Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (57 page)

"Anton",
he warned, "you just came back from your suspension, so don't do
anything funny. Just wait for the right time".

Egypt was very picky
about their referees; at first, when they saw Anton, they complained:
"This guy looks a little too fat".

We
insisted and finally Anton was designated to officiate the match and
the game went according to plans. The Bulgarian ref
awarded
a single penalty in the final minutes of Egypt vs Australia, which
ended 3-0 in favor of the Pharaohs. After the match I called Dan to
find out what my share of the win was.

"I bet one
million dollars on the game", he said, "your share is 200
thousand dollars".

"What the fuck
do you mean?" I asked. "You only threw one million?"

"This is your
quota", Dan insisted, "200 thousand".

"You must be
joking", I said.

Dan
was not being honest with me, he was taking me for a ride; I didn't
need to be a rocket scientist to know that. M
y
suspicion that Dan's bets were larger than what he was telling me -
making my share smaller - had become an absolute certainty. But
whatever he took from me, I had ways and means to take it back.
I
had shared the information on Egypt's match with a friend, telling
him to throw 500 thousand dollars on it for me.

"Are you very
sure?" my friend asked. "500 thousand?"

"Yes, don't
worry", I reassured him, "the final whistle will not come
before three goals are scored".

When we fix a match,
we often read our associates their rights: "Don't pass it on to
anybody else. Anything you say can and will be held against you".

Usually, the fuckers
will pass the information on to other punters nonetheless.

I've been in this
business long enough to know which match you can share and which you
cannot share. Whether sharing is convenient really depends on the
volumes offered for the fixture. For example: Egypt vs Australia; big
volume; one click on the website is 20-over-thousand dollars; that,
you can share. My friend, whom I had shared the information with, had
managed to throw half a million dollars on the match within five
minutes from the beginning of the second half, and here was Dan, with
his portentous betting firepower, wagering for the entire 90 minutes
and claiming that he had only thrown a million.

"You were
betting for the whole duration of the game and threw a mere million?"
I repeated to Dan. "How often do you have a referee that you
fuck, eat and sleep with? And he even put his own money on this
match, didn't he?"

"Wilson",
Dan cut me short, "this is your share, if you don't want it..."

"Why did you
play so little?" I was enraged. "Only one million?"

"We only play
one million per match", Dan insisted.

There was no way for
me to check but I knew that Dan could easily place three million
dollars on such a match.

"OK, you want
to play this game with me?" I thought. "Wait till I catch
you red handed. Then I'll fuck you up".

On that same day,
Egypt Under-23 played against Moldova Under-23 in Cairo. The Moldovan
team was under Dan's control and the match ended 5-0 in favor of
Egypt. After the game, Dan claimed that he hadn't made any money from
it. He asserted that the African ref that I had provided hadn't
gotten his message clearly during the half-time break and had fucked
up the result.

Our third match of
the day was Ecuador vs Venezuela. I flew from London to Madrid and
from Madrid to Quito, Ecuador, where the match was to be played.
Ibrahim was there to officiate the game so, before kick off, we sat
down for a chat.

"Hey Ibrahim",
I asked, "I thought I saw you a month ago in a match between
Bolivia and Venezuela. Were you officiating that game?"

"Yeah, I was
the referee", he replied.

"How come you
didn't tell me?" I asked him.

"I didn't know
that you were unaware", he sounded surprised. "I thought
that you were part of the group too".

So did I.

I gave Ibrahim
instructions as commanded by Dan to provide a total of three goals in
Ecuador vs Venezuela. This was the very last international friendly
match that I organized. In the first five minutes of the game,
Ecuador scored two goals, then, by the end of the first half, the
third goal was netted and Ibrahim's work was done. It was an easy job
for him; final score, 4-1 in favor of Ecuador.

After the match, I
dispatched Ibrahim to Bolivia to see what exactly was going on with
the Copa Aerosur that Dan and Anthony had organized behind my back. I
told Ibrahim to call me and relay any information that he could
gather on the games. After spending a few days in Bolivia without
being able to find out any intricate details about the tournament, I
let Ibrahim go and he flew back to his home in Niamey, Niger, via
Paris.

By
then I was seriously questioning Dan's honesty so, whenever there was
a tournament to organize, if the cost was 400 thousand dollars, I
would quote Dan for half a million and keep
the
surplus for myself. Overall, we were
very busy and our money was moving. Our runners trotted frantically
to and fro carrying bagfuls of cash all around the globe. Mohamed
Hassan, Sivarajan's friend that I had recruited in Johor, Malaysia,
after the World Cup, was one of them. I trusted Hassan blindly. So
much that I had given him the password to my Exclusive Sports e-mail
account and was a little too outspoken with him about the money that
I was skimming from Dan. Finally, as he came to realize that Dan was
the man with the cash, Hassan chose to betray me. He ran over to Dan
and told him that the figures that I was relating to him were not
correct and gave him the password to my e-mail account. Ratting on me
bought Hassan a special place in Dan's hierarchy; he became Dan's
trusted associate and began working stably for him.
When Sivarajan
called to inform me about Hassan's betrayal it was too late. Dan had
gone through my e-mails and had gathered plenty of information about
my deals around the globe. I tried not to worry too much about the
circumstance but couldn't help thinking that Anthony's and Hassan's
betrayals were grim presages of a tumult to come.

In
late November, Mohamed Rais flew to Finland from Singapore carrying
400 thousand euro for the second Tampere sponsorship installment. I
met him in Helsinki. Dan had instructed him to meet the Tampere
United CEO Deniz face to face and hand the money directly
into
his hands; he just didn't trust me
anymore.

"Look here",
I said to Rais when we met, "you keep 20 thousand euro of this
money for yourself and, if you keep your mouth shut, I will keep
sending money your way. If Dan asks, you met Deniz in person and gave
him the money".

Rais agreed to dance
to my tune. 20 thousand euro is a lot of money for a taxi driver. In
spite of his modest income, Rais was spending money like the Prince
of Dubai. He often abused alcohol and would splurge on women; he was
a regular sex tourist at Batam island in Indonesia. I took Dan's
money from Rais' hands and sent him back to Singapore.

When I met Tampere's
CEO Deniz, I gave him 250 thousand euro and pocketed the remaining
130 thousand. I knew that Dan was fucking me up so my conscience
didn't bother me one iota. I considered the money a payback for the
extra that Dan had pocketed on the matches that he hadn't informed me
about.

The deal with
Tampere United was that they would take our money and allow us to
place five or six players in their team's lineup.

"Your players
have to be good", Deniz clarified. "Only then will I field
them. They have to be better than our players. There is no use
signing a player who is below the standard of our local boys".

"OK, fair
enough", I answered.

I was confident that
we could recruit players in other European countries to fit the
ticket. After all, Dan had a strong European network and it shouldn't
have been a problem for him to find five or six decent players. I
shook hands with Deniz and returned to London.

In early December
2010, the Copa Cordoba International Sub-20 in Argentina was about to
begin and we needed to find trustworthy referees to officiate its
matches.

"I need six
match officials", I told Dan. "Give me two reliable refs
and four linesmen".

Dan found the
officials in Hungary and Bulgaria and dispatched them to Argentina.
The refs were escorted by a new member of Dan's syndicate, a
Hungarian man called Zeekay. Zeekay was very influential in Hungary;
he was the boss and nothing budged there if he wasn't involved.
Zeekay was already betting through an on-line account with decent
volumes before he met Dan. At first, Dan's European partners had
refused to introduce Zeekay to him but, when they realized that it
was impossible to operate in Hungary without him, they chose to bring
him into the picture. After the arrests of Admir and Dino, Zeekay had
become a major player in the syndicate and was designated by Dan to
run the show in Argentina. I was, of course, in charge of logistics,
which I handled from my home in London. I sent Sivarajan to Argentina
to run errands for me and, the moment Zeekay and the refs touched
down in Buenos Aires, Siva put them on a domestic flight to Cordoba
where a hotel was already booked for them. Everything was ready and
my boys were running the show for me.

The
first two matches of the Copa Cordoba went well; everything was
running smoothly. Then came the December 17
^th
,
2010, Argentina vs Bolivia match. The biggest fuck-up of my
match-fixing career after the fake Togo match was about to go on
stage.

Zeekay's Hungarian
referee, a guy called Lengyel, was officiating the game in Cordoba
while Dan was barking orders from his home in Singapore.

"We are going
Under on this match", Dan told Zeekay. "I only want one
goal in the last two or three minutes or during injury time".

Referees nowadays
all use headsets to speak to their assistants on the opposite side of
the green. We too decided to use them for the first time in
Argentina. Back then, you could not find that kind of equipment on
the market; only football officials could purchase the headsets. But
we were way ahead of the game. Kosta, Dan's Bulgarian associate, had
come up with the headset idea and had managed to obtain the
microphones and radio terminals through his contacts in some eastern
European FA. During the matches, each official had his own frequency:
the ref had his; the linesmen had theirs; and we had ours.

When the bookmakers
opened the odds for the Argentina vs Bolivia game, I noticed that the
volumes were way smaller than I had expected, so I called Dan.

"Dan", I
said, "don't do anything crazy, I know that the volumes are
small but I have a bigger tournament coming up in Argentina involving
River Plate and Boca Juniors in just two-weeks' time. We are going to
have our referees in that tournament, so you just be cautious".

The first half of
the match was played without particular worries, then, during the
second half, Argentina netted a goal that looked legitimate. The
players and the fans jumped from their seats and were already
celebrating when Zeekay, who was sitting in the stands with his radio
control in hand, decided to intervene. He spoke to the match
officials through the headsets.

"Disallow the
goal! Disallow the goal!" he shouted.

Mother-fucker.

Two Bolivian
defenders were standing between the Argentinian player and the
Bolivian goal when the ball was passed; there was no way that he
could have been offside. One would have had to be partially blind to
think that he was. Still, the linesman lifted his flag and the goal
was disallowed.

"Why the fuck
did he do that for?" I thought. "A goal is a goal. Just let
it be".

When
the 90 minutes of regular time ended there were still no goals scored
and the match continued into injury time. Argentina didn't look like
it was going to score so Lengyel let the match play and play and play
until the 11
^th
minute of stoppage-time, when he
finally awarded a dubious penalty in favor of the home side. The
Argentinians managed to score the penalty and seal their 1-0 victory.
After the final whistle blew, all hell broke loose. One of the
Bolivian players was so frustrated that he ran up to Lengyel and spit
right in his face. Everyone was pointing accusing fingers at the
Hungarian match official.