Kelong Kings: Confessions of the world's most prolific match-fixer (64 page)

And I was getting
bolder.

"Arttu", I
asked, "why is there a satellite box in my cell? What is it used
for?"

"You can have
satellite television if you want", he answered.

"You're not
joking, are you?" it was unreal.

"I'm serious",
he replied.

"How much does
it cost?"

"Hold on",
he smiled. "I'll check for you".

I got satellite TV
at my own expense. The English Premier League, UEFA Champions League,
movies; I could even watch porn in police lock-up. It was crazy,
absolutely crazy. Compared to this, Singapore police lock-up was
downright medieval.

Sometime before the
trial, Arttu received permission to bring me out to buy shoes and
have lunch at a Chinese restaurant downtown; no handcuffs, just
myself, Arttu, another officer and the dreaded little can of pepper
spray.

"Don't run",
Arttu warned.

"No, no, no",
I shook my head. "I'm not running, don't worry".

Why would I want to
run? I was being given ample time to plan my next move. Arttu and I
had a chat over lunch then he paid the bill and deducted my part from
the money that I had in my room at police lock-up.

At one point, Arttu
even allowed me to use the internet connection to send e-mails. Not
alone, of course, he would sit behind my back like a hawk, watching
my every move. Arttu was a nice guy but not a simpleton. My sister
could now scan articles from the Singapore papers and send them to me
by e-mail. Arttu would allow me to print the articles and read them
in my cell. I was also allowed to receive newspapers from the UK;
reading the paper with a cup of coffee in hand was still an important
part of my daily routine.

During the
investigation, Arttu and the other NBI officers would interview me
regularly for two, three hours at a time. By then, there was nothing
left to hide, so I just cooperated with the Finnish authorities while
I waited for my case to come up in court. I was trying to downplay
the role of Dan and the others, whose names the police had already
found in my telephone and e-mail account. Then, during one of our
interviews, Arttu dropped the bomb on me.

"Your people
fixed you up, Wilson", he wasn't smiling anymore. "You were
fixed from the inside".

I found it hard to
believe him.

"Dan? No way",
I thought, "Chinese people don't do that. They don't rat on you.
If they want you, then they come and get you. But they don't fix you
up with the police, it's not their style".

In
late March, a young journalist for Singapore's 'The New Paper' called
Zaihan traveled to Finland. He had been working on my story since our
fuck-up with the fake Togo team in Bahrain and had managed to get his
newspaper to send him to Rovaniemi to speak with Finnish authorities.
At the same time, FIFA had dispatched one of its men who was also in
Rovaniemi hoping to catch a glimpse of yours truly. Both of them
wanted to see me but were not allowed to because they were neither
part of a police authority nor of my immediate family. Zaihan flew
back to Singapore and wrote an article about my arrest which was
published by 'The New Paper' on April 30
^th
,
2011.

"An Asian man
turned up at a police station in Finland to provide information about
Wilson Raj Perumal's fake passport", read the article.

I received a scan of
the piece from my sister by e-mail, read it, then spoke to Arttu.

"Arttu", I
asked, "who is this man that reported me to the police?"

Arttu wasn't
forthcoming with the details.

"It's just a
guy that came to file a police report about you", he said.

Now I knew for sure
that somebody had tipped off the Finns about my false passport. But
who? Benny couldn't possibly have pulled enough strings to get me
arrested within a few hours from our e-mail exchange and had really
nothing to gain from my arrest. Apart from Benny, only Dan knew my
whereabouts in Finland, but I still couldn't think of a single reason
why he would want to do something like this to me.

I was waiting to
face my trial in Finland and still ran the risk of receiving a
suspended sentence. If that were to happen, I needed a new passport
to avoid being sent back to Singapore. I figured that I could get a
second citizenship, so I got somebody to pay my Ghanaian contacts ten
thousand US dollars in exchange for an original Ghana passport. But
my contacts conned me; they got me a fake passport and not even a
good fake at that. It could be used to check into hotels at the most
but could certainly not get me across the border; Finnish authorities
were not so incompetent as to release me on another forged document.
Moreover, as soon as Singapore had been alerted about my presence in
Finland, they had proceeded to include me in the Interpol wanted
list, so I could kiss goodbye to my idea of a second nationality.
There is a protocol that calls for countries to check with the
Interpol before issuing a new passport. I guess that, when you are
cornered and locked up, your mind does not function as well as it
should; it gets rusty and leads you into making hasty, stupid
decisions.

One day I received a
message from my friend Ravin Raj saying that Danny's wife was looking
to get in touch with me. Ravin Raj told me that lately Danny had been
walking around Little India hand-in-hand with his mistress and her
child, where everyone could see them. Danny's wife had soon found out
about his extramarital affair, had filed for a divorce and wanted to
speak with me, probably to have confirmed what she already knew. I
had found out about Danny's mistress when the two were traveling
across the USA at my expense but I had no reason to expose Danny's
dirty linen to his wife so I refused to get in touch with her. If I
have a score to settle with someone, it is between him and me; that
person's family will never get caught in the crossfire.

Convinced
that I was to blame for his problems of the heart and wanting to get
back at me, Danny began speaking with Singapore's 'The New Paper'
journalist Zaihan. He introduced himself as someone who had worked
for me but who was totally in the dark about my match-fixing
activities and began leaking information about the match in Bahrain
with the fake Togo team; revelations which were readily published in
an article on Zaihan's newspaper.
The
mother-fucker had gone globe-trotting and fixing matches left and
right with my money and now claimed that he had been duped.
I
don't think that Danny's divorce was the only reason why he spoke to
Zaihan. I reckon that his own involvement in the Bahrain vs Togo
match was making him nervous and that he was trying to protect his
own ass by giving away mine.

"Yeah, Wilson
Raj fixed this match", he told Zaihan. "We were all working
for him, then, when we realized that he was actually fixing matches,
we moved away from him".

Dumb fucker. Nobody
from Bahrain could have arrested him for fixing that match because
the offense had taken place in Bahrain and there was no extradition
treaty between Bahrain and Singapore. Not satisfied with spilling the
beans about Bahrain, Danny continued to speak to Zaihan and went on
to expose everything that he knew about me. The NBI had found the
number of a London escort service in my mobile phone's directory and
had leaked the circumstance to Zaihan, who sought confirmation from
Danny.

"Wilson is a
busy man", Danny told Zaihan, "he needs to ease himself
with escorts and so on".

I gave Arttu and the
others at NBI a piece of my mind.

"What the fuck
is wrong with you guys?" I confronted them. "You're making
me look like I host bunga bunga parties or something. What's wrong
with having the phone number of a single escort service?"

I knew that Danny
was responsible for all the garbage being published on 'The New
Paper' because of a single quote that he had let slip: "Wilson
can sell ice to Eskimos".

The phrase, which
had appeared inside one of Zaihan's articles, was one that Danny
enjoyed using. I had known the fucker since he was 16 and, with a
quote like that, he could not escape anymore. Since he enjoyed
washing dirty linen in public, I sat down and slowly wrote everything
that I knew about him, from A to Z: from the age of 16 onward I
exposed all of his philandering to his wife, whom I also knew well.

"Your husband
is fucking your Filipino domestic helper", I wrote to her. "Your
husband is also fucking the rest of the Filipino maids along Dix
Road. Each time he brings the pet dog out for a walk he's on a double
mission: to walk the dog and to lure the domestic helpers that live
along the stretch, etc. etc."

Danny's attempt to
clear his own name by sullying mine had backfired. Never mind my
linen going public; I was single and had nothing to lose. So what if
I fucked escorts? Who doesn't fuck escorts? Silvio Berlusconi and
Dominique Strauss-Kahn do; Ronaldo even brought transvestites back to
his hotel room claiming that he thought they were ladies. In
Singapore everybody is on-line trying to fuck underage girls,
60-year-old big shots, school teachers; it's a list long as a train.
Danny had dug his own grave; if his wife had second thoughts about
divorcing him, after my letter those thoughts were erased; finished.
Danny had stirred the hornet's nest and I had no regrets in
destroying a man who wanted to destroy me.

Faced with the
measure and breadth of my business, Finnish authorities began to
liaise with other countries, making it look like I was a huge fish.
The Germans were the first to pay me a visit in Rovaniemi.
Prosecutors from a German town called Bochum had been investigating
the network of Ante and Milan for years and had found links to
Singapore. They asked me if I could help them but I had little or no
information to offer. Apart from Finland, I hadn't done any business
in Europe that could be of interest to them. The Bochum police chief
spoke to me and listed a multitude of names to verify whether I knew
any of them, but I did not. I asked him whether they had a witness
protection program in Germany.

"Even if you
decide to collaborate with us", he said, "I cannot prevent
you from being sent back to Singapore. But if you want to tell us
something that could be of help, you are more than welcome".

Subsequently,
another German officer from Bochum was dispatched to interrogate me.
He had printouts of my e-mails and questioned my involvement in
Africa, Latin America and North America. He also had a large map with
all the matches that they thought had been fixed throughout Europe.
On the map, the various match-fixing syndicates were sketched out.
The Germans had done their homework very well and were extremely up
to date with their information. They had even listed the names of the
unregulated betting operators throughout Asia. They were aware that
there was a Chinese guy who was actively moving around Europe and
fixing matches since 2008; they even knew that he had lived in a
villa in Slovenia and had organized his fixes from there. Although
they did not know Dan's name, his syndicate was neatly sketched out
on their map. The detective questioned me about the syndicate's
involvement in the floodlight incident during the 2001 Fenerbahce vs
Barcelona Champions League fixture in Istanbul, Turkey.

"Where did you
get that information?" I asked.

I received no
answer.

"You know",
I said, "this floodlight thing was originally my idea and was
later stolen by somebody else".

"What do you
mean?" queried the officer. "Wouldn't cutting the electric
cables be dangerous?"

"You fucking
morons", I thought in my heart, "I wasn't going to cut the
cables myself; I'd engage a professional to do the job as he thought
was best".

At that point, I
still didn't want to fully expose my associates; the Finnish police
had found their names, emails and phone numbers; they had retrieved a
wealth of information on match-fixing in my laptop and mobile; but I
was trying to minimize their roles. I knew that they were all
actively match-fixing even while I was locked up.

In early June, Arttu
brought a football match to my attention: Nigeria vs Argentina, an
international friendly played in Abuja, Nigeria. The final score was
4-1 for the Nigerians with two penalties awarded by our star referee,
Ibrahim. By then, Arttu and the others were on the lookout for
suspicious fixtures and the result of the game was rather odd. It's
an internet world we live in; anybody with a computer can check the
results of international friendly matches and Arttu was receiving
valuable input from both FIFA and the German police.