Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (11 page)

One day, during my
daily visit, I was given a copy of a local newspaper which ran the
title: "That Singapore connection again". The article read
that, after the match against Liverpool, Birmingham's goalkeeper Ian
Bennet had filed a complaint, saying that two individuals posing as
Singapore journalists had approached him and offered him money to
throw the match against Liverpool. Both the English Football
Association and Scotland Yard dismissed Bennet's claims, asserting
that it was a "hoax". I smiled as I read the article: had I
told anyone that it was Pal's brother-in-law and myself who
approached Bennet, they would never have believed me.

In early February
1995, after two weeks in remand prison, my trial came up and I was
sentenced to one year behind bars
.

If
remand was bad, prison in Singapore was hell. I was a plump guy when
I went in but lost all my weight
while
inside. The prison halls were packed with screaming inmates, each
locked up in a small room with three other guys and without any tap
water. Each of us was given a small bucket filled with water that we
were allowed to replenish twice a day: during lunch at noon and
before dinner at about five o'clock in the afternoon. That single
bucket was supposed to last us from five o'clock until our next meal
on the following day. Everything had to be done with that one bucket:
brush one's teeth, wash and drink. Once the water from the bucket was
finished, one would be left with nothing to drink, but the more
seasoned criminals showed us the way. They would flush the toilet
then take the water coming down from the top of the toilet bowl
before it reached the pool at its bottom and use it to wash their
face. Some would
even
go to the extent of drinking it. In our
mind, the water flowed from the top, not from the bottom, so it was
clean water. As for me, I never brought myself to drink the water
from the bowl; I rinsed my face with it and that's the furthest that
I could go. You washed and drank where you shit, and
no
doubt
there was some bacteria there so,
after your turn on the throne, you would have to clean the toilet
bowl thoroughly with a green pad and soap that the prison provided.
Most of us would try to pass motion in the morning unless we had yard
time in the very early hours of day. In that case, we would try to
keep it on hold until the doors swung open, because the last person
to use the toilet was the one charged with cleaning the bowl with the
pad and soap. When it was your responsibility to carry out the
ungrateful task, it was hell. The ventilation holes in the cell were
so tiny that the smell had no way of leaving the room; the shit stank
like a mother-fucker; it was like a gas chamber.

There was no divisor
separating the toilet bowl from the rest of the cell so, in order to
have some privacy when you were doing your business, you needed to
improvise. The prisoners used rice to make it into glue and secure it
to the walls. They would then pull a piece of thread from their
blankets and attach it to the rice-glue. Then they made some sort of
stopper at the other end of the thread and used it to attach the line
to a hole in the
opposite
wall. Once that was done, you could hang your blanket on
the string so that you wouldn't have to shit in front of everybody
else. Once or twice a month there would be a spot check, which meant
that the guards would barge in and destroy the makeshift curtain
because you were not allowed to improvise anything of that sort. We
all thought that in a civilized society it would amount to common
sense: why the fuck should I shit in front of everybody else?

But people just tend
to ignore criminals and no one outside really fought for our rights.
The prison system looked perfect from the public's perspective but it
certainly was not. During my detention a prisoner was beaten to
death. After the incident, no prison officer was allowed to abuse or
use violence against inmates anymore unless they were threatened
physically, which was something that the prison guards could always
claim in their defense if they decided to mistreat you.

The food in prison
was really pathetic. The first time that I was presented with a
prison meal, I refused to touch it. I watched the guys around me and
asked: "How do you people eat this shit?"

You were given three
meals per day: two slices of bread and a cup of tea in the morning;
one vegetable, a miserable piece of fish and a handful of rice at
lunchtime; one small piece of chicken, some rice and one vegetable in
the evening. Mondays and Fridays were the worst; they gave us a
pathetic piece of tofu with some vegetables and some rice.
That
was
it.

Books were your only
companion when you were stuck in a cell, unless you wanted to end up
reading the bare walls; had I not been in prison so many damn times,
my English would not have been this good. Prisoners are encouraged to
read books, although not all novels are allowed inside prison walls:
books like 'The Godfather' and 'Papillon', for instance, were
forbidden by prison authorities because of their violent or malicious
content. The prison department probably assumed that, had we read
them, we would have turned into Michael Corleone or attempted a
daring escape. The first book I read was a Sidney Sheldon novel
called 'Rage of Angels'. I had gotten into an argument with a prison
officer who was giving me a hard time and was reported for it. A
prisoner who breaks prison rules undergoes a trial within prison
walls, 'Pechara' in Malaysian, during which the superintendent acts
as the sole judge and jury. I was convicted for my insubordination
and confined to a single cell for five months where I spent my time
exercising and pacing up and down the length of the minuscule room.
Pace up, pace down; when you get tired you sit and rest; then you get
up and start pacing again. After much pacing, I started a
conversation with the prisoner in the adjacent cell. He was a young,
handsome looking guy, with a good body and all. Not that I am gay,
but I admire people who deserve to be admired, regardless of their
gender. My unfortunate neighbor had robbed a lady at the Newton
Circus hawker center. After being chased and cornered by a retired
police officer who had witnessed the theft, he took out his chopper
and chopped the former cop to bits. The retired officer had died from
the wounds so both my unfortunate neighbor and myself knew that he
wasn't going to be spared the noose. Since he was facing the death
sentence, he decided to entrust some of his books to me, the first of
which was 'Rage of Angels'.

I immediately got
hooked
on
reading, growing especially fond of page-turners and
thrillers. At nine o'clock in the evening, when the lights went out,
I would find a small ray of light to continue reading because I
needed to know what happened next. The second book I read was 'Honour
Among Thieves' by Jeffrey Archer, another page-turner, followed by
John Grisham's 'The Pelican brief'. Little by little, my interest in
books grew and I began craving more challenging reads, like the
biographies of Gandhi and Nehru. I avidly read fiction and
non-fiction alike; anything that I could get my hands on. Gradually,
I started to appreciate the English language and its incredible
beauty and, as I turned the pages, my command and understanding of
English improved substantially. As I sat alone in my cell, I tried to
learn certain phrases by heart. Then I read Thomas Hardy's 'Jude the
Obscure' and its language
blew me away. It was
completely different from the other books that I had read;
it
was
English in its older form, which I
found fascinating. Reading helped me survive.

In
September 1995, a few days before my release, a corrections officer
came up to me and said: "Hey, your God is drinking milk in real
life".

"What
do you mean drinking milk?" I asked. "Who?"

"There
is a statue of Ganesh in New Delhi", he explained, "you
give him the milk and it disappears".

From
India, the news spread to the rest of the world and Hindus everywhere
flocked to temples and shrines to offer Ganesh milk. Long cues of
worshipers fed milk to Ganesh statues all around the globe and the
milk was all disappearing.

"Fuck",
I thought, "I want to bring some milk to the statue myself and
see whether it will drink it or not".

Hinduism
is one of the earliest religions. Hindus have many gods: Shiva,
Brahma, Rama and so on; Ganesh is the mightiest of them all. Every
year, Hindus celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi, the birthday of Ganesh. On
that recurrence we immerse the statues of the god in the sea or in
other bodies of water. Just recently I watched on television as
worshipers who were immersing a statue
of
Ganesh were carried away by the current to their death.

"Ganesh,
where the fuck were you?" I asked my god. "You were
supposed to perform your duty and save these people".

Still,
Ganesh is the number one god among Hindus. We really believe in him
and the children totally
love
him. If you circle 108 times around him, Ganesh can clear all
obstacles; eight rounds will suffice if you're running out of time.
When I was in Singapore I would sometimes walk to the temple to
worship Ganesh; I have faith in him and always keep Ganesh in my
heart. Hinduism is quite complicated but if you read the Mahabharata
you'll find that the basic principle is always the same: good will
eventually prevail over evil. It is the basis of every religion. All
of them try to teach one the right path but sometimes their message
is misunderstood. I never could comprehend those Sunday Christians
that go to church once a week and confess their sins.

"Oh
my Lord", they say, "I'm sorry, please forgive me for I
have sinned".

Then,
on Monday, the sinning begins all over again. It sounds like a bad
joke; these guys are a bunch of hypocrites; I think that even their
god will think of them as the biggest and dirtiest bastards.

"You
are not supposed to ogle at another man's woman", the Bible
says. "If your mind and your eyes ogle, then you are supposed to
gouge them out of your head".

It
would be a nightmare for a Hindu. We are the ones that created the
Kamasutra and sometimes the representations of our goddesses are very
sexy. The human mind is corrupt and nothing can change a person's
mindset. You cannot prevent thoughts from arising; before you know
it, they're already there. The most you can do is to erase them as
quickly as possible. Nor can you prevent your eyes from looking at a
woman, even if you're a very religious person. You look at the tits,
fuck, then you go.

I had served my
eight months in prison when, by the end of September 1995, I was out
into society again. By then Ganesh was sated and had stopped drinking
milk.

While I was locked
up, Pal's involvement in the Malaysia Cup had come under the
spotlight of local authorities; he was re-arrested in Singapore and
deported back to Malaysia. He was then made to tour 14 out of the 16
Malaysian states, one week here and two weeks there, from one trial
to the next, to face the match-fixing charges being brought against
him. While catching up on the recent developments outside of prison,
I overheard from the grapevine that Pal had also been betrayed by
Bryan.

"For one
million Singapore dollars", Bryan had told Pal, "I can
solve all of your problems with the Malaysia Cup. I have somebody
very high up there. I know a high-ranking Minister who can settle
this matter".

A desperate Pal had
given Bryan the money, one million, to hush-hush the entire incident,
but Bryan had immediately gone missing. He had probably taken off
gambling in some casino and had forgotten all about his old boss.
Despite the substantial loss, Pal had still managed to pay off a lot
of people. He had sold a local property and had used the money to
bribe officials left and right. While in court, he had bragged about
making millions from his fixed matches. Pal was the kingpin of the
Malaysia Cup; for two years in a row he had decided who would be the
champion and, within a relatively short time-span, he had made up to
40 million Singapore dollars from match-fixing alone. Pal was a guy
who liked to blow his own trumpet but there was really no need to
brag. Nobody was going to know how much he was betting or how much he
had earned if he had kept his trap shut.

"I can do this,
I can do that", he boasted.

Finally Pal was
convicted, but only in one of the Malaysian states, Penang, to a
single day in prison. In Malaysia the law can be bent and, if you
have money, it can do wonders for you.