back another time to gamble
some more".

But
if you play a dirty league, like an Indonesian league game, and you
play a game that pays win-5, when you show up to collect your win,
they'll know what you are up to. They will pay you the first time
around, then they'll say: "Don't ever come back to me again".

The
agents are not asking you to lose, they are asking you to gamble. You
can win ten bets in a row and they will say nothing, but you cannot
play one dirty game, put your net to sleep and collect the winnings
on the following Monday. That means you're a dirty bastard and that
you're betting on fixed matches. They don't want or need a customer
like that.

No
agent will ever give a one million dollar line of credit to any
regular Joe, that's why nobody was giving
Dan
the credit that he needed: he hadn't proven his worth. Anyone can
say, "I will fix Manchester United tomorrow", but then they
would have to actually do it to gain credibility and credit. And Dan
could not become a master agent himself because he had defaulted his
payment once already; in the gambling market, when you lose your
credibility, you will never be able to win it back.

Dan used Harry, who
was a senior master agent worth at least two to three million dollars
by then, to boost his credibility in Europe. He had people in Europe,
Bryan's people, who could fix matches so he sat them down in front of
Harry.

"What is it
that you can do?" Harry asked them. "Can you fix this
match? OK. This is the amount of credit that I can give you".

Harry wanted to use
his credit facility for something that was a sure winner; all Dan had
to do was convince him that he could provide such circumstance. Harry
began traveling frequently to Europe with Dan, one week at a time.
They would travel together to watch the fixed games, then they would
return to Singapore. Harry used his master agent website to provide
user-names and passwords for Dan's associates so that they could
place their bets, ten thousand dollars per click. He could provide
the possibility of placing 200 thousand dollar bets on a single fixed
match, setting that amount as the ceiling that each user could hit.
Before Harry came on board, Dan and his partners had to lock the
match long enough to place the entire amount that they wanted to bet;
it was not uncommon, we
often
had to keep matches on hold for up to 30 minutes with no goals scored
until our bets reached the desired volume. If you were betting on
your own, 100 thousand dollars could be placed in 10-15 minutes; two
or three hundred thousand could be placed within 20 minutes. If
something happened before then, say a goal was scored, we would tell
our teams that it should not be accounted for.

"If
a goal comes in the first half-hour, you still have to provide four
more goals by the end of the match".

The year was 2008.
Dan was already his own boss and had rekindled the relationships with
Bryan's old partners. He was in touch with FC Chiasso, Sandro and
everybody else; the network was already consolidated and Harry was
providing him with the betting power that he needed. We had begun
doing business together on the African 2010 World Cup qualifiers,
then, sometime in mid-2008, Dan asked Murugan to travel to Slovenia
to collect some money from his European partners.

"Board a flight
to Zurich and then head over to Ljubljana", he ordered.

Murugan called me to
say that he was leaving for Europe, so I called Dan.

"Dan", I
said, "I'm under stress. Why don't you give me a ticket to
Slovenia so that I can travel there with Murugan. I need a break; let
me go along with him, just to chill and relax".

Dan agreed. I gave
him all my personal details, including a copy of my passport and my
address, and he got his travel agency, Cosmos Travel, to issue my
ticket.

Murugan and I flew
to Zurich, Switzerland. From there we drove to Ljubljana, Slovenia's
capital, and checked into a hotel. Dan's European partners Vinko,
Admir and Dino came to greet us at our hotel. It was the first time
that I saw them in person. Murugan, who already knew them, made the
introductions.

Vinko was a big bald
guy. At that time he was a junior coach with the Croatian club Dinamo
Zagreb. He didn't speak much English but was a laughing and jovial
fellow nonetheless; a very nice, friendly person. Admir and Dino were
both Slovenian footballers. Admir was a defender, a center back, and
was still playing in Hungary at the time. He was boastful and a bit
arrogant. Just like Pal, Admir liked to think of us as his workers
and not as his partners. Dino, whom had last played in Cyprus, was a
goalkeeper; a really big, huge man. He didn't talk much, he was
humble, soft spoken and a very nice person, compared to Admir, that
is. With the exception of Vinko, the guys all spoke English well
enough.

Murugan told them
that I was a guest, so they were really friendly with me.

"You guys go
for a massage", they suggested.

After the massage,
they took us to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

"This is Dan's
favorite restaurant", said the three, "he loves the food
here".

While at dinner, we
shared some match-fixing anecdotes and a few laughs. Admir told us
that he once approached a player's father, and that the man had some
sort of handicap. He was really good at imitating people, so he
imitated the player's father limping and we all laughed.

"You are the
first person to approach the father of a player to fix a match
instead of the player himself", someone said.

Dan's
European partners were very active in the Swiss league at that time.
One of them mentioned their connection with the Swiss club AC
Bellinzona: an Italian goalkeeper. This goalkeeper had accepted to
fix a match with them but the agreed result had not materialized.
Admir, Vinko and Dino then proceeded to threaten the goalkeeper who
filed a police report, landing them into trouble.

While
mingling with Dan's European partners, I felt like a local guy from
Singapore and Malaysia. I told them about some of my past fixes in
Asia and the good connections that I had in Africa. We were getting
to know each other, laughing over our accomplishments and sharing old
stories, but no one was going to expose anything important that they
had done on the first meeting: it is not nice for people to pry into
one's business and ask about what games one has fixed, and I didn't
want to sound like an investigator, so I didn't ask.

That evening, after
dinner, Admir, Dino and Vinko took us sightseeing in Ljubljana. After
a couple of days spent in their company, Murugan and I headed back to
Zurich. Then, as Murugan left for Singapore with Dan's money, I
remained in Switzerland for a few days. When I returned to Singapore,
I found out through Murugan that somebody had spoken to Admir, saying
everything negative that there was to say about me.

"Hey",
said Murugan, "Admir called me to ask if you have a criminal
record in Singapore and if you've been to prison before. He says that
the Slovenian immigration called him seeking information about you".

"Immigration?"
I was surprised.

"Admir said
that they asked him about your assault against Ivica Raguz with the
hockey stick", added Murugan.

"It cannot be
the immigration", I replied, "if the Slovenian border
control had knowledge of my criminal history they would not have
allowed me across the border in the first place. They would have
repatriated me straight back to Singapore".