Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer Read online

  KELONG KINGS

  Wilson Raj Perumal

  Alessandro Righi Emanuele Piano

  Invisible Dog Classics

  Readers who are interested in more information on Invisible Dog are invited to visit our website at

  www.invisible-dog.com

  For further information on the book visit

  www.kelongkings.com

  The text was specially revised at the authors' request by

  Prof. Tony Brophy.

  Text © Wilson Raj Perumal, Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Piano 2014

  Foreword © Prof. Tony Brophy 2014

  All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Authors.

  ISBN 978-963-08-9123-3

  THE AUTHORS

  Wilson Raj Perumal (b. July 31, 1965) Singaporean citizen and convicted match-fixer. Wilson Raj Perumal was one of the shareholders of a Singapore-based match-fixing syndicate that manipulated the outcome of football matches worldwide to bet on the rigged results. He was arrested in Helsinki, Finland, in 2011 and became the first Asian match-fixer to collaborate with police authorities.

  Alessandro Righi (b. April 11, 1975) BA from the NYU Dept. of Journalism. Worked for top media outlets such as the Yomiuri Shimbun Tokyo, Al Jazeera etc. In 2011, together with co-author Emanuele Piano, founded the independent investigative journalism portal, production company and publisher Invisible Dog.

  Emanuele Piano (b. May 9, 1977) BA in Economics from the LUISS in Rome and Master in Development Economics. Covered as a freelance writer, producer and director Africa and the Middle East's conflict zones for major Italian and international news outlets. In 2011, together with co-author Alessandro Righi, founded the independent investigative journalism portal, production company and publisher Invisible Dog.

  To my mum.

  -Wilson Raj Perumal

  CONTENTS

  Author's note

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. Kampong boy

  Chapter 2. A guppy in the sea

  Chapter 3. Going bust

  Chapter 4. A ten-year holiday

  Chapter 5. A frog in the well

  Chapter 6. Ah Blur

  Chapter 7. The syndicate

  Chapter 8. The betting house

  Chapter 9. My own boss

  Chapter 10. Unsettled debts

  Chapter 11. Unsung hero

  Chapter 12. 1-1

  Chapter 13. Repeat offender

  Chapter 14. Farewell to Singapore

  Chapter 15. I am the savior

  Chapter 16. He who ate my bread

  Chapter 17. The soup got fucked

  Chapter 18. The rat

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  In the summer of 2012, Invisible Dog produced an investigative report entitled "The Fix" that was subsequently aired on a major international broadcaster. "The Fix" was an investigation on a trans-national match-fixing syndicate capable of influencing the results of football matches worldwide. From their base in Singapore, the members of the syndicate profited from wagering large amounts of money on the fixtures that they rigged at every level of the beautiful game.

  During production we traveled to Singapore where we met an associate of Wilson Raj Perumal - a shareholder of said syndicate - who put us in touch with Wilson himself. Wilson was the first member of the Singaporean branch of the association to have been apprehended and was detained in a remote town in northern Finland; he was also the first to decide to collaborate with European authorities, thus unveiling the true extent of his criminal organization's global outreach. Since he could not meet us in person, Wilson began corresponding with us via e-mail. It was but a year later that, after much convincing, he was persuaded that his story was one worth telling.

  When we met Wilson face to face in Budapest, Hungary, where he had been extradited to testify against a fellow member of his syndicate, and heard his story, we were initially taken aback by the sheer quantity and variety of football matches that Wilson claimed to have fixed. Immediately, we embarked in an odyssey of scrupulous fact-checking amid the sea of anonymous matches and leagues that gambling outfits offer to punters. We were soon thoroughly convinced: Wilson was not only telling the truth, or at least his version of it, but also uncovering the Pandora's box of international football. His was and is an invaluable testimony capable of sweeping away any residual doubt in the reader's mind that there is indeed a widespread dirty, obscure, underbelly beneath the glossy and pristine image of professional football.

  While we corrected, arranged the text and checked our facts, flying in and out of Budapest to iron out the details of Wilson's account, we decided to employ an agent to find a publisher for our work. We were persuaded that Wilson's exclusive revelations would not be difficult to get on a bookshelf. We were, however, gravely mistaken; when the feedback from the tens of 'big' publishers that we had contacted began to come back to us, we noticed that the most recurring definition of our manuscript was "legal nightmare". Surprising though it was for us - we thought that 'big' publishers also had 'big' legal offices and broad shoulders - we didn't let their fainthearted approach divert our aims and decided to publish the book ourselves.

  Taking the full burden of Wilson's revelations on our shoulders - and his - meant that we had to be especially cautious about the way we treated each circumstance involving persons, associations, companies, etc. In consideration of this, we chose to either remove names in full or in part; change them; use nicknames; withhold titles and, in some cases, to remove the circumstance altogether. This does not mean that we have been selective about the facts in Wilson's tale, but that some of the events described in the book, especially the ones witnessed by Wilson alone, cannot be corroborated to a sufficient extent or ascribed to a specific, provable enough context, to put them into writing. We have tried to be as comprehensive as we possibly could but also chose to withhold part of the details about Wilson's fixes to allow the story to flow freely, as any story should. This book is neither a mere collection of facts and figures about match-fixing nor an indictment of those responsible for the global proliferation of sports fraud. First and foremost, this book is the story of a man's life.

  Alessandro Righi

  Emanuele Piano

  FOREWORD

  You will never be quite the same if you read this book through to the end. It enters into you and envelops you and you come out of Wilson's extraordinary personal labyrinth with all its twists and turns inside you, and yet with no clear idea of what path you took or why you chose or were chosen for that route. A little like the gambler himself. It is both a bewildering and fascinating book and a minefield of personal revelation, exploration and confrontation with many ghosts and realities. If you love soccer as I do, or perhaps any competitive game that people bet on, you will never again be able to watch a single game without myriad doubts emerging and merging. I'm not sure whether this is an advantage or if it is, of what kind, but it does add some enriching level of ambiguous depth to the experience, and that cannot be all bad. It is a book that blows apart the myth of all innocence, much like mortal sin does, in a wider context, and yet they are not unrelated. They alternately explain each other and much else that is human besides.

  I grew up in a small town in the West of Ireland and as I grew into adolescence that secret enclave, almost conclave, of bookies, their betting
shops and the pubs nearby, their up-front clubs, so to speak, began to intrigue me. There was something of the hushed mysteries and solemnity of a dark church about them. I never entered because my father (luckily!) was not a betting man, except for a quick 'flutter' on a horse, every now and then, the Grand National, the Irish Derby, Ascot and so on. Relatively innocent. But I was fascinated by the bookies shops themselves, their secret, enticing, sinister even, character, their sense of exclusiveness, of male intrigue, of something apart and with its own aura of almost tangible mystery clinging to its peculiar and particular world. And when I began to visit the adjacent, complicit pubs, the atmosphere was even further enhanced and deepened. Groups of conspiratorial men gathered in whispered lore around television sets with non-stop betting odds flashing across multiple screens. Nothing else seemed to exist or have any other importance compared with the business in hand. It was deadly serious, totally engaging and self-defining in its absoluteness. It also had a destructive quality that ruined some and their lives forever. I began to understand and be inquisitively entranced by its deadly aspects as well. It was suddenly no longer just a well-intentioned, male passtime, a fantasy world for a curious child, but was also full of lurking, insidious dangers and pitfalls too, and perhaps those especially.

  Two old students of mine, now adult friends, introduced me to this book, to the person and personality of Wilson. I am grateful and enriched by the experience and by the book itself. It could also be a bombshell in the extent and reach of the world it portrays and exposes. Another risk and wager perhaps. In this world, Wilson is amoral and yet moral enough not to wish to harm his friends, or his family, not even for money. Money is everything in (t)his world and experience, and yet it is nothing: temporary, transient, unrewarding in itself, merely the structural wheel on which everything turns. Riches and wealth come and go in immense quantities and also mean nothing. The gambling, the pervasive mind-set of wagering, of fixing, the thrill of the organising of bets, huge ones, and the immediate ambience around them, of involving and manipulating others skillfully and profitably, of using them as unscrupulously as they would use you, of savouring the thrill and temporary elation of that evanescent winning moment - this is where his aspiration and life are, up to the very end.

  I like Wilson. I came to have a deepening and growing liking for and appreciation of him throughout the book, an empathy and sympathy for the path he took in the daily battle for survival, its labyrinthine twists and turns. His philosophy is perhaps crude but authentic: we are all animals who will prey off each other when and if necessary. It is hard to dispute this, even with the highest of moral and altruistic intentions, when the chips are really down, to use a relevant metaphor. All you have to do is watch a good programme on animal habits and survival or listen to or read a professional commentary on the widespread, depressing state of the world today, the abysmal living conditions of the great poor, the cynical, hard-nosed indifference of the great rich, the spiritually impoverished state of religion, under corrupt politicians and hardened, bureaucratic church leaders, without exception, almost. Theirs too is a different, much more pernicious kind of gambling, with far more serious consequences where the un-named stakes are considerably higher in human terms.

  Wilson has opened my eyes and mind to a different world than the one I envisaged as a child. I cannot condemn him for what he did, the path he followed. Who am I to do so. He sets it out with compassion, kindness and gentleness. And with lucidity and frankness, great self-honesty and awareness, as he outlines the devious paths he took or life took him on. There is a joke I once heard from a serious gambler: an Irishman and an Englishman, friends, who, on their last boozy night in Rome, find out that the Pope is dead when they trip over his prone body in the narrow streets around St Peter's. Sworn to secrecy for three days (so that a 'suitable' death scene can be arranged!) by a cardinal, they return to London and decide that putting a bet on the Pope's death won't be breaking their promise. Everyone would simply think they were crazy. They go their separate ways and meet up again six months later. Tommy drives up in a chauffeur driven Mercedes and sees a man he takes to be Paddy sitting by the railings of the fancy hotel. It is indeed Paddy and he readily admits to be begging 'for a few bob' to put on a horse that evening. Perplexed, Tommy asks him if he didn't place the bet on the Pope's death, since it was his idea and suggestion in the first place. Paddy's reply is classic, "Ah, I did indeed, but sure didn't I go and do the double on the Archbishop of Canterbury!"

  There is much of Wilson in Paddy and much of Paddy in Wilson throughout the book. The joke has always seemed to me to get right to the heart of the gambler's psychology. A certain bet, a sure thing, doesn't ever have the thrill that the risk involves. Wilson is a prime character and player in every sense in this bizarre world that the book portrays and exposes. May the rest of his strange, perhaps unenviable, yet deeply colourful, life grant him the peace he would seem (so richly!) to deserve.

  Prof. Tony Brophy

  La Vela

  Trevignano Romano

  KELONG KINGS

  PROLOGUE

  When they fixed me up in Finland, they thought it was just going to be a Wilson-Raj-send-him-back-to-Singapore story; locked up and out of the picture for five long years. They never realized that match-fixing was going to be uncovered; it never occurred to them that the police would check my mobile phone, my laptop and go through all of my belongings.

  I had just landed in Vantaa airport, Helsinki, Finland, from the small arctic town of Rovaniemi, when they stopped me. Only me. So I immediately sensed that something was amiss. It wasn't really a random check; they were already after me, following my every move. Somehow they had missed me in Rovaniemi; perhaps they didn't expect me to take the first flight out at six o'clock in the morning. So when I showed up in Vantaa airport the police stopped me, checked my passport and escorted me down to the airport's Police holding bay. Then an officer came in.

  "You're traveling under a false passport", he said.

  The officer was holding a picture of me in his hand; a big picture. I couldn't recognize the T-shirt that I wore in the photo.

  "Where the fuck did I get that T-shirt from", it looked like an old picture.

  The officer examined the photo carefully, then began scrutinizing me.

  "This is not the guy".

  Old photo.

  He checked for a cut on my forehead; I have a little scar just below my hairline, but the officer couldn't spot it.

  "No, no, no", he shook his head. "This is not the guy".

  But the police in Rovaniemi insisted that they hold on to me, so there I was, sitting in the Vantaa Helsinki airport's holding bay.

  On the previous day, the police had ambushed the wrong Indian guy in a Rovaniemi hotel.

  "Hey, are you Wilson Raj Perumal?"

  "I'm Perumal", the man said as he raised his hands over his head, "but I'm not Wilson Raj".

  Someone had given the Finnish authorities all of my true details: Singaporean, Indian origin, my real name, my picture. The police had called all the hotels in town.

  "When he checks in", they demanded, "please contact us immediately".

  Somebody had been saving this old photo of me for this... But who?

  The night before my arrest I had an argument by e-mail with a Singaporean guy from Macao called Benny.

  "Maybe it was Benny", I thought, "he's quite influential".

  Our discussion was over money that I owed him, 1.1 million Singapore dollars, roughly 900 thousand US dollars. I'd lost the amount while gambling on Premier League matches and had repaid Benny close to 800 thousand dollars.

  "I'll settle the 300 thousand left, you just hang on", I wrote to Benny. "Just bear with me".

  "No", he replied, "people are chasing me for this money".

  "I paid you 800 thousand already", I wrote. "You think I'm not going to pay the remaining 300? Just give me a couple of months and I'll clear you".

  "I know what name you're using", he th
reatened, "and what passport you're using: Raja Morgan Chelliah".

  "Fuck you!" I answered. "You can do whatever you want".

  Now I was thinking: "It must be this mother-fucker".

  But why would he want to do this? If I get arrested, he's not going to get his money back.

  CHAPTER I

  Kampong boy

  My name is Wilson Raj Perumal, I'm an Indian Tamil born in Singapore.

  Singapore is a developed country today; it was not in 1965, when I was born. In that same year, Singapore broke away from Malaysia and obtained its independence. My father and mother were born Malaysians but, after the partition, they chose to live in Singapore and eventually became citizens of the newborn state. We kids were born Singaporeans.

  I was the third of five children: I had an older brother and an older sister; a younger brother and a younger sister; I was exactly in the middle. As a child, I was a kampong boy; in Malaysian, the term 'kampong' means village. My family had a small strip of land in Chua Chu Kang, a rural area in western Singapore with large pig farms and cultivations. We didn't live very deep into the farmland; we were on the outskirts, closer to town, and right next-to the train track that goes from Malaysia to Tanjong Pagar, the heart of Singapore's Central Business District.

  Ours was a below-average family. During my childhood, my father struggled to find a job, then became a contractor; he opened up his own company and would tender public contracts for streetlight painting, cable laying and such things. He was not into gambling; he was a straight man who did voluntary police work. Father was also a black belt in Judo and a martial arts instructor.