Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (10 page)

My statement was
recorded and I was released on bail. While awaiting trial for
match-fixing, my passport was impounded so that I would not leave the
country.

With
Singapore out of the Malaysia Cup, bookies started seeking new
ventures abroad. Many of us had gambled on European football matches
but none had ever tried to manipulate them; we thought Europe to be
well
beyond
our
reach. Once, during one of our poker sessions, I had brought up the
subject with Pal.

"Why aren't we
trying to fix the English Premier League?" I inquired.

"Impossible",
laughed Bryan.

"So long as
footballers are human", I insisted, "anything is possible".

Bryan gave me a
nasty look while Pal didn't flinch; he just kept playing, a smoking
Dunhill dangling from his lips, but the idea had somehow taken root
in his head. Then, in early January 1995, Pal decided to venture for
the first time into Europe. Without the Malaysia Cup to manipulate,
his match-fixing had come to an abrupt end and, following his arrest,
a substantial amount of his wealth had been confiscated by the
Singapore authorities. Bryan was not around anymore; Pal's right-hand
man had left and, although Pal was street-smart when it came to
Singapore, he knew nothing about the world beyond the causeway to
Malaysia. That's why he came to me; he knew that I was intelligent,
that I spoke good English and that I had a way with people and could
get things done. Pal asked me to travel to the UK with his
brother-in-law and see whether we could come up with something in
England to help him climb back to his old splendor. I had nothing
much to do at the time and I too was broke so I agreed.

"All right",
I said to Pal. "Let's go and try".

Pal
took out a loan from one of the gentlemen that participated in our
poker sessions and gave me a little pocket money for the trip.
Since
I was out on bail and my passport was impounded, I used a friend's
passport to leave Singapore and travel to the UK. It wasn't a fake
passport; it simply wasn't mine. My friend and I looked somewhat
similar so I didn't even bother replacing his picture with mine; when
white guys see two Indians, they cannot spot the difference between
them anyways.

I had no prior
information about players that fixed matches in England so, randomly,
I chose a match: Liverpool vs Birmingham City, FA Cup replay, January
18
^th
, 1995.
Birmingham had drawn at home and was now supposed to play the return
leg in Anfield. Liverpool was the overwhelming favorite to win the
match so we decided to set our sights on Birmingham's goalkeeper, Ian
Bennett.

It was my first trip
to the UK; we checked into a hotel in Liverpool. At the reception an
Indian, a Sikh man,
worked
whom we asked for directions to the closest shopping
center or mall.

"I haven't got
a clue, mate", he shrugged his shoulders.

I had never heard an
Indian speak with a British accent before and my first reaction was:
"Fuck, this Sikh is trying to pretend he's British".

I had no idea that
there were Indians who were born and bred in the United Kingdom and
whose accent was simply British, irrespective of their origin. Later
that day, Pal's brother-in-law and I went to watch a League Cup match
between Liverpool and Arsenal. I called Pal from the stadium.

"Take
Liverpool", I suggested.

I was not a Reds
fan, but after watching their initial performance on the pitch, I
thought that they were going to pull through. As expected, Ian Rush
scored and the home team won. We left the stadium right after Ian's
goal as the weather was unbearable; way too cold to endure.

With a week to go
before the FA Cup replay, Pal's brother-in-law and I traveled to
Birmingham. We took a cab to the club's training ground and
introduced ourselves at the gate as being journalists from Singapore.
The coach and the staff seemed very friendly. We asked politely if we
could snap some pictures and eventually managed to lure Birmingham's
goalkeeper, Ian Bennet, to a secluded corner of the training ground.
As Pal's brother-in-law spoke to Bennet, I paced back to our taxi and
waited at a distance while I kept the driver on hold in case we
needed to take off in a rush.

"If you are
interested", my associate told Bennett, "I will give you 20
thousand pounds to lose the match against Liverpool. You're going to
lose to them anyways."

"No",
replied Bennett, "I am not interested".

"Well, just
think about it", added Pal's brother-in-law. "And don't
tell anyone".

We quickly hopped in
the cab and took off. We were desperate; in normal circumstances we
would have never chanced with such a reckless approach. No luck.
Eventually, Liverpool drew the match and won at the penalty shoot-out
after extra time.

After our failed
attempt in Birmingham, we moved to London for our second try. We
decided to approach the goalkeeper of Chelsea FC, Dmitri Kharine. We
hung out for some time around Chelsea's training ground trying to
stage a meeting with the Russian goalkeeper. As we had done in
Birmingham, we passed ourselves off as journalists and asked
Chelsea's staff if we could enter the premises.

"Chelsea's
coach Glenn Hoddle says you have to talk to the press office first",
we were told. "If they agree, you can come inside, otherwise,
you can't speak to any of the players".

The staff then
escorted us out. Despite the refusal, it was not difficult to speak
to the players. When the training session ended, we saw the
footballers walk out one by one and drive away in their cars so we
decided to wait for Kharine in
the
parking lot outside. We approached
the Russian goalkeeper as he was climbing into his small Mini car.

"Hello",
said Pal's brother-in-law to Kharine, "how are you? Can we take
a picture together? Can you give us a lift?"

It was just a
regular conversation.

"Climb in",
Kharine didn't speak English very well. "I'll give you a lift".

Once inside his car,
we decided to make our move.

"We will give
you 60 thousand US dollars if you lose the coming match", I told
Kharine as I placed the money in plain view.

The Russian
goalkeeper kept his cool.

"I've
had a long career at Chelsea", said Kharine as he kept his eyes
on the road. "I don't think that this offer would be good for
me. In the United States, during the 1994 World Cup, many people
offered me money to lose matches. I
just want to focus on what's left of my career".

He dropped us off
and, the moment his car moved, we moved. We didn't want to get in
trouble so we quickly disappeared from the scene.

Instead
of going back to Singapore to face my match-fixing trial, I could
have remained in the UK. I could have passed myself off as a Tamil
from Sri Lanka seeking refuge in England and nobody would have
suspected that it wasn't the truth. By now I would be a British
citizen but, at the time, I had no interest in staying in the United
Kingdom. The weather in London was far too cold for me to endure; it
was a torture so I dropped the idea and, a week later, flew back
home.
I landed in Singapore unannounced
and immediately called Pal to brief him on the outcome of our
mission.

"Hello boss",
I said, "I'm back. No luck in the UK, boss".

"What the fuck
are you doing back in Singapore?" Pal was furious. "Who
told you to come back? Get on another fucking plane to England right
now and try again".

"Why the fuck
do we have go to the UK to try to bribe players?" I asked. "It
looks like a difficult thing to do because these guys have a very
high level of integrity. Why don't we find the stadium's electrician,
pay him 100 thousand pounds or so and tell him: 'Switch the
floodlights off'".

In those days, Asian
betting allowed payments for matches that ended during the second
half. Games that finished in the first 45 minutes were considered
null and void but, once the second half had started, even if the
match was called off after ten seconds, Asian betting companies would
pay according to the score standing at that point in time.

"No one is
going to get hurt", I elaborated to Pal, "and the game will
simply be replayed on a different day. The best part is that you
cannot lose. We decide when to call the match off; I can find ways,
technical ways, to do it, you know. All we need is a professional for
the job. It's still a raw idea but once we've polished it and have
the technicians to carry it out..."

I had come up with
the concept and would have left the rest of the work to the
professionals. It was like coming up with the idea of curbing
population growth and implementing safe sex through the use of
rubbers; you cannot expect the inventor of the rubber to come up with
flavors and colors as well.

In 1997, Bryan sold
my floodlight scam to a Malaysian syndicate and the scheme was
executed in the UK. He brought my project to a timber merchant in
Sabah whom he owed money to. The merchant canceled Bryan's debts and
paid him an additional one million dollars for my idea. My baby had
been auctioned in the market for more than a million dollars without
my knowledge or consent. I still vividly remember the Premier League
matches where the floodlights were killed: Derby vs Wimbledon, West
Ham vs Crystal Palace and Wimbledon vs Arsenal. But Pal didn't take
my idea seriously at the time.

"Try your luck
again", he said, "try another player. Go back to England,
approach another player and see what you can do".

This
time around the designated target was Leicester City's goalkeeper
Kevin Poole.
I was about to board the
flight to the UK with my friend's passport once again but Singapore
had enacted more stringent immigration controls. The wave of Indians
passing themselves off as Sinhalese to enter the UK had alerted
Singaporean authorities and passports were rigorously checked. An
immigration officer began scrutinizing my passport closely.

"Something is
not right with this passport", he said as he looked up at my
face.

I was detained and
the police was called in. I was placed under arrest but, since I had
no papers on me except for my friend's passport, none of the officers
had any idea of who I was. I would have been kept there forever had I
not decided to confess.

"I'm Wilson Raj
Perumal", I finally conceded. "I am wanted by the CPIB".

I was transferred to
the Bedok police station and charged with cheating by impersonation
for the passport and with corruption for calling the Constituency Cup
player from my father's house. The two charges added up and I was
sent to Queenstown remand prison for two weeks. After being escorted
to my cell I met my inmates who introduced themselves. One of them,
an Indian national, had been in remand for five months. I was
stunned.

"Five fucking
months in the same cell for 23 hours a day?" I thought. "This
is crazy".

When you could not
afford bail and had to wait for your trial to come up, you would be
locked up in remand prison. While in remand, you would be confined to
your cell for 23 hours per day and had but one hour to stretch your
legs outside. During that hour, you could take a shower, wash your
clothes and
you
would then be sent back to your cell.
Fortunately, one of the officers in Block D was an old classmate of
my brothers', so he offered me a job as a
'cookie'.
Cookies were runners who distributed food, cleaned the
blocks and were spared from spending the entire day in confinement.
Cookies would carry out all sorts of odd tasks until the time for
lights-out came.

While in remand, my
family came to visit me often, especially my mother, who was there
every single morning. She usually had to wait two to three hours
outside before being allowed in for a 15-minute meeting with me. The
visits were nothing like the ones you see in the movies:
a
quiet hall, two working phones on opposite sides of a
glass, a regular conversation. Singapore's visit rooms were extremely
noisy and packed with inmates and visitors leaning over and screaming
across the transparent Plexiglas divider in order to be heard. Each
visitor was allowed to bring two fresh fruits, one canned fruit and a
pack of cigarettes for the inmates. Even though I was not a smoker, I
still asked my family to buy me cigarettes; they were portable gold
bars in prison as my cellmates seldom received any visits
or
gifts from the outside. They would save their smokes by
unwrapping the paper and rolling five cigarettes out of a single
cancer-stick. My daily pack granted me a royal treatment in my cell;
I was spared the inconvenience of having to clean the floor after
meals and things like that. My cellmates and I soon became like
brothers; we would share anything coming from the outside equally
between the four of us.