The Big Fix
The Big Fix
Brett Forrest
Timed to coincide with the World Cup in Brazil and told in the style of a page-turning thriller, this is the book that will blow the lid off international match fixing in football: a pandemic that has struck at the heart of the ‘beautiful game’It began as a series of disparate reports coming in from the corners of the football world: referees, players and managers were deliberately fixing results at the behest of illegal bettors. But as the reports kept coming, bit by bit the scale of the problem began to emerge. These weren’t just footballing minnows but major teams and players, playing on the biggest possible stages. The money at stake ran into the billions. And the people pulling the strings were operating for some of the largest, most heinous criminal syndicates in the world.In THE BIG FIX, Brett Forrest uncovers the scarcely believable scale of a threat to the beautiful game that is only just now coming to light.Told in the style of a thriller, Forrest tracks down the criminals who occupy this murky world of billion-dollar transactions, as well as the people tasked with hunting them and saving football’s lifeblood.Published on the eve of the World Cup, this shocking expose reveals a criminal enterprise that threatens to rot football to its core.
(#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
(#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game
CONTENTS
Cover (#u09675638-af7d-5dc8-b784-93467953afbd)
Title Page (#ulink_37e73a66-c3cb-5843-bd63-6e9e6b857b81)
Dedication (#ulink_68af63b1-11d8-55e8-9cdb-b7d09ae036d3)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_e3c7d994-6c44-5adc-8caf-e3376cb8a1a8)
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_992fe90c-fc68-5dcd-8e3a-544a7b0332b0)
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_762f4978-7a6c-5782-bd14-87f457e7437e)
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_836da60a-3eab-5e60-ab7d-d4929d496584)
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_1d7ee867-dcec-5717-9c77-bb96ecae9af5)
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_c808f31a-a789-5f7b-a81e-f71dc56bb931)
CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM
SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011
The FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing football apart. Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, in the unglamorous dust, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Unlike Dubai, Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of football. Their specialty was illusion, and events in Sharjah were about to give them another lucrative ninety-minute return.
The match set for that day – March 26, 2011 – was an exhibition, or friendly, between the national teams of Kuwait and Jordan. It was the sort of game that took place hundreds of times each year around the world, with limited notice and consequence. National team coaches often looked upon these contests as little more than vigorous practice. Interested criminal groups from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, on the other hand, considered them the cornerstones of an extensive commercial enterprise.
Now Kuwait versus Jordan was forming into the front line in a gathering war. On one side were organized criminal syndicates, which were making hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions, the total amount a drop in the opaque, trillion-dollar pool of football betting – by manipulating game results. On the other side were football administrators, who were beginning to accept that match-fixing was the stunning sports scandal of our time, a fundamental threat to the most popular game in the world.
FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), football’s international governing body, had received information that a collection of known criminals had arranged to manipulate the outcome of the Sharjah match. This was no great surprise, as inflated final scores, questionable penalty calls, and strange betting patterns had been occurring with great frequency in recent seasons. What was novel about this Sharjah match was the fact that FIFA, directed by a newly hired security chief, was operating a clandestine investigation. The time had come to take action.
When the two FIFA investigators entered Khalid Bin Mohammed Stadium, shortly before game time, there was no one else there. It had been a challenge to gather reliable information about the match, even for FIFA, which had sanctioned the competition. The date, the kickoff time, the location – all were in doubt. The websites for the Kuwaiti and Jordanian teams provided conflicting information. Gambling websites did as well. Some sources even listed the match as having been canceled. That’s what it looked like to the two FIFA men as they passed through the wide-open stadium gates. Nobody was selling tickets. The stands were empty. The FIFA investigators took seats in the grandstand, and they noticed that there were no TV cameras or production vehicles present. The match had not been advertised in the local press. In an age of constant coverage and information, it felt like this game was going to take place only in the imagination.
Eventually, the players filtered into the stadium, as did a few fans. Several men milled about on the edge of the playing field, and the FIFA operatives took particular notice of them. They recognized the men, one from an Emirati promotional company, another from a similar firm in Egypt. They had helped arrange the match, though they were ultimately incidental to FIFA’s investigation. Instead, FIFA was interested in the architects of this fix, a notorious group from Singapore, which operated unchecked in dozens of countries across the world. The FIFA investigators noticed two known Singaporean fixers enter the stadium and take seats in the VIP stands. The match was set to begin.
The Sharjah fix had originated in the mind of the most prolific match-fixer in the world, a man of mysterious movements who had manipulated hundreds of matches in more than sixty countries, making untold sums for the syndicate in Asia. But the syndicate had betrayed him. Police had discovered details of the Sharjah fix sketched on a piece of paper lying on his hotel room bed in a Finnish town along the Arctic Circle.
This information had led FIFA’s investigators to Sharjah. They planned, at halftime, to barge in unannounced to the locker rooms of the players and officials, threatening suspension – or prosecution – unless the second half was contested honestly. But although the two FIFA men had attempted to contact officials from the UAE Football Association, their calls and emails had gone unreturned. For now they were relegated to the stands, without the proper credential to visit other areas of the stadium. They speculated that some of the UAE football officials may have knowledge of the upcoming fix. Plenty of national football federations around the world had gone into the lucrative business of fixing with the Singapore syndicate itself.
The purpose of match-fixing was betting fraud. Fixers compromised players, directing them to allow the other team to score. Fixers bribed referees to hand out red cards and penalty kicks, thus influencing the outcomes of matches. The syndicate placed bets based on the timing of these planned events. The fixers defrauded both the bookmaker, who was always one step behind them, and the fan, who believed that what he was watching was real. There was also the player, often coerced into participating. When play began between Kuwait and Jordan, activity on the international betting market revealed that the fix was in.
At some point in the 1990s, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of FIFA, began characterizing the numerous football players and administrators around the world, collectively, in his public comments, as the “football family.” FIFA, headquartered in Zurich, is the organization that is responsible for staging the World Cup every four years. Among the patchwork of federations and confederations that control and administer football, FIFA carries the most weight. It is the organization that most football people petition in order to solve a dispute, or to dispense a handout. But FIFA is hardly the guardian of goodwill that Blatter’s benevolent terminology suggests. FIFA is registered in Switzerland as a charity, yet it does not operate as a traditional nonprofit organization, with its income of $1 billion per year and its multifarious corporate sponsorship deals and TV contracts. Nor does FIFA behave like a modern business, with standard corporate checks and balances. Instead, it resides somewhere in the imprecise middle, and for some of its top executives this has been just fine, ambiguity being the facilitator of exploitation.
In the last decade, the imprecise way that global football is administered has exposed it to crisis. Match-fixing has overtaken the sport. It is not the fault of FIFA that international organized crime has targeted football. But considering the criminal nature of match-fixing, Blatter’s words have assumed a new meaning. This is football’s modern “family”:
Operation Last Bet rocked the Italian Football Federation, as fifteen clubs and twenty-four players, coaches, refs, and officials were implicated in match-fixing. Turkish police arrested nearly one hundred players, while the Turkish Football Federation excluded its club, Fenerbahce, from the UEFA Champions League, questioning how the team managed to win eighteen of its last nineteen games to take the domestic title. The Zimbabwe Football Association banned eighty players from its national team selection based on suspicion of match-fixing. Lu Jun, the first Chinese official to referee a World Cup game, was jailed for five and a half years for taking bribes totaling $128,000, enhancing the meaning of his nickname, the “golden whistle.”
In South Korea, prosecutors charged fifty-seven people with match-fixing; two players subsequently committed suicide, rather than face the shame. Two Brazilian refs were handed prison terms and the Brazilian Football Confederation was fined $8 million for their roles in a series of fixes. As soon as eight Estonians received a one-year ban, a court charged another dozen with fixing. German police recorded Croatian criminals discussing by phone their plans to fix games in Canada. The disgraced head of the Chinese Football Association is currently serving time in a penal colony for match-fixing. Hungarian police arrested more than fifty people for fixing, though before they could apprehend the director of a club under scrutiny, he jumped to his death. The Czechs are prosecuting two referees for fixing.
Macedonia is so corrupt that few bookies will take a bet on a game in its domestic league. The executives at a Bulgarian club, Lokomotiv Plovdiv, ordered their players and coaches to take a lie detector test after a loss. Georgian players, team owners, and bookies are behind bars for match-fixing. In Malaysia, a few dozen players are currently in custody. Kenyan, Lebanese, and Tanzanian refs have worked fixes. Polish authorities have prosecuted a dozen players for fixing. The Russian government has established a committee to eradicate match-fixing from its leagues. The prime minister of Belize ordered a match-fixing probe into the country’s football association.
Chinese and Italian organized crime have targeted the Belgian league for years. Bosnia’s league is targeted by Bosnia’s criminals. Switzerland banned nine players for fixing. Italian prosecutors pinned fixing charges on Gennaro “Rino” Gattuso, a popular, World Cup-winning midfielder and former star for AC Milan. Gattuso said he was prepared “to go into the town square and kill myself in front of everyone if I should be found guilty of such a crime.” Two scandals rocked English football this past fall, one involving Singaporean fixers, the other a former Premier League player. Germany is prosecuting the most famous fixing case of all, in Bochum, which has revealed that a network of criminal match-fixers has been manipulating football in every corner of the world for the better part of the last decade.
Could the state of affairs be this bad? Unequivocally, yes. Today, there are active police investigations into match-fixing in more than sixty countries, which is about one-third of the world. Half of the national and regional associations affiliated with FIFA have reported incidents of fixing. One can only imagine the amount of fixes that have transpired with only the perpetrators in the know. The fixing of international football matches has become as epidemic as drug trafficking, prostitution, and the trade in illegal weapons. This is happening in a sport where the players walk from the locker room to the field hand in hand with small children, as though football were a refuge of innocence and moral purity. Overwhelming evidence presents a contradictory argument: the most popular game in the world is the most corrupt game in the world.
Gambling is to blame. The market in sports betting has ballooned in the last decade, its illegal portion rivaling long-established criminal enterprises. Interpol claims that $1 trillion is bet on football games per year. Asian bookies suggest a much higher figure. The football industry itself – the TV contracts and sponsorship deals that comprise the business of the game – is estimated at an annual value of just $25 billion.
Unpoliced, driven by easy profits, match-fixing has grown out of control. Superior clubs lie down for inferior clubs that are trying to avoid relegation to a lower division of competition. Coaches, players, refs, and government officials collude for the fix. International qualifiers result in outrageous scores: 11–1, 7–0. The opportunity for easy profits drove early, creative attempts to manipulate results. On November 3, 1997, in an English Premier League match against Crystal Palace, West Ham scored to tie the game at two all in the sixty-fifth minute. Abruptly, the stadium lights went out. The same thing happened when Wimbledon played Arsenal a month later. A Chinese-Malaysian gang had paid the technicians at the stadia to cut the power when the game had reached the desired score. Enveloping greed has caused the players themselves to take severe measures to enforce the fix. In a 2010 Italian match, a goalkeeper allegedly drugged his own teammates at halftime so that opponents could easily outrun them.
The players are inconsequential. They are tools of the syndicate bosses who operate in the shadows. For the established criminals, international football has been a free zone of activity, a territory of endless opportunities for manipulation. Each of the nearly two hundred countries that FIFA recognizes has a professional league and a national team, which is classified into several age groups. The total worldwide number of national and professional football teams exceeds ten thousand. Multiply this figure by the number of players per team, then add referees, club officials, and federation administrators, and the entry points for a match-fixer are voluminous and as ever changing as a club roster from season to season. There is no centralized control, no disciplinary commissioner. International football is a loosely administered network of different languages and customs and laws and economies and currencies that connects the world, yet barely hangs together. This variance gives the game its special charm. It also allows dark motivations to flourish. Criminal fixing syndicates have infiltrated the game of football so fundamentally, manipulating the betting market to their advantage, that they have called into question the outcome of every match in the world.
The opening moments of the Kuwait-Jordan match elapsed at a brisk pace. There were several heavy tackles. A man sitting behind the FIFA investigators laughed, remarking that people from Kuwait and Jordan disliked each other. The referee made a questionable penalty call in the game’s twenty-third minute, when the ball ricocheted off the hand of an unwitting Jordanian player. Kuwait converted. The FIFA operatives looked at the Singaporean fixers in the crowd, but their body language revealed nothing. It didn’t have to. The evidence was in the numbers.
There are several ways to fix a match. One of the most popular is to wager on the total number of goals scored. If a bookie lists the over-under at 2.5, and a fixer bets on the over, he will direct his compromised players or referee to make certain that three goals or more are scored in the game. If he bets on the under, then he will order two or fewer goals.
The fixing syndicate operated on the in-game gambling market, which allowed for betting as a match progressed. At the opening of the Sharjah match, 188Bet, one of the largest bookmakers in the world, began taking a preponderance of bets that supported three goals or more. The 188Bet odds for three or more goals started at 2.00, or a 50 percent probability. At the match’s eighteenth minute, the match still scoreless, the odds for three or more goals decreased to 1.88, or a 53 percent chance. These figures revealed a telling detail. At the beginning of the match, with ninety minutes in which to score three goals, 188Bet calculated the chance of three or more goals at 50 percent. Paradoxically, after eighteen minutes had elapsed, the chance of three or more goals was now greater, even though there was less time – only 80 percent of the match remained – in which to score them.
The bookies at 188Bet had not determined that an outcome of three or more goals was now more likely. What they had done was moved the odds in reaction to the overwhelming wagers they were receiving on three or more goals. It is the bookmaker’s goal to level his book, taking equivalent action on either side of a proposition in order to reduce his exposure and profit from his margin. And a bookie knows that his exposure is highest when he is taking a large amount of action on an illogical proposition. He knows that the match is fixed, as the bookies at 188Bet are likely to have understood as they re-calculated in-game odds for the Sharjah match following the bets placed.
As the game neared halftime, only one goal had been scored. In the thirty-eighth minute, the referee called another penalty. This one appeared legitimate, as a Kuwaiti defender tackled a Jordanian forward in the box. The goalkeeper for Kuwait saved the ensuing kick. However, the linesman flagged him for early movement. Jordan scored on the retake. At the half, the match was tied at one all. With forty-five minutes to play, all the syndicate needed to win its bets was one more goal. Easy. But then something happened.
In the grandstand, the FIFA investigators contemplated attempting to bluff their way into the locker rooms to confront the referee and players. As they did so, they watched the man from the Emirati promotional company climb the stairs of the VIP stands. He spoke with the Singaporean fixers. As FIFA suspected, the match referee had received a tip that the match was under observation. The players returned to the field for the second half, and the Singaporeans left the stadium. Midway through the second half, the score was still 1–1.
Suddenly, in the seventy-first minute, the betting action reversed. There was no longer heavy action at 188Bet for more than three goals, although there were nineteen minutes remaining in which to score for the third time. Warned that FIFA investigators were present in the stadium, the syndicate had pulled the fix, pulled its bets. The match finished in a 1–1 draw.
From the chatter that FIFA’s security team subsequently collected in Singapore, syndicate members were confused, wondering who had leaked word of the Sharjah operation. The syndicate had lost roughly $500,000 on the Sharjah match, according to FIFA intelligence. Considering the size of the football betting market, this wasn’t a considerable number. However, the event in Sharjah was significant. No one had ever fought the syndicate before. Sure, there had been traditional prosecutions, investigations conducted after the crime had been committed and the profits earned. But never before had FIFA conducted a counter-fixing operation in real time. Asian fixers and their European partners had operated freely for a decade. Everything was about to change.
CHAPTER 2 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
SINGAPORE, 1983
The best football players are poor. Wilson Raj Perumal came to this understanding decades ago, sitting in the grandstand of Singapore’s Jalan Besar Stadium. It was the mid-1980s, and the old grounds, near the city-state’s Little India neighborhood, were hosting a domestic league match. Perumal had no rooting interest. For him, it would always be about the odds, the line, the payout.
During the World War II occupation of Singapore, Japanese authorities set up camp at Jalan Besar, where they culled the Chinese from the population, marking them for summary execution. Now, to Perumal, it was the Chinese who stood out most of all. Sipping tea, betting on matches (contrary to local statutes), they orchestrated the action that worked Perumal’s mind toward opportunity.
Perumal had plenty of friends who played organized football. He understood the game. What he didn’t understand was how these old men had been taking his money for the past half year. Perumal had started betting for fun. It was something to do with his friends from school. He didn’t comprehend what was known as hang cheng betting, which was determined not by which team won the game, but by an agreed-upon value of one’s bet. The line dictated the score by which one team had to win, and the odds corresponded to the likelihood of that event coming to pass, establishing the amount of a winning bet. Once he learned this, Perumal easily recognized the pattern of his losses. Each time Perumal placed a bet, the Chinese men changed the odds and the line to suit themselves. They had been manipulating the market depending on which team Perumal chose, which bet he wanted to place. They had been rigging the action all along. Determined on winning back the money he had lost, and more besides, Perumal got an idea.
Theft was the first charge the cops hung on Perumal, for stealing a pair of football cleats. This was in 1983. Eighteen years old, Perumal lived with his family in Choa Chu Kang, a farming area in Singapore’s northwest. His parents traced their roots to Chennai, the capital city of India’s heavily populated Tamil Nadu state, a wellspring of cheap labor to Asia and the Middle East. They were part of a long line of convicts and unskilled workers who had made their way from India to Singapore during the century leading up to World War II, when the two territories existed under British colonial governance. Perumal’s father, a simple laborer who painted street curbs and laid cable, was a black belt in judo. Perumal never took to such discipline. Instead, the lasting impression that his father gave him was how difficult it was to feed five children on honest industry. “Some days we had to make it on one meal,” Perumal says. He was the middle child, the one who gets lost in the shuffle, the one who finds other ways to survive. He attended Teck Whye, the local school where he ran the 800 meters and paid passing attention to his studies, more interested in the dubious extracurricular activities that awaited him after school.
Perumal and the Singaporean state were born the same year, 1965, though their characters instantly diverged. Upon exiting the British realm, Singapore’s leaders placed the country on a path of economic vigor. Shipping, manufacturing, and industrialization transformed Singapore into one of the four Asian Tigers, a center of international business and finance. Underlying this growth was Singapore’s commitment to discipline, its blunt approach to crime. Unlike many of its neighbors, stricken with the chaos of liberalism or the stagnation of autocracy, the Singaporean city-state struck a balance: tough on crime, friendly to business. Singapore became a place where the sinner was punished disproportionately to his sin, so that the innocent could prosper likewise beyond proportion.
Wilson Perumal belonged to the third-largest ethnic group in Singapore. There was no such thing as a Singaporean. There was Chinese, Malay, Sinhalese, Filipino, Thai, each with a different language, each adopting English as default dialect, each keeping secrets in their particular tongues. Singapore was a place of secondary identities, a place of no insiders. Perumal skimmed from one social set to another, between ethnic groups, learning to conceal his motivation in order to persuade and gain advantage. He could have made an effective salesman if he hadn’t gravitated to kids who likewise couldn’t conceive of their futures, just what they could get their hands on right now. Perumal tried his hand at petty crime. With a few friends, he stole a VCR from the Teck Whye School. They sold it, pulling in five hundred Singapore dollars. They took a cab downtown, saw a few movies, blew the money on popcorn and beer, incautious about what they had done.
Later, a member of his crew stole a pair of football cleats, and this led to the group’s undoing. Confronted by the authorities, the friend told the whole story, about the shoes, the VCR, and other thefts, implicating Perumal in so doing. The next day, a headline in the local paper read: “Asian School Athlete Charged with House Breaking.” It was the sort of teenage troublemaking that often scares an adolescent onto the right path in life. In Perumal, the episode simply provided his first publicity. There would be much more.
Perumal was now acquainted with criminality, yet this was hardly the most serious offense in Singapore. The country had become a disciplined, transparent economic model for the world, yet illegal betting remained the most tolerated crime there was, a clandestine element of the culture. There was little the strict government could do about it. Everyone gambled. Just as Perumal did, at Jalan Besar Stadium.
When Perumal realized that the Chinese men had taken advantage of him, he turned his attention to the players who sprinted and struggled in the clinging Singapore humidity, less than one hundred miles north of the equator. Perumal knew what that was like, to work hard for little reward, growing up with nothing in your pockets, with few prospects to fill them, your restless energy leading in self-destructive directions. Perumal understood the point of developing a singular focus on something that might carry you out of poverty. Along the way toward on-field glory, he thought, what was wrong with making a little something on the side?
He related this reasoning to several of his friends who played football. Everyone saw eye to eye, common understanding being the essential element of manipulation. He purchased two sets of football jerseys. One red, one white. He rented a local stadium, paying a hundred dollars to monopolize the field for two hours. He listed the match in the local papers. He bought a pair of shorts, a polo shirt, and socks and shoes – all black – draping them on a friend. “You’re the referee,” Perumal told him.
When the Chinese bettors from Jalan Besar Stadium, always looking for action, read about the match in the newspaper, they showed up at the appropriate time and location. When the red team went up 2–0 at halftime, the old Chinese men were all too happy to bet on red to win the match, handing their markers to Perumal and smiling to themselves at the kid who didn’t understand hang cheng. When the white team had scored its third goal of the second half, the old Chinese men weren’t laughing anymore. They knew that the kid who was learning the ropes had just roped them into a scam.
Perumal had found his calling: easy money. His first fixed match was so successful that he carried it out in stadiums throughout Singapore. The losing bettors didn’t complain, even though they sensed something tricky about these wagers and these games. They couldn’t go to the cops. They couldn’t grouse and lose face. All they could do was pay Wilson Perumal what they owed him.
Perumal pursued this scheme into his twenties, and he developed a taste for things that he could never have before. It was the first time he had any money. Running through pool halls and chasing girls with his friends until the sun came up, he bet his earnings on matches in Europe’s biggest football leagues, the matches that were just starting to be televised in Singapore. As he watched the games, in that charged, early-morning condition of fatigue, youth, and stimulation, Perumal conceived of something bigger.
CHAPTER 3 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
With a mustache that runs long and tall and out of date, Chris Eaton calls to mind a frontier sheriff, the one man willing to establish justice on the range, where the sun catches his tin star, confirming the higher calling of order. “I quite would have liked that,” Eaton says. “There are a lot of people that need shooting on the edge of the corral.”
Eaton comes at you with the inevitable momentum of an arrest. However, his Australian informality requires you to remind yourself that he is an upholder of the law. Sixty-two years old, Eaton has the energy of a thirty-year-old. He has fathered six children, the youngest now just two years of age, confirming that he’s not slowing down. “Life is for living,” Eaton is fond of saying. “Not for rule-making.” His firm moral foundation, however, is a touchstone shallowly concealed, a lager in hand all that’s necessary to lead him sometimes to soliloquy.
The speech he gives these days invariably instructs the ill-informed, the morally lax, and the financially curious about the inner evils and workings of match-fixing. In European conference halls and Asian banquet rooms and the New York bar or two, Eaton arrives as featured speaker, the face and voice of the fight against “the manipulation of sporting events for the purpose of illegal betting.” He is an official carved perfectly to combat fixing. Eaton is dogged, antipolitical, rule-bound, perceptive of people, and not afraid of an audience, which he doesn’t coddle. “Chris talks to powerful people like they’ve never been spoken to,” says one of his lieutenants.
When Eaton leaves these powerful people – elected officials, police superintendents, administrators in the sporting world – they often shake their heads in derision. Match-fixing could never happen to us. Invariably, months or maybe a year or two later, when enough time has passed for Eaton to fade from their thoughts, suddenly he returns. What he predicted has come to pass. And he is the only one to call for help, because no one else knows what to do. This has happened so often as to defy coincidence. The billions of dollars available in the manipulation of football matches are too tempting for organized crime to ignore, and match-fixing creeps into every local market. Eaton spreads his gospel and combats his criminal opponents, his monthly itinerary a checkerboard of takeoffs and landings from one continent to another. A lifelong policeman, he has become football’s redeemer, the one man with the will and the strategy to scuttle match-fixing and restore the integrity of the game.
Eaton never wanted to be a cop. In his view, the police force was a destination of lowly ambition. In 1960s Australia, it was. Policing employed muscle, rather than cunning. It reflected not only the predominate domestic view, that the law cast no shades of gray, but also the country’s sporting culture. Australian rules football was the sport of choice, a game that developed a man’s ability to wear down his opponent in barely legislated brutality. Football, the thinking man’s game, a sport of deft artistry, was the province of European émigrés, awkward souls stranded Down Under who gathered now and again on the patchy turf of neglected fields, communicating in this foreign language of strategy.
It was Eaton’s older brother, Ian, the firstborn of the family, who wanted to wear blue. At eighteen years old, he was the right size, six foot two and 200 pounds, big and rangy enough to succeed with aggression in the Victoria Police, but he failed the police exam.
Life’s path navigated away from Ian’s control, while Chris was certain that he would draw his own. The family spent its Christmas vacations at Mornington, outside Melbourne, bunking together in a mobile home, where Chris would break out pencil and paper. He had inherited a talent for sketching from his father, an architect, who encouraged him toward the profession. But Chris was interested in the human form. While he sketched the outlines of a face or a torso, he felt a person take shape in his understanding – how a well-placed stroke could manipulate them to one position or another. He thought that he would attend art college in Melbourne.
Ian’s path carried him to the army, though it always meandered back to Mornington every summery December. Ian would pack into a car with two of his friends, headed for nearby Cape Schanck, where the nineteenth-century lighthouse brought in the tourists, while the girls in bikinis attracted their own local attention. One clear afternoon, the boys wandered along the cliffs that overlooked the beach, the waves elapsing along the rocks, and the sandy pathway crumbled underfoot. Ian fell the full seventy feet to the rocks, causing the brain hemorrhage that killed him.
Sixteen-year-old Chris watched his mother sink into depression. Regret consumed his father, a career man who had known his oldest son only passingly. Chris’s younger brother, Anthony, was neglected. Chris put away his pencils and drawings, and he abandoned school in favor of the police academy. This would be his way of memorializing Ian. He didn’t see himself as a cop, but by sacrificing himself so that his family might emotionally recover, he displayed the character of the ideal policeman – shielding the victims, even if he didn’t realize, in his youth, that he was a victim, too.
At Melbourne’s St. Kilda precinct, Eaton looked the part physically, like his brother big enough to handle himself. But the difference in temperament between his colleagues and himself was so striking that Eaton was certain he was in the wrong profession. By the 1970s, St. Kilda’s nineteenth-century seaside mansions had been sectioned into apartments for low-income families, and the neighborhood became a dim environment of drugs, violence, and prostitution. Crime was such a part of life in St. Kilda that police could apply no lasting solution to it. They could only identify “natural criminals,” night-sticking them into temporary submission. “We were really the thin blue line in those days,” Eaton says. “I learned quickly that policing was there to repress the troublesome in society from those who didn’t want to be troubled by them.”
This was no element for the righteous or the philosophical, or even the merciful. One afternoon, police detained an offender, who arrived at the St. Kilda precinct. The man had groped a girl on the beach, but by law Eaton had to let him free. There was not enough evidence. Eaton later learned that the man had gone on to rape and murder. And so while the roughhouse nature of St. Kilda policing offended Eaton’s cerebral disposition, experience broadened his view. “By taking no action, you exude weakness,” he says. “Criminals only respect authority. And authority doesn’t come from the uniform. It comes from a style.”
In a place beholden to gangs, the police were St. Kilda’s biggest gang of all. As Eaton looked through the bars of the precinct’s back window and out onto Port Phillip Bay, he realized that he hadn’t signed up to be part of a posse. Each night, he felt for a solution, as he transited from the charged environment of the St. Kilda streets to his wife, Debbie, back home.
Debbie was the slim, brown-haired girl next door, laughing and animated. She was also sixteen, and the two married in a shotgun wedding in 1972 when Chris was nineteen and a rookie in the Victoria police force. They named their son Ian. A daughter, Sarah, came along in 1976.
As if compensating for the education that he had relinquished, Eaton became a reader of great hunger and interest. In the pages of the books that he read in his young family’s two-bedroom apartment, he encountered mention of an organization that might serve as a model for his own. It was the FBI’s cerebral approach to crime prevention that agreed with the ideas Eaton was rapidly developing. He admired the work of J. Edgar Hoover, if not the man himself, and Hoover’s vigorous application of the law to the influential, whereas police had before applied it only to the impoverished. In Australia, Eaton saw a mirror image. “The people who were committing the big crime in Melbourne, the people with money, the people who were committing enormous frauds on society, police didn’t even pay a note’s attention to them,” he says. Eaton understood that the crime that was visible on the streets of St. Kilda was the result of greater forces, grand manipulators hidden from view. He realized that it wasn’t enough to cultivate authority, but to apply it to effect.
Eaton wrote about his progressive ideals in the police journals. This gained him notice and promotion into the Australian federal police, working in Canberra, the Australian capital. Not yet thirty years old, Eaton had achieved all of the things that his brother Ian had hoped he would in a lifetime.
He was enjoying a cool respite in 1981 as he steered his Ford Fairmont north along the M31 highway, on his way home from Melbourne, where he had just served as best man at the wedding of his brother Anthony. The kids were asleep in the backseat. Debbie was slouched against a pillow in the passenger seat, her eyes closed. The fog in the air wisped in spirals around the rushing frame of the Fairmont coupe. It wasn’t a long trip from Melbourne to Canberra – five hours if you drove like you meant it – and Eaton was taking it slow. There was no rush. He steered along the highway’s winding curve, enjoying the way that felt, to be in control. Headlights roused him from his thoughts.
CHAPTER 4 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
KUALA LUMPUR, 1990
Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.
As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.
The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn’t be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn’t tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.
The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.
Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren’t clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn’t control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn’t need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.
Perumal’s profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn’t back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you’re bound to lose big, especially when you’re not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn’t know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn’t confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.
They said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn’t mind letting people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful people in Malaysia.
Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy’s enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss’s place near Yishun Park, in Singapore’s Sembawang district. It didn’t take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.
Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.
Perumal wasn’t sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-Singaporean horse-racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn’t cover a large football bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore’s bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.
Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy’s fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy’s side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.
Perumal watched and learned how fixing was done at the highest level. How to approach a player in false friendship. The way to pay him far greater than the competition, in order to poach him. How to use women to trap players. How to develop a player, then pull strings to get him transferred to a club under your control. How to threaten someone else in the player’s presence, so that he would get the message without feeling in danger himself. How to take a player shopping, buy him some clothes, some shoes, make him feel special, as you would do for your girlfriend. How to follow through on a threat if a player resisted your demands.
Perumal also saw that even a figure as important as Kurusamy still had to bow to the Chinese in gambling circles. The Chinese ultimately held every big ticket. Not only did China have the largest mass of people the world, as well as a rising economy, but it also had the strongest organized crime network in Asia, the Triads. All down the line in the bookmaking business, Chinese controlled everything of worth and importance.
Kurusamy was undeniable, but he was not the only one. Perumal watched teams staying in the same hotel get friendly with one another. Club officials had drinks together in the lounge. One team needed a win to advance in the tournament. The other team had already gained the next round. Money exchanged hands. Or sometimes just the promise of a return favor. It was easy. No victims. It was just the way things were done in Asian football. To Perumal, it appeared that everybody was in on the fix, and that nobody was trying to stop it.
He watched players inexplicably miss the net on penalty kicks, and he knew why. The talk was in the market, and if you listened to the talk, you could make some real money. But the money was fleeting. It came and went. Whatever he made fixing, he ended up betting on English Premier League matches, on UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League matches. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost, because he never knew how those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.
In his own fixes, Perumal was learning the valuable lessons of experience. He learned that the fix was not always easy to complete. Players were unreliable. They wouldn’t follow directions. They would score when they were supposed to concede. They were sometimes hungover, or they just didn’t care. Perumal would watch as the clock wound down on a match, and all he needed was his chosen team to let in one more goal, but sometimes it just wouldn’t come. He would harangue the players, but it was clear that even though he paid them money, they didn’t feel like they owed him anything. To them, he was just a small-time criminal. He couldn’t control them. He was missing something.
Perumal would escape it all at Orchard Towers, Singapore’s “Four Floors of Whores,” a shopping complex that turned into a sprawling boudoir in the evening. Here there was business to be done. Perumal mingled with football players there, many of them foreign players, the high-priced imports with the disposable income that Perumal was trying to secure for himself. As the European players tossed money around and as the girls laughed and wanted in on the action, Perumal sauntered into their circle. He approached one of the players, this time with a new strategy.
Perumal approached a foreign player he recognised from watching league matches in Singapore. And from what Perumal could surmise, the player was disinterested. At times, he was the strongest player on the field. At other times, it was hard to pick him out of the lazy back-and-forth of the play. As they spoke over the music at Orchard Towers, Perumal asked him to win.
Perumal had been fixing single games by compromising the defenders and goalkeeper, compelling them to allow the opposing team to score. Now he saw how the fix could work in another way, with a foreign player who was slumming, on the downside of his career, stuck in an Asian lower league for the nightclubs, the easy money, the women, not the glory that he had once imagined, but which had long faded from his aspirations. In those nights at the Orchard Towers, Perumal realized that the players were just like he was, living without a thought for tomorrow, concerned with money only to spend it. Perumal and the player locked eyes in agreement over the flashing lights of the action.
Perumal instructed him to jog along with the rest of the players throughout a game, until that moment when he needed a goal. Perumal would then shout from the stands, like an impassioned fan. That was the signal, and the player would exert himself. In the first game under this arrangement he scored four goals. He easily controlled the intensity with which he played, especially since he was superior to the competition he faced. The partnership thrived. Things went well, so successfully and profitably that the player started suggesting fixes. Perumal realized that he was not the only one getting addicted to easy money.
Perumal was liquid again, and he rejoined Kurusamy’s poker game. He wasn’t consistently winning at Pal’s table, but he was bragging plenty. The Boss listened closely to what Perumal said, even if he didn’t let on. And soon his player had slipped through Perumal’s fingers, going to work for Kurusamy. Perumal was left with nothing besides a costly lesson in the fix. Players had fleeting loyalty. Fixing partners had none at all. Years later, such realities would upend the high life that Perumal had constructed for himself.
There was another lesson that was more valuable, though Perumal was not ready to learn it. Since Kurusamy had many influential people on his payroll in Malaysia and Singapore, he felt comfortable enough to boast. He had spent ten years in prison, starting in the 1980s, and through that despair had attained wealth and criminal authority. But he became too public. The king of this “victimless” crime hadn’t figured on the pride of the victim. Kurusamy wasn’t concerned about defrauding bettors or preying on the morality of the players on the field. But he would have profited by understanding that he was lampooning the state. In 1994, Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), the terror of local criminals, initiated a match-fixing crackdown. Kurusamy was arrested.
He wasn’t the only one. In September 1994, a Singaporean tournament called the Constituency Cup was coming up, and Perumal phoned a player, proposing a fix in the competition, offering $3,000. In light of the CPIB crackdown, the player reported the approach to police. The authorities researched the phone record. They traced the call to Perumal’s residence, and in short order, Perumal had a new residence: prison. But in time, he would soon go further afield than he had ever imagined.
Bail was Singapore’s beautiful game, as Perumal and Kurusamy quickly gained their liberty while awaiting sentencing. But their business was shackled by the CPIB. Fixing was too hot in Singapore and Malaysia. The cash had ceased flowing. Kurusamy needed to find another way.
Kurusamy had no other way, no other place. He was uneducated. He spoke only passable English. He was not a man of the world. His world was the Malay Peninsula, with its government and police officials whom the Boss knew by name and shared history. Now this world was off-limits to him. Kurusamy developed an idea. Like the many goods that flowed out of the Singapore port, one of the busiest in the world, export was the key to financial mobility. The Boss summoned Perumal. “Go to Europe,” he told him.
Perumal traveled on the passport of a friend, easily slipping off the island, breaking the bounds of his bail agreement. He traveled with a partner. The two flew to the United Kingdom, the center of world football, where the inhospitable weather surprised them. They weren’t in Asia anymore, and they realized that they had wandered into the deep end of the pool. Back home, they had been suave operators. England neutralized any special powers they thought they possessed. They didn’t know any players. They didn’t know any cops or politicians. Wandering nearly without aim, they found their way to the training grounds of Birmingham, and of Chelsea, the latter one of the biggest clubs in the game. Like rank amateurs, Perumal and his partner posed as journalists.
This was the land of Ladbrokes and William Hill, a sophisticated, legal gambling market that provided the Englishman with a betting slip to heighten his interest in a match. But this had nothing on the Asian marketplace. Betting in Asia was not for fun, or even for watching a game. It was serious business, the business of cultural addiction, and it was about to grow exponentially, making the English market look like a child’s hobby. The Singaporean, Indonesian, and Chinese had no favorite teams, just favorite bets, those that appeared winnable. These billions of people drawn together in identical behavior constituted an enormous market. Ladbrokes and the other regulated bookmakers had the name, the veneer of English respectability. But as Perumal realised, the market and the power were Asian. But few people knew this. Not yet.
When Perumal approached players in Great Britain, they turned their backs on him, walked right past him, looked right through him. When he did happen to get close enough to players to make his proposal – £60,000 to enhance a match – players laughed at him, then reported him. Word got around, and soon coaches and administrators were running Perumal and his partner off their grounds. Most insulting of all: no one ever called the cops. They didn’t take Perumal seriously.
Back in Singapore, Kurusamy was furious with Perumal’s lack of results, though there was not much he could do. His trial was approaching. Perumal himself stood trial in January 1995. The court convicted him for match-fixing and leaving the country on a false passport. He was sentenced to one year in prison.
When Perumal received parole, eight months later, little had changed. Match-fixing was still too hot in Singapore. The country’s international reputation was at stake. How could Singapore be known for best business practices when its most public events constituted a fraud? The CPIB set out to eradicate fixing in Singapore. The Boss still had to make his money. The United Kingdom had proven impenetrable, for now. But there was another market, and it was even bigger.
Kurusamy arrived in the United States flush with cash, connecting in New York for a flight to Atlanta. Perumal joined him, as did several others from a gathering Asian syndicate. The opportunity before them was worth a concentrated effort.
In Atlanta, they blended in with all the other tourists who were there for the 1996 Olympics. They hung around the hotels, the stadiums, and practice fields where they might encounter players for the sixteen national teams included in the football tournament. Olympic football was a jerry-rigged competition that FIFA tolerated, so long as it wouldn’t infringe on the popularity of the World Cup. After limitations on players’ ages and levels of experience diluted the rosters, the result was a marginalized round-robin that hardly did justice to an Olympic competition of the world’s most popular game.
All the same, the betting on the Olympics football tournament would be worth the effort that Kurusamy and Perumal put into manipulating it. Five different cities in the eastern United States hosted the Olympics football competition. Kurusamy and Perumal traveled to one of the venues – Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. There, according to Perumal, they approached Mexico’s goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, one of the most well-known players in the international game. The Singaporeans attempted to corrupt Campos, but he turned them down.
A partner of Kurusamy, a middle-aged man whom Perumal knew only as “Uncle,” had made contact with players from another national team before the games started. He claimed to have struck a deal with the team’s defenders and goalie. Perumal couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to him on seeing their results that Uncle wasn’t exaggerating his influence over the team.
It was Perumal’s first taste of success while abroad. He saw how it might be done, how you could approach national team players, how willing they were likely to be. And when he returned to Singapore, Perumal wished he had simply stayed in America.
Singaporean police had issued another warrant for his arrest. He spent the night in lockup at the CPIB holding pen. The following day, as officers escorted him to a car on the police grounds, Perumal slipped one of his handcuffs and ran for it. He tried to scale a fence, but it was too high, and the officers dragged him back to the ground. At court, a judge sent him down for two years – plus extra time for attempting to escape custody. Police also picked up Kurusamy. The Boss ended up spending two years in solitary confinement.
When Perumal was released, in 2000, while those around him were excited about the prospects of the new millennium, his hopes were dim. He was thirty-five years old, a convicted felon with no professional skills, no references, and no viable financial prospects. There was only one thing he had ever known how to do. And his time in prison, where he shared a small cell with a dozen men, where a small bowl served as his toilet and his drinking cup, this period had not caused him to develop his talents.
When Perumal consulted the schedule and noticed that a match between two S. League teams was a few days off, he got an idea. There was still too much heat on fixing. Perumal didn’t trust the players. They were liable to turn him in, notifying the CPIB to save themselves. But there were other ways to influence the outcome of a match.
The strongest player for the Woodlands Wellington club was a Croatian import, a midfielder named Ivica Raguz. Perumal had watched enough Wellington matches to understand that the team’s chances were largely dependent on Raguz’s performance. If Raguz happened to miss a game, and if Perumal happened to possess this knowledge before a bookmaker knew that Raguz was going to sit it out, Perumal stood to gain. Perumal had always considered match-fixing a victimless crime. The only people who got burned were the bookies, and they were dealing in such high volume that, Perumal rationalized, his manner of fraud made little impact. Perumal had developed a philosophy by which he was the patron of football’s lost souls, the financial champion of players whom the establishment paid less than a living wage. Perumal was the one who augmented their salaries, made their lives possible. Financial desperation may have altered his character. Maybe it was prison. Or maybe the elaborate stories that he was telling himself and others were the convoluted justifications of someone who would indeed do anything to beat the system.
Perumal hired two Bangladeshi men to assault Ivica Raguz before Wellington’s next match, against Geylang United. Perumal and a friend placed a bet, 30,000 Singapore dollars, on Wellington’s opponent to win. Then they sat back and waited to hear from the Bangladeshis. But the call from the Bangladeshis, confirming that they had incapacitated Raguz, never came. Raguz was a large, heavily muscled man, and when the Bangladeshis saw him in person, they froze. They decided this job wasn’t for them. But the bet had already been placed. Perumal had to do something. He had to do the job himself. With money on the line, and a crude sort of match-fixing proposed, Perumal proved his industry.
He lay in wait in a stand of bushes near the Lower Seletar Reservoir, in northern Singapore, where Wellington’s practice field was located. Perumal held a field hockey stick in his hand. He waited for some time before Raguz appeared. When Raguz did materialize, a teammate was by his side. This was Perumal’s chance to abandon his plan. He hadn’t yet crossed over from fraud to felony assault. His victims showed no visible bruises. He hadn’t threatened anyone’s health or livelihood. But desperation outweighed all concerns. Perumal didn’t want to miss the chance. He stepped out of the bushes, approaching the men from behind. He swung his field hockey stick, striking Raguz on the knee with the dull, hard wood. Raguz and his teammate managed to escape, but the damage was done. Raguz didn’t play against Geylang United, and the bet came off.
Perumal had little time to enjoy his winnings. A few days after the match, police arrested him on assault charges. He spent another year in prison.
When he was released, in September 2001, Perumal kept to himself. He felt like a pariah. He kept away from the few friends who continued to associate with him. Fixing was off-limits, even if he had wanted to revive his connections in that world. But he had to earn a living somehow. Regular work was not an option for Perumal. He had never held a traditional job. With his criminal record, he would not have been able to find honest work that equaled his conception of himself. Instead, he opted for credit card fraud. Match-fixing had earned Perumal fairly light sentences – six months, a year. Considering fixing’s financial potential, the risk of such limited prison time seemed worth the gamble. However, institutional financial crime was serious business in Singapore. When the bank that Perumal targeted traced the source of the fraud, it was easy to identify the perpetrator.
Perumal was too poor to hire an attorney, and he instead represented himself at trial. Because of Perumal’s previous escape attempts, the judge ordered him to wear handcuffs in court. It was humiliating. And inevitable. Perumal wasn’t surprised when he was convicted of fraud. He understood the evidence. He also figured that his days as a match-fixer were over. He had already begun to conceive of how he was going to make a living when he got out of prison. But all of this thinking stopped, as he was staggered to learn of the penalty he would have to pay. When the judge pronounced a judgment of four years, Perumal wanted to hide his face in his hands. But he couldn’t, since he was shackled.
CHAPTER 5 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
Chris Eaton was at the wheel of his Ford Fairmont. The headlights up ahead belonged to a refrigeration truck that was crossing over into his lane. Eaton had little time to react. Instinctively, he swerved to the right. Eaton was driving in the left lane, as is the way in Australia, in a right-hand-drive car. A simple twist of the steering wheel. Debbie, mercifully asleep against her pillow, accepted the force of the collision. Everything transpired at highway speed.
Ian’s front teeth were knocked out, and his face was severely lacerated. Eaton’s daughter, Sarah, was just fine. At the door of the ambulance, parked across the M31 highway, Eaton looked on. He knew the protocol. He was a cop. He had looked the victim in the eye before, delivered the news. The victim was the last one to hope for a good outcome, and Eaton knew better than to do that now. He watched the paramedics work, and he knew. The whip of the crash had snapped Debbie’s brain stem. She was gone. “Life was to be lived for Debbie,” Eaton says. “Which was good, since she had such a short life.”
Eaton was a widower at twenty-nine, with two young children. He couldn’t handle the variable hours of shift work any longer, nor long-term investigations. He had to find stable work. This is how the man who wasn’t suited to be a bureaucrat became just that, joining Australia’s federal police union, eventually becoming its chief. He thrived in the union, learning how to operate in a political environment, though a rough-and-tumble Australian one, aided by what he had endured. “I developed a healthy cynicism as a result of the tragic parts of my life,” he says. “It made me see the realities of life for what they were.” Eaton remarried, and with his second wife, Kathie, he had twin daughters. He spent the rest of the 1980s and ’90s gaining administrative experience, an Aussie cop for life, it appeared, until an unexpected opportunity arose, expanding his policing portfolio in ways he had never imagined.
In 1999, at the age of forty-seven, Eaton broke from his established career path, challenging himself in a foreign world. He joined Interpol. Headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol was the eyes and ears of international law enforcement, the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world, after the United Nations. Interpol didn’t arrest suspects. It served a more critical function in the modern, globalized environment. Interpol was the one agency that could serve as a liaison between various national and local police forces, a hub of international criminal intelligence. When a suspect fled one country for another – or, worse, one continent for another – Interpol was instrumental in tracking this person and connecting the relevant policing agencies in order to apprehend him. Interpol was like an international FBI, which made sense to Eaton, from his study of J. Edgar Hoover. As international borders, especially European borders, disappeared, as technology shrank the world, Interpol’s role enlarged.
However, when Eaton arrived, Interpol was technically behind the times, and woefully so. The agency still dispatched messages to foreign branches by telex. Among various initial jobs, Eaton managed the implementation of a new communication protocol, Interpol 24/7, which replaced the telex system. He worked as the chief of staff for Interpol’s president. All the while, he attended a school of new social and professional manners. He had come from a continent unto itself. Australia in its isolation produced some of the most professional, energetic, and cooperative police officers in the world. But they had limited experience globally. They knew a little about Southeast Asia. But for Eaton, this didn’t compare to the astounding complexity of working in Europe, with its sophistication, with its fifty countries and dozens of languages, customs, and legal codes.
At Interpol, Eaton also mixed with African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American colleagues. A great reader, he now became a great listener, coming to understand what other cultures valued, how they operated. He made quick friendships with his counterparts from Germany, Austria, Russia, Thailand. Eaton further burnished his international credentials when Interpol lent him to the United Nations’ independent inquiry committee, which was investigating the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. Working under Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Eaton traced the sources of Saddam Hussein’s wealth. Eaton had come a long way from the beat in St. Kilda. He was learning the skills that would transform him into a cop who could capably and imaginatively combat an international criminal conspiracy.
Eaton had come to the attention of Ron Noble, Interpol’s secretary general. A tenured professor at the New York University School of Law, Noble had served as an undersecretary at the U.S. Treasury Department before coming to Lyon. He was credited with sweeping structural reform that revitalized Interpol after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But he was frustrated. Interpol’s Command and Coordination Center was brand new, a reaction to the rising global terrorist threat. It was designed to be the room through which all of Interpol’s critical information flowed in up-to-the-minute fashion. In practice, the center was underutilized, noncritical, an underperforming asset. Noble recalled Eaton from the UN in order to fix the problem.
Noble knew that Eaton was a talented administrator. Eaton was aggressive. In pressure situations, he acted calmly, assertively, insulating his subordinates from distraction and giving them the assurance to perform. When he returned to Lyon, Eaton went about transforming the command center into the innovation that Noble had envisioned. In short order, the command center became a hive of activity. A massive screen hung on the main wall, and it displayed the status of active incidents and investigations from across the globe. Operators at individual desks communicated to international police agencies in Russian, French, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic. The world of crime and cops generated an intense, unending flow of information, which Eaton’s seventy-five charges coordinated with increasing adeptness. A serial killer on the loose in Southeast Asia, a terrorist incident in Africa, a drug suspect arrested in South America, a prison break in the Middle East. As Eaton’s daily attention switched from terrorism to organized crime to genocide, he learned the value of sharing live operational information with the people who could utilize it to put an end to the victimization of others.
When this sharing didn’t happen, Eaton grew furious, then morose. He watched in disgust as national police agencies greedily hoarded information about a Swiss pedophile who had traveled around Europe on a thirty-year killing spree. This only confirmed Eaton’s belief in the need for international cooperation. It didn’t matter who got credit for solving a crime or making a collar. All that mattered was getting it right in the end.
Within a few years, Interpol’s command center had become the single most important repository of operational data and information in all of international policing. Cops in the field contacted the command center because they believed that Interpol – through Eaton, its manager of operations – would react with the information and assistance that would make a difference in their investigations. Each day, as Eaton scanned the command center’s big screen of human frailty, he knew that he was harboring a secret frailty in his own personal life.
Eaton took some getting used to. Colleagues who met him for the first time often found him crass, direct, a little touchy. But once the heat rose in the command center, these same people discovered that there were few senior Interpol officials who were more capable, more fraternal.
Eaton displayed a striking, fundamental dedication to the job. Most people who worked at Interpol were there by appointment, on temporary assignment while still employed by national policing agencies. They were there to make professional contacts, to pad their résumés – there for an education in French wine – until their real bosses called them home. Eaton was an Interpol employee, so he had a stake. But there was something more. “Always remember what you’re doing this for,” he would routinely tell those in his charge. “What you’re trying to do is help the police officer in the field.”
One night, Eaton was leaving work, making his way around the command center to shake hands with each person on duty, as was his custom. Word arrived of a South American prison break. When Eaton learned that one of the escapees had shot and killed a cop, he hung up his coat. He slumped in a chair, identifying with the victim.
He phoned one of his underlings, whose expertise he required in order to dispatch the Interpol notices that would aid in the search for the suspects. The employee said that she was home, and that she would come to office once she had finished her dinner. “The only reason you have food on your table is because of these police officers,” Eaton told her. “Get your ass in here. Now.” Eaton’s professional behavior left no doubt that he was operational, not political, and come what may.
When his passion was inflamed, Eaton’s voice would boom. His words would come out in a high-vocabulary jumble, and it might be hard to understand him, especially if you weren’t a native English speaker, which was true of many at Interpol. Although his arguments were often correct, the bluntness of his debating style derailed him from a path to the top jobs in Interpol’s highly political environment.
Often over the years, he and Ron Noble differed. Yet they retained mutual respect. One night over dinner in 2008, Noble told Eaton: “You might be the only person who is more loyal to Interpol than to me.”
Eaton “aspired to leadership at Interpol,” but he was not obtuse. Such a determined cop, such a disinclined politician. His fundamental political flaw was what made him operationally effective. He was unforgiving. But he was not perfect.
He had had a liaison with a Frenchwoman he had met in Lyon. In secret, there was a daughter. Eaton’s marriage to his second wife, Kathie, ended – though, he says, not acrimoniously. The two remain in cordial contact today. “My wife was a good housekeeper,” he says. “She kept the house. She deserved it.”
Approaching sixty, Eaton’s career had stalled, advancement at Interpol closed off to him. His personal life was an open question. But unlike many others of his age, he was not unduly discouraged by the future. He believed he had more to do. He had energy. He was an expert in not only the way that international organized crime operated, but also the way that international police did its business – and how it might cooperate more effectively in combating global conspiracy. Eaton had acquired the knowledge and skills that come to only the adept, energetic, well-placed international policeman. All he needed was a place to apply them.
CHAPTER 6 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
HONG KONG, PRESENT DAY
Hong Kong’s Wooloomooloo Steakhouse attracts a busy lunchtime crowd. On the thirty-first floor of the Hennessy building, the restaurant overlooks Victoria Harbor, toward Kowloon and mainland China and all of the money that has transformed global sports betting.
Patrick Jay works his way through a cut of meat. Jay is the head of the sportsbook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. This may be the most profitable sportsbook in the world, though such rankings are impossible to calculate, given the nature of the business. Jay explains that the Hong Kong Jockey Club handles roughly $6.5 billion in betting on football per year. From its entire gambling portfolio, the book takes $1 billion in profit annually. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the largest taxpayer in Hong Kong, representing 8 percent of the local budget.
Jay is a tall, large-boned man, with the gregarious and happily ravenous manner of someone whose strategic decisions have guided him to a windfall. He projects the attitude of that rare animal, the winning gambler. Jay is one of an expanding cast of Englishmen come east. They carry expertise in the traditional, respected, English way of making a book – at shops like Ladbrokes and William Hill – and they now apply these business principles to Asia, where their experienced hand is welcomed. The Asian market has grown exponentially in the last decade. Jay estimates that the market represented about $100 billion at the turn of the millennium. Today, he says, Asian gamblers wager $1 trillion on sports per year. “The numbers are absolutely unfathomable to everybody,” Jay says. “People back in the U.K. don’t believe it. If you show them financial numbers, they say, ‘You’re making this up. You got Enron to do your accounting for you.’ ” It is not only the size and growth of the Chinese economy that has attracted so many in Western gaming. Nor would adventure be a sufficient motive for someone as oriented to business as Jay to relocate this far from home. It is habit most of all that draws people in Jay’s line – Chinese habit, the role that gambling plays in Asian cultures, the well-documented acquaintance with risk. This, as much as Asian economic dynamism, is the guarantor of continued growth in the gambling business. Jay’s research tells him that in Hong Kong, locals allocate upward of two and a half times more of their disposable income for gambling than do people in the United Kingdom. “Asia is not the center of the universe,” Jay says. “Asia is the universe.”
Jay’s sportsbook is located at, unsurprisingly, a racetrack. It is public, open, legal. And it is categorized in the minority. Throughout nearly all of Asia, the most active gambling continent, gambling is illegal. It is illegal to bet on sports on mainland China, for this activity is antithetical to the precepts of the communist state. The Muslim religion does not permit gambling for Indonesia’s 250 million people. This doesn’t mean that legal statutes prevent gambling. On the contrary, illegal, unregulated bookies in China, Indonesia, and all across Asia predominate. Jay claims that the illegal betting market is ten times larger than the legal market. Of the $1 trillion total, he says that $900 billion is wagered in the dark, administered by the criminal entities that finance, regulate, and enforce a parallel industry.
At Wooloomooloo, lunch draws to a close, and Patrick Jay readies to make a demonstrative point. “Look around the restaurant,” he says. “What do you see?” There are tables full of what appear to be businessmen in the midst of congenial lunch meetings. There are a few romantic couples sharing their little moments. At other tables, friends speak loudly with one another, then laugh. It is the usual steakhouse crowd, but for one missing element. “No booze,” Jay says. He’s right. Plates of steaks and potatoes cover the tabletops, but no single glass of beer or whiskey accompanies them. “These people don’t spend their money on alcohol. They gamble.”
China’s market reforms of the late twentieth century incited one of the most remarkable periods of localized economic growth that the world has ever experienced. Throughout the 1990s, the Chinese economy grew at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year. In rapid fashion, this swelling generated both great personal wealth for some individuals and general liquidity in Chinese society.
While this miraculous event was unfolding, so was an episode of even greater global significance and revelation. During this period, the Internet was growing from a computer engineer’s curiosity into the world’s primary means of commerce and communication. At the moment that many millions of Chinese people all of a sudden possessed disposable income, there was a new place to play with it. When these fortunate Chinese considered how they might float their new wealth for the enjoyment and risk that had long been a central part of their culture, they were presented with a growing number of gambling options online.
The emergence of the Internet not only precipitated the growth of online betting sites, but also improved options for the gambler. Before the Internet, the corner-store bookie, such as Ladbrokes, had little incentive to offer its clients competitive odds. It possessed a quasi-monopoly, defined by location and the immobility of the gambler. Internet betting introduced choice to the betting market. A new catalogue of gambling sites began dropping odds and commissions in the competition to attract business.
In China, the new bourgeoisie within this population of 1.3 billion people flooded the Internet gambling market. As the millennium turned, European sportsbooks followed the lead of their Asian counterparts, establishing online portals. Eventually the European and Asian markets began to work in concert, online, following each other’s price and line movements, bookies on one continent laying off bets with bookies on the other as part of their risk management strategy. Asian books established European-registered subsidiaries under different names, the client none the wiser. As happened with other industries as they migrated online, in gambling, national borders dissolved. In short order, the Internet enforced global regulation, of a sort, on a largely unregulated, gray-market, underground industry.
“The Asian and European betting markets have come together and created one giant pool,” says David Forrest, an economics professor at the University of Salford, in Manchester, England, who specializes in the study of sports gambling. “It’s now one huge liquid market. And liquidity is the friend of the fixer. You can put down big bets without notice, and without changing the odds against yourself.”
The Internet altered what people bet on, as well as the way that they bet. Twenty years ago, roughly 15 percent of bets on the international sports market were placed on football. But as the Internet enabled betting houses to offer continuous propositions based on the various factors of a game in progress – including the time remaining, the score, the players on the field, and the intuition of the bookie adjusting the line and the odds – the rise of in-game betting enhanced the popularity of football as a gambling proposition. The game now accounts for roughly 70 percent of the international sports betting market, according to Interpol estimates. The Internet also allowed for a rise in the trading of bets between bettors. International gambling on football matches has come to resemble a stock market, with constant fluctuations, numerous propositions, and instantaneous arbitrage.
Along with these changes came heightened scrutiny on football matches and the valuable information secreted within them. Patrick Jay tells the story of a grizzled old bookie he worked with at Ladbrokes. “In 1995,” the man liked to say, “if the midfielder for Manchester United broke his leg, five people would know about it. His wife, his father, his coach, and his trainer. And me.” Now, said the man, if a minor injury afflicts an inconsequential player on an unknown club, “they’re betting $10 million on it in that Macau.”
Before the Internet, one of the only ways to bet on football was on the 1x2 market. The “1” represents a victory by the home team. The “2” represents an away-team win. The “x” represents a draw. The 1x2 market does not incorporate a line, or a point spread. Odds are simply established for the chances of each of the three possible outcomes. The final score is irrelevant. When the favorite builds an insurmountable lead in a match, the gambler doesn’t have much incentive to watch anymore. Despite this, the 1x2 market remains the most popular form of football betting in Europe.
Almost no one in Asia bets 1x2. The majority of people betting on football in the world – and this includes all sizable international match-fixing groups – operate on the Asian handicap and Asian totals markets. Locally known as hang cheng, the Asian handicap market takes the draw out of football betting. In essence, you bet on one team to win by an assigned handicap, or on the other team to lose by this same handicap. Bookies establish a point spread that recognizes one team as the favorite. They also assign odds to each bet. The odds place a number value on the chances of a proposition and thus the payout on a winning bet. The Asian totals market, on the other hand, offers the chance to bet on the number of goals scored in a match in aggregate, the over-under. Except for a few minor differences, the Asian handicap and the Asian totals markets are identical to the markets for betting on the NFL or NBA, in the United States.
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Brett Forrest
Timed to coincide with the World Cup in Brazil and told in the style of a page-turning thriller, this is the book that will blow the lid off international match fixing in football: a pandemic that has struck at the heart of the ‘beautiful game’It began as a series of disparate reports coming in from the corners of the football world: referees, players and managers were deliberately fixing results at the behest of illegal bettors. But as the reports kept coming, bit by bit the scale of the problem began to emerge. These weren’t just footballing minnows but major teams and players, playing on the biggest possible stages. The money at stake ran into the billions. And the people pulling the strings were operating for some of the largest, most heinous criminal syndicates in the world.In THE BIG FIX, Brett Forrest uncovers the scarcely believable scale of a threat to the beautiful game that is only just now coming to light.Told in the style of a thriller, Forrest tracks down the criminals who occupy this murky world of billion-dollar transactions, as well as the people tasked with hunting them and saving football’s lifeblood.Published on the eve of the World Cup, this shocking expose reveals a criminal enterprise that threatens to rot football to its core.
(#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
(#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game
CONTENTS
Cover (#u09675638-af7d-5dc8-b784-93467953afbd)
Title Page (#ulink_37e73a66-c3cb-5843-bd63-6e9e6b857b81)
Dedication (#ulink_68af63b1-11d8-55e8-9cdb-b7d09ae036d3)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_e3c7d994-6c44-5adc-8caf-e3376cb8a1a8)
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_992fe90c-fc68-5dcd-8e3a-544a7b0332b0)
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_762f4978-7a6c-5782-bd14-87f457e7437e)
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_836da60a-3eab-5e60-ab7d-d4929d496584)
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_1d7ee867-dcec-5717-9c77-bb96ecae9af5)
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_c808f31a-a789-5f7b-a81e-f71dc56bb931)
CHAPTER 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM
SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011
The FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing football apart. Sharjah was a short drive up the road from Dubai, but it felt like a world away, in the unglamorous dust, a face of the United Arab Emirates that most Westerners never saw. Unlike Dubai, Sharjah didn’t look like a place where someone could get rich overnight. This made it a fitting location for the criminals who had infiltrated the game of football. Their specialty was illusion, and events in Sharjah were about to give them another lucrative ninety-minute return.
The match set for that day – March 26, 2011 – was an exhibition, or friendly, between the national teams of Kuwait and Jordan. It was the sort of game that took place hundreds of times each year around the world, with limited notice and consequence. National team coaches often looked upon these contests as little more than vigorous practice. Interested criminal groups from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, on the other hand, considered them the cornerstones of an extensive commercial enterprise.
Now Kuwait versus Jordan was forming into the front line in a gathering war. On one side were organized criminal syndicates, which were making hundreds of millions of dollars – if not billions, the total amount a drop in the opaque, trillion-dollar pool of football betting – by manipulating game results. On the other side were football administrators, who were beginning to accept that match-fixing was the stunning sports scandal of our time, a fundamental threat to the most popular game in the world.
FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), football’s international governing body, had received information that a collection of known criminals had arranged to manipulate the outcome of the Sharjah match. This was no great surprise, as inflated final scores, questionable penalty calls, and strange betting patterns had been occurring with great frequency in recent seasons. What was novel about this Sharjah match was the fact that FIFA, directed by a newly hired security chief, was operating a clandestine investigation. The time had come to take action.
When the two FIFA investigators entered Khalid Bin Mohammed Stadium, shortly before game time, there was no one else there. It had been a challenge to gather reliable information about the match, even for FIFA, which had sanctioned the competition. The date, the kickoff time, the location – all were in doubt. The websites for the Kuwaiti and Jordanian teams provided conflicting information. Gambling websites did as well. Some sources even listed the match as having been canceled. That’s what it looked like to the two FIFA men as they passed through the wide-open stadium gates. Nobody was selling tickets. The stands were empty. The FIFA investigators took seats in the grandstand, and they noticed that there were no TV cameras or production vehicles present. The match had not been advertised in the local press. In an age of constant coverage and information, it felt like this game was going to take place only in the imagination.
Eventually, the players filtered into the stadium, as did a few fans. Several men milled about on the edge of the playing field, and the FIFA operatives took particular notice of them. They recognized the men, one from an Emirati promotional company, another from a similar firm in Egypt. They had helped arrange the match, though they were ultimately incidental to FIFA’s investigation. Instead, FIFA was interested in the architects of this fix, a notorious group from Singapore, which operated unchecked in dozens of countries across the world. The FIFA investigators noticed two known Singaporean fixers enter the stadium and take seats in the VIP stands. The match was set to begin.
The Sharjah fix had originated in the mind of the most prolific match-fixer in the world, a man of mysterious movements who had manipulated hundreds of matches in more than sixty countries, making untold sums for the syndicate in Asia. But the syndicate had betrayed him. Police had discovered details of the Sharjah fix sketched on a piece of paper lying on his hotel room bed in a Finnish town along the Arctic Circle.
This information had led FIFA’s investigators to Sharjah. They planned, at halftime, to barge in unannounced to the locker rooms of the players and officials, threatening suspension – or prosecution – unless the second half was contested honestly. But although the two FIFA men had attempted to contact officials from the UAE Football Association, their calls and emails had gone unreturned. For now they were relegated to the stands, without the proper credential to visit other areas of the stadium. They speculated that some of the UAE football officials may have knowledge of the upcoming fix. Plenty of national football federations around the world had gone into the lucrative business of fixing with the Singapore syndicate itself.
The purpose of match-fixing was betting fraud. Fixers compromised players, directing them to allow the other team to score. Fixers bribed referees to hand out red cards and penalty kicks, thus influencing the outcomes of matches. The syndicate placed bets based on the timing of these planned events. The fixers defrauded both the bookmaker, who was always one step behind them, and the fan, who believed that what he was watching was real. There was also the player, often coerced into participating. When play began between Kuwait and Jordan, activity on the international betting market revealed that the fix was in.
At some point in the 1990s, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of FIFA, began characterizing the numerous football players and administrators around the world, collectively, in his public comments, as the “football family.” FIFA, headquartered in Zurich, is the organization that is responsible for staging the World Cup every four years. Among the patchwork of federations and confederations that control and administer football, FIFA carries the most weight. It is the organization that most football people petition in order to solve a dispute, or to dispense a handout. But FIFA is hardly the guardian of goodwill that Blatter’s benevolent terminology suggests. FIFA is registered in Switzerland as a charity, yet it does not operate as a traditional nonprofit organization, with its income of $1 billion per year and its multifarious corporate sponsorship deals and TV contracts. Nor does FIFA behave like a modern business, with standard corporate checks and balances. Instead, it resides somewhere in the imprecise middle, and for some of its top executives this has been just fine, ambiguity being the facilitator of exploitation.
In the last decade, the imprecise way that global football is administered has exposed it to crisis. Match-fixing has overtaken the sport. It is not the fault of FIFA that international organized crime has targeted football. But considering the criminal nature of match-fixing, Blatter’s words have assumed a new meaning. This is football’s modern “family”:
Operation Last Bet rocked the Italian Football Federation, as fifteen clubs and twenty-four players, coaches, refs, and officials were implicated in match-fixing. Turkish police arrested nearly one hundred players, while the Turkish Football Federation excluded its club, Fenerbahce, from the UEFA Champions League, questioning how the team managed to win eighteen of its last nineteen games to take the domestic title. The Zimbabwe Football Association banned eighty players from its national team selection based on suspicion of match-fixing. Lu Jun, the first Chinese official to referee a World Cup game, was jailed for five and a half years for taking bribes totaling $128,000, enhancing the meaning of his nickname, the “golden whistle.”
In South Korea, prosecutors charged fifty-seven people with match-fixing; two players subsequently committed suicide, rather than face the shame. Two Brazilian refs were handed prison terms and the Brazilian Football Confederation was fined $8 million for their roles in a series of fixes. As soon as eight Estonians received a one-year ban, a court charged another dozen with fixing. German police recorded Croatian criminals discussing by phone their plans to fix games in Canada. The disgraced head of the Chinese Football Association is currently serving time in a penal colony for match-fixing. Hungarian police arrested more than fifty people for fixing, though before they could apprehend the director of a club under scrutiny, he jumped to his death. The Czechs are prosecuting two referees for fixing.
Macedonia is so corrupt that few bookies will take a bet on a game in its domestic league. The executives at a Bulgarian club, Lokomotiv Plovdiv, ordered their players and coaches to take a lie detector test after a loss. Georgian players, team owners, and bookies are behind bars for match-fixing. In Malaysia, a few dozen players are currently in custody. Kenyan, Lebanese, and Tanzanian refs have worked fixes. Polish authorities have prosecuted a dozen players for fixing. The Russian government has established a committee to eradicate match-fixing from its leagues. The prime minister of Belize ordered a match-fixing probe into the country’s football association.
Chinese and Italian organized crime have targeted the Belgian league for years. Bosnia’s league is targeted by Bosnia’s criminals. Switzerland banned nine players for fixing. Italian prosecutors pinned fixing charges on Gennaro “Rino” Gattuso, a popular, World Cup-winning midfielder and former star for AC Milan. Gattuso said he was prepared “to go into the town square and kill myself in front of everyone if I should be found guilty of such a crime.” Two scandals rocked English football this past fall, one involving Singaporean fixers, the other a former Premier League player. Germany is prosecuting the most famous fixing case of all, in Bochum, which has revealed that a network of criminal match-fixers has been manipulating football in every corner of the world for the better part of the last decade.
Could the state of affairs be this bad? Unequivocally, yes. Today, there are active police investigations into match-fixing in more than sixty countries, which is about one-third of the world. Half of the national and regional associations affiliated with FIFA have reported incidents of fixing. One can only imagine the amount of fixes that have transpired with only the perpetrators in the know. The fixing of international football matches has become as epidemic as drug trafficking, prostitution, and the trade in illegal weapons. This is happening in a sport where the players walk from the locker room to the field hand in hand with small children, as though football were a refuge of innocence and moral purity. Overwhelming evidence presents a contradictory argument: the most popular game in the world is the most corrupt game in the world.
Gambling is to blame. The market in sports betting has ballooned in the last decade, its illegal portion rivaling long-established criminal enterprises. Interpol claims that $1 trillion is bet on football games per year. Asian bookies suggest a much higher figure. The football industry itself – the TV contracts and sponsorship deals that comprise the business of the game – is estimated at an annual value of just $25 billion.
Unpoliced, driven by easy profits, match-fixing has grown out of control. Superior clubs lie down for inferior clubs that are trying to avoid relegation to a lower division of competition. Coaches, players, refs, and government officials collude for the fix. International qualifiers result in outrageous scores: 11–1, 7–0. The opportunity for easy profits drove early, creative attempts to manipulate results. On November 3, 1997, in an English Premier League match against Crystal Palace, West Ham scored to tie the game at two all in the sixty-fifth minute. Abruptly, the stadium lights went out. The same thing happened when Wimbledon played Arsenal a month later. A Chinese-Malaysian gang had paid the technicians at the stadia to cut the power when the game had reached the desired score. Enveloping greed has caused the players themselves to take severe measures to enforce the fix. In a 2010 Italian match, a goalkeeper allegedly drugged his own teammates at halftime so that opponents could easily outrun them.
The players are inconsequential. They are tools of the syndicate bosses who operate in the shadows. For the established criminals, international football has been a free zone of activity, a territory of endless opportunities for manipulation. Each of the nearly two hundred countries that FIFA recognizes has a professional league and a national team, which is classified into several age groups. The total worldwide number of national and professional football teams exceeds ten thousand. Multiply this figure by the number of players per team, then add referees, club officials, and federation administrators, and the entry points for a match-fixer are voluminous and as ever changing as a club roster from season to season. There is no centralized control, no disciplinary commissioner. International football is a loosely administered network of different languages and customs and laws and economies and currencies that connects the world, yet barely hangs together. This variance gives the game its special charm. It also allows dark motivations to flourish. Criminal fixing syndicates have infiltrated the game of football so fundamentally, manipulating the betting market to their advantage, that they have called into question the outcome of every match in the world.
The opening moments of the Kuwait-Jordan match elapsed at a brisk pace. There were several heavy tackles. A man sitting behind the FIFA investigators laughed, remarking that people from Kuwait and Jordan disliked each other. The referee made a questionable penalty call in the game’s twenty-third minute, when the ball ricocheted off the hand of an unwitting Jordanian player. Kuwait converted. The FIFA operatives looked at the Singaporean fixers in the crowd, but their body language revealed nothing. It didn’t have to. The evidence was in the numbers.
There are several ways to fix a match. One of the most popular is to wager on the total number of goals scored. If a bookie lists the over-under at 2.5, and a fixer bets on the over, he will direct his compromised players or referee to make certain that three goals or more are scored in the game. If he bets on the under, then he will order two or fewer goals.
The fixing syndicate operated on the in-game gambling market, which allowed for betting as a match progressed. At the opening of the Sharjah match, 188Bet, one of the largest bookmakers in the world, began taking a preponderance of bets that supported three goals or more. The 188Bet odds for three or more goals started at 2.00, or a 50 percent probability. At the match’s eighteenth minute, the match still scoreless, the odds for three or more goals decreased to 1.88, or a 53 percent chance. These figures revealed a telling detail. At the beginning of the match, with ninety minutes in which to score three goals, 188Bet calculated the chance of three or more goals at 50 percent. Paradoxically, after eighteen minutes had elapsed, the chance of three or more goals was now greater, even though there was less time – only 80 percent of the match remained – in which to score them.
The bookies at 188Bet had not determined that an outcome of three or more goals was now more likely. What they had done was moved the odds in reaction to the overwhelming wagers they were receiving on three or more goals. It is the bookmaker’s goal to level his book, taking equivalent action on either side of a proposition in order to reduce his exposure and profit from his margin. And a bookie knows that his exposure is highest when he is taking a large amount of action on an illogical proposition. He knows that the match is fixed, as the bookies at 188Bet are likely to have understood as they re-calculated in-game odds for the Sharjah match following the bets placed.
As the game neared halftime, only one goal had been scored. In the thirty-eighth minute, the referee called another penalty. This one appeared legitimate, as a Kuwaiti defender tackled a Jordanian forward in the box. The goalkeeper for Kuwait saved the ensuing kick. However, the linesman flagged him for early movement. Jordan scored on the retake. At the half, the match was tied at one all. With forty-five minutes to play, all the syndicate needed to win its bets was one more goal. Easy. But then something happened.
In the grandstand, the FIFA investigators contemplated attempting to bluff their way into the locker rooms to confront the referee and players. As they did so, they watched the man from the Emirati promotional company climb the stairs of the VIP stands. He spoke with the Singaporean fixers. As FIFA suspected, the match referee had received a tip that the match was under observation. The players returned to the field for the second half, and the Singaporeans left the stadium. Midway through the second half, the score was still 1–1.
Suddenly, in the seventy-first minute, the betting action reversed. There was no longer heavy action at 188Bet for more than three goals, although there were nineteen minutes remaining in which to score for the third time. Warned that FIFA investigators were present in the stadium, the syndicate had pulled the fix, pulled its bets. The match finished in a 1–1 draw.
From the chatter that FIFA’s security team subsequently collected in Singapore, syndicate members were confused, wondering who had leaked word of the Sharjah operation. The syndicate had lost roughly $500,000 on the Sharjah match, according to FIFA intelligence. Considering the size of the football betting market, this wasn’t a considerable number. However, the event in Sharjah was significant. No one had ever fought the syndicate before. Sure, there had been traditional prosecutions, investigations conducted after the crime had been committed and the profits earned. But never before had FIFA conducted a counter-fixing operation in real time. Asian fixers and their European partners had operated freely for a decade. Everything was about to change.
CHAPTER 2 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
SINGAPORE, 1983
The best football players are poor. Wilson Raj Perumal came to this understanding decades ago, sitting in the grandstand of Singapore’s Jalan Besar Stadium. It was the mid-1980s, and the old grounds, near the city-state’s Little India neighborhood, were hosting a domestic league match. Perumal had no rooting interest. For him, it would always be about the odds, the line, the payout.
During the World War II occupation of Singapore, Japanese authorities set up camp at Jalan Besar, where they culled the Chinese from the population, marking them for summary execution. Now, to Perumal, it was the Chinese who stood out most of all. Sipping tea, betting on matches (contrary to local statutes), they orchestrated the action that worked Perumal’s mind toward opportunity.
Perumal had plenty of friends who played organized football. He understood the game. What he didn’t understand was how these old men had been taking his money for the past half year. Perumal had started betting for fun. It was something to do with his friends from school. He didn’t comprehend what was known as hang cheng betting, which was determined not by which team won the game, but by an agreed-upon value of one’s bet. The line dictated the score by which one team had to win, and the odds corresponded to the likelihood of that event coming to pass, establishing the amount of a winning bet. Once he learned this, Perumal easily recognized the pattern of his losses. Each time Perumal placed a bet, the Chinese men changed the odds and the line to suit themselves. They had been manipulating the market depending on which team Perumal chose, which bet he wanted to place. They had been rigging the action all along. Determined on winning back the money he had lost, and more besides, Perumal got an idea.
Theft was the first charge the cops hung on Perumal, for stealing a pair of football cleats. This was in 1983. Eighteen years old, Perumal lived with his family in Choa Chu Kang, a farming area in Singapore’s northwest. His parents traced their roots to Chennai, the capital city of India’s heavily populated Tamil Nadu state, a wellspring of cheap labor to Asia and the Middle East. They were part of a long line of convicts and unskilled workers who had made their way from India to Singapore during the century leading up to World War II, when the two territories existed under British colonial governance. Perumal’s father, a simple laborer who painted street curbs and laid cable, was a black belt in judo. Perumal never took to such discipline. Instead, the lasting impression that his father gave him was how difficult it was to feed five children on honest industry. “Some days we had to make it on one meal,” Perumal says. He was the middle child, the one who gets lost in the shuffle, the one who finds other ways to survive. He attended Teck Whye, the local school where he ran the 800 meters and paid passing attention to his studies, more interested in the dubious extracurricular activities that awaited him after school.
Perumal and the Singaporean state were born the same year, 1965, though their characters instantly diverged. Upon exiting the British realm, Singapore’s leaders placed the country on a path of economic vigor. Shipping, manufacturing, and industrialization transformed Singapore into one of the four Asian Tigers, a center of international business and finance. Underlying this growth was Singapore’s commitment to discipline, its blunt approach to crime. Unlike many of its neighbors, stricken with the chaos of liberalism or the stagnation of autocracy, the Singaporean city-state struck a balance: tough on crime, friendly to business. Singapore became a place where the sinner was punished disproportionately to his sin, so that the innocent could prosper likewise beyond proportion.
Wilson Perumal belonged to the third-largest ethnic group in Singapore. There was no such thing as a Singaporean. There was Chinese, Malay, Sinhalese, Filipino, Thai, each with a different language, each adopting English as default dialect, each keeping secrets in their particular tongues. Singapore was a place of secondary identities, a place of no insiders. Perumal skimmed from one social set to another, between ethnic groups, learning to conceal his motivation in order to persuade and gain advantage. He could have made an effective salesman if he hadn’t gravitated to kids who likewise couldn’t conceive of their futures, just what they could get their hands on right now. Perumal tried his hand at petty crime. With a few friends, he stole a VCR from the Teck Whye School. They sold it, pulling in five hundred Singapore dollars. They took a cab downtown, saw a few movies, blew the money on popcorn and beer, incautious about what they had done.
Later, a member of his crew stole a pair of football cleats, and this led to the group’s undoing. Confronted by the authorities, the friend told the whole story, about the shoes, the VCR, and other thefts, implicating Perumal in so doing. The next day, a headline in the local paper read: “Asian School Athlete Charged with House Breaking.” It was the sort of teenage troublemaking that often scares an adolescent onto the right path in life. In Perumal, the episode simply provided his first publicity. There would be much more.
Perumal was now acquainted with criminality, yet this was hardly the most serious offense in Singapore. The country had become a disciplined, transparent economic model for the world, yet illegal betting remained the most tolerated crime there was, a clandestine element of the culture. There was little the strict government could do about it. Everyone gambled. Just as Perumal did, at Jalan Besar Stadium.
When Perumal realized that the Chinese men had taken advantage of him, he turned his attention to the players who sprinted and struggled in the clinging Singapore humidity, less than one hundred miles north of the equator. Perumal knew what that was like, to work hard for little reward, growing up with nothing in your pockets, with few prospects to fill them, your restless energy leading in self-destructive directions. Perumal understood the point of developing a singular focus on something that might carry you out of poverty. Along the way toward on-field glory, he thought, what was wrong with making a little something on the side?
He related this reasoning to several of his friends who played football. Everyone saw eye to eye, common understanding being the essential element of manipulation. He purchased two sets of football jerseys. One red, one white. He rented a local stadium, paying a hundred dollars to monopolize the field for two hours. He listed the match in the local papers. He bought a pair of shorts, a polo shirt, and socks and shoes – all black – draping them on a friend. “You’re the referee,” Perumal told him.
When the Chinese bettors from Jalan Besar Stadium, always looking for action, read about the match in the newspaper, they showed up at the appropriate time and location. When the red team went up 2–0 at halftime, the old Chinese men were all too happy to bet on red to win the match, handing their markers to Perumal and smiling to themselves at the kid who didn’t understand hang cheng. When the white team had scored its third goal of the second half, the old Chinese men weren’t laughing anymore. They knew that the kid who was learning the ropes had just roped them into a scam.
Perumal had found his calling: easy money. His first fixed match was so successful that he carried it out in stadiums throughout Singapore. The losing bettors didn’t complain, even though they sensed something tricky about these wagers and these games. They couldn’t go to the cops. They couldn’t grouse and lose face. All they could do was pay Wilson Perumal what they owed him.
Perumal pursued this scheme into his twenties, and he developed a taste for things that he could never have before. It was the first time he had any money. Running through pool halls and chasing girls with his friends until the sun came up, he bet his earnings on matches in Europe’s biggest football leagues, the matches that were just starting to be televised in Singapore. As he watched the games, in that charged, early-morning condition of fatigue, youth, and stimulation, Perumal conceived of something bigger.
CHAPTER 3 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
With a mustache that runs long and tall and out of date, Chris Eaton calls to mind a frontier sheriff, the one man willing to establish justice on the range, where the sun catches his tin star, confirming the higher calling of order. “I quite would have liked that,” Eaton says. “There are a lot of people that need shooting on the edge of the corral.”
Eaton comes at you with the inevitable momentum of an arrest. However, his Australian informality requires you to remind yourself that he is an upholder of the law. Sixty-two years old, Eaton has the energy of a thirty-year-old. He has fathered six children, the youngest now just two years of age, confirming that he’s not slowing down. “Life is for living,” Eaton is fond of saying. “Not for rule-making.” His firm moral foundation, however, is a touchstone shallowly concealed, a lager in hand all that’s necessary to lead him sometimes to soliloquy.
The speech he gives these days invariably instructs the ill-informed, the morally lax, and the financially curious about the inner evils and workings of match-fixing. In European conference halls and Asian banquet rooms and the New York bar or two, Eaton arrives as featured speaker, the face and voice of the fight against “the manipulation of sporting events for the purpose of illegal betting.” He is an official carved perfectly to combat fixing. Eaton is dogged, antipolitical, rule-bound, perceptive of people, and not afraid of an audience, which he doesn’t coddle. “Chris talks to powerful people like they’ve never been spoken to,” says one of his lieutenants.
When Eaton leaves these powerful people – elected officials, police superintendents, administrators in the sporting world – they often shake their heads in derision. Match-fixing could never happen to us. Invariably, months or maybe a year or two later, when enough time has passed for Eaton to fade from their thoughts, suddenly he returns. What he predicted has come to pass. And he is the only one to call for help, because no one else knows what to do. This has happened so often as to defy coincidence. The billions of dollars available in the manipulation of football matches are too tempting for organized crime to ignore, and match-fixing creeps into every local market. Eaton spreads his gospel and combats his criminal opponents, his monthly itinerary a checkerboard of takeoffs and landings from one continent to another. A lifelong policeman, he has become football’s redeemer, the one man with the will and the strategy to scuttle match-fixing and restore the integrity of the game.
Eaton never wanted to be a cop. In his view, the police force was a destination of lowly ambition. In 1960s Australia, it was. Policing employed muscle, rather than cunning. It reflected not only the predominate domestic view, that the law cast no shades of gray, but also the country’s sporting culture. Australian rules football was the sport of choice, a game that developed a man’s ability to wear down his opponent in barely legislated brutality. Football, the thinking man’s game, a sport of deft artistry, was the province of European émigrés, awkward souls stranded Down Under who gathered now and again on the patchy turf of neglected fields, communicating in this foreign language of strategy.
It was Eaton’s older brother, Ian, the firstborn of the family, who wanted to wear blue. At eighteen years old, he was the right size, six foot two and 200 pounds, big and rangy enough to succeed with aggression in the Victoria Police, but he failed the police exam.
Life’s path navigated away from Ian’s control, while Chris was certain that he would draw his own. The family spent its Christmas vacations at Mornington, outside Melbourne, bunking together in a mobile home, where Chris would break out pencil and paper. He had inherited a talent for sketching from his father, an architect, who encouraged him toward the profession. But Chris was interested in the human form. While he sketched the outlines of a face or a torso, he felt a person take shape in his understanding – how a well-placed stroke could manipulate them to one position or another. He thought that he would attend art college in Melbourne.
Ian’s path carried him to the army, though it always meandered back to Mornington every summery December. Ian would pack into a car with two of his friends, headed for nearby Cape Schanck, where the nineteenth-century lighthouse brought in the tourists, while the girls in bikinis attracted their own local attention. One clear afternoon, the boys wandered along the cliffs that overlooked the beach, the waves elapsing along the rocks, and the sandy pathway crumbled underfoot. Ian fell the full seventy feet to the rocks, causing the brain hemorrhage that killed him.
Sixteen-year-old Chris watched his mother sink into depression. Regret consumed his father, a career man who had known his oldest son only passingly. Chris’s younger brother, Anthony, was neglected. Chris put away his pencils and drawings, and he abandoned school in favor of the police academy. This would be his way of memorializing Ian. He didn’t see himself as a cop, but by sacrificing himself so that his family might emotionally recover, he displayed the character of the ideal policeman – shielding the victims, even if he didn’t realize, in his youth, that he was a victim, too.
At Melbourne’s St. Kilda precinct, Eaton looked the part physically, like his brother big enough to handle himself. But the difference in temperament between his colleagues and himself was so striking that Eaton was certain he was in the wrong profession. By the 1970s, St. Kilda’s nineteenth-century seaside mansions had been sectioned into apartments for low-income families, and the neighborhood became a dim environment of drugs, violence, and prostitution. Crime was such a part of life in St. Kilda that police could apply no lasting solution to it. They could only identify “natural criminals,” night-sticking them into temporary submission. “We were really the thin blue line in those days,” Eaton says. “I learned quickly that policing was there to repress the troublesome in society from those who didn’t want to be troubled by them.”
This was no element for the righteous or the philosophical, or even the merciful. One afternoon, police detained an offender, who arrived at the St. Kilda precinct. The man had groped a girl on the beach, but by law Eaton had to let him free. There was not enough evidence. Eaton later learned that the man had gone on to rape and murder. And so while the roughhouse nature of St. Kilda policing offended Eaton’s cerebral disposition, experience broadened his view. “By taking no action, you exude weakness,” he says. “Criminals only respect authority. And authority doesn’t come from the uniform. It comes from a style.”
In a place beholden to gangs, the police were St. Kilda’s biggest gang of all. As Eaton looked through the bars of the precinct’s back window and out onto Port Phillip Bay, he realized that he hadn’t signed up to be part of a posse. Each night, he felt for a solution, as he transited from the charged environment of the St. Kilda streets to his wife, Debbie, back home.
Debbie was the slim, brown-haired girl next door, laughing and animated. She was also sixteen, and the two married in a shotgun wedding in 1972 when Chris was nineteen and a rookie in the Victoria police force. They named their son Ian. A daughter, Sarah, came along in 1976.
As if compensating for the education that he had relinquished, Eaton became a reader of great hunger and interest. In the pages of the books that he read in his young family’s two-bedroom apartment, he encountered mention of an organization that might serve as a model for his own. It was the FBI’s cerebral approach to crime prevention that agreed with the ideas Eaton was rapidly developing. He admired the work of J. Edgar Hoover, if not the man himself, and Hoover’s vigorous application of the law to the influential, whereas police had before applied it only to the impoverished. In Australia, Eaton saw a mirror image. “The people who were committing the big crime in Melbourne, the people with money, the people who were committing enormous frauds on society, police didn’t even pay a note’s attention to them,” he says. Eaton understood that the crime that was visible on the streets of St. Kilda was the result of greater forces, grand manipulators hidden from view. He realized that it wasn’t enough to cultivate authority, but to apply it to effect.
Eaton wrote about his progressive ideals in the police journals. This gained him notice and promotion into the Australian federal police, working in Canberra, the Australian capital. Not yet thirty years old, Eaton had achieved all of the things that his brother Ian had hoped he would in a lifetime.
He was enjoying a cool respite in 1981 as he steered his Ford Fairmont north along the M31 highway, on his way home from Melbourne, where he had just served as best man at the wedding of his brother Anthony. The kids were asleep in the backseat. Debbie was slouched against a pillow in the passenger seat, her eyes closed. The fog in the air wisped in spirals around the rushing frame of the Fairmont coupe. It wasn’t a long trip from Melbourne to Canberra – five hours if you drove like you meant it – and Eaton was taking it slow. There was no rush. He steered along the highway’s winding curve, enjoying the way that felt, to be in control. Headlights roused him from his thoughts.
CHAPTER 4 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
KUALA LUMPUR, 1990
Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.
As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.
The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn’t be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn’t tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.
The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.
Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren’t clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn’t control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn’t need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.
Perumal’s profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn’t back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you’re bound to lose big, especially when you’re not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn’t know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn’t confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.
They said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn’t mind letting people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful people in Malaysia.
Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy’s enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss’s place near Yishun Park, in Singapore’s Sembawang district. It didn’t take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.
Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.
Perumal wasn’t sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-Singaporean horse-racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn’t cover a large football bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore’s bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.
Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy’s fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy’s side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.
Perumal watched and learned how fixing was done at the highest level. How to approach a player in false friendship. The way to pay him far greater than the competition, in order to poach him. How to use women to trap players. How to develop a player, then pull strings to get him transferred to a club under your control. How to threaten someone else in the player’s presence, so that he would get the message without feeling in danger himself. How to take a player shopping, buy him some clothes, some shoes, make him feel special, as you would do for your girlfriend. How to follow through on a threat if a player resisted your demands.
Perumal also saw that even a figure as important as Kurusamy still had to bow to the Chinese in gambling circles. The Chinese ultimately held every big ticket. Not only did China have the largest mass of people the world, as well as a rising economy, but it also had the strongest organized crime network in Asia, the Triads. All down the line in the bookmaking business, Chinese controlled everything of worth and importance.
Kurusamy was undeniable, but he was not the only one. Perumal watched teams staying in the same hotel get friendly with one another. Club officials had drinks together in the lounge. One team needed a win to advance in the tournament. The other team had already gained the next round. Money exchanged hands. Or sometimes just the promise of a return favor. It was easy. No victims. It was just the way things were done in Asian football. To Perumal, it appeared that everybody was in on the fix, and that nobody was trying to stop it.
He watched players inexplicably miss the net on penalty kicks, and he knew why. The talk was in the market, and if you listened to the talk, you could make some real money. But the money was fleeting. It came and went. Whatever he made fixing, he ended up betting on English Premier League matches, on UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League matches. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost, because he never knew how those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.
In his own fixes, Perumal was learning the valuable lessons of experience. He learned that the fix was not always easy to complete. Players were unreliable. They wouldn’t follow directions. They would score when they were supposed to concede. They were sometimes hungover, or they just didn’t care. Perumal would watch as the clock wound down on a match, and all he needed was his chosen team to let in one more goal, but sometimes it just wouldn’t come. He would harangue the players, but it was clear that even though he paid them money, they didn’t feel like they owed him anything. To them, he was just a small-time criminal. He couldn’t control them. He was missing something.
Perumal would escape it all at Orchard Towers, Singapore’s “Four Floors of Whores,” a shopping complex that turned into a sprawling boudoir in the evening. Here there was business to be done. Perumal mingled with football players there, many of them foreign players, the high-priced imports with the disposable income that Perumal was trying to secure for himself. As the European players tossed money around and as the girls laughed and wanted in on the action, Perumal sauntered into their circle. He approached one of the players, this time with a new strategy.
Perumal approached a foreign player he recognised from watching league matches in Singapore. And from what Perumal could surmise, the player was disinterested. At times, he was the strongest player on the field. At other times, it was hard to pick him out of the lazy back-and-forth of the play. As they spoke over the music at Orchard Towers, Perumal asked him to win.
Perumal had been fixing single games by compromising the defenders and goalkeeper, compelling them to allow the opposing team to score. Now he saw how the fix could work in another way, with a foreign player who was slumming, on the downside of his career, stuck in an Asian lower league for the nightclubs, the easy money, the women, not the glory that he had once imagined, but which had long faded from his aspirations. In those nights at the Orchard Towers, Perumal realized that the players were just like he was, living without a thought for tomorrow, concerned with money only to spend it. Perumal and the player locked eyes in agreement over the flashing lights of the action.
Perumal instructed him to jog along with the rest of the players throughout a game, until that moment when he needed a goal. Perumal would then shout from the stands, like an impassioned fan. That was the signal, and the player would exert himself. In the first game under this arrangement he scored four goals. He easily controlled the intensity with which he played, especially since he was superior to the competition he faced. The partnership thrived. Things went well, so successfully and profitably that the player started suggesting fixes. Perumal realized that he was not the only one getting addicted to easy money.
Perumal was liquid again, and he rejoined Kurusamy’s poker game. He wasn’t consistently winning at Pal’s table, but he was bragging plenty. The Boss listened closely to what Perumal said, even if he didn’t let on. And soon his player had slipped through Perumal’s fingers, going to work for Kurusamy. Perumal was left with nothing besides a costly lesson in the fix. Players had fleeting loyalty. Fixing partners had none at all. Years later, such realities would upend the high life that Perumal had constructed for himself.
There was another lesson that was more valuable, though Perumal was not ready to learn it. Since Kurusamy had many influential people on his payroll in Malaysia and Singapore, he felt comfortable enough to boast. He had spent ten years in prison, starting in the 1980s, and through that despair had attained wealth and criminal authority. But he became too public. The king of this “victimless” crime hadn’t figured on the pride of the victim. Kurusamy wasn’t concerned about defrauding bettors or preying on the morality of the players on the field. But he would have profited by understanding that he was lampooning the state. In 1994, Singapore’s Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), the terror of local criminals, initiated a match-fixing crackdown. Kurusamy was arrested.
He wasn’t the only one. In September 1994, a Singaporean tournament called the Constituency Cup was coming up, and Perumal phoned a player, proposing a fix in the competition, offering $3,000. In light of the CPIB crackdown, the player reported the approach to police. The authorities researched the phone record. They traced the call to Perumal’s residence, and in short order, Perumal had a new residence: prison. But in time, he would soon go further afield than he had ever imagined.
Bail was Singapore’s beautiful game, as Perumal and Kurusamy quickly gained their liberty while awaiting sentencing. But their business was shackled by the CPIB. Fixing was too hot in Singapore and Malaysia. The cash had ceased flowing. Kurusamy needed to find another way.
Kurusamy had no other way, no other place. He was uneducated. He spoke only passable English. He was not a man of the world. His world was the Malay Peninsula, with its government and police officials whom the Boss knew by name and shared history. Now this world was off-limits to him. Kurusamy developed an idea. Like the many goods that flowed out of the Singapore port, one of the busiest in the world, export was the key to financial mobility. The Boss summoned Perumal. “Go to Europe,” he told him.
Perumal traveled on the passport of a friend, easily slipping off the island, breaking the bounds of his bail agreement. He traveled with a partner. The two flew to the United Kingdom, the center of world football, where the inhospitable weather surprised them. They weren’t in Asia anymore, and they realized that they had wandered into the deep end of the pool. Back home, they had been suave operators. England neutralized any special powers they thought they possessed. They didn’t know any players. They didn’t know any cops or politicians. Wandering nearly without aim, they found their way to the training grounds of Birmingham, and of Chelsea, the latter one of the biggest clubs in the game. Like rank amateurs, Perumal and his partner posed as journalists.
This was the land of Ladbrokes and William Hill, a sophisticated, legal gambling market that provided the Englishman with a betting slip to heighten his interest in a match. But this had nothing on the Asian marketplace. Betting in Asia was not for fun, or even for watching a game. It was serious business, the business of cultural addiction, and it was about to grow exponentially, making the English market look like a child’s hobby. The Singaporean, Indonesian, and Chinese had no favorite teams, just favorite bets, those that appeared winnable. These billions of people drawn together in identical behavior constituted an enormous market. Ladbrokes and the other regulated bookmakers had the name, the veneer of English respectability. But as Perumal realised, the market and the power were Asian. But few people knew this. Not yet.
When Perumal approached players in Great Britain, they turned their backs on him, walked right past him, looked right through him. When he did happen to get close enough to players to make his proposal – £60,000 to enhance a match – players laughed at him, then reported him. Word got around, and soon coaches and administrators were running Perumal and his partner off their grounds. Most insulting of all: no one ever called the cops. They didn’t take Perumal seriously.
Back in Singapore, Kurusamy was furious with Perumal’s lack of results, though there was not much he could do. His trial was approaching. Perumal himself stood trial in January 1995. The court convicted him for match-fixing and leaving the country on a false passport. He was sentenced to one year in prison.
When Perumal received parole, eight months later, little had changed. Match-fixing was still too hot in Singapore. The country’s international reputation was at stake. How could Singapore be known for best business practices when its most public events constituted a fraud? The CPIB set out to eradicate fixing in Singapore. The Boss still had to make his money. The United Kingdom had proven impenetrable, for now. But there was another market, and it was even bigger.
Kurusamy arrived in the United States flush with cash, connecting in New York for a flight to Atlanta. Perumal joined him, as did several others from a gathering Asian syndicate. The opportunity before them was worth a concentrated effort.
In Atlanta, they blended in with all the other tourists who were there for the 1996 Olympics. They hung around the hotels, the stadiums, and practice fields where they might encounter players for the sixteen national teams included in the football tournament. Olympic football was a jerry-rigged competition that FIFA tolerated, so long as it wouldn’t infringe on the popularity of the World Cup. After limitations on players’ ages and levels of experience diluted the rosters, the result was a marginalized round-robin that hardly did justice to an Olympic competition of the world’s most popular game.
All the same, the betting on the Olympics football tournament would be worth the effort that Kurusamy and Perumal put into manipulating it. Five different cities in the eastern United States hosted the Olympics football competition. Kurusamy and Perumal traveled to one of the venues – Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. There, according to Perumal, they approached Mexico’s goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, one of the most well-known players in the international game. The Singaporeans attempted to corrupt Campos, but he turned them down.
A partner of Kurusamy, a middle-aged man whom Perumal knew only as “Uncle,” had made contact with players from another national team before the games started. He claimed to have struck a deal with the team’s defenders and goalie. Perumal couldn’t be sure, but it appeared to him on seeing their results that Uncle wasn’t exaggerating his influence over the team.
It was Perumal’s first taste of success while abroad. He saw how it might be done, how you could approach national team players, how willing they were likely to be. And when he returned to Singapore, Perumal wished he had simply stayed in America.
Singaporean police had issued another warrant for his arrest. He spent the night in lockup at the CPIB holding pen. The following day, as officers escorted him to a car on the police grounds, Perumal slipped one of his handcuffs and ran for it. He tried to scale a fence, but it was too high, and the officers dragged him back to the ground. At court, a judge sent him down for two years – plus extra time for attempting to escape custody. Police also picked up Kurusamy. The Boss ended up spending two years in solitary confinement.
When Perumal was released, in 2000, while those around him were excited about the prospects of the new millennium, his hopes were dim. He was thirty-five years old, a convicted felon with no professional skills, no references, and no viable financial prospects. There was only one thing he had ever known how to do. And his time in prison, where he shared a small cell with a dozen men, where a small bowl served as his toilet and his drinking cup, this period had not caused him to develop his talents.
When Perumal consulted the schedule and noticed that a match between two S. League teams was a few days off, he got an idea. There was still too much heat on fixing. Perumal didn’t trust the players. They were liable to turn him in, notifying the CPIB to save themselves. But there were other ways to influence the outcome of a match.
The strongest player for the Woodlands Wellington club was a Croatian import, a midfielder named Ivica Raguz. Perumal had watched enough Wellington matches to understand that the team’s chances were largely dependent on Raguz’s performance. If Raguz happened to miss a game, and if Perumal happened to possess this knowledge before a bookmaker knew that Raguz was going to sit it out, Perumal stood to gain. Perumal had always considered match-fixing a victimless crime. The only people who got burned were the bookies, and they were dealing in such high volume that, Perumal rationalized, his manner of fraud made little impact. Perumal had developed a philosophy by which he was the patron of football’s lost souls, the financial champion of players whom the establishment paid less than a living wage. Perumal was the one who augmented their salaries, made their lives possible. Financial desperation may have altered his character. Maybe it was prison. Or maybe the elaborate stories that he was telling himself and others were the convoluted justifications of someone who would indeed do anything to beat the system.
Perumal hired two Bangladeshi men to assault Ivica Raguz before Wellington’s next match, against Geylang United. Perumal and a friend placed a bet, 30,000 Singapore dollars, on Wellington’s opponent to win. Then they sat back and waited to hear from the Bangladeshis. But the call from the Bangladeshis, confirming that they had incapacitated Raguz, never came. Raguz was a large, heavily muscled man, and when the Bangladeshis saw him in person, they froze. They decided this job wasn’t for them. But the bet had already been placed. Perumal had to do something. He had to do the job himself. With money on the line, and a crude sort of match-fixing proposed, Perumal proved his industry.
He lay in wait in a stand of bushes near the Lower Seletar Reservoir, in northern Singapore, where Wellington’s practice field was located. Perumal held a field hockey stick in his hand. He waited for some time before Raguz appeared. When Raguz did materialize, a teammate was by his side. This was Perumal’s chance to abandon his plan. He hadn’t yet crossed over from fraud to felony assault. His victims showed no visible bruises. He hadn’t threatened anyone’s health or livelihood. But desperation outweighed all concerns. Perumal didn’t want to miss the chance. He stepped out of the bushes, approaching the men from behind. He swung his field hockey stick, striking Raguz on the knee with the dull, hard wood. Raguz and his teammate managed to escape, but the damage was done. Raguz didn’t play against Geylang United, and the bet came off.
Perumal had little time to enjoy his winnings. A few days after the match, police arrested him on assault charges. He spent another year in prison.
When he was released, in September 2001, Perumal kept to himself. He felt like a pariah. He kept away from the few friends who continued to associate with him. Fixing was off-limits, even if he had wanted to revive his connections in that world. But he had to earn a living somehow. Regular work was not an option for Perumal. He had never held a traditional job. With his criminal record, he would not have been able to find honest work that equaled his conception of himself. Instead, he opted for credit card fraud. Match-fixing had earned Perumal fairly light sentences – six months, a year. Considering fixing’s financial potential, the risk of such limited prison time seemed worth the gamble. However, institutional financial crime was serious business in Singapore. When the bank that Perumal targeted traced the source of the fraud, it was easy to identify the perpetrator.
Perumal was too poor to hire an attorney, and he instead represented himself at trial. Because of Perumal’s previous escape attempts, the judge ordered him to wear handcuffs in court. It was humiliating. And inevitable. Perumal wasn’t surprised when he was convicted of fraud. He understood the evidence. He also figured that his days as a match-fixer were over. He had already begun to conceive of how he was going to make a living when he got out of prison. But all of this thinking stopped, as he was staggered to learn of the penalty he would have to pay. When the judge pronounced a judgment of four years, Perumal wanted to hide his face in his hands. But he couldn’t, since he was shackled.
CHAPTER 5 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
Chris Eaton was at the wheel of his Ford Fairmont. The headlights up ahead belonged to a refrigeration truck that was crossing over into his lane. Eaton had little time to react. Instinctively, he swerved to the right. Eaton was driving in the left lane, as is the way in Australia, in a right-hand-drive car. A simple twist of the steering wheel. Debbie, mercifully asleep against her pillow, accepted the force of the collision. Everything transpired at highway speed.
Ian’s front teeth were knocked out, and his face was severely lacerated. Eaton’s daughter, Sarah, was just fine. At the door of the ambulance, parked across the M31 highway, Eaton looked on. He knew the protocol. He was a cop. He had looked the victim in the eye before, delivered the news. The victim was the last one to hope for a good outcome, and Eaton knew better than to do that now. He watched the paramedics work, and he knew. The whip of the crash had snapped Debbie’s brain stem. She was gone. “Life was to be lived for Debbie,” Eaton says. “Which was good, since she had such a short life.”
Eaton was a widower at twenty-nine, with two young children. He couldn’t handle the variable hours of shift work any longer, nor long-term investigations. He had to find stable work. This is how the man who wasn’t suited to be a bureaucrat became just that, joining Australia’s federal police union, eventually becoming its chief. He thrived in the union, learning how to operate in a political environment, though a rough-and-tumble Australian one, aided by what he had endured. “I developed a healthy cynicism as a result of the tragic parts of my life,” he says. “It made me see the realities of life for what they were.” Eaton remarried, and with his second wife, Kathie, he had twin daughters. He spent the rest of the 1980s and ’90s gaining administrative experience, an Aussie cop for life, it appeared, until an unexpected opportunity arose, expanding his policing portfolio in ways he had never imagined.
In 1999, at the age of forty-seven, Eaton broke from his established career path, challenging himself in a foreign world. He joined Interpol. Headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol was the eyes and ears of international law enforcement, the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world, after the United Nations. Interpol didn’t arrest suspects. It served a more critical function in the modern, globalized environment. Interpol was the one agency that could serve as a liaison between various national and local police forces, a hub of international criminal intelligence. When a suspect fled one country for another – or, worse, one continent for another – Interpol was instrumental in tracking this person and connecting the relevant policing agencies in order to apprehend him. Interpol was like an international FBI, which made sense to Eaton, from his study of J. Edgar Hoover. As international borders, especially European borders, disappeared, as technology shrank the world, Interpol’s role enlarged.
However, when Eaton arrived, Interpol was technically behind the times, and woefully so. The agency still dispatched messages to foreign branches by telex. Among various initial jobs, Eaton managed the implementation of a new communication protocol, Interpol 24/7, which replaced the telex system. He worked as the chief of staff for Interpol’s president. All the while, he attended a school of new social and professional manners. He had come from a continent unto itself. Australia in its isolation produced some of the most professional, energetic, and cooperative police officers in the world. But they had limited experience globally. They knew a little about Southeast Asia. But for Eaton, this didn’t compare to the astounding complexity of working in Europe, with its sophistication, with its fifty countries and dozens of languages, customs, and legal codes.
At Interpol, Eaton also mixed with African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American colleagues. A great reader, he now became a great listener, coming to understand what other cultures valued, how they operated. He made quick friendships with his counterparts from Germany, Austria, Russia, Thailand. Eaton further burnished his international credentials when Interpol lent him to the United Nations’ independent inquiry committee, which was investigating the Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. Working under Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Eaton traced the sources of Saddam Hussein’s wealth. Eaton had come a long way from the beat in St. Kilda. He was learning the skills that would transform him into a cop who could capably and imaginatively combat an international criminal conspiracy.
Eaton had come to the attention of Ron Noble, Interpol’s secretary general. A tenured professor at the New York University School of Law, Noble had served as an undersecretary at the U.S. Treasury Department before coming to Lyon. He was credited with sweeping structural reform that revitalized Interpol after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But he was frustrated. Interpol’s Command and Coordination Center was brand new, a reaction to the rising global terrorist threat. It was designed to be the room through which all of Interpol’s critical information flowed in up-to-the-minute fashion. In practice, the center was underutilized, noncritical, an underperforming asset. Noble recalled Eaton from the UN in order to fix the problem.
Noble knew that Eaton was a talented administrator. Eaton was aggressive. In pressure situations, he acted calmly, assertively, insulating his subordinates from distraction and giving them the assurance to perform. When he returned to Lyon, Eaton went about transforming the command center into the innovation that Noble had envisioned. In short order, the command center became a hive of activity. A massive screen hung on the main wall, and it displayed the status of active incidents and investigations from across the globe. Operators at individual desks communicated to international police agencies in Russian, French, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic. The world of crime and cops generated an intense, unending flow of information, which Eaton’s seventy-five charges coordinated with increasing adeptness. A serial killer on the loose in Southeast Asia, a terrorist incident in Africa, a drug suspect arrested in South America, a prison break in the Middle East. As Eaton’s daily attention switched from terrorism to organized crime to genocide, he learned the value of sharing live operational information with the people who could utilize it to put an end to the victimization of others.
When this sharing didn’t happen, Eaton grew furious, then morose. He watched in disgust as national police agencies greedily hoarded information about a Swiss pedophile who had traveled around Europe on a thirty-year killing spree. This only confirmed Eaton’s belief in the need for international cooperation. It didn’t matter who got credit for solving a crime or making a collar. All that mattered was getting it right in the end.
Within a few years, Interpol’s command center had become the single most important repository of operational data and information in all of international policing. Cops in the field contacted the command center because they believed that Interpol – through Eaton, its manager of operations – would react with the information and assistance that would make a difference in their investigations. Each day, as Eaton scanned the command center’s big screen of human frailty, he knew that he was harboring a secret frailty in his own personal life.
Eaton took some getting used to. Colleagues who met him for the first time often found him crass, direct, a little touchy. But once the heat rose in the command center, these same people discovered that there were few senior Interpol officials who were more capable, more fraternal.
Eaton displayed a striking, fundamental dedication to the job. Most people who worked at Interpol were there by appointment, on temporary assignment while still employed by national policing agencies. They were there to make professional contacts, to pad their résumés – there for an education in French wine – until their real bosses called them home. Eaton was an Interpol employee, so he had a stake. But there was something more. “Always remember what you’re doing this for,” he would routinely tell those in his charge. “What you’re trying to do is help the police officer in the field.”
One night, Eaton was leaving work, making his way around the command center to shake hands with each person on duty, as was his custom. Word arrived of a South American prison break. When Eaton learned that one of the escapees had shot and killed a cop, he hung up his coat. He slumped in a chair, identifying with the victim.
He phoned one of his underlings, whose expertise he required in order to dispatch the Interpol notices that would aid in the search for the suspects. The employee said that she was home, and that she would come to office once she had finished her dinner. “The only reason you have food on your table is because of these police officers,” Eaton told her. “Get your ass in here. Now.” Eaton’s professional behavior left no doubt that he was operational, not political, and come what may.
When his passion was inflamed, Eaton’s voice would boom. His words would come out in a high-vocabulary jumble, and it might be hard to understand him, especially if you weren’t a native English speaker, which was true of many at Interpol. Although his arguments were often correct, the bluntness of his debating style derailed him from a path to the top jobs in Interpol’s highly political environment.
Often over the years, he and Ron Noble differed. Yet they retained mutual respect. One night over dinner in 2008, Noble told Eaton: “You might be the only person who is more loyal to Interpol than to me.”
Eaton “aspired to leadership at Interpol,” but he was not obtuse. Such a determined cop, such a disinclined politician. His fundamental political flaw was what made him operationally effective. He was unforgiving. But he was not perfect.
He had had a liaison with a Frenchwoman he had met in Lyon. In secret, there was a daughter. Eaton’s marriage to his second wife, Kathie, ended – though, he says, not acrimoniously. The two remain in cordial contact today. “My wife was a good housekeeper,” he says. “She kept the house. She deserved it.”
Approaching sixty, Eaton’s career had stalled, advancement at Interpol closed off to him. His personal life was an open question. But unlike many others of his age, he was not unduly discouraged by the future. He believed he had more to do. He had energy. He was an expert in not only the way that international organized crime operated, but also the way that international police did its business – and how it might cooperate more effectively in combating global conspiracy. Eaton had acquired the knowledge and skills that come to only the adept, energetic, well-placed international policeman. All he needed was a place to apply them.
CHAPTER 6 (#u27ab88ec-d4cd-5075-86bc-12848a517557)
HONG KONG, PRESENT DAY
Hong Kong’s Wooloomooloo Steakhouse attracts a busy lunchtime crowd. On the thirty-first floor of the Hennessy building, the restaurant overlooks Victoria Harbor, toward Kowloon and mainland China and all of the money that has transformed global sports betting.
Patrick Jay works his way through a cut of meat. Jay is the head of the sportsbook at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. This may be the most profitable sportsbook in the world, though such rankings are impossible to calculate, given the nature of the business. Jay explains that the Hong Kong Jockey Club handles roughly $6.5 billion in betting on football per year. From its entire gambling portfolio, the book takes $1 billion in profit annually. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the largest taxpayer in Hong Kong, representing 8 percent of the local budget.
Jay is a tall, large-boned man, with the gregarious and happily ravenous manner of someone whose strategic decisions have guided him to a windfall. He projects the attitude of that rare animal, the winning gambler. Jay is one of an expanding cast of Englishmen come east. They carry expertise in the traditional, respected, English way of making a book – at shops like Ladbrokes and William Hill – and they now apply these business principles to Asia, where their experienced hand is welcomed. The Asian market has grown exponentially in the last decade. Jay estimates that the market represented about $100 billion at the turn of the millennium. Today, he says, Asian gamblers wager $1 trillion on sports per year. “The numbers are absolutely unfathomable to everybody,” Jay says. “People back in the U.K. don’t believe it. If you show them financial numbers, they say, ‘You’re making this up. You got Enron to do your accounting for you.’ ” It is not only the size and growth of the Chinese economy that has attracted so many in Western gaming. Nor would adventure be a sufficient motive for someone as oriented to business as Jay to relocate this far from home. It is habit most of all that draws people in Jay’s line – Chinese habit, the role that gambling plays in Asian cultures, the well-documented acquaintance with risk. This, as much as Asian economic dynamism, is the guarantor of continued growth in the gambling business. Jay’s research tells him that in Hong Kong, locals allocate upward of two and a half times more of their disposable income for gambling than do people in the United Kingdom. “Asia is not the center of the universe,” Jay says. “Asia is the universe.”
Jay’s sportsbook is located at, unsurprisingly, a racetrack. It is public, open, legal. And it is categorized in the minority. Throughout nearly all of Asia, the most active gambling continent, gambling is illegal. It is illegal to bet on sports on mainland China, for this activity is antithetical to the precepts of the communist state. The Muslim religion does not permit gambling for Indonesia’s 250 million people. This doesn’t mean that legal statutes prevent gambling. On the contrary, illegal, unregulated bookies in China, Indonesia, and all across Asia predominate. Jay claims that the illegal betting market is ten times larger than the legal market. Of the $1 trillion total, he says that $900 billion is wagered in the dark, administered by the criminal entities that finance, regulate, and enforce a parallel industry.
At Wooloomooloo, lunch draws to a close, and Patrick Jay readies to make a demonstrative point. “Look around the restaurant,” he says. “What do you see?” There are tables full of what appear to be businessmen in the midst of congenial lunch meetings. There are a few romantic couples sharing their little moments. At other tables, friends speak loudly with one another, then laugh. It is the usual steakhouse crowd, but for one missing element. “No booze,” Jay says. He’s right. Plates of steaks and potatoes cover the tabletops, but no single glass of beer or whiskey accompanies them. “These people don’t spend their money on alcohol. They gamble.”
China’s market reforms of the late twentieth century incited one of the most remarkable periods of localized economic growth that the world has ever experienced. Throughout the 1990s, the Chinese economy grew at a rate of roughly 10 percent per year. In rapid fashion, this swelling generated both great personal wealth for some individuals and general liquidity in Chinese society.
While this miraculous event was unfolding, so was an episode of even greater global significance and revelation. During this period, the Internet was growing from a computer engineer’s curiosity into the world’s primary means of commerce and communication. At the moment that many millions of Chinese people all of a sudden possessed disposable income, there was a new place to play with it. When these fortunate Chinese considered how they might float their new wealth for the enjoyment and risk that had long been a central part of their culture, they were presented with a growing number of gambling options online.
The emergence of the Internet not only precipitated the growth of online betting sites, but also improved options for the gambler. Before the Internet, the corner-store bookie, such as Ladbrokes, had little incentive to offer its clients competitive odds. It possessed a quasi-monopoly, defined by location and the immobility of the gambler. Internet betting introduced choice to the betting market. A new catalogue of gambling sites began dropping odds and commissions in the competition to attract business.
In China, the new bourgeoisie within this population of 1.3 billion people flooded the Internet gambling market. As the millennium turned, European sportsbooks followed the lead of their Asian counterparts, establishing online portals. Eventually the European and Asian markets began to work in concert, online, following each other’s price and line movements, bookies on one continent laying off bets with bookies on the other as part of their risk management strategy. Asian books established European-registered subsidiaries under different names, the client none the wiser. As happened with other industries as they migrated online, in gambling, national borders dissolved. In short order, the Internet enforced global regulation, of a sort, on a largely unregulated, gray-market, underground industry.
“The Asian and European betting markets have come together and created one giant pool,” says David Forrest, an economics professor at the University of Salford, in Manchester, England, who specializes in the study of sports gambling. “It’s now one huge liquid market. And liquidity is the friend of the fixer. You can put down big bets without notice, and without changing the odds against yourself.”
The Internet altered what people bet on, as well as the way that they bet. Twenty years ago, roughly 15 percent of bets on the international sports market were placed on football. But as the Internet enabled betting houses to offer continuous propositions based on the various factors of a game in progress – including the time remaining, the score, the players on the field, and the intuition of the bookie adjusting the line and the odds – the rise of in-game betting enhanced the popularity of football as a gambling proposition. The game now accounts for roughly 70 percent of the international sports betting market, according to Interpol estimates. The Internet also allowed for a rise in the trading of bets between bettors. International gambling on football matches has come to resemble a stock market, with constant fluctuations, numerous propositions, and instantaneous arbitrage.
Along with these changes came heightened scrutiny on football matches and the valuable information secreted within them. Patrick Jay tells the story of a grizzled old bookie he worked with at Ladbrokes. “In 1995,” the man liked to say, “if the midfielder for Manchester United broke his leg, five people would know about it. His wife, his father, his coach, and his trainer. And me.” Now, said the man, if a minor injury afflicts an inconsequential player on an unknown club, “they’re betting $10 million on it in that Macau.”
Before the Internet, one of the only ways to bet on football was on the 1x2 market. The “1” represents a victory by the home team. The “2” represents an away-team win. The “x” represents a draw. The 1x2 market does not incorporate a line, or a point spread. Odds are simply established for the chances of each of the three possible outcomes. The final score is irrelevant. When the favorite builds an insurmountable lead in a match, the gambler doesn’t have much incentive to watch anymore. Despite this, the 1x2 market remains the most popular form of football betting in Europe.
Almost no one in Asia bets 1x2. The majority of people betting on football in the world – and this includes all sizable international match-fixing groups – operate on the Asian handicap and Asian totals markets. Locally known as hang cheng, the Asian handicap market takes the draw out of football betting. In essence, you bet on one team to win by an assigned handicap, or on the other team to lose by this same handicap. Bookies establish a point spread that recognizes one team as the favorite. They also assign odds to each bet. The odds place a number value on the chances of a proposition and thus the payout on a winning bet. The Asian totals market, on the other hand, offers the chance to bet on the number of goals scored in a match in aggregate, the over-under. Except for a few minor differences, the Asian handicap and the Asian totals markets are identical to the markets for betting on the NFL or NBA, in the United States.
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Brett Forrest
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Хобби, увлечения
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Timed to coincide with the World Cup in Brazil and told in the style of a page-turning thriller, this is the book that will blow the lid off international match fixing in football: a pandemic that has struck at the heart of the ‘beautiful game’It began as a series of disparate reports coming in from the corners of the football world: referees, players and managers were deliberately fixing results at the behest of illegal bettors. But as the reports kept coming, bit by bit the scale of the problem began to emerge. These weren’t just footballing minnows but major teams and players, playing on the biggest possible stages. The money at stake ran into the billions. And the people pulling the strings were operating for some of the largest, most heinous criminal syndicates in the world.In THE BIG FIX, Brett Forrest uncovers the scarcely believable scale of a threat to the beautiful game that is only just now coming to light.Told in the style of a thriller, Forrest tracks down the criminals who occupy this murky world of billion-dollar transactions, as well as the people tasked with hunting them and saving football’s lifeblood.Published on the eve of the World Cup, this shocking expose reveals a criminal enterprise that threatens to rot football to its core.