Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (30 page)

It was in that
moment that Dan decided to fuck Harry up. He had been using Harry's
credit facility in Europe but there was mounting rivalry between the
two. Both Dan and Harry were trying to show off their power to a
mainland Chinese man who was very powerful in the gambling circle.
His name was Ah Kang and he ran a 'betting house': an outfit that
could provide millions in credit to match-fixers for gambling
purposes. Dan asked for my help in fixing Harry up; as usual I was
asked to be the brain-man of the operation.

"Let's get my
friend Rashid from Oman to call Harry", I told Dan.

Harry knew Rashid
from the Lebanon vs Singapore match that Mega and I had fixed for
him. The match had been fixed by us but we had made it look as if
Rashid had done it. I called Rashid and told him to call Harry and
inform him about the arrival of the Sierra Leone team to Malaysia.
Rachid made the call and told Harry that he had Sierra Leone under
his control. Harry, eager to capitalize from the match, asked Rashid
to make arrangements to meet the players in his Kuala Lumpur hotel.
The trap was now set and ready to spring into action. When Admir
heard about Dan's plan to fuck Harry up, he was astounded.

"Why the fuck
would we want to do that?" he asked.

"Harry's a
mother-fucker", answered Dan, "I must do this. I want to
teach this fucker a lesson. Let's fix him up".

Dan doesn't usually
pass the wrong information to people but this time he had chosen to
lure Harry into a trap and fuck him up. He wanted Harry to lose big
money.

"Let's see
who's the boss", said Dan, "let's see who's the Big Boss".

In order to lure
Harry into Dan's trap, I needed to convince him thoroughly that he
was dealing directly with the Sierra Leone team, so I sought the
assistance of my friend Alassane who was African and could speak
French.

When Alassane landed
in Singapore from Mali in the early 90's he was just 19 years old. He
was transferred to Tiong Bahru United FC, a local club, but soon
proved to be a hopeless football player; he always sat on the bench.
He would run and run and run during the club's training sessions; the
heart was there, but the standard just wasn't. Alassane and I lived
in the same neighborhood, Woodlands, and I often bumped into him at
the gym. At first, when he saw me, he scuttled away. He knew that I
was a fixer so, like a nice dedicated footballer, he avoided me as if
I were an infectious disease.
After
leaving Tiong Bahru United, Alassane went on to play for other local
clubs: Woodlands Wellington, Tampines Rovers and finally Gombak
United, but he still spent most of his time on the bench. At one
point the Gombak coach asked him to get up from the bench and warm up
at the 90
^th
minute.

"You
mother-fucker", Alassane yelled in his face, "you bastard.
You want me to warm up at the 90
^th
minute? When the fuck is it that you
want me to play?"

Alassane almost got
into a fistfight with his coach and that was the end of his football
career. After that scene nobody would field him and he never played
professional football again. By that time Alassane had already
married, had two kids and divorced. He was naturalized sometime
between 2004 and 2006, thus becoming a Singaporean. Later, he joined
an amateur team in Singapore's National Football League, Division 1,
and that's when we became friends and started hanging out.

Alassane then set up
a football academy in Singapore called 'Football For You' and was
engaged by some local schools to teach football to their female
students; he charged the schools 50 dollars per hour of coaching. One
day I went to see him at his academy; I needed someone who could
speak French.

"What the fuck
are you doing?" I asked him.

"I'm coaching
this school's female team", he replied while pointing at the
girls on the pitch.

"I can see
that. For 50 dollars an hour under the hot sun?" I taunted him.
"Come on man, you can do better. Come and work with me, I'll
give you a better salary".

Despite his
inadequate football skills, Alassane was a resourceful guy and was
the perfect choice for Dan's plot against Harry. I introduced
Alassane to Dan, Admir and the others, then we dressed him up to look
like the captain of the Sierra Leone team and sent him to Harry's
hotel in Kuala Lumpur together with five authentic members of the
squad.

"No problem, we
will deliver", Alassane and the others assured Harry, "we
can do this. We can easily win this game".

But that was not the
plan, at least not the one that Dan had in mind. Sierra Leone
delivered the perfect job: they got thrashed 4-0 by Malaysia. We
recovered from our loss and Harry was fucked.

The next match of
the 2008 Merdeka Cup was Mozambique against Vietnam. This time around
we put the boys in a room and explained clearly what was needed of
them. The players were forthcoming and Mozambique lost by four
second-half goals as requested, then, during their third game against
Myanmar, they went missing again. The person who was supposed to meet
us to receive the instructions on the third match disappeared and
stopped answering our calls; Mozambique simply didn't want to
cooperate. I must admit that they gave me a really hard time. Only
one of the players understood English, the rest spoke Portuguese.
Most of the players were willing to cooperate but didn't want to
bypass their coach because they wanted to avoid trouble once they
returned home. The entire scheme was wrong from the start; it was a
bad call on my part to bring Mozambique, that's all.

Sierra Leone was our
chance for a comeback. In their second match they faced Afghanistan.
We asked the boys to play very open football.

"You can go and
win if you like", I said, "but your total goals must be
four or more".

The Sierra Leonean
boys were much better players than the Afghans, who made for quite a
weak side and got crushed: 6-1.

In the following
game, Sierra Leone had to win in order to qualify for the
semi-finals. They were set to play against Nepal, and we had some of
the Nepal players on our payroll as well. After the match against
Afghanistan, the odds for Sierra Leone were about
two-and-a-half-ball, so we needed to play three-and-a-half. I called
Abu Bakar.

"Look here",
I said to him, "we are going to make you win. First half, keep
it 0-0, then, in the second half, we need four or five goals. It's
quite simple, Nepal will let you score, no problem, so just go and
score".

Nepal was already
corrupt before we ever came in contact with them. We approached them
through a Malaysian agent and the players came to speak with us.
Nepalese
are very small in size: some of these boys were slightly taller than
Admir's waist and he was curiously examining them head to toe.

"You play
football?" he asked.

Admir is a tall,
huge man.

"Are you very
sure you are a footballer?"

He couldn't believe
that they could play football; they were too small to be true.

We had told Abu
Bakar's boys not to score during the first half but, as the game
kicked off, Sierra Leone leaped ahead in the first ten minutes. It
seemed like they were really looking for a goal; hurting to score. I
started becoming a little worried.

"Fuck", I
thought, "these are not the instructions that we gave them".

After scoring the
opener, at around the 20
^th
minute, a Sierra Leone player was given a red card and
sent off the pitch. Fuck. All these guys had to do was win the game
4-0 in the second half; Nepal was ready to concede. Then, in the 40
^th
minute, Nepal equalized on a penalty and the first half
ended 1-1. We had bet on both handicap and Over, but after 45 minutes
both teams had already fucked us up because we had a ten-men Sierra
Leone side on the pitch and Nepal had equalized.

After
the second half kicked off, the Nepalese kept playing their normal
match; it looked like they were not working towards the agreed
result. Fortunately, around the 75
^th
minute, one particularly committed
player from Nepal spoke to their right-back defender and they started
to move. From then on, the Nepalese paved the way for Sierra Leone's
victory. Bam, Bam. The game ended 3-1. We had won the Over, but
hadn't
cleared the
handicap. Not a heavy defeat, but I still caught hold of Abu Bakar
after the
match to give
him a piece of my mind.

"You
mother-fucker…" I hissed at him.

"I thought you
were lying to me", Abu Bakar raised his shoulders, "and
that you were trying to get us kicked out of the competition. That's
why we scored the first goal".

"I fucking
brought you here…" I continued.

"We just wanted
to make sure we'd win", he insisted, "I thought you would
fuck us up".

"You fucker",
I concluded, "because of that one goal in the first half, you
destroyed the whole fucking game for us".

When the odds on
total goals are 2.5 or 3.5, they will jump every time a goal is
scored. If the score is stuck on 0-0, we can continue to bet on the
Over, but Sierra Leone's early opener had altered the odds. During
the second half, we continued to place our bets on Over but the odds
were coming down because the game could go either way. Eventually, we
didn't win much from the match and we didn't pay Abu Bakar and his
boys. The Nepalese players, on the other hand, were paid.

That night Abu
Bakar, Admir, Dino and myself went out for dinner together in Kuala
Lumpur. Admir and Dino were trying to stage a serious conversation
about the match with Abu Bakar, when he suddenly exclaimed: "Hey,
look at the twin towers, their light is very beautiful".

Dino stared at him.

"Fuck", he
turned to me, "we are talking about match-fixing and he looks at
the lights?"

Dino tried to pursue
his discussion but Abu Bakar turned around once again.

"Hey", he
pointed to the dark sky, "the lights have gone off".

Abu Bakar was not
paying the least attention and Dino was furious.

"Fuck", he
said to me as he brandished his fork, "I tell you, I'm going to
stab this guy. I'm going to stab him with my fork".

"
You'd
better tell him to pay attention to what we're saying",
Admir suggested.

But after a couple
of beers, Abu Bakar's mood changed completely.

"We are here
for the money", he stated with conviction.

He was transformed
into a different person.

"We are here
for the money", he repeated. "We must be committed to those
that are paying us, we will do as you say".

"Finally this
bastard
has
come
to his senses", said Dino.

"Maybe we
should intoxicate this guy before the matches", we reckoned.

After that night's
dinner, we had no more problems with Abu Bakar and Sierra Leone went
on to play the semi-final against Vietnam.

"We need four
goals", we told them, "you can either score or you can
concede".

After 30 minutes,
Sierra Leone scored the opening goal. Then, during the second half,
they netted another. When there were fifteen minutes left in the
game, they conceded the third and fourth goal.
It
was
2-2, and the match proceeded into
extra-time. We wanted Sierra Leone to qualify for the final but the
extra-time ended nil-nil, they lost the penalty kicks and were booted
out of the tournament, which Vietnam went on to win. It was a huge
loss for us, because if Sierra Leone had qualified for the final, we
would have had the possibility to do business all over again.
Dan
gave me only ten thousand dollars for the services that I had
rendered during the entire tournament; peanuts. He was indebted with
some loan sharks and it took him over a week to pay me my money.
Although bitterly disappointed, I remained loyal to him.

After returning to
Singapore, Alassane called me to tell me that he would be playing in
the final of the National Football League Division 1. I wasn't busy
on that night and was near the stadium so I decided to catch the
match. I walked into the stadium about ten minutes from kick off and
sat down. I spotted Alassane's presence on the pitch immediately
because he was the tallest guy out there and wore dreadlocks on his
head. Would you believe me if I told you that, for the entire first
half of the match, Alassane never once touched the ball with his
foot? He may have had a header or two at the most. And the
mother-fucker was yelling at all of his teammates, telling them what
to do. Alassane must be the stubbornest mother-fucker I've ever met
in my entire life but he was a really hopeless footballer. I called
Dan, Admir and Dino and they all laughed heartily when I told them
that Alassane hadn't touched the ball with his legs for 45 full
minutes.