Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (5 page)

After my six-months
leave from the national service was over, I went back to my duties at
camp. My chief clerk was not happy with the privileges that I had
obtained as a runner and we ended up having a heated argument. She
tried to push me around and then wanted to charge me for
insubordination but my Commanding Officer provided her with a better
alternative.

"Forget about
charging Wilson", he suggested, "I'll take him with me".

My CO was an old man
who
had a liking for athletics. He wanted to run the
marathon and asked me for advice on his training schedule.

"How many
kilometers am I supposed to run?" he'd ask. "How many days
per week? What's the right speed?"

I became the CO's
personal assistant. There were two of us, myself and a friend, with
practically nothing to do. I spent my days on the telephone. My CO
would walk by, look at me and ask: "You're on the phone again,
Wilson?"

Then he would just
walk away. Again, our attendance was the only requirement. We had to
show up on time or else we would end up in confinement. Guard duty
was once a week and I would pay someone else to do it in my place.
One hundred Singapore dollars well spent so that I could go to the
football stadium and gamble.

In Singapore, we
have many ethnic groups. If you say, "He's a Singaporean",
you are not defining the person as a Chinese, Indian, or Malaysian.
But if you say "Indian", it is a lot easier to identify
someone, so people say, "He's an Indian", even though the
person is a Singaporean national.

Usually Kanan and I
would be the only Indians at the Jalan Besar stadium. There would be
a couple of Malaysians and the remaining 30 or 40 people present were
Chinese. The Chinese are inveterate gamblers; it is in their blood.
You give them a box of match-sticks and they'll come up with a way to
gamble on it; they are very ingenious when it comes to betting.

The Chinese bookies
and punters at Jalan Besar stadium used to prey on newcomers and
novices that didn't know how the odds worked; they were like a pack
of wolves and Kanan and I initially lost most of our bets. The
bookies immediately realized that we preferred to take the favorites
and would team up against us and manipulate the odds. If we chose the
White team, they would counter the odds and push the handicap up from
half to half-one and then to one and would finally collect a good
amount of cash. If we picked the Red team, they would say, "OK.
50 dollars on Red, that's it", and they would close the betting.
But when we began to offer higher odds, they came to us like bees to
honey. So one day, after a heavy loss, I said to myself: "OK,
you mother-fuckers. You want to play this game with me?"

I decided to bring
their game to their doorstep. I had taken up football at a very late
stage so I never made it into the top league, but I occasionally
played for some lower division teams and in the seven-aside
tournaments. This meant that I had enough friends to assemble two
squads. I booked the stadium from the local Sports Council two weeks
prior to the game: 180 Singapore dollars and you could have the
floodlights and the stadium all to yourself for two full hours. I
invited 32 friends, split them into two teams and borrowed two sets
of jerseys. Each player was promised 50 dollars for participating in
the match.

Singapore was a
small city, you know, if you called the local paper to inform them
that a match was scheduled, they would print it in the 'Today's
Events' column for free; and that's what I did. I made up a random
name for a cup and advertised its grand final on the local paper. To
make the bait more
appealing
,
I said that the match was between two fast-food chains' teams. Saying
that the match was a final meant that, given the importance of the
fixture, more money could be wagered on the game. I also provided a
referee; he was not an official referee, he was just a friend who was
initially supposed to play, but he accepted to be the match official
in exchange for 500 Singapore dollars. I bought him a black outfit;
black, black, black, gave him a whistle and he became our referee.

On the next morning,
Tai Sun read the paper as usual.

"Oh, look",
he must have thought, "there is a game today".

HQ immediately
proceeded to inform all the Chinese bookies and punters about the
match and they flocked to the stadium. Before kick off, I made one
team look better than the other and arranged for two friends to place
bets on my behalf; I wanted to gradually increase the betting volume
that we wagered without raising too many eyebrows. My friends began
by offering odds for the underdogs but had to be careful and avoid
jumping the gun. I also did my own gambling on the side to maximize
my profits.

The referee blew the
whistle. First half:
the
Reds attacked without intermission. They
were the favorites and the first 45 minutes ended with them
leading
3-0.
Then, at half-time, when we insisted
on offering odds for the White team, the bookies and punters all
rushed to us and started pestering us, asking for more; only then did
we gradually offer more bets. One thousand, two thousand, five
thousand; before the second half-time had kicked off, we had
accumulated wagers worth at least 15 thousand Singapore dollars, a
huge amount for an amateur game. I switched the best players from one
side to the other and instructed them and the referee on what the
final outcome of the game would be.
In
the second half, the Whites
attacked and
the tables were turned. The final score was 4-3 for the White team.
That's when the mother-fuckers realized that they had been duped.

"Oh, he just
fucked us up nicely", I heard some of the bookies saying in
Hokkien. "The fucker fixed the match".

After the game there
was no retaliation nor any argument. They sensed that I had fucked
them up but could not prove it. They had no evidence that the players
were my friends. They lost and they paid, that's it. If they had
started a fuss, they would have lost their face and people would have
said to them: "Mother-fucker! You lose and you've got no money
to pay up?"

Any delay in the
payment of a loss would have damaged their credibility and none of
them wanted to lose their reputation over a few thousand dollars.

"If you
outsmart me then the fault is mine because I allowed you to do so",
that is how we perceived a fixed match.

Fixing already
existed in Singapore at a higher level and everybody knew about it;
it's not like they had seen a rigged game for the first time. But
until that day, no one had outsmarted the Chinese bookies and punters
in Jalan Besar stadium. From that day onward, they stopped fucking
around with me.

I
played football and I gambled on football and, as my national
serviceman days came to an end, a truly different life was about to
begin for me. Due to my supposed medical condition, I was given a
permanent discharge from any military training in the future,
something that all servicemen were supposed to undergo once a year
after completing their national service. At first, I tried to find a
regular job. I was hired by a ship-building company called Far East
Livingston that built ships and oil rigs in the Singapore shipyards.
I worked for some time
as
an understudy for their piping
department, trying to juggle the job with my gambling habit. I would
give a portion of my salary to my mother and gamble the rest away.
Then I lost interest in working for somebody eight-to-five, so I
became a full-time punter.
Spending
the evenings at the stadium became a way of life for me. I was living
day by day and did not have the mindset to plan ten years ahead or
think about what I wanted to
do
in the future.
And before I knew it, gambling had become more than just a way of
life, it had become my line of business. Every evening we would go to
the stadium and win or lose money. The matches kicked off at five
thirty in the afternoon so, about an hour earlier, we would call HQ,
take a taxi to the designated stadium, sit down, have a cup of coffee
and start wagering. The second match of the day usually got underway
at about seven thirty in the evening and, if it was played in a
different venue from the first, we would bum a ride from someone,
have a quick dinner and be busy gambling until ten or ten thirty at
night. After that, a quick coffee, some food and we'd go play pool,
billiards, at our regular meeting spot until about three o'clock in
the morning. Then those of us who had jobs in the morning would head
home, while the rest would have yet more coffee in Geylang,
Singapore's red light district, in the popular night spots where
foreigners came to pick up local women for company. Prostitution is
legal in Singapore but, even though prostitutes walk the streets
freely, soliciting is an offense. Watching these men pick up scantily
dressed hookers and transvestites was a fun and popular pass-time for
us, as were the occasional
police
raids that caused havoc and sent
people running and screaming in every direction. The unlucky ones
who
were caught were usually jailed
before being deported back to their countries of origin. At times we
would play cards with a lady friend and her escorts in her office
and, by the time we got home, it would be six o'clock in the morning.
We would sleep until three in the afternoon and then we'd get up and
start all over again. This was our life; this was the routine in the
late 80's and early 90's.

When
we got to the stadium, we either started some meaningless
conversation or came up with something to gamble on.
Any
gambling would do: who can kick the ball the furthest, score from
midfield in an unguarded goal or any other stupid football-related
bets among ourselves; anything that
served
to kill time. We would place the ball in the center of
the field.

"OK, it's a
bet".

"It goes in",
one guy would say.

"No, it's not
going in", another guy would counter.

There were also
other bets, like running the 400 meters against one-another. The
older of the two competitors would usually get a 100-meter
head-start. The bet would start between the two runners and would
then spread to the rest of us. One day, the bookies at Jalan Besar
were daring any of us to run ten laps of the athletics track
surrounding the green in under 20 minutes. They didn't know that I
was a runner so I immediately grabbed the gamble. I knew that I could
easily make it in 15 minutes but pretended that I was not that
confident. Confidence would have killed my chances of making money
and my body language was such that I induced several punters to bet
against me. The whistle blew, I ran my fastest and went home with
five thousand Singapore dollars in my pocket: the easiest money that
I have ever won without having to fix a match.

In
those days I was fixing the Business Houses Football league and some
other simple, small amateur leagues. I also arranged my own fake
matches every time that I was broke; I must have done it a good 10-15
times. Winning money was always a thrill because success was not
guaranteed: I didn't always have both teams on my payroll. The final
score depended on the level of commitment of my players and on the
strength of the team that was not part of the fix. As usual, I booked
the stadium and would bring my friends to play the game.
I
would normally plan
everything
three or four hours before the match.

"OK, this is
what's going to happen", I'd tell the players, informing them
about
the score that I needed and
about
their share of the cash.

There could be
changes in my plans during the match. In amateur games there was no
security in the stadiums so I could easily pass messages on to the
players who were on the pitch or during half-time in the changing
rooms. Friendly matches were a different story altogether because I
would be watching the game from the bookies corner so, when there
were changes in my plans, I would page my players at half-time from a
payphone in a nearby cafeteria and they would call me back. Then I
would instruct them on the number of goals that I needed. Done. The
money was usually handed out after the match at the same cafeteria.

While
I was fixing local amateur matches, I was betting on professional
games: the English Premier League, the UEFA Champions League and so
forth. Gambling is:
you
win, you lose, you win, you lose. The
money I made from the fixes, I usually lost on Premier League
matches.