Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (3 page)

My English was very
bad back then. I mean, although English was our first language in
school - mathematics, history, science... all were taught in English
- there was really no good command of the language around when we
were young. We all spoke broken English and the Chinese were the
worst at it. They were so unrefined that we called the boys 'Ah Beng'
and the girls 'Ah Lian': The equivalent of 'rogue' and 'bimbo' in the
local street dialect Hokkien. When we met outside school, we would
blurt out: "Hey Ah Beng. Where you go, la?"

"Ho, hey".

"How are you,
la?"

We also mixed other
languages with English: Tamil, Chinese, Malay; sometimes within the
span of a single sentence.

"Na bei
chee-bye. What the fuck is this fellow doing? Lu ki ma".

Vulgarity was very
common, especially among the Chinese. First thing in the morning,
they would burst out "Na bei chee-bye", which literally
means "your mother's pussy" in Hokkien. That was their way
of wishing you a good morning.

In school, we all
studied our mother tongues as second languages. It wasn't compulsory;
an Indian guy could choose to study Mandarin and a Chinese could
learn Tamil. Well, I've never actually met a Chinese guy in Singapore
who studied Tamil but many Indians chose to study Mandarin. I studied
Tamil as my second language but I can also speak Malaysian, a bit of
Chinese and Sinhalese. I didn't bother to learn Filipino or Thai;
most Singaporeans who know Filipino or Thai are either pimps -
prostitution is legal in Singapore - or have a penchant for women
from those countries.

I placed my first
bet at around the age of 13. I picked Manchester United to win in an
FA Cup final against my neighbor, who was much older than me. He lost
and refused to pay but I was too young to stand up to him and claim
my money. At that time I also played cards with my friends and
occasionally did some petty betting. Our favorite pastime was 'si ki
phuay', a Chinese card game that resembles poker. Gambling was
illegal in Singapore and our parents didn't let us play cards for
money so we had to find secluded places around town to play our
games. When I was 16, as we were playing cards behind our school, the
police suddenly ambushed us. A friend and I took off in the same
direction with a policeman giving chase after us. When we were out in
the open, the officer aimed his gun in our direction and shouted:
"The two of you. Stop or I'll shoot".

My friend slowed
down and looked back, thinking of turning himself in, but I had a
different plan.

"You asshole",
I yelled at him, "he's not going to shoot you for playing cards.
Just keep running".

We managed to get
away and return home.

On a different
occasion, two friends and I were arrested for playing cards on the
staircases of a shopping center and were taken to the police station.
Since there were no policemen of Indian origin in sight, I started
speaking to my friends in Tamil.

"Look", I
suggested, "when we record our statements, let's say that only
two of us were gambling while the third person was simply watching".

"Who shall we
say was watching?" they inquired.

"Me of course,
you dumb fuckers", I replied. "I'm the one who came up with
the idea".

I was not made for
academic studies, I was an average student:
n
either
too smart nor too dumb. The only time when I would really sit down
and study were the final three weeks before exams, that
was
it. No one had ever taken the time to drill the
importance of an education into me.

My real talent was
in sports and, although I had a passion for football, I was persuaded
to take up athletics by my school teachers. I had come in second at a
cross-country race and one of the coaches of the school's athletics
team recruited me. My school had a reputation for forging excellent
runners dating back to the early 70's so athletics had precedence
over any other discipline. I was not born a talented athlete, it took
hard work; I would wake up at four o'clock in the morning and run 10
to 15 kilometers before heading to school. After school was finished
,
I would rest a bit and then head for the athletics'
track for further training. I dreamed of winning the inter-school
championship. I ran middle-distance, the 800 meters, in about 1
minute and 58 seconds and the 1500 meters in 4 minutes and 7 seconds;
not too shabby for a school boy. I didn't have a proper trainer and
lacked guidance in my diet but I trained among professional athletes
who competed on longer distances. My coach at the time was a very
nice man who sacrificed a good portion of his time and money on his
pupils without getting anything in return. His name was Mr.
Sivalingam and he allowed me to train with a group of national
athletes belonging to a top club called Swift Athletes Association.
Training was tough and exhausting; when our sessions were over, we
would all go to a hawker center - an open-air food court - nearby to
buy some food and drinks. My teenage life was focused on sports;
nobody bothered to tell me that there was no future in what I was
doing. Had I broken the world record, there would have been no
special treatment to be expected; only much later did I realize that
most of the friends with whom I used to train and compete either
abandoned athletics after the end of school or went on to become
Physical Education teachers.

While in school, my
other extra-curricular activity was the boy-scouts. I can still
recite our promise to God, to the Republic of Singapore and to Scout
Law. As boy-scouts, we had access to the keys of certain locked
premises on school campus, including the Audio-Visual Aid (AVA) room,
that we tidied periodically to impress the headmaster. One day a
friend and fellow boy-scout managed to copy the AVA room's keys so
that we could spend the weekends there watching movies until late at
night. During one of those evenings my friends and I decided to steal
a VHS video recorder from the room then went downtown to sell it for
five hundred Singapore dollars. We divided the booty equally among
us. The year was 1984 and I was 18 years old; at that time, going
downtown was a big thrill for us. With the five hundred dollars in
our pockets, we went to watch a movie in the city; I can't remember
what film it was. When the theft was discovered, the school filed a
police report but no arrests were made. The Principal marveled as to
how a VHS recorder had gone missing without a proper break-in.

After this incident,
some of my friends continued to spend their nights inside the school;
they brought outsiders with them and planned a massive break-in. By
then, I had completed my secondary school and begun my
Pre-University. I was attending Arts and Social Sciences; had I gone
on to University and obtained my degree, I would probably be a
teacher today, but fate had another path in mind for me.

During a weekend, my
former schoolmates entered the school premises and stole every single
electronic device in the AVA room. They then
focused
their attention to the school's canteen and took food and drinks to
quell their
hunger and thirst. One of my
friends, whose name was Rajah, stole a pair of used football boots
that had been stored in the canteen room. The idiot then wore them at
an inter-class football competition and their original owner happened
to see them on his feet.

"Hey", he
shouted, "those are my boots".

We were all friends.
Had I been present, I would have settled the matter with an apology
and without any further consequences, but my friend Rajah was too
stubborn to give in and return the ill-gotten gain.

"No",
Rajah retorted, "these are my boots".

At which point, the
owner of the boots, knowing that they were his, complained to the
owner of the canteen, with whom he had left the boots for
safekeeping. The canteen owner reported to the school Principal and
the Principal called the police. Rajah was interrogated and claimed
that he had bought the boots outside of the school's campus. The
person who, in Rajah's version, had sold him the boots, another
friend of mine named Maniam, was then picked up by the police and
given the 'cold treatment' until he admitted his involvement in the
break-in.

If you are wondering
what the 'cold treatment' is, let me enlighten you as to how the
Singapore police carried out its investigations in those days. If
they had the slightest hint of your involvement in a crime and you
happened to deny the wrongdoing or minimize your role, you would get
the 'cold treatment'. This meant that you were forced to take a
shower in the early hours of
the
day, say at four in the morning, then, while you were
soaking wet, you were made to stand before an air-conditioner with
the cold wind blowing against your b
are
skin while wearing nothing but your underwear.
If
that
was not enough to convince you to
talk, they would move on to the second stage: the police would beat
you without leaving any external marks, something that they were well
trained to do and, since you would undergo a medical examination
before being taken to court, the doctors would turn a blind eye to
any eventual bruises on your body.

After receiving the
cold treatment, Maniam sang like a bird and the cat was out of the
bag:
f
ootball
boots, VHS video recorder and all. While my schoolmates were being
picked up left and right by the police, I was away in Malaysia to
participate in an athletics event, the ASEAN Schools Athletics
Competition. Upon returning to Singapore, I received an invitation to
present myself at the police station, so my father accompanied me
there. My friends had spilled the beans and had fingered me as their
accomplice. We were all charged with burglary and I was put on
probation. I was 18 years old then and, until that moment, my parents
had thought that I was a goody two-shoes. My father tried to ignore
the incident but my mother didn't:
the
moment I walked into the house she began throwing
whatever she could get her hands on at me. To make things worse,
having represented the Singapore schools in an international sports
event, I made the local headlines.

"ASEAN school
athlete charged with house breaking".

Fuck, how can you
show your face in school after your name appears in the local paper
for theft? Unlucky bastard. I was so humiliated that I decided to
change school.

Upon completing my
A-level examination at the end of Pre-University, I began my National
Military Service. It was a two-and-a-half year mandatory service that
every Singaporean citizen had to undergo. As an athlete, I attended
special training sessions and could avoid serving in the military
camp most of the time. During the first three months of service we
underwent basic military training. It was tough but I enjoyed the new
experience. We learned unarmed combat, how to handle an M-16 rifle
and how to fire on moving targets. It was during this time that I
tried to make my way into the school of midshipmen.

"I want to be a
naval officer", I thought. "I want to sign up".

Some of my close
friends were already in the Navy; wearing the white uniform and round
hat of a naval officer was one of my dreams. I was among the best
physical trainees they had; I had won all the awards that a school
athlete could possibly win. Even among the servicemen, I was the
fastest 2.4 km runner and the second fastest when it came to
obstacles. When I applied, the Navy ran my ID through the system.

"You cannot
sign up because of your criminal record", they said. "Sorry,
but you cannot enlist".

I was shattered. It
took me a couple of days to digest the news.
Had
I
been
able to enlist
, I would have had a salary
of about one thousand Singapore dollars per month; very good money at
the time. Instead, I was left to wonder why I could be a national
serviceman and handle an M-16 with my criminal record but not enlist
to join the permanent staff. Life suddenly became aimless and all my
aspirations to serve my country and become a responsible citizen
simply vanished; that's when I started to fuck around with my
national service.

I didn't take up
gambling
in a
serious
way
until I was 19. One day my best friend and
running mate from the school's athletics team, Kanan, came looking
for me.

"Hey Wilson",
he seemed excited, "I went to Jalan Besar Stadium to watch a
football match and saw a bunch of old men who were gambling on
football games; old Chinese men".

Jalan Besar was a
very famous stadium located close to Singapore's Little India; it was
the birthplace of Singaporean football. It housed the Singaporean
Football Association and was like a museum for local footballers.
Jalan Besar had a lot of sentimental value for both players and
officials and was thus a very common site for them to hang out at.
The national team used to train there before international fixtures
and the pitch was always in pristine condition. During the 70's and
80's, the Singaporean national team was our joy and pride; they would
easily glide past teams like the Philippines,
with
scores of 5-0
. Fandi Ahmad was our
greatest player back then, if not our all-time greatest. Ahmad was a
very friendly and down-to-earth guy
even
though
he could boast a successful
international career; he had played in the Dutch club FC Groningen
and had
also
scored a goal during a UEFA Cup match against
International Milan. V. Sundramoorthy was another talented footballer
from Singapore who had played in the Swiss club FC Basel. I have
never seen anyone back-heel the ball the way Sundramoorthy
could
and
did. Both Fandi and Sundram had
started their international career in the Singaporean national team
at the age of 16. These and other legends of Singaporean football had
perfected their skills on the pitch of Jalan Besar, which made the
stadium feel like the Maracanã stadium of Rio de Janeiro to
any Singaporean that
stepped
on its green.