The Big Fix (13 page)

 

CHAPTER 21

T
he FIFA executive committee tabulated its results on December 2, 2010. When Sepp Blatter climbed the stage at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, he said simply: “We go to new lands.” FIFA awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia. The 2022 World Cup went to Qatar. Six months earlier, FIFA had staged its first African World Cup. After a stopover in Brazil in 2014, the fifth time that the tournament would be held in South America, FIFA would take the World Cup competition to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the first time for both regions. This was a distinct acknowledgment of FIFA's regard for emerging markets. Or was it? As soon as Blatter had made the announcement, charges of corruption and vote-­rigging began to circulate. And no wonder. A month before the World Cup ballot, FIFA's ethics committee had suspended two members of its executive committee—­a Nigerian, Amos Adamu, and Reynald Temarii of Tahiti—­suspected of attempting to sell their votes.

Qatar's poor reputation meant that the preponderance of the accusations was directed at it, and not at Russia. FIFA's own scouting report on Qatar's viability as a World Cup host warned of the dangers of the high summer temperatures, which were a health risk to fans and players alike. Members of the U.S. contingent, which lost to Qatar in the final round, had difficulty understanding how the United States' developed infrastructure, large population and fan base, and the marketing opportunities of its economy failed to attract enough votes. Those familiar with the history of FIFA's internal politics recalled the organization's contentious 1998 presidential election. At the time, there were whispers that the Qatari government had financed Blatter's campaign, enabling him to defeat the reformer Lennart Johansson, a Swede, who had once appeared to be the favorite. Insiders now alleged that Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari member of FIFA's executive committee, had paid for votes. But was there any proof? The World Cup brings great financial benefit to the host economy and those closely tied to it. The losers in the World Cup selection process routinely cry foul. FIFA's murky histories make it an easy target.

Only the rare FIFA vote—­whether it was to determine a tournament host or who would be president of the organization—­was devoid of suspicion. From João Havelange's 1974 ouster of Stanley Rous as FIFA president, to the voluminous, opaque licensing and sponsorship deals that Blatter had engineered, it was often hard to tell how things transpired. FIFA didn't benefit from the sorts of financial controls that usually guide large organizations. The photo of Blatter with the infamous Russian organized criminal leader Taiwanchik (who was charged with fixing the figure-­skating competition during the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City) may have been an unfortunate coincidence for the FIFA president. But it served to confirm ever-­growing public sentiment that Blatter and FIFA were unscrupulous. It felt as though there was always another FIFA scandal waiting to happen.

That's the one benefit often overlooked in a state of continuous scandal: a new disgrace obscures the one previous to it. No sooner was the World Cup announcement completed than another FIFA election materialized in the near distance, to be held on June 1, 2011. Blatter's four-­year term was about to expire. Surprisingly, in the upcoming election that would determine if he would stay or go, Blatter was facing a serious challenger. The identity of this candidate came as a shock. Mohamed bin Hammam had always been a close ally.

A longtime member of FIFA's executive committee, bin Hammam also sat on Qatar's Advisory Council, a select group that counseled Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-­Thani, then the country's emir. Bin Hammam was close to power, and he wanted some of his own. On March 18, 2011, he announced his candidacy in the upcoming election. In the wake of the World Cup announcement, Qatar was gaining momentum.

 

CHAPTER 22

FIFA HEADQUARTERS, ZURICH, MARCH 2011

E
aton dispatched an alert to various national soccer federations, advising them to be aware of bogus front companies, of Tamils from Singapore, of a man who called himself Raj. While concerned about the vulnerability of these organizations, Eaton privately hoped that Perumal would attempt to compromise one of them, thereby revealing himself and his location. Eaton continued to compile evidence from the many global sources he had accumulated during his Interpol days. To him, these pieces composed a conspiracy, with Wilson Perumal at its center. But Perumal was the one piece that was missing.

Eaton felt like he was the only one in Zurich who understood the importance of finding Perumal. This was another sign of Eaton's incompatibility with his colleagues. He took no part in the “team-­building” activities outside the office. He knew that he would never fit in with the reserved, Swiss way of doing things. When he did make jokes with ­people around the office, as was his way, they often took him at his word. Eaton concentrated on his operational task, rather than on internal politics. Invariably, he took his lunches alone. On March 1, 2011, having recently returned from San Salvador, he returned to his drab basement office after another solitary lunch. His phone rang.

On the line was Graham Peaker, intelligence coordinator at UEFA. He and Eaton had cooperated on previous match-­fixing-­related inquiries, sharing information and expertise. Peaker specialized in IT. He wasn't an investigator. But he knew that Eaton was. He was calling now because the phone request he had just received required Eaton's experienced hand. Peaker said that he had information about a crime that had been committed in Finland.

Eaton was interested. He listened intently to Peaker. “Police in Finland have arrested someone,” Peaker told him. “We don't know who he is. But he has been fixing matches up there.”

Eaton asked Peaker for details. Until now, Eaton had been dealing only with compromised players and soccer officials. The fixers themselves were phantoms, aliases signed at the bottom of an email, blurred images on stadium security videos, the binary code of mounting data. Peaker said that he would supply more information in an email. But Eaton persisted. He had a feeling about this one, and he wanted to confirm it right away.

“Okay,” said Peaker. “The police said that they observed this guy yelling at the players and threatening them.” Eaton sat up in his chair, excited. Could this have just fallen into his lap?

Peaker said: “The players call him Raj.”

Eaton knew that millions of Indians went by the name of Raj. But there could be no mistake. This Raj had to be the one he was looking for. Eaton told Peaker: “I'm going to Finland.”

 

CHAPTER 23

N
ine days earlier, on February 20, 2011, a man named Joseph Tan Xin walked into the central police station of Rovaniemi, Finland. Tan Xin, a Singaporean national of Chinese descent, informed the duty officers that another Singaporean man, of Indian background, was currently in town traveling on a false passport. Tan Xin identified the man as Wilson Perumal. When the officers asked Tan Xin why he had supplied them with this information, he reacted defensively, saying that he would leave the station if they treated him as a criminal.

Jukka Lakkala, an inspector with the Rovaniemi police, walked over to the Scandic Hotel, where Perumal was lodging. There Lakkala and a colleague took Perumal into custody. When they returned to the station, the officers realized that they had detained the wrong suspect, another Indian man who had been staying in a different room in the same hotel. Careful not to make the same mistake twice, Lakkala placed the hotel under surveillance. When Perumal appeared, police followed him.

On February 23, they watched Perumal join three other men, European in appearance. The group headed to the Keskuskenttä stadium, where RoPS was about to play Tampere United. In the stands, Perumal held his phone to his ear throughout almost the entire match, talking only occasionally. Lakkala and his colleagues couldn't figure out what might cause him to behave this way. They were intrigued. They didn't know that Perumal had paid Musonda €80,000, 10,000 per participating player, for RoPS to lose by a score of 3–0. On the phone, Perumal was directing his betting.

A bookie in Macau had been hounding Perumal over a $200,000 debt. Via email, the bookie wrote that he knew Perumal was traveling on a false passport, that it would be easy to alert the police. Perumal was offended. That was against the criminal code. You never went to the police. And he was anxious. Any contact with the police in Finland could lead him to a prison cell in Singapore, where his five-­year sentence awaited. But if Musonda and his RoPS teammates could affect the fix, Perumal would go a long way to solving his financial difficulties. In this small stadium, in this forgotten league, how hard could it be to influence the game's outcome? No one was watching. He had most of the players in his pocket. But of the seven matches that Perumal had attempted to fix with RoPS that season, only one had come through. Instead of stockpiling the money he needed to settle his debts, he was losing. This was the final match of the RoPS season, Perumal's last chance. On his phone during the match, he stood to win $1 million, but RoPS had to lose. When the game ended, Perumal couldn't believe it. RoPS had tied, 1–1.

Police were watching. They followed Perumal and one of his associates to Fransmanni, the French restaurant near the soccer stadium. Officers watched the restaurant as Musonda and two other players joined Perumal. It was a contentious meeting. The players cowered as Perumal and his associate appeared to threaten them. To Lakkala, this all looked more interesting than a simple case of a fraudulent passport. But he wasn't sure what he was watching. Although various fixers had been manipulating RoPS matches for at least the past three seasons, doing so through the club's most popular player, who had then become its coach, the local police professed to have no idea of such activity.

Two days later, at 6
A.M.,
Lakkala watched Perumal board a flight from Rovaniemi to Helsinki. Lakkala phoned ahead to his colleagues in the capital. When Perumal arrived at Helsinki's Vantaa airport, customs officers took him aside. They scrutinized his passport. Chelliah Raja Morgan was the name on the document. The date of birth was listed as October 7, 1987. Perumal may have been a youthful forty-­five years old, but he could hardly pass for twenty-­three. On February 24, 2011, at 8:50
A.M.,
police took him into custody. But they didn't know who he was.

Perumal was desperate to keep it that way. However, the trail of evidence he had left behind threatened to undo him. Once police transported him back to Rovaniemi, Lakkala and his colleagues began going through Perumal's belongings. They recovered files from his laptop. They read his emails and text messages. They looked through the numbers in his phone. His phone book included a Cyprus number for “Dan.” Two of Ibrahim Chaibou's numbers were there also. There was a listing for “Dead Ball Specialist,” as well as numbers for Christopher Musonda, Togo soccer officials, bookies, and criminal figures and financiers. In all, he had contacts from thirty-­four different countries, from Venezuela to Slovakia to Qatar to Zambia. From Perumal's Rovaniemi hotel room, police recovered the scratch-­pad math of his fixes, what he paid players, the amounts he expected to make on the betting market. The notes referred to a series of under-­twenty-­three friendlies that he was arranging in Kuwait, between the Kuwaiti national team and Syria, Palestine, and even Switzerland, Singapore's European equivalent. All told, the evidence constituted the most complete record of the Singapore syndicate that authorities had ever seized. But to the Finns, it was a thousand scattered puzzle pieces. They couldn't see the image they were looking at.

Although Perumal would boast that “a five-­year jail term in Singapore is nothing,” avoiding this stretch remained a guiding concern. As police led him, handcuffed, from a squad car toward the steps of the Rovaniemi courthouse, he broke free and ran. It was February along the Arctic Circle, twenty degrees below zero. Perumal was wearing a T-­shirt and jeans. He was handcuffed. When he tired, cold and aimless, he stopped running. A cop cruiser pulled up alongside him. He got in.

If he was going to avoid that long flight back to Singapore, Perumal was going to have to make friends in Finland.

W
hen Chris Eaton's Finnair flight landed in Rovaniemi, there was darkness all around. It was dead winter, twenty-­four hours of night in a day. Eaton was in the right place. He had traveled to Lapland in order to enlighten Finnish police and prosecutors to the importance of their Singaporean captive.

Two of Eaton's operatives had preceded him to Finland, and they had assisted in confirming Perumal's identity. They had never before managed to get a visual ID on Perumal, and they wanted to make sure that this was the Raj they wanted. When Eaton arrived, he met with Jukka Lakkala and other local cops, joining them at Rovaniemi's police station, a squat building freeze-­washed with snow and ice. Eaton briefed them, leading them through Perumal's history, as his evidence allowed him to outline it, where Perumal had traveled, whom he had compromised. “You have, I can assure you,” Eaton told the cops over lunch that first day, “the world's most prolific known match-­fixer.”

The weather was bitterly cold, the Kemijoki River thick with ice. Eaton persisted in his mission, convincing Finnish authorities to align with FIFA's greater purpose. “I wanted them to realize the international impact of this guy's activity,” he says. “I wanted to see them take their investigation, which on the surface looked like a simple Finnish case, to a global context.” Eaton laid out all of his Perumal evidence on the table. Unlike the many international police organizations he had worked with during his time at Interpol, Eaton didn't need to be cajoled into distributing what he had.

He briefed Ron Noble at Interpol, sharing news of Perumal's arrest and an understanding of his significance. Eaton also contacted journalists across Europe, alerting them to not only Perumal's detention, but also why they should care about it. For most writers and most readers, this marked their initial exposure to Perumal and the Singapore syndicate—­topics that would come to dominate sports news in the ensuing years.

Eaton's pronouncements didn't sit well with some Finnish authorities. Even though they would not have understood Perumal's importance without Eaton's evidence and urging, some felt that he had overstepped his bounds. Like police everywhere, some in Finland were concerned about who would ultimately get the credit for the capture and handling of this prolific fixer. Eaton professed not to care, and he continued to feed the Finns the information and strategic guidance that would allow them to interrogate Perumal effectively.

Over his three days in Rovaniemi, Eaton was busy. But not too occupied to consider how an encounter with Perumal might play out. After all, Perumal was just down the street from the police station, detained in the local jail. But Eaton didn't pursue a meeting, instead leaving Rovaniemi's darkness, sure that he knew Perumal as well as he needed to. “Perumal is not a smart man,” Eaton believed. “Just a bold and lucky one until the latter ran out.” In time, Eaton would develop a deeper interest in the subject.