Читать книгу The Big Fix - Brett Forrest - Страница 8

KUALA LUMPUR, 1990

Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.

As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.

The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn’t be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn’t tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.

The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.

Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren’t clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn’t control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn’t need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.

Perumal’s profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn’t back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you’re bound to lose big, especially when you’re not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn’t know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn’t confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.

They said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn’t mind letting people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful people in Malaysia.

Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy’s enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss’s place near Yishun Park, in Singapore’s Sembawang district. It didn’t take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.

Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.

Perumal wasn’t sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-Singaporean horse-racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn’t cover a large football bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore’s bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.

Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy’s fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy’s side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.

Perumal watched and learned how fixing was done at the highest level. How to approach a player in false friendship. The way to pay him far greater than the competition, in order to poach him. How to use women to trap players. How to develop a player, then pull strings to get him transferred to a club under your control. How to threaten someone else in the player’s presence, so that he would get the message without feeling in danger himself. How to take a player shopping, buy him some clothes, some shoes, make him feel special, as you would do for your girlfriend. How to follow through on a threat if a player resisted your demands.

Perumal also saw that even a figure as important as Kurusamy still had to bow to the Chinese in gambling circles. The Chinese ultimately held every big ticket. Not only did China have the largest mass of people the world, as well as a rising economy, but it also had the strongest organized crime network in Asia, the Triads. All down the line in the bookmaking business, Chinese controlled everything of worth and importance.

Kurusamy was undeniable, but he was not the only one. Perumal watched teams staying in the same hotel get friendly with one another. Club officials had drinks together in the lounge. One team needed a win to advance in the tournament. The other team had already gained the next round. Money exchanged hands. Or sometimes just the promise of a return favor. It was easy. No victims. It was just the way things were done in Asian football. To Perumal, it appeared that everybody was in on the fix, and that nobody was trying to stop it.

He watched players inexplicably miss the net on penalty kicks, and he knew why. The talk was in the market, and if you listened to the talk, you could make some real money. But the money was fleeting. It came and went. Whatever he made fixing, he ended up betting on English Premier League matches, on UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League matches. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost, because he never knew how those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.

In his own fixes, Perumal was learning the valuable lessons of experience. He learned that the fix was not always easy to complete. Players were unreliable. They wouldn’t follow directions. They would score when they were supposed to concede. They were sometimes hungover, or they just didn’t care. Perumal would watch as the clock wound down on a match, and all he needed was his chosen team to let in one more goal, but sometimes it just wouldn’t come. He would harangue the players, but it was clear that even though he paid them money, they didn’t feel like they owed him anything. To them, he was just a small-time criminal. He couldn’t control them. He was missing something.

Perumal would escape it all at Orchard Towers, Singapore’s “Four Floors of Whores,” a shopping complex that turned into a sprawling boudoir in the evening. Here there was business to be done. Perumal mingled with football players there, many of them foreign players, the high-priced imports with the disposable income that Perumal was trying to secure for himself. As the European players tossed money around and as the girls laughed and wanted in on the action, Perumal sauntered into their circle. He approached one of the players, this time with a new strategy.

Perumal approached a foreign player he recognised from watching league matches in Singapore. And from what Perumal could surmise, the player was disinterested. At times, he was the strongest player on the field. At other times, it was hard to pick him out of the lazy back-and-forth of the play. As they spoke over the music at Orchard Towers, Perumal asked him to win.

Perumal had been fixing single games by compromising the defenders and goalkeeper, compelling them to allow the opposing team to score. Now he saw how the fix could work in another way, with a foreign player who was slumming, on the downside of his career, stuck in an Asian lower league for the nightclubs, the easy money, the women, not the glory that he had once imagined, but which had long faded from his aspirations. In those nights at the Orchard Towers, Perumal realized that the players were just like he was, living without a thought for tomorrow, concerned with money only to spend it. Perumal and the player locked eyes in agreement over the flashing lights of the action.

Perumal instructed him to jog along with the rest of the players throughout a game, until that moment when he needed a goal. Perumal would then shout from the stands, like an impassioned fan. That was the signal, and the player would exert himself. In the first game under this arrangement he scored four goals. He easily controlled the intensity with which he played, especially since he was superior to the competition he faced. The partnership thrived. Things went well, so successfully and profitably that the player started suggesting fixes. Perumal realized that he was not the only one getting addicted to easy money.

Perumal was liquid again, and he rejoined Kurusamy’s poker game. He wasn’t consistently winning at Pal’s table, but he was bragging plenty. The Boss listened closely to what Perumal said, even if he didn’t let on. And soon his player had slipped through Perumal’s fingers, going to work for Kurusamy. Perumal was left with nothing besides a costly lesson in the fix. Players had fleeting loyalty. Fixing partners had none at all. Years later, such realities would upend the high life that Perumal had constructed for himself.

There was another lesson that was more valuable, though Perumal was not ready to learn it. Since Kurusamy had many influential people on his payroll in Malaysia and Singapore, he felt comfortable enough to boast. He had spent ten years in prison, starting in the 1980s, and through that despair had attained wealth and criminal authority. But he became too public. The king of this “victimless” crime hadn’t figured on the pride of the victim. Kurusamy wasn’t concerned about defrauding bettors or preying on the morality of the players on the field. But he would have profited by understanding that he was lampooning the state. In 1994, Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), the terror of local criminals, initiated a match-fixing crackdown. Kurusamy was arrested.

He wasn’t the only one. In September 1994, a Singaporean tournament called the Constituency Cup was coming up, and Perumal phoned a player, proposing a fix in the competition, offering $3,000. In light of the CPIB crackdown, the player reported the approach to police. The authorities researched the phone record. They traced the call to Perumal’s residence, and in short order, Perumal had a new residence: prison. But in time, he would soon go further afield than he had ever imagined.

Bail was Singapore’s beautiful game, as Perumal and Kurusamy quickly gained their liberty while awaiting sentencing. But their business was shackled by the CPIB. Fixing was too hot in Singapore and Malaysia. The cash had ceased flowing. Kurusamy needed to find another way.

Kurusamy had no other way, no other place. He was uneducated. He spoke only passable English. He was not a man of the world. His world was the Malay Peninsula, with its government and police officials whom the Boss knew by name and shared history. Now this world was off-limits to him. Kurusamy developed an idea. Like the many goods that flowed out of the Singapore port, one of the busiest in the world, export was the key to financial mobility. The Boss summoned Perumal. “Go to Europe,” he told him.

Perumal traveled on the passport of a friend, easily slipping off the island, breaking the bounds of his bail agreement. He traveled with a partner. The two flew to the United Kingdom, the center of world football, where the inhospitable weather surprised them. They weren’t in Asia anymore, and they realized that they had wandered into the deep end of the pool. Back home, they had been suave operators. England neutralized any special powers they thought they possessed. They didn’t know any players. They didn’t know any cops or politicians. Wandering nearly without aim, they found their way to the training grounds of Birmingham, and of Chelsea, the latter one of the biggest clubs in the game. Like rank amateurs, Perumal and his partner posed as journalists.

This was the land of Ladbrokes and William Hill, a sophisticated, legal gambling market that provided the Englishman with a betting slip to heighten his interest in a match. But this had nothing on the Asian marketplace. Betting in Asia was not for fun, or even for watching a game. It was serious business, the business of cultural addiction, and it was about to grow exponentially, making the English market look like a child’s hobby. The Singaporean, Indonesian, and Chinese had no favorite teams, just favorite bets, those that appeared winnable. These billions of people drawn together in identical behavior constituted an enormous market. Ladbrokes and the other regulated bookmakers had the name, the veneer of English respectability. But as Perumal realised, the market and the power were Asian. But few people knew this. Not yet.

When Perumal approached players in Great Britain, they turned their backs on him, walked right past him, looked right through him. When he did happen to get close enough to players to make his proposal – £60,000 to enhance a match – players laughed at him, then reported him. Word got around, and soon coaches and administrators were running Perumal and his partner off their grounds. Most insulting of all: no one ever called the cops. They didn’t take Perumal seriously.

Back in Singapore, Kurusamy was furious with Perumal’s lack of results, though there was not much he could do. His trial was approaching. Perumal himself stood trial in January 1995. The court convicted him for match-fixing and leaving the country on a false passport. He was sentenced to one year in prison.

When Perumal received parole, eight months later, little had changed. Match-fixing was still too hot in Singapore. The country’s international reputation was at stake. How could Singapore be known for best business practices when its most public events constituted a fraud? The CPIB set out to eradicate fixing in Singapore. The Boss still had to make his money. The United Kingdom had proven impenetrable, for now. But there was another market, and it was even bigger.

Kurusamy arrived in the United States flush with cash, connecting in New York for a flight to Atlanta. Perumal joined him, as did several others from a gathering Asian syndicate. The opportunity before them was worth a concentrated effort.

In Atlanta, they blended in with all the other tourists who were there for the 1996 Olympics. They hung around the hotels, the stadiums, and practice fields where they might encounter players for the sixteen national teams included in the football tournament. Olympic football was a jerry-rigged competition that FIFA tolerated, so long as it wouldn’t infringe on the popularity of the World Cup. After limitations on players’ ages and levels of experience diluted the rosters, the result was a marginalized round-robin that hardly did justice to an Olympic competition of the world’s most popular game.

All the same, the betting on the Olympics football tournament would be worth the effort that Kurusamy and Perumal put into manipulating it. Five different cities in the eastern United States hosted the Olympics football competition. Kurusamy and Perumal traveled to one of the venues – Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. There, according to Perumal, they approached Mexico’s goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, one of the most well-known players in the international game. The Singaporeans attempted to corrupt Campos, but he turned them down.

A partner of Kurusamy, a middle-aged man whom Perumal knew only as “Uncle,” had made contact with players from another national team before the games started. He claimed to have struck a deal with the team’s defenders and goalie. Perumal couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to him on seeing their results that Uncle wasn’t exaggerating his influence over the team.

It was Perumal’s first taste of success while abroad. He saw how it might be done, how you could approach national team players, how willing they were likely to be. And when he returned to Singapore, Perumal wished he had simply stayed in America.

Singaporean police had issued another warrant for his arrest. He spent the night in lockup at the CPIB holding pen. The following day, as officers escorted him to a car on the police grounds, Perumal slipped one of his handcuffs and ran for it. He tried to scale a fence, but it was too high, and the officers dragged him back to the ground. At court, a judge sent him down for two years – plus extra time for attempting to escape custody. Police also picked up Kurusamy. The Boss ended up spending two years in solitary confinement.

When Perumal was released, in 2000, while those around him were excited about the prospects of the new millennium, his hopes were dim. He was thirty-five years old, a convicted felon with no professional skills, no references, and no viable financial prospects. There was only one thing he had ever known how to do. And his time in prison, where he shared a small cell with a dozen men, where a small bowl served as his toilet and his drinking cup, this period had not caused him to develop his talents.

When Perumal consulted the schedule and noticed that a match between two S. League teams was a few days off, he got an idea. There was still too much heat on fixing. Perumal didn’t trust the players. They were liable to turn him in, notifying the CPIB to save themselves. But there were other ways to influence the outcome of a match.

The strongest player for the Woodlands Wellington club was a Croatian import, a midfielder named Ivica Raguz. Perumal had watched enough Wellington matches to understand that the team’s chances were largely dependent on Raguz’s performance. If Raguz happened to miss a game, and if Perumal happened to possess this knowledge before a bookmaker knew that Raguz was going to sit it out, Perumal stood to gain. Perumal had always considered match-fixing a victimless crime. The only people who got burned were the bookies, and they were dealing in such high volume that, Perumal rationalized, his manner of fraud made little impact. Perumal had developed a philosophy by which he was the patron of football’s lost souls, the financial champion of players whom the establishment paid less than a living wage. Perumal was the one who augmented their salaries, made their lives possible. Financial desperation may have altered his character. Maybe it was prison. Or maybe the elaborate stories that he was telling himself and others were the convoluted justifications of someone who would indeed do anything to beat the system.

Perumal hired two Bangladeshi men to assault Ivica Raguz before Wellington’s next match, against Geylang United. Perumal and a friend placed a bet, 30,000 Singapore dollars, on Wellington’s opponent to win. Then they sat back and waited to hear from the Bangladeshis. But the call from the Bangladeshis, confirming that they had incapacitated Raguz, never came. Raguz was a large, heavily muscled man, and when the Bangladeshis saw him in person, they froze. They decided this job wasn’t for them. But the bet had already been placed. Perumal had to do something. He had to do the job himself. With money on the line, and a crude sort of match-fixing proposed, Perumal proved his industry.

He lay in wait in a stand of bushes near the Lower Seletar Reservoir, in northern Singapore, where Wellington’s practice field was located. Perumal held a field hockey stick in his hand. He waited for some time before Raguz appeared. When Raguz did materialize, a teammate was by his side. This was Perumal’s chance to abandon his plan. He hadn’t yet crossed over from fraud to felony assault. His victims showed no visible bruises. He hadn’t threatened anyone’s health or livelihood. But desperation outweighed all concerns. Perumal didn’t want to miss the chance. He stepped out of the bushes, approaching the men from behind. He swung his field hockey stick, striking Raguz on the knee with the dull, hard wood. Raguz and his teammate managed to escape, but the damage was done. Raguz didn’t play against Geylang United, and the bet came off.

Perumal had little time to enjoy his winnings. A few days after the match, police arrested him on assault charges. He spent another year in prison.

When he was released, in September 2001, Perumal kept to himself. He felt like a pariah. He kept away from the few friends who continued to associate with him. Fixing was off-limits, even if he had wanted to revive his connections in that world. But he had to earn a living somehow. Regular work was not an option for Perumal. He had never held a traditional job. With his criminal record, he would not have been able to find honest work that equaled his conception of himself. Instead, he opted for credit card fraud. Match-fixing had earned Perumal fairly light sentences – six months, a year. Considering fixing’s financial potential, the risk of such limited prison time seemed worth the gamble. However, institutional financial crime was serious business in Singapore. When the bank that Perumal targeted traced the source of the fraud, it was easy to identify the perpetrator.

Perumal was too poor to hire an attorney, and he instead represented himself at trial. Because of Perumal’s previous escape attempts, the judge ordered him to wear handcuffs in court. It was humiliating. And inevitable. Perumal wasn’t surprised when he was convicted of fraud. He understood the evidence. He also figured that his days as a match-fixer were over. He had already begun to conceive of how he was going to make a living when he got out of prison. But all of this thinking stopped, as he was staggered to learn of the penalty he would have to pay. When the judge pronounced a judgment of four years, Perumal wanted to hide his face in his hands. But he couldn’t, since he was shackled.