Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (18 page)

Play games, share
stories or read; those are the only ways to kill time in prison. I
tried to avoid playing games with the others so that I could read my
beloved books, which were still my best companion. But Thayam needs
four players so, from time to time, I would participate to help out
my cellmates. You need to have a timetable to survive the prison
routine; mine was exercise in the morning with five hundred push ups
and sit ups, a nap in the afternoon and Thayam after dinner. And life
goes on, newcomers enter the cell, you swap stories, play games, read
books and wait to be sentenced.

After five months in
remand, seeing that my case was going nowhere, I decided to take
matters into my own hands and conduct my own trial. I had a lawyer
but no money to pay him and the courts in Singapore do not usually
provide a counsel for you so I made a request with the senior
officer; I still remember his name, ASPC Mong San.

"Sir", I
asked, "I'm going to conduct my trial on my own. I need pen and
paper".

"Are you facing
capital punishment?" he inquired.

"No".

"In that case,
we cannot give you pen and paper".

Goodbye. Finished.
You may go now.

Yard time usually
lasted from one to one-and-a-half hours and, if you were allowed out
in the morning on one day, on the following day you would be let out
in the afternoon. Before entering the yard, you had to strip naked
and squat before the on-duty prison guards; they wanted to make sure
you were not smuggling anything outside. During yard time you could
take a shower, wash your clothes, work out at the pull bar or play
Sepak Takraw. Since I was given neither pen nor paper, I borrowed
them during yard time and used my time to write down the questions
that I was going to raise with the witnesses during the trial.
Finally, the day of my first court session came and I was brought
before the judge, who initially raised my hopes.

"Since you are
not represented", he pointed out, "I will give you some
leeway".

"Thank God",
I thought, "this guy is on my side".

"Your honor",
I asked, "can I have my handcuffs removed so that I can write
down the answers to the questions that I'm going to ask?"

"No", the
judge dismissed my request. "I cannot allow that. You have a
previous charge for escaping custody in 1998 so I cannot allow your
hands to be freed".

"How can I
conduct a trial with my hands cuffed?" I objected.

"You'll just
have to", said the judge, flushing my presumed innocence down
the drain.

I still had to give
it a shot so, relying on the experience gathered during the trial
that I had undergone in 1998, I approached the first witness: the DBS
bank officer.

"What is your
name?" I asked; and the bank officer provided her details to the
court.

"What is the
nature of your job?" I continued, "How long have you been
in this profession?"

Then, finally, I
asked: "How did you deduce that the application form for the
credit card was a fraud?"

"I deduced it
by looking at the financial document", she replied.

There were only
three court exhibits marked P1, P2 and P3.

"Are you
referring to one of these court exhibits?" I inquired as I
showed them to her.

"No", she
answered, "I'm referring to the payslip".

There was no payslip
among the court exhibits so I turned to the judge.

"Your honor",
I asked, "the witness is referring to a payslip which has not
been produced as a court exhibit".

"If it's not
there, it's not there", he waved me off. "Just go ahead
with your questions".

"Fuck", I
thought, "what else am I supposed to ask?"

"I have no
further questions, your honor", I said.

Then my friend,
Chandar, came to the stand as a prosecution witness. When my turn
came to question him, I asked: "Have you applied for a credit
card before?"

I knew he had. The
fucker was staying at my place; we were good friends; we used to hang
out together and all. I knew that he had used my father's address to
apply for a Hong Kong Shanghai Bank credit card.

"Have you ever
applied for a credit card before?"

"Yes", he
answered.

"Who filled out
the application form for you?"

"Another
friend".

"What was the
mailing address?"

"The
accused's
place of residence".

"And did the
accused hand the card over to you?"

"Yes, the
accused handed the card over to me".

Then I asked him:
"When did you first find out that the accused had applied for a
credit card in your name?"

"January
something 2003", he replied.

The mother-fucker
had filed his complaint at the DBS Bank in November 2002. He was
lying. I didn't go to law school and I'm not a professional attorney
but I realized that I had to subpoena the DBS Bank officer from the
credit card center to prove my case. The bank officer could have
taken the stand, looked at the date of the complaint, and confirmed
that my friend was lying. I voiced my request with the judge but,
once again, he rejected it. As a last resort, I thought of calling
Chandar back to the stand to expose his lies. I was sure that lawyers
were allowed to call a witness back to the stand even though they had
testified already, so I addressed the judge.

"Can I call the
prosecution witness back to the stand for further questioning?"
I asked.

"No", the
judge cut me short, "just continue".

Continue what? I
realized that the court was fucking around with me. All the judges in
the Subordinate Court already knew who Wilson Raj was. I was way too
popular in their circle; they would all have lunch together at the
same table and say: "See, this fucker never changes. Let's give
him five years".

They all knew about
my antecedents but, first and foremost, I was the only one who had
come clean from a match-fixing trial initiated by the CPIB in
Singapore. I had beaten them and had therefore become the Attorney
General's enemy. I stood there, before the court, with no room left
to move; I could not subpoena the bank officer nor call the witnesses
back to the stand; what else could I do?

"OK", I
capitulated. "I throw in the towel. I plead guilty".

On the day of the
sentence, the judge started off with the following words: "I've
seen your mother in this courtroom every single day since the trial
began and I feel very sorry for her".

"You fuck me
up", I thought, "and you feel sorry for my mom?"

I begged my sister
to engage a lawyer to save what was left of my trial. She took out a
five thousand dollar loan and hired one,
but he
didn't seem too bright. I expected him to take over the proceedings
but he wanted me to do all the talking and asked me to request the
witness to be recalled to the stand. It was written all over that I
was in a kangaroo court. Finally, my lawyer went for a mitigation. We
mitigated and I got a four-year sentence for my credit card fraud:
forgery; maximum punishment. Then, in October 2003, I got an
additional year for the fistfight with my girlfriend's sister's
boyfriend. Once again: assault; maximum punishment. All in all, I was
sentenced to five years and served four of them. Four fucking years
that took everything out of me.

Every single day I
sat and thought: "How the fuck am I going to serve this? A
five-year sentence for nothing. The bank did not incur any illegal
loss; I did not obtain any illegal gain. Seen my previous
convictions, maybe a fine would have been too light a sentence, but
one or two years would have sufficed".

I was totally
broken.

When I was taken
back to my cell, Singh was gone. He had also been tried and had been
moved to a different hall: the Preventive Detention hall. I spotted
him once from the holes in the prison cell; I jumped, pulled myself
up to the wind hole and stuck my face in.

"Hey Singh",
I called out. "How did it go?"

"12 years",
he said.

"Fuck! Are you
going to appeal?"

"Yes, of
course".

The moment Singh
said he wanted to appeal I thought to myself that the fucker was
asking for further trouble.

A few days later, I
was made to climb
into
a prison van for the transfer to my final place of
detention. Once again, Singh was there with me; he was going to
Changi prison while I was headed to the Moon Crescent penitentiary, a
more flexible environment.

"OK", I
told Singh, "this is the last time I'm ever going to see you.
Take care of yourself. You've got 12 years. I've got five. Take care,
my friend".

In the Moon Crescent
penitentiary I received much better treatment than I had received in
Queenstown remand prison. I had gone from a guesthouse to a 3-star
hotel. There were only 50 to 60 prisoners in each detention hall,
bunk beds, games and TV in the evening. The prison also provided a
working environment for the detainees in its three factories: the
bakery, the laundry and the fertilizer plant. I worked in the
fertilizer plant where we would grow soya, dry it up and turn it into
compost. A contractor rented the space and we worked for him under
the prison's supervision. I sometimes stepped into the bakery as
well; it was the filthiest bakery that I have ever seen; there were
rats running all over the place and the bread it baked was sold to
hospitals outside. We were paid very small money: six Singapore
dollars per week. Three dollars would go into our savings account and
the other three could be spent to buy food. I never understood the
principle behind the choice of splitting this tiny amount of money in
two. What the fuck am I supposed to buy with just three dollars?

The trade groups, or
triads, were very present within the prison walls. When you entered
the detention hall for the first time, if you belonged to any of the
trade groups, you would have to declare your allegiance before the
head-man of your triad and you would then sit together with them. I
don't believe in gangs; they are just a safety net for their members
but I'm not a troublemaker so I didn't bother joining any of them.
Either way, we Indians believe in the principle that, no matter what
group you belong to, when you go to prison, you sit with the Indians;
it's common practice among us. The Malays sit with their gang, the
Chinese sit with their gang, the Indians just sit with other Indians;
the number one priority is our religion, not our trade group.

In 2004, Singapore
was enacting major transfers of inmates and I was moved to a new,
high-tech prison: the Changi cluster prison. In Changi we had bigger,
cleaner cells and the conditions were slightly better; there was a
partial enclosure blocking the view to the toilet and there was a
shower. The shower had a button that one had to hold pressed in order
to activate the water so we improvised and found a way to keep it
pressed by wedging a lever along its edge. When in prison, we always
devised new ways to facilitate our lifestyle. After a short while, I
began working in the laundry department. We would wash the linen,
clothes and everything else for all the hospitals in Singapore. The
laundry was computerized and high-tech; the machines were provided by
a German company and about three hundred prisoners worked there. At
Changi cluster prison I played a bit of basketball and could attend
some matches in different halls. During one of these games I saw
Singh; and Singh saw me.

"You again.
Fuck. How are you?" I asked Singh.

"I'm coming out
next year", the year was 2005.

"What?" I
asked. "How can you come out next year? Weren't you sentenced to
12 years?"

"I have a
strong case and I'm going to fight it out in court", he boasted,
"I'll be out within a year".

Singh sounded very
confident. Years later I found out that he appealed and landed with
Judge Woh, whom we called 'Mad' Woh. If you appealed, Judge Woh took
it as a sign that you were not remorseful; that you were just trying
to be funny with the law. Sometimes he would triple your sentence and
make a mockery out of you.

Once, a drama
teacher named Gilberto was slapped with a maximum punishment of seven
years for punching a lawyer in a family court. Gilberto had no
criminal past but had hit his wife's lawyer during their divorce
proceedings. He had no money and his wife was depriving him of all
his resources and selling off his property, so he snapped. We met in
prison when he was transferred to the laundry department. We Indians
have the habit of offering some canteen items to newcomers so I gave
Gilberto some food during our first encounter and we became
acquainted. He spoke excellent English and even the superintendent
could not hold a candle to his oratorical skills. When I met him, he
had already appealed to Judge Woh.