Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (12 page)

As for myself, I
went back to the same old
routine
.
I gambled at Jalan Besar stadium and played football in Ang Mo Kio
with my seven-aside team Brazilian Boys. After a few weeks of
carefree liberty I was approached by a friend called Mike,
who
has since passed away; Mike asked me to introduce him to
some of the players from my team. He knew that some of my Brazilian
Boys also played in a local team called Balestier Khalsa FC and
wanted to ask them whether they would be willing to fix some matches
with him. I told Mike that I had no intention of going back to prison
and suggested that he come to our friendly matches and speak to the
players himself if he wanted to.

"Don't get me
involved", I
reasoned
with him, "I cannot sit another three or four years
in prison. I just can't".

"Just introduce
me", he insisted. "I have a powerful boss".

"All right",
I agreed.

I introduced the
players to Mike during a friendly match and they began talking
business. Mike's boss was a bookie called Ah Seng
who
belonged to the Hai Lok San trade group
.
After being introduced to m
y friends from
Balestier FC, Ah Seng and Mike went on to fix three Balestier matches
with them.

My sojourn in prison
had left me penniless so, when Pal returned from Malaysia, I decided
to visit him and ask him for some money. Usually the procedure was
that the boss would give anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars
to any of his boys that were fresh out of prison. Instead, Pal kept
me waiting for three days, then only gave me one thousand dollars.

"Fuck!" I
complained. "You're only giving me one thousand? That's it?"

I did my
calculations and I knew that Pal was broke. We are gamblers, you
know; in '91, '92 and '93, Pal was a multimillionaire; in '95, fuck,
he was a pauper and was borrowing money from his friends. Pal was
brilliant when it came to making money but a hopeless fucker in
managing it. The trial, the arrests and the seizures by Singapore's
authorities had landed him back at square one. Pal was left with a
single property, a shop-house or something, but it could not be sold
so I gave him the idea of taking out a loan against it. I suggested
that he try to borrow some money from Ah Seng, Mike's boss, whom Pal
knew well because they had spent time together in prison under
Section 55. I prepared the paperwork for him and Ah Seng lent Pal one
million Singapore dollars. The contract that I drafted gave Ah Seng
the possibility to sell Pal's property if he were to default his
payments. Pal was the same old dirty bastard: he was a member of the
Ang Soon Tong triad but had no problem borrowing money from a member
of a rival gang, the Hai Lok San.

With a million
dollars in our pockets we flew business class to the USA to fix the
1996 Atlanta Olympics. Pal was sharing his business with Uncle and
with an Indonesian-Chinese friend of his called Ronnie. Ronnie and
Uncle did not know each other nor did Pal ever bother to introduce
the two but they were nonetheless dividing the expenses by three and
betting together. Since I had helped him borrow money from Ah Seng,
Pal asked me to come along with him to the United States; I was to
play a very marginal role there; I was just an accessory.

I landed in New York
and met Pal at the Holiday Inn Hotel, where the Tunisian national
team's delegation was staying. The minute I arrived on the scene, I
tried to get close to some of the Tunisian players. I was already on
talking terms with a couple of them when Pal came over to me.

"Stay away",
he whispered. "Uncle has already accomplished the job".

Uncle had the
ability to convince people very quickly. I had already heard about
this quality of his from some players who had worked for him in the
past. My role was to approach and speak to the footballers but Uncle
had jumped the gun; he had arrived a day earlier than us and had
managed to build a relationship with the Tunisian team. He had gotten
the defense back-line into the network and had started doing business
with them. By the time Pal and I arrived, he had already accomplished
the job and was nowhere to be found.

Our first match was
Portugal vs Tunisia in Washington D.C. The odds were one-ball in
favor of Portugal so Tunisia had to lose by two goals. At that point
Pal decided to double-cross Ah Seng, the man that was financing his
fixes. I don't know why he chose to do so but I was aware that Pal
had this dirty mother-fucking habit; he would call you and say,
"today, you go and take this team", then he would bet on
the other team. This was a very, very dirty habit that he had.

He called Ah Seng
and suggested: "Tunisia, we're supposed to collect".

It meant that they
were supposed to take Tunisia. Pal did this every fucking time,
perhaps to obtain better odds for his bets. He was unaware that I was
placing my own bets on the side with Ah Seng, whom I called on that
very same day.

"Take Portugal
and give one-ball for me", I told Ah Seng, "50 thousand".

"Listen",
Ah Seng was puzzled, "are you very sure that you want to do
this? Pal said he eat ball. Take Tunisia, he said".

"You want to
follow Pal?" I asked Ah Seng. "Go ahead and do that, but
for me, you take Portugal and give one-ball".

Pal wasn't in the
habit of attending a match that he had fixed so I personally went to
watch Tunisia's first match and relayed the live commentary for him
from the stadium. Portugal scored first and was leading one-nil so we
needed Tunisia to concede just one more goal. In the 67
^th
minute there was a shot at the Tunisian goal from some
distance away and the goalkeeper dove in the opposite direction. End
result, 2-0. I called Pal from the stadium.

"Pal", I
said, "you must give the players an additional ten thousand
dollars for their level of commitment because these mother-fuckers
did a perfect job. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't be collecting
a cent".

After the Tunisia vs
Portugal match, Pal asked me to deliver 100 thousand US dollars to
Uncle who was staying in another city, about 100 km away from
Washington D.C. I picked up the money and traveled to Uncle's motel,
your typical US motel with a large parking lot and a two-story
building. It was the first and only time that I saw Uncle in person.
He was a few years older than Pal, perhaps in his mid-50's, of
regular build, with tanned skin, his hair combed sideways and wore
glasses. He was quite well-dressed and appeared to be well mannered.
He shared his room with a lady that I did not know. Uncle had been
the first of us all; a true pioneer of the business. At one time or
the other, we all eventually got caught by the authorities; Uncle
never did. I left the money with him and drove back to our hotel.

When I walked into
the hall, I could hear Pal shouting from his room. Back in Singapore,
Pal had been fucking two girls who worked in his office at the same
time; one was named Sita, the other I cannot remember. He had sent
the second girl to get an abortion while he and Sita had flown off to
the Atalanta Olympics. The girl who had aborted hadn't seen Sita in
the office for a couple of days so she had asked around and learned
that Sita was with Pal in the United States. Blinded by jealousy, she
had called Pal's wife, who had remained at home in Singapore.

"Your husband
fucked me and sent me to get an abortion", she cried to Pal's
wife. "And now he's fucking another girl in the US. Right now!"

I walked into my
room, which was at the other end of the corridor, and closed the
door, but could still hear Pal shouting into the telephone in Tamil.

"You're a
fucking whore", he hollered, "you're a fucking whore,
you're a fucking whore".

I reckoned that Pal
must have been speaking with the girl that had alerted his wife. He
just kept yelling the same thing over and over.

"You're a
fucking whore".

After about ten
minutes I walked out of my room, down the aisle and into Pal's room.

"Pal", I
said, "you are too loud".

"You can hear
me?" he asked.

"Of course I
can hear you. Everybody in this entire fucking hotel can hear you".

"OK. Just wait
there for a second", he hung up the telephone and called his
runner, James, who was also in the hotel with us.

"James,
listen", Pal explained, "now you call my wife and you tell
her that Sita is not here in the US with us".

"But boss",
argued James, "Sita is here".

"James",
sighed Pal, "you simply tell my wife that Sita is not here. It's
just you, me and Wilson. Just the three of us".

"But boss",
James insisted, "Sita is right here".

I turned to Pal,
"Where the fuck did you get this moron from?"

On the following day
we moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where Tunisia was playing against
the United States. The US team was not that strong and initially
Tunisia was struggling to concede the two goals that we needed. I
think that Uncle had co-opted additional players from the Tunisian
lineup by then because, through an admirable team effort, they
eventually managed to lose by two goals. I don't know why but we were
not involved in Tunisia's third and last match against Argentina.

Next, we moved from
Washington to Miami, Florida, where Pal planned to fix Brazil vs
Nigeria. He sent me to the Nigerian Olympic village where I managed
to speak to three players. My offer was pretty straight forward.

"300 thousand
dollars for you, if you lose against Brazil".

Before I could
elaborate any further, a security officer came up to me and asked to
see my ID. I didn't have one on me and was therefore asked to leave
the premises immediately or be arrested. I left without arguing and
reported back to Pal, who refused to give up on Nigeria. He took it
upon himself to approach some senior officials from the Nigerian
delegation who claimed that they could fix the match. Pal left 100
thousand US dollars in cash with them as a deposit. There was no need
to worry about the money, he thought, because the Nigerians were
participating in an official tournament and could not run away with
it; they were traveling with their delegation and had one or two more
matches left to play in the competition. Pal wanted Brazil to win by
a two-goal margin but they only won 2-1 and we lost half of our bet.
After the match, since the result had not fully materialized, Pal
sent me to retrieve the 100 thousand dollars from the Nigerians. I
called the Nigerian delegation members that Pal had left the money
with and was told that they had already spent 20 thousand dollars,
leaving only 80 thousand to recover. I was supposed to pick up the
money and bring it back to Pal but decided instead that I would keep
it for myself. I knew that Pal wanted to use my services and that he
would attempt not to pay me after the job; my profit came solely from
the bets that I managed to place behind his back. I retrieved the 80
thousand dollars from the Nigerians and hid them in a safe spot, then
I made up a plausible explanation for Pal.

"The Nigerian
team is leaving today for Birmingham, Alabama", I told him,
"where they're going to play the quarter-final against Mexico.
We'll just have to wait until we get there to fetch your deposit".

Since Pal and I were
moving together, I needed someone else to recover the money that I
had hidden in Miami. I made plans for my friend Danny to pick up the
stack; I bought him a ticket from Singapore to the US and told him
where I had hidden the cash.

I'd known Danny for
a lifetime. He and I were best friends ever since we were teenagers.
When we were 19, we attended the same Tamil course at the language
center. Back then, we both liked to listen to hip-hop music and Danny
decided to become a rapper. He once played a recording of a rap song
that he had written.

"Not bad",
I thought. "It's OK for a local guy".

Danny admired the
hip-hop culture and became a black wannabe. He loved to hang out with
a group of black friends from the US who played live music in clubs
like the Top-10 and began to move and speak as if he were a black guy
himself.

"You eat Indian
food", I teased him, "then you walk around like a black
mother-fucker? Why don't you rap in Tamil? There is nobody in the
market rapping in Tamil. Go fucking rap in Tamil".

What I taunted in
the 80's later came true: Tamil rappers from Malaysia were making the
headlines two decades later but it was too late for Danny. He had
pursued his musical career and had joined a local band. I remember
hearing one of their songs on a local radio once as I was driving
around in my car. Danny sang a couple of lines in the middle of the
song and that was it. A couple of lines was the most he could achieve
so I told him to drop the hip-hop gimmicks and come along with me to
the US for some match-fixing; there was no future for Singaporeans in
the music business.