The Big Fix (14 page)

 

CHAPTER 24

P
erumal's persistent claim that he was, in fact, Raja Morgan Chelliah crumbled when the Finns sent his fingerprints to Singapore authorities and received a positive ID in return. Not only was Perumal's cover blown, but he now understood that the Singaporean government knew where he was.

When the Finnish police informed Perumal that Singapore had requested his extradition, he panicked. What could he do? Perumal had spent years making high-­level political connections around the world. National soccer federations were tied into national power structures in every country. Behind bars in Finland, Perumal thought of his influential friends. If he could convince one of his political contacts to grant him citizenship in another country, this would annul his Singaporean citizenship, and perhaps the extradition request along with it.

Perumal contacted his Togo connections, applying for asylum and citizenship in their country. But he had miscalculated the fallout of the match he had arranged with the fake Togo national team. No one in Togo was willing to help. He contacted friends in Ghana, with no luck. He tried Zimbabwe. This was one of the most corrupt countries in Africa, led by the despotic Robert Mugabe for more than thirty years, a place of rule-­bending and golden handshakes. Surely, Perumal calculated, the Zimbabweans knew what it meant to help a friend in jeopardy. “I am in urgent need of you guys to help me out with my present situation,” Perumal wrote in an email to Jonathan Musavengana, the programs officer of the Zimbabwean national soccer federation. He continued:

I need to renounce my Singapore citizenship. In order to do that I either need to be naturalized or require permanent residence status In your country or any other country known to u. Does your country allow the naturalization of a foreigner if he is married To women in Your country. What is the duration one will have to wait from the date of marriage before he is allowed to apply to be naturalized. This is what I have in mind. I have traveled in your country in 2007/08/09. Is it possible to officially back-­date the marriage with the registry of marriages in your country.

By this time, Eaton and his team of FIFA investigators were nosing around the Zimbabwean federation and its dealings with Football 4U. Eventually, the details that they uncovered would spark a major criminal case in Zimbabwe, dubbed Asiagate. Musavengana wanted nothing to do with the man responsible for Asiagate. Musavengana forwarded Perumal's email to Henrietta Rushwaya, writing: “i even got a fone [
sic
] call from one caaled [
sic
] Aisha who claims to be his girlfriend and another one who says she z the sister!!!!!!!!!” A friend in flush times, the fiscal savior of the failing soccer associations of the world, Perumal had become a pariah.

A Finnish prison cell being more hospitable than one in Singapore, Perumal realized that he had only one option remaining. He was going to have to talk. Musonda and various RoPS teammates had broken quickly under police pressure, revealing the extent and detail of their fixing activities. The Finnish police already knew what had transpired. Presented with this information, Perumal would gain little by denying it. But the police, urged by Eaton, wanted more.

First, Perumal wanted some information of his own. He wanted to know who had turned him in. He kept thinking about his contact in Macau, to whom he owed $200,000. The man had said he knew that Perumal was traveling under a false passport. He had threatened to contact the police. Perumal thought that it must have been him.

When Perumal learned the identity of the man who had walked into the Rovaniemi precinct on February 20, he was floored. Joseph Tan Xin was a runner for the syndicate, one of the connecting lines on Perumal's international fixing diagram. And since Tan Xin had now handed off Perumal to the police, everything made awful logic.

Perumal was devastated. It was one thing for Anthony Raj Santia to use Chaibou in a match. Kurusamy had taught him that lesson a long time ago. If you weren't able to adapt to evolving circumstances, you had no business being a fixer. You had no business operating in a criminal world of deceptive allegiance. Perumal had the perfect character for such an environment. He made friendly acquaintance quickly and easily—­he was a master at sincerity—­though he never went deeper, and he could turn in an instant, for no apparent reason. This was the only way to get by in his world, the only way to leverage relationships for financial gain. However, if Perumal was slippery in this way, he believed that he was firm in the greater criminal code: you don't go to the police. When he discovered that Dan Tan was responsible for his incarceration, that Dan Tan had dispatched Tan Xin, he underwent a transformation. He began talking in the kinds of specifics that police and prosecutors—­and Eaton—­would find prescriptive in the fight against fixing.

Perumal began to outline the structure and profits of the syndicate. He claimed that the syndicate could earn a few hundred thousand euros on an operation, though its biggest scores ran all the way up to €15 million, even €20 million on a single match. Slowly, he continued to reveal information. The more he talked in Finland, the longer he would stay out of Singapore. He told Finnish police:

The organization is structured just like a firm. There is the boss at the top, from Singapore, who decides which matches to fix, how much to pay for bribes, where to send his couriers and agents and where to place the bets. The betting mainly takes place in China. Below the boss are six shareholders from Bulgaria, Slovenia (two), Croatia, Hungary and Singapore.

Perumal drew a crude diagram of the syndicate, which he titled “Syndicate For Fixing International Matches.” A rectangular box represented each of five shareholders, the boxes connected by lines that signified runners. Along the top of the diagram, he wrote: “Winnings are tranfered [
sic
] to Spore from China through Remittance agents.” Then, “Shareholders will receive percentage of the winnings even if they are not directly involved.” Along the bottom of the diagram, he wrote: “Transport Cash. Analyse Games. To report the nature of the matches. To report on the performance of the players.”

Beyond that, Perumal was cagey. His diagram hardly revealed much of fundamental importance. It was the traditional structure of an international criminal group, in which partners shared influence and connections, investing and profiting in established proportions. Finnish police (and Eaton) wanted names. They wanted to know the identity of the boss that Perumal kept mentioning. Repeatedly, Perumal said that the syndicate's leader was an Asian betting industry kingpin named Ah Keng. Police were skeptical, as they were with all of the information that Perumal was providing. He had spent years constructing an elaborate deception, which he peddled to players, coaches, and federations, and which had likely confused even himself, as he was the one living it.

Some of the stress that urged Perumal to his new position was artificial. The truth was that even if Singaporean officials had requested Perumal's extradition, they couldn't hope to get him. Because of Singapore's usage of capital punishment, most European countries did not maintain an extradition treaty with Singapore. Finland didn't have one. This was public information. It would not have required much research to discover it. This single fact revealed a surprising amateurism in the Singapore syndicate.

What was Dan Tan's ultimate goal in revealing Perumal to Finnish police? Dan Tan knew of Perumal's five-­year prison term. This was a convenient reality. If Perumal was compelled to serve his term, he would be out of the fixing marketplace. If the goal was to initiate the extradition process that would ultimately lock up Perumal for his five-­year term, Dan Tan horribly miscalculated. He didn't take into account the possibility that Finnish police might discover Perumal's match-­fixing activities, and quickly, before blindly dispatching him from their jurisdiction on a passport charge. He didn't count on Chris Eaton.

Dan Tan could hardly be blamed. Soccer and law enforcement officials had never taken a proactive approach to fixing. But because of Eaton and his rapidly accumulating understanding of the syndicate, times were changing. In double-­crossing Perumal, the syndicate sabotaged itself, handing police an informed source, while supplying him with the motivation to provide intricate, insider, incriminating evidence.

Perumal's arrest made news back home. Zaihan Mohamed Yusof, a prominent Singaporean journalist writing for the
New Paper,
had called Perumal the “
kelong
king.”
Kelong
is a Malay word, for a fishing platform from which one casts a line. In Singapore, “
kelong
king” had come to mean the person who rules match-­fixing. In jailhouse letters to Yusof, this new
kelong
king sounded the vitriol of the high, yet real, drama that he was living. “Seeking police assistance is a violation of code number one in any criminal business,” Perumal wrote. “Dan Tan broke this code and stirred the hornet's nest. And now he has to face the consequences. . . . I hold the key to the Pandora's Box. And I will not hesitate to unlock it. . . .”

 

CHAPTER 25

W
hile Perumal was indulging an urge for revenge, Eaton dispatched his operatives to the Far East, which he now understood was the locus of the international fixing trade. They began cultivating sources within the Singapore syndicate, building an easygoing rapport, an approach close to a match-­fixer's heart. Later, they inched closer, driving down Singapore's left-­handed roads, sitting back and listening to the fixers' stories of global adventure, playing to their egos. In this way, they began to learn the identities of the main operators, began to track their movements and their emails and their phone calls, getting a grasp for how the business worked and how they might prevent it. One low-­level member of the syndicate agreed to meet, and he showed up in a welder's mask, refusing to remove it throughout the interview. Eaton's operatives cultivated sources in bars and clubs and back-­alley cafés. They spent time at Perumal's old haunt, the Orchard Towers, where the only thing more difficult than grasping the worth of a source was figuring out if the women on the stage in front of them might instead be men. Asia had its own way. It was no surprise that Eaton's operatives struggled to see clearly to the top of Singapore's match-­fixing syndicate, to the bosses who ran it. “We know what they do and who they work with,” one operative says. “We just don't know who they are.”

Eventually, Eaton and his ­people discovered the identities of the syndicate bosses, from Dan Tan to his lesser conspirators. Behind these men were Chinese Triad groups, which controlled the betting ser­vices that had only recently come into being. “There is a two-­billion-­dollar weekly turnover for Asian bookmakers,” Eaton says. “It's as big as Coca-­Cola. And it does not produce anything. It's just paper.”

The new FIFA security team discovered that in many parts of the world, all one need do to play an international friendly was show up at a stadium and pay a day's rent. There were no papers to sign, no sanctioning procedures to endure, nothing at all that made an official FIFA friendly official. There was no one asleep at the switch, for there was no switch. One operative visited the office of a match promoter behind an international friendly. The office was empty, the words “Import/Export” written on the door. When the operative called the number listed on the door, a woman answered, her voice barely audible over the crying children in the background. Another operative investigated an upcoming friendly between Turkey and the Maldives, a match listed with SBOBET, one of Asia's largest legal bookmakers. The game was set to take place at the MSN Stadium in Bukit Jalil, Malaysia. Suddenly it was switched to Petronas Stadium in Kuala Lumpur. When the agent contacted the soccer federations of Turkey and the Maldives, he discovered that neither organization knew anything about the match.