The Big Fix

 

 

DEDICATION

For Cindy and Eric, who got me back in the game

 

CONTENTS

 

 

CHAPTER 1

KHALID BIN MOHAMMED STADIUM

SHARJAH, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, MARCH 2011

T
he FIFA operatives arrived at the stadium past noon, prepared to disrupt the crime that was tearing soccer 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 soccer. 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 soccer betting—­by manipulating game results. On the other side were soccer 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), soccer'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 the UAE soccer officials may have knowledge of the upcoming fix. Plenty of national soccer 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.

A
t some point in the 1990s, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the president of FIFA, began characterizing the numerous soccer 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 soccer, FIFA carries the most weight. It is the organization that most soccer ­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 is just fine, ambiguity being the facilitator of exploitation.

In the last decade, the imprecise way that global soccer 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 soccer. But considering the criminal nature of match-­fixing, Blatter's words have assumed a new meaning. This is soccer'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. The Cambodian national team manipulated its failed two-­game series with Laos, a qualifier for the 2014 World Cup.

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. Niger bred the most corrupt referee of all. 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 head of the country's soccer 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 ensnaring 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 soccer 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 soccer 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 soccer 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 soccer games per year. Asian bookies suggest a much higher figure. The soccer 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 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 stadiums 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 soccer 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 soccer 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 soccer 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 soccer so fundamentally, manipulating the betting market to their advantage, that they have called into question the outcome of every match in the world.