Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (65 page)

Nigeria vs Argentina
was Ibrahim's last match before retirement. Through the mediation of
Prince, Anthony and the others must have convinced someone in the
Nigeria FF to designate Ibrahim for the game. After his final
exploit, Ibrahim retired with close to half a million US dollars in
his pockets and probably doesn't give a flying fuck about what FIFA
thinks of him. Today Ibrahim is back in Niger, where I last heard
that he had four wives and two or three houses; he is settled for the
rest of his life like Jack Warner. Niger is one of the poorest
countries in the world and Ibrahim's expenses there probably amount
to two hundred US dollars per month; half a million dollars will
suffice him for another two or three generations and Sepp Blatter can
go fuck himself.

A week later, my
trial began. It was a fucking boring legal proceeding; very lengthy
and completely in Finnish. The Finns tried to translate but the
translators were fucked; their English was total rubbish. During the
trial, security was very lax; there were two police officers, one on
each side of the door to the courtroom, period. I was seated next to
Musonda and another Zambian player from RoPS.

I wrote a message on
a slip of paper and handed it to them.

"Get me a
mobile phone", read the note.

The two jokers
stared at me in terror and shook their heads. If you take a look at
the pictures from the trial, there is one where I'm clearly holding
my hand near my ear, mimicking the gesture of someone speaking on the
telephone.

"Give me your
mobile phone then", I wrote in another note.

They just kept
shaking their fucking heads. They were too scared to help me, so I
asked my lawyer to give Mweetwa a few hundred euro and a message:
"Get me a fucking phone please".

We're talking about
a cheap, basic mobile phone. Mweetwa pocketed the money but didn't
bring me anything. I didn't give up and, finally, another one of the
players did the job for two hundred euro. He managed to bring me a
telephone but no SIM card. Then, on my last day in court, I brought a
book along with me, it was 'The Fix' by Declan Hill. One of the
Finnish officers had asked me if I wanted a copy to read in my cell.

"Why not?"
I had said.

I slipped a note
between the pages and passed the volume to one of the Georgian
players from RoPS. The message read: "Get me a SIM card. Today
is the last day, please get me a SIM card".

The Georgian player
left the courthouse, bought a SIM card, slipped it inside the book
and handed it back to me through the same player that had obtained
the telephone. I had asked for them to load 50 euro worth of credit
on the SIM but when I slid it inside my new telephone the display
informed me that there were but five euro inside. Fucking RoPS
players. They were dead broke themselves and were skimming money from
my telephone expenses.

I used the mobile
phone from within prison lock-up to communicate with my family and
friends. I would give them a missed call and they would ring me back.
I also sent plenty of text messages and, finally, I could watch
matches on television and use my mobile phone to gamble from behind
bars. As the verdict from my trial neared, I insisted with Arttu to
know who the complainant that had fixed me up was.

"Arttu", I
pleaded, "the whole thing is already out; it's in the papers".

After putting up
much resistance, Arttu decided to show me a copy of the informant's
passport. His name was Joseph Xie Tan.

"Who the fuck
is this guy?" I wondered. "I've never seen this
mother-fucker before in my entire life".

I examined the
picture more closely but could make nothing of it.

"Do you know
this guy?" Arttu inquired.

I took a third,
attentive look as I made a mental note of his passport number.

"I don't know
this guy", I gave up. "Why would he want to fix me up?"

"He's one of
your guys", repeated Arttu as he left my cell with the
photocopy. "You were fixed by your own people".

Joseph Xie Tan had
showed up at the police station in Rovaniemi just days before my
arrest to file a report.

"Can I speak to
the Sergeant?" he had asked.

"Yes, please
sit down", the officer had said. "How may I help you?"

"There is a guy
who is wanted in Singapore", Joseph had explained, "I saw
him in Rovaniemi".

The officer had
looked at the visa on Joseph's passport and had noticed that Joseph
had arrived in Finland on that very day or on the previous one.

"You mean that
you came all the way from Singapore", the officer had asked,
"just to file a report about this guy? How do you know him?"

The Finnish officer
had begun questioning Joseph's motives and investigating his
statements.

"If you're
going to treat me like a criminal", Joseph had jumped from his
seat, "I'm just going to leave".

"OK", the
officer had replied. "Sit down, sit down and relax".

Joseph
had then cooled down and had
patiently listed all the details about me: wanted man in Singapore;
using a forged passport; my true identity, etc.

"Whether you
want to use this information or not is up to you", Joseph had
concluded, "I am going".

And he had walked
out.

I
had memorized Joseph Xie Tan's passport number and told my guys in
Singapore to look for him. Arttu admitted that the Finnish police had
provided the same passport copy to FIFA when they had visited
Rovaniemi. They considered FIFA to be a top organization so I guess
that they just got carried away. They trusted them to keep the
information to themselves for investigative purposes, instead, FIFA
immediately passed the news on to Zaihan from 'The New Pap
er'.
I
reckoned that Zaihan could prove to be instrumental in my hunt for
the rat; and he was. From my correspondence with him and from his
articles I learned that Joseph Xie Tan had traveled to Antalya,
Turkey, on February 9
^th
,
2011, for the matches that Anthony had organized there and that the
two had stayed in the same hotel.

My blood rushed to
my head. Anthony, my childhood friend. I had taught the bastard what
this whole business was about. I had paid him 20 to 30 thousand
dollars per match when, at his age, I was organizing an entire
Merdeka Cup for 10 thousand. Like Brutus with Caesar, father with
son, he had stabbed me in the back and I couldn't find a single
reason for him to do so. I was dumbfounded. Anthony didn't owe me a
cent and I didn't owe him a cent. I was the boss, of course, but I
had taught him how to become one himself: take your 30 thousand and
invest them on your next match. 30, 60, 90, you make your money and
then you become your own boss; gradually. You don't kill somebody
else to become the top-man; there is no need to fuck others during
your climb. The money is out there, you just need to put your brain
to good use. When Dan wanted Lebanon, I gave it to him. When he took
Haiti and Alassane from me, I let them go. I didn't run over to the
police to make a report about him. Had I used my hockey stick on
these fuckers perhaps I would have instilled some fear in them; now I
bitterly regretted not doing so. Murugan's words echoed in my head.

"Dan can turn
friends into foes", he had warned. "He is a very bad,
dangerous fellow".

Mega and Anthony
were neighbors in Singapore, so I decided to invest some of my
telephone credit to ring Mega up.

"You tell this
mother-fucker", I said to him, "that one day, I don't know
when, I will come after him. I will not sleep peacefully until I even
the score with the bastard".

Then I contacted
Zaihan and answered his questions on Danny, Mohamed Hassan, Mohamed
Rais, Anthony and on his company Footy Media International.

"I was not
intelligent enough to spot the wolves", I wrote to Zaihan. "I
would have admired my enemy if he had brought the sword to my heart
instead of my back".

It was now visible
that Dan was also involved in my arrest but I continued to give him
the benefit of the doubt. As for Joseph Xie Tan, I had no ill
feelings towards him because he was just a puppet; I would not
consider him my enemy. If I was a poor bastard and someone offered me
ten thousand dollars to file a report against another person that I
did not know, perhaps I would do it too; that would not make me that
person's enemy. But there is one thing that I would like to say to
Joseph.

"You are
Chinese, and Chinese people have certain standards. You don't have
the pedigree to call yourself a Chinese".

In mid-July, as
expected, the Finnish court sentenced me to two years in prison; no
suspended sentence and no extradition, since there was no treaty
between Singapore and Finland. As for the RoPS players, they all
received suspended sentences and were banned from the game by FIFA. I
am not a hypocrite. When a player gets banned for fixing with me it
really affects me a lot. But I will not feel responsible for the
choices made by others. I don't coerce anybody into fixing a match.
When I approach a player, neither of us expects to be caught and we
are both doing it for the money. After being sentenced, I was to be
transferred from police lock-up to a regular prison.

"Arttu", I
asked, "can I stay here for my entire sentence?"

I didn't want to go
to prison. Everything was running smoothly in police lock-up with
Arttu. It was like a hotel: I had a mobile phone, my satellite TV, my
gambling and there were no searches; none at all.

"I'm sorry
Wilson", said Arttu. "We cannot keep you here. You've been
sentenced and you'll have to go to prison".

At the end of July I
was transferred to prison in Oulu, where I was supposed to serve my
sentence. Since I have no fear in my heart, I decided that I would
try to bring my mobile phone along. I put it and its charger inside a
sock, wrapped it up in a ball and stuck it in my underwear. When I
got to the Oulu penitentiary, I had to stand in a line with the other
prisoners and, when my turn came, had to take off all my clothes so
that the guards could check that I wasn't smuggling anything inside.
As I took off my shirt I threw a quick look around me: the policeman
in charge of checking us was facing away from me and speaking to
another officer; he was not paying attention. I extracted the sock
from my underwear and rolled it on the floor. The officers looked
through my clothes and checked me to see whether I was concealing
anything: "Pull up your testicles. OK, done".

As I was putting my
clothes back on I reached down, collected the rolled-up sock, and
quickly plunged it into my side pocket. Once again, I had a telephone
in my cell.

The Oulu prison was
also fitted with a television but no satellite channels because some
of the inmates had abused the system. I checked with one of the
prisoners if there was any way to smuggle satellite TV cards into the
prison and he said that there was. I gave him five hundred euro and
asked him to get me a card but the mother-fucker bought himself a
huge stereo and ignored my request altogether. What could I do? I
learned my lesson the expensive way. Fortunately, the prison's
television had a teletext so I could check the football fixtures and
the results came in as soon as the goals were scored. I continued
gambling with my telephone just to kill time.

Meanwhile, on the
outside, Dan was moving his pawns extremely well. Before being
arrested, I had unknowingly given him the chance to steal my Latin
American contacts. In early February, Dan had sent Zeekay to El
Salvador for their match against Haiti and, although the game had not
appeared on betting websites, the trip had not been a total waste of
time. I had made arrangements for Zeekay to meet the Cuban national
team players who were also in El Salvador for their centralized
training. The Finnish investigators informed me that Dan's Hungarian
partners had paid my agent in Cuba ten thousand dollars to do
business with them. Before my arrest I had also introduced Armando to
Dan and now the fuckers were busy with Cuba and Grenada, two of my
teams, in the 2011 CONCACAF Gold Cup. Dan, Armando and the others
fixed six Gold Cup matches, all of which ended with a four-goal
margin or above. Cuba and Grenada conceded goals as if they had no
goalkeepers and nobody bothered to give me a cent or even to inform
me about the business. My executioners were making millions with my
teams as I sat counting bars.