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

  Dan had refused to take on the Lebanon vs Singapore 2010 FIFA World Cup qualifier in Beirut so, before leaving for South Africa, I had arranged for Mega to deal with Harry for this game. Since I could not attend the match in person, Mega and I had decided to tell Harry that the fix was being arranged by a contact of ours from Oman, a man named Rashid.

  "OK, Mega", I had instructed him, "I spoke to the guys in Lebanon, they are ready. You go down there, see the players, and do business with Harry. You tell him that Rashid will be there in my stead".

  Mega was in charge and the match materialized; Lebanon lost to Singapore 2-1 and Harry was going to deliver our cut together with the money for the Lebanese players on the next day in Doha, Qatar. I was still in South Africa and I didn't want to fly back to Singapore so I diverted Dan's attention to Qatar.

  "Dan", I suggested, "Harry did good business in Lebanon, now I need to go there and take the team back from him or else we are going to lose it. Change my ticket from Singapore to Doha; I will travel from there to Beirut and reclaim the Lebanese team before their next match in Vietnam".

  Lebanon was set to play their opening 2011 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) Asian Cup qualifier in Hanoi in January 2009. Dan changed my ticket and I flew to Doha, Qatar. The place was too hot, 50 degrees in the shade; even wearing only a singlet was too much for such heat. In Doha I met Mega and picked up the money Harry had sent over, then I went to watch a local football match. There was a big-league game going on with quite a few star players on the pitch. In Qatar they pay big money to lure aged celebrity footballers to play but there are no spectators to watch the matches. As I paced around the stadium I saw two sheikhs lying down on a sofa, each with a white pillow and a cup of tea in their hand, following the match on television with the actual teams on the pitch just a few steps away. People pay crazy money to witness footballers in action and the players were right there, within sight, but the sheikhs preferred to lay on their couches and watch the match on a screen.

  "All they need is a TV", somebody commented, "a cup of tea and a bed to lie on. That's all".

  To designate Qatar as the host of the 2022 World Cup is one of the dumbest decisions that a human being could ever make; absolutely absurd. I have a lot of respect for Zinedine Zidane as a footballer but not for his role in supporting Qatar's bid. I have nothing against Qatar; Doha is a beautiful city with well-mannered inhabitants, but I can't help but wonder what FIFA's Executive Committee was thinking when they awarded the World Cup to a country with a summer temperature of 50 degrees Celsius. Did these guys put their brains to sleep during the vote or what? I've always suspected that there was a mechanism of corruption at play but have no evidence to prove my hunch.

  I always tell my players: "Do what you have to do but do it intelligently, without being caught".

  I guess that if you and I need money to survive, so do FIFA officials.

  On the day following the match I flew from Doha to Beirut to pay the Lebanese players for the World Cup qualifier that they had lost against Singapore.

  Beirut was a very nice city, especially the Corniche, with the cliff-side cafés that line Avenue du Général de Gaulle in front of the Pigeon Rock. And the Lebanese women were stunning; very beautiful. They really made the extra effort to dress up nicely and look pretty. There were plenty of wealthy Saudi men outside the Verdun Mall trying to lure them. But Lebanon was also visibly a war-torn country; the tanks were parked right there, in the corner of the street. People would sit in small chairs on the sidewalk, really tiny chairs, with a cup of espresso coffee in their hand and would talk for hours. They would have incredibly animated conversations while perched on those tiny chairs; how can one sit for hours on something so small? The Lebanese are some weird people and their women, I tell you, fuck, they are exceptionally beautiful. While in Beirut, I met the Lebanese players to give them their money. Since none of them could speak English well enough, they brought along a Syrian man named Fadi who spoke in their stead. Fadi acted as the interpreter; he had a quick and crafty character, he was fluent in English and subsequently became my agent in Lebanon.

  After paying the Lebanese players their share I returned to Singapore with some cash in hand and began preparing for the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics. Gambling websites had begun expanding their portfolios and had started providing fun bets to entice more customers to join the gamblers' ranks. Trivial things like kick off were now up for odds. Who's going to kick the ball first and start the match? In the past, we couldn't bet on such things. How many times will a team hit the woodwork? How many corner kicks? How many red and yellow cards? Substitutions? Gambling companies allowed for bets up to 100 thousand dollars on kick off alone. Even odds: 9-9. For every 100 thousand dollars that you wagered, you could win 90 thousand; the remaining 10 thousand would, of course, go to the company to pay the agents their commission.

  The Nigerian team was set to play the Beijing Olympic semi-final against Belgium on August 19th in Shanghai, China. We already had links with some of their officials and players that we had met during the Inter Continental Cup in Malaysia just a few months before. We decided to take kick off: Belgium. I could not return to China after trying to fix the Women's World Cup on the previous year - Sivarajan had tried and had been refused entrance by the Chinese authorities - so I contacted someone in the Nigerian delegation who managed to speak to the team's goalkeeper.

  "We will pay you 20 thousand US dollars if you make sure Nigeria doesn't kick off", my guy said to the goalie. "You can say whatever you want to the Belgian captain and to your captain but just make sure that Belgium starts the match".

  Dan Tan was providing the money for our bets and for the players so he flew to Beijing and then to Shanghai, where the match was to be played. As for myself, I sat in a Singapore hotel room with Dan's partner and friend whose name I do not remember watching the coin toss on television. We were interested in the kick off alone because we weren't going to place any bets on any other aspects of the match; we didn't care about the final result. I don't know what the goalie said to the captains and I don't know who won the toss because I had left the room when it happened but, when I walked back in, Dan's friend shrieked a triumphant: "Good. We won".

  Belgium had kicked off.

  Nigeria defeated Belgium 4-1 and proceeded to the August 23rd final against Juan Roman Riquelme's Argentina. It was kick off hysteria again for us, only this time we picked Nigeria to start the match. My guy in the Nigerian delegation called the goalkeeper again.

  "Go to Riquelme and tell him that you want to kick off", he said. "Tell him that for Africans it's a good omen or something like that. Say that you want to start the match if it's OK with him".

  I was sitting in Dan's friend's hotel room again; this time I was glued to the television screen watching the coin toss. Nigeria's captain was facing Riquelme, his Argentinian counterpart, for the final act of the Olympic football tournament; the referee standing between them flipped the coin high up in the air. He then pointed to Riquelme; Argentina had won the toss, fuck, our balls were in our throats.

  "Now we're going to find out whether the goalie actually spoke to Riquelme", I thought with my fingers tightly crossed.

  "OK", said Riquelme, "give Nigeria the kick off".

  Riquelme's gestures clearly showed that the whole thing was arranged. He wasn't involved, of course, he had been duped, but he waved his hand in the direction of the Nigerian captain as if to say: "OK, go ahead, take the kick off if it's so important to you".

  Again, we had won our bet, for which I received a measly five thousand dollars from Dan; greedy mother-fucker.

  CHAPTER VII

  The syndicate

  The main difference between European and Asian gambling lies in the betting volumes offered by the operators. An Asian website like IBCbet, SBObet or Crown Net can offer up to 35 thousand euro per click for the four first-tier leagues: England, Spain, Italy and Germany. The volume for second-class leagues such as the French, Portuguese
, Swedish and Danish leagues is anywhere from 12 to 20 thousand euro per click. European operators not only offer much lower volumes but they also take much longer to confirm bets. An Asian website will confirm your bet within a matter of seconds. It takes them less than ten minutes to accumulate three million euro's worth of wagers on a match whereas, if you use a European betting company, you will not be able to accumulate bets worth 200 thousand euro in the same time frame. Asian websites have a better performance and offer bets for almost all the European leagues and many other leagues around the world. Because of the limitations of European gambling operators, European punters had trouble making enough money from the bets that they placed. Then, when we came into the picture with access to an Asian website, they got carried away. We provided them with a master agent that could give them up to 400 thousand dollars worth of credit, then we sat together with them and clicked away on the website. We were not limited to the major leagues anymore; we now had access to new opportunities that had opened up in Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland and a wide array of other minor leagues.

  The first match-fixer who left Singapore and ventured into Europe was Bryan, Pal's former second-in-command. After Singapore withdrew from the Malaysia Cup in 1994, Bryan moved to Europe with the objective of meddling with football overseas. He stayed in England at first, but wasn't able to do anything there, so he began traveling around Europe looking for new opportunities. He often flew from Singapore to Milan, Italy, and from Milan to other neighboring countries, patiently building up his network.

  By that time, a number of European footballers who had previously played in Singapore had returned to Europe and Bryan knew many of them from Pal's days. Even though most of them had hung up their boots by then, they were still involved in other football-related activities. These former footballers helped Bryan secure the connections that he needed to start building his network and to start fixing matches in Europe.

  Dan and Bryan were very close in those days and every time that Bryan flew to Europe, Dan would trot along as his right-hand man and bookkeeper.

  Murugan became part of Bryan's European network sometime in 2005, when Bryan's group was already busy fixing matches in Europe. Through Bryan, Murugan met Dan. Around that time Bryan began manipulating the matches of a Swiss club called FC Chiasso. He used a company, Stanton Technologies, which he had founded almost a decade earlier in Malaysia, to offer a sponsorship to the indebted Swiss club, then moved in to control the club's players.

  It doesn't take much money to acquire control of a football club. I recently read about a Dutch club called SC Veendam that went bankrupt because they could not repay a one million dollar debt. What's one million dollars for a match-fixer? We can raise that much money in a single match. All SC Veendam needed to do was agree to fix a single match and they would have made two million; their debt would have been settled and they would still be playing. They could have just played their 'total football' and provided a good number of goals to make millions from every single match that they competed in.

  I don't think that Bryan invested massive amounts of cash to gain control of FC Chiasso, maybe between one and three hundred thousand euro per year. The money could be split into ten monthly installments, 10 to 30 thousand euro per month; it's peanuts for us. If that amount buys you an agreement with the club and you are allowed to put five or six of your players in their lineup, then you can dictate the results and raise the money needed in a single match.

  I don't know if the FC Chiasso ownership was aware of the scam; I don't think that they were. We match-fixers usually devise some kind of ploy, like a sponsorship deal, to move in and start doing business. Stanton Technologies was the official sponsor of FC Chiasso during the 2007-2008 season. Bryan was funding the team and fixing their matches through players that he had placed in the club's lineup. In order to pass the instructions to the players, Bryan needed somebody in the team's management, so he and Dan tried to approach Michal, who was back in the Czech Republic, but Michal was not too keen to collaborate. He was not a gung-ho kind of guy like Sandro, the long-haired Croatian goalkeeper that I had introduced to Pal in the early 90's. Sandro had been arrested in Singapore in 1997, following the bust that had sent the lot of us to prison. He had been suspended from the S-League and his passport had been impounded. He had escaped by boat through Indonesia, just like Michal had done a few years before him. Perhaps he was helped by Bryan in his flight from Singapore, just like Michal had been assisted by Pal.

  Bryan called Sandro and hired him as a goalkeeper's coach in FC Chiasso, but according to Dan's account of the events, Sandro was too temperamental and was causing trouble so he was eventually booted. By that time, Bryan's fixing with FC Chiasso had become so blatant that rumors of it had reached Singapore and the bookies had begun refusing to accept bets on the Swiss team.

  "If you take my website", they'd say, "don't bet on FC Chiasso. If you do, we will not pay you. And don't tell me that I didn't warn you".

  It was, of course, none of their concern to let the Interpol or anybody else know that the club was being manipulated. In those days Singaporeans didn't bother those who fixed matches; even if they knew, they considered it to be none of their concern. Once they were informed, many of them just chose to capitalize on the information. Nowadays things are different; competition is intense and there is a lot of jealousy among fixers. These days fixers don't honor the code of conduct anymore.

  In 2008, Bryan's European adventure came abruptly to an end. Bryan was in business with two Muslim brothers from Turkey, Hamdo and Saffet, the former a football agent and the latter the owner of a Turkish football club. According to Murugan, Bryan borrowed money from the Turkish brothers then went missing as he had done with Pal in Malaysia. Bryan was gambling heavily. I was told that, before boarding a flight, he would throw bets on Manchester Utd for 500 thousand, AS Roma for 300 thousand and so on. By the time his plane had landed, he would have lost or won one million euro. The Turkish brothers had loaned money to Bryan because they trusted him; after all, he had told them that he was a fellow Muslim. When he disappeared, they called Murugan.

  "Bryan is nowhere to be found. Are you sure he's a Muslim?" they asked.

  "No way, he's not a Muslim", answered Murugan.

  "Mother-fucker".

  Bryan had fucked the Turks up and was gambling their money away. But these were dangerous guys, if you fucked with them and came back to their part of the world, you'd be a dead man. So Bryan had to leave Europe and couldn't come back; he gave up on football and moved to Malaysia, where he changed his line of work. He was recently acquitted for bank fraud: instead of making 500 thousand dollars on a fixed match, he allegedly found a way to make 10 or 20 million dollars from bank loans.

  When Bryan left Europe, Dan took over his business. He contacted Bryan's old partners and started to settle Bryan's debts by gradually paying by installments. Little by little, Dan took over Bryan's business and contacts, then began building on his network by venturing into yet other countries. In this business you can't just sit on your ass and wait for the apple to drop from the tree; you have to dig deeper and deeper to achieve results. But Dan had a problem: he needed to offer higher betting volumes to his European partners but had neither a master agent nor access to a master agent website.

  All the Asian punters with a reputation have access to a master agent website; it gives them anywhere from two to ten million dollars worth of credit. In other words, their credibility is worth that much money.

  Senior master agents have their own special web page on mainstream gambling websites. The head of the betting company will award the senior master agent, say, five million dollars worth of credit because he is deemed to be a trusted agent. The senior master agent will then break down the five million among five of his most trusted master agents. The five trusted master agents will in turn break down their share into 100 thousand dollar shares assigned to ten of their most trusted agents. These agents will split their 100 thousan
d into 10 thousand dollar shares and so on. This is a business based on turnover and commission. For every punter that an agent gets to gamble, there is a turnover for the betting company, and out of that turnover comes the agent's commission. All of these agents survive on the commissions that they rake in.

  Only the highest ranking agent deals directly with the betting company and it is only the senior master agent who decides the maximum line of credit that each sub-agent is allowed. He holds the keys to the website and provides one with a user-name and a password worth, say, 200 thousand Singapore dollars. Then, if one wants to bet one million dollars, they have to log out and log in with another user ID and password granting them another 200 thousand dollar credit line and so on. Nobody but the senior master agent knows who the actual punter is, to all the other agents down the line he is just another ID and password. That's how it works.

  Not everybody pays up, of course. There are fuck-ups, but the agents will usually give a punter enough time to come up with the money to settle his debt.

  "You can pay me monthly", they'll say, "You need time? How much time do you need?"

  Agents are also specifically told never to gamble. If you're a gambler, you're not going anywhere. The betting company instructs their senior master agents and they instruct their subordinates: "Mother-fuckers. Don't gamble your credit away".

  If an agent were to gamble, it would be like a drug dealer doing drugs; exactly the same. At the end of the day, it is the senior master agent's problem if people fuck him over; he is responsible, at least in part, for the money credited to him by the gambling company.

  There are two different kinds of gambling websites that are popular in Asia, one uses the Hong Kong dollar while the other uses the Singapore dollar. Singapore dollar websites usually allow the senior master agent to negotiate with the betting company's HQ on what percentage of his credit line he is willing to fight for.