Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (31 page)

I remember that I
once asked Alassane: "If I allow you to train for three solid
months, would you be able to mark Kaka out of a match?"

"Yes", he
said.

Kaka was
one
of the best players
in the world at the
time.

"This guy is
totally insane", I thought.

At one point
Alassane even approached Dan to get him into a team in Greece which
the syndicate was thinking of buying.

"I'll go and
play there", Alassane volunteered, "I can totally do this
job. A perfect job".

"Alassane, you
don't have the standard to play in Greece", I told him.

Out of all the guys,
Admir was the only decent footballer. Alassane told me that he had
brought him along once for training at a local club.

"Hey", he
exclaimed, "this fucker can play. He is good".

Dan was the worst
player of us all. Whenever there was a match, he would play in goal.
He didn't know anything about football. He didn't know what a square
pass, a diagonal pass and a byline were, he only knew the odds. He
could call the shots by staring at the screen before him: if the
website said 2.5, he'd call for 3 goals, but he never would know how
to plan a strategy to get the goals scored.

In
early November 2008, Fadi, my contact with the Lebanese players,
called to inform me that Lebanon was going to
participate
in the
AFC Under-19 Championship to be played in Saudi Arabia. Fadi
explained that he had a few Lebanese players in mind who could be
willing to do business with us. I told him to fly to Dammam, Saudi
Arabia and speak to the footballers before the match. I also caught a
flight to Dammam, where I joined Fadi. Just a few hours before
Lebanon's
first
group
stage match against North Korea, Fadi
instructed
the Lebanese players to lose by a four-goal margin, which they did,
delivering the perfect job.

Two
days later, Lebanon was facing China in their second match of the
championship and we were attacking the odds which, instead of
increasing, began to plunge rapidly. This meant that somebody else
was collecting on the other end and that China was also doing
business. Once again, we found ourselves engaged in a
match-fixing
competition
with another boss. I soon received a call from Dan; he was in
Singapore and had also noticed the unusual fluctuation in the odds.

"What
the fuck is going on?" he asked in an anxious tone. "The
Chinese are also doing business".

Lebanon was ahead by
one goal by the end of the first half but, although our players were
giving way, the Chinese hesitated to attack and score the equalizer.
Then, during the second half, one Chinese boy, a young reserve
player, came in from the bench and reversed the entire match; he ran
out onto the pitch and helped China score twice as our Lebanese
players slipped and fell every which way. Our boys were so dedicated
to the cause that they persisted in their atrocious performance until
they had conceded the third goal that we needed. The young Chinese
substitute must have been unaware of the fixing on his side and,
thanks to him, the match ended 3-1 in favor of China.

After
the AFC Under-19 Championship I planned to travel to Chile to watch
the FIFA Under-20 Women's World Cup. I decided to stop in Brazil on
my way there because I was curious to see one of the homelands of
football. When I arrived in Sao Paulo, I realized how fucked up
Brazil really was. It was not the kind of place where you would want
to go to for a holiday; it was fine and safe during daylight hours
but you could not venture outside at night without being accompanied
by a local. I could not leave my hotel after dusk; everything looked
dangerous out there so I just sat in my room and watched the football
matches on television. Fluminense or Flamingo was playing, I do not
remember which. I had 30 thousand dollars worth of credit on my
on-line account and it was obvious from kick off that both teams were
going for an Over. I placed every single dollar that I owned on Over
until my line of credit was completely sapped. I was not mistaken;
the final result was favorable. After years of watching football
matches, my reading of the game had greatly improved. I noticed that
I could pick the winning side by simply watching the performance of
the teams during the first few minutes of play. When wagering on
top-league football, a correct prediction is harder to achieve, but,
as the technical abilities on the pitch decrease, my chances of
picking the right result increase exponentially. After the first win
I continued punting on the following match then on the next yet. Soon
my 30 thousand dollars had multiplied to 300 thousand.
F
rom
there, I just kept gambling until the credit on my account had
reached 2.5 million dollars; the largest win that I have ever
achieved without fixing matches. I was ecstatic. My agent soon
received a call from the betting company's boss.

"Who is this
mother-fucker that beat my company for 2.5 million?" he
inquired.

Anyone
in my shoes would have immediately returned to Singapore to collect
his money and retire from gambling and match-fixing altogether; but I
am a punter so I seized the opportunity to take my wagers a step
higher. I began betting 500 thousand dollars at a time on the UEFA
Champions League and on a number of other random matches in hopes of
multiplying my winnings even further. In less than a week's time,
b
efore
I even set foot back in Singapore, over
1.5
million dollars had evaporated. I was in pain but life goes on; easy
come, easy go, they say; and I still had about a million dollars
worth of credit left. Nowadays I am struggling to keep afloat and
often look back on my stupidity. There are many nights when I go to
bed and gather my memories to think about what I could have done
differently. I could have done this; I could have done that: life is
all about hope. I made millions several times in my life: in 1996; in
1997; in 2009 it happened twice; and finally, in 2010. All five times
I let the money slip between my fingers like worthless dust, but it's
not going to happen again. I've learned my lesson the bitter way.

From Brazil, I flew
to Chile to follow the FIFA Under-20 Women's World Cup. I hadn't made
any previous arrangements with any of the teams involved. I usually
started out by hunting for squads that had lost their first matches,
then I would step in to do business. The Democratic Republic of Congo
had lost their first two fixtures but were a French-speaking lot;
there was a language barrier between us because I don't speak French
so I didn't try to approach them.

From Chile I hopped
onto a flight to Jamaica and landed just in time for the Caribbean
Cup, a qualifying tournament for the CONCACAF Gold Cup which was to
be held the following summer in the United States. The competition
was taking place in Montego Bay, on the northwestern coast of the
Caribbean island. Jamaica is a beautiful place: crystalline sea and
white beaches; you see the sunset; you see the sunshine. If you ask
me, the Caribbean region is the best place to live on the face of
Earth but Jamaica in particular is not my kind of country. It is way
too poor, very dangerous and thoroughly corrupt. I also found it
difficult to understand Jamaicans when they spoke; their accent was
very strange. In fact, the entire Caribbean region is fucked up
accent-wise. When they speak, you don't understand shit. I remember
chatting with some guys from Trinidad and Tobago.

"Oh, oh, hold
on there", I halted their senseless blabber, "when you
speak to me you have to speak reeeal slow because I'm from Asia and I
can't understand a word you're saying".

The jokers didn't
speak, they sang.

I planned to
approach the teams that were going to qualify for the Gold Cup and
try to build a relationship with their players ahead of the
tournament. Grenada qualified first so I strove to make friends with
some members of their delegation and dished out money to all of them.

Then I hooked up
with Cuba, which had also qualified for the cup. I was planning to
give one thousand dollars to each of the Cubans, so I pulled out a
thick stack of banknotes from my side pocket. We are in the
match-fixing business, you know, we are accustomed to handling large
sums of money. I counted: ten banknotes, ten, ten, ten, one thousand
dollars each. As I handed the first Cuban player the banknotes one at
a time, he stared at me wide-eyed.

"Are these real
or are you just giving us worthless pieces of paper?" he asked.

"Of course
they're real", I said matter-of-factly.

They were
incredulous.

"Nobody hands
out money just like that", they said as they turned the notes
over in their fingers and inspected them closely to see whether they
were counterfeit.

These guys had never
seen one thousand dollars at once, let alone the stack. I quickly
secured a relationship with the Cubans, then flew back to Singapore.

By the end of
December 2008 I was on the move again. I flew to Bahrain where their
national team was set to play a friendly match against Syria. Bahrain
has a tiny population, a semi-professional football league and no
football support at all. When matches are played, there will be
barely twenty people in the entire stadium. Manama, the country's
capital, is a very nice city; a miniature Dubai. Sex, alcohol and
women are readily available so convoys of cars from Saudi Arabia
cross the bridge into Bahrain on Thursday night and travel back on
Saturday after a two-night blowout.

In Bahrain
everything revolves around the tension between Sunni and Shiite
Muslims. The Shiites are a very poor minority who all work as taxi
drivers. They are pariahs in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia but, if you
travel across the Persian Gulf to Iran and you are a Sunni, then
you'll be the pariah because the Shiites rule there. My girlfriend
back then was a Muslim and I often discussed the circumstance with
her.

"We Indians
report to so many gods but we have no trouble between us", I
said to her, "no ethnic wars and such. You Muslims all report to
Allah but the Sunni and Shiite bomb and kill one-another. What is
your problem?"

In Bahrain, it is
all about the Khalifa family; they run the show and rule the country
as if they were one man.

"The Khalifas
give us everything but we are still slaves", people told me. "We
have no right to speak out".

I
was well in touch with the circumstance; we were slaves ourselves in
Singapore. The ruling party, the People's Action Party (PAP), had
complete control over us. Civil servants were forced to vote for the
ruling party in fear of losing their jobs. Politicians always prefer
to keep the people in the dark so that they can manipulate them with
greater ease. Although Singapore was an English-speaking country,
satellite TV was banned there until 1995 and we had to travel all the
way to Batam island in Indonesia to watch World Cup qualifiers and
other football matches. We were far more developed than Indonesia but
still had to cross the Singapore Strait to watch satellite channels
like the BBC. News from around the world would have informed the
people of Singapore about what happened outside and the ruling party
didn't like the idea one bit. I am not an anti-PAP but I think that a
good dose of opposition parties in Parliament are healthy for
democracy. Singaporeans don't stand up for their rights. They're like
sheep in a herd; so long as
there
is food
on the
table, who the fuck worries?

While
in Bahrain I got acquainted
with
some of the Syrian national team
players who were there for the match against Bahrain.

"I can help you
do business in the Syrian national league", one of them boasted.
"You come over to Syria and we'll see what can be done".

I tucked his number
away for future reference.

You see, money is
the root of corruption and of everyone's worries. Everyone needs
money to make their next move in life and those that don't have any
are, of course, the most vulnerable ones. If you stand in front of
players who have never had much money and offer them a good sum for
their trouble, they will seldom back away. Sometimes Arab players, if
they are very pious Muslims, will try to argue that it is 'haram' -
an Arabic term for 'sinful' - for them to accept a bribe.