The Big Fix (17 page)

 

CHAPTER 30

DOHA, QATAR, 2013

O
n the veranda of the Wahm Bar at the W Doha Hotel in Qatar, Chris Eaton raises his beer in his right hand. “A steak in every glass,” he says, justifying the nourishment. He toasts the four men standing around him. These faces are familiar, because they are all the same as before. Eaton's FIFA investigative team has transferred with him to the ICSS.

A searing Arabian breeze sculpts the terrace. All around Eaton's group stand the architectural markers of sudden wealth, along with the ambition and impatience that this stimulates. Doha is an architect's palette. Anything goes here, any shape, any material, any color. One tower looks like a bottle of perfume. Another skyscraper appears to be layered in white gold. There is nothing within sight that is in keeping with nature's sandy surroundings, nor is there harmony between these structures. This place looks like a collection of lost towers from other places.

This is where the World Cup will take place in 2022, on the Qatari peninsula, which juts, aridly, one hundred miles into the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia the only bordering neighbor. Viewed on a map, Qatar looks like a tick on the backside of Saudi Arabia. But Qatar is no bloodsucker, with the third-­largest natural gas reserves in the world. There is virtually no unemployment here. Nor are there any taxes.

About one-­eighth of Qatar's population are citizens of Qatar. The rest of the ­people within these borders are here to serve, engaging in the remittance economy. There are more Indians here than Qataris. There are more Nepalese. On an afternoon in June or July, when temperatures in Doha reach 135 degrees (as soccer fans now know), from the comfort of an air-­cooled sedan you may witness these foreign laborers fulfilling their duties on outdoor construction sites, somehow surviving beneath the sun. The towers must rise, and now the stadiums, too.

It may be difficult to accept that an organization that is meant to uphold the integrity and transparency of sports, the ICSS, comes from a country where political parties are outlawed, where there is no elected legislature, where a woman's testimony is worth little in court, where one family, the al-­Thani, has reigned since well before the Cambridge Rules codified soccer, at Trinity College, in 1848. In the vacuum of soccer's leadership, however, those who might have led relinquish their right to complain. Ennobling burdens fall to those eager to assume them.

Shortly after beginning with the ICSS, in May 2012, Eaton encountered the question of how a man of professional integrity such as himself could work under questionable assignment. Conventional wisdom led most ­people to believe that the Qataris were corrupt, repressive, backward, and that they had used bribery to secure the World Cup. Eaton took to high ground, stating that he “peddled facts, not allegations.” He could produce an affidavit from a Qatari whistle-­blower who had initiated the World Cup scandal; the woman wrote that she had fabricated the entire ordeal. “Look, I was the head of security at FIFA when those allegations emerged,” Eaton would tell those who asked. “I never saw any evidence. In my assessment, the Qataris were perfectly clean.” His years at Interpol had granted him professional experience with the cultures of the world, and he did not carry prejudice into a region that inexperienced Westerners assumed operated under deep deceitfulness.

Nevertheless, the questions unsettled Eaton. He learned to accept this collective doubt about Qatar and himself as the price of opportunity. Considering the fact that FIFA had collapsed his ambitions, who else was hiring? “The ICSS is my opportunity to finish what I started,” he told himself. Eaton is not the only Westerner occupying a senior position at the ICSS. Just as the Qatari government owns Al Jazeera, the influential international TV news network, so the ICSS would utilize domestic funding to coalesce international expertise, creating a new utility for the world. At least, that was the idea.

The ICSS offices occupy the thirty-­third floor of the Alfardan Towers, in Doha's West Bay. At sixty-­four stories, the towers are the tallest buildings in Qatar. They are modest steel and glass structures, built as residential buildings. Eaton's office is a converted bedroom with a large desk that he does not use, instead taking meetings in an extended lounge. From his window, he sees the city in a sweeping view, looking toward the Pearl.

This is where he lives, having left Zurich behind. The Pearl is a thousand-­acre artificial island built on the former site of Qatar's main diving area, pearling having been the heart of the country's pre-­oil economy. The island was designed in Venetian style, with interlocking canals. Waterside villas are painted in bright blues, reds, yellows. It is a beautiful place, though lonely, with low occupancy. Eaton resides in a three-­story villa with Joyce and Roy. Their sector on the Pearl, the Qanat Quartier, is so devoid of residents that the stray Jet-­Ski that cuts up the canal is the only reminder that the Eatons are not alone out here in the aquatic desert.

A Venetian ghost town, the Pearl was a quiet place for Eaton to reformulate his approach to the match-­fixing fight. He was now freed of FIFA's institutional restraints. He didn't have to protect the image of soccer's corporate body at the expense of the game's integrity. And his horizon now went beyond soccer. Eaton's position at the ICSS required him to investigate all sports, since all sports were afflicted with manipulation, to varying degrees. Horse racing, rugby, cricket, tennis, volleyball, baseball. “You know where it's big?” Eaton asks, rhetorically. “Badminton. Huge.”

The particular sport didn't matter, because Eaton was no longer investigating matches and fixers. He was now interested in the ­people who controlled the fixers, those who owned and manipulated the sportsbooks. Fixing in all sports emanated and terminated in the same place. Ultimately, the money flowed in and out of Southeast Asian organized crime. To defeat fixing, Eaton and his investigators would have to learn how Asian and European criminals cooperated in betting manipulation. “What is the opportunity that is causing this attraction by organized crime?” Eaton asked himself. “Betting fraud. The real target should be the criminals who handle the betting fraud that inspires and funds match-fixing. It's like international banking in the 1960s and '70s. It's a free-­for-­all in Asian betting. I want to know their MO. I want to know who they are. We're going to get to the heart of organized crime's interest in match-­fixing.”

As Eaton outlined his strategy to himself and to Hanzab and to underlings, he heard news of an old contact. Through his police sources in Europe, Eaton learned that Wilson Perumal was not being held in detention in Budapest, nor in a safe house, though his life was in danger. Nor, it appeared, were Perumal's activities particularly restricted. “I heard that he was living it up in Budapest in the nightclubs, having a great time,” Eaton says. “The injustice of it.”

As European police used the information that Perumal gave them to arrest players and referees and soccer administrators, Eaton moreover didn't understand how this approach might impact the greater fixing syndicate. Though operationally significant, players were ultimately incidental, interchangeable, renewable. The only way to strike at fixing in a meaningful way was to map the criminal structure and attack those at the head of it. This required a coordinated strategy developed and carried out by police and government authorities in multiple countries. But as in Finland, authorities in Europe were using Perumal's information to arrest those ­people who operated locally and could be charged locally. The ambition and tenacity of European prosecutors and judges elapsed at their national borders, the same borders that were meaningless to the syndicate.

“I didn't see a global strategy behind it all,” Eaton says. “I saw this guy, this global fixer, laughing his head off. We're looking at someone who was clearly the glue that brought it all together. And he's the only one who doesn't get the maximum penalty. It struck me as fantastic.”

Frustrating though the situation was, Eaton could do little to influence it. He furthermore had his own easterly operations to construct and manage. He dispatched his operatives to Southeast Asia, providing them with a single guiding principle: “Even with all the Sportradars in the world, you will not know what the criminal is doing. There's only one way you will know what the criminal is doing. And that is by speaking with him.”

 

CHAPTER 31

I
n July 2012, Perumal learned that a Swiss court had implicated João Havelange, the former FIFA president, in a bribery scandal. The court claimed that Havelange had pocketed $1.53 million through a bankrupt marketing company that had once held contracts with FIFA and the International Olympic Committee. His alleged partner in the scheme, Ricardo Teixeira, his former son-­in-­law, was the head of Brazil's 2014 World Cup organizing committee. Teixeira resigned his post. Perumal wrote an email, asking Zaihan Mohamed Yusof, from his hometown the
New Paper,
to forward it to Eaton:

FIFA looks more like a criminal enterprise than a official organization. The pot calling the kettle black. These guys are criminal who deserve to be sentenced to serve prison terms and not judged by an ethics committee. A very convenient way to escape from justice. A bunch of crooks trying to go around the world to preach against corruption. FIFA is a joke.

FIFA's behavior was so questionable that it allowed a convicted match-­fixer to appear credible in his criticism of it. It was hard to mount an argument against Perumal's claims. Eaton realized this. Recognizing an opportunity to revive direct communication, he wrote to Perumal:

Wilson I do not admire what you have done in football, whatever your motivation and circumstances. And I will not try to humor you like I am sure others have done to try to get you to talk. But I do like what you are doing now. It will help football, indeed all global sport, to face up to the realities of the global greed and it's-­just-­a-­business culture that has corrupted so many. Being real and facing up to the ugly past in global sport is urgently needed today, and directly and indirectly you are playing your part in that.

Now I well know there are many others who have done far more damage than you, many others. And if they were showing the backbone you are, I would be asking them too. But most are just shadowy, greedy bastards without consciences. You certainly were not shadowy, and that might have been your undoing, and you are showing a conscience—­good for you.

I left FIFA after two short years for many reasons Wilson, but mostly because I saw an opportunity to work across all sports. To the extent i have any ability to do this, i want the shame that has hit football to be prevented in other sports, and the resistance of those who are vulnerable to corruption, strengthened. If you think I left FIFA for money—­well it is true that you don't know me. If you did I am sure you would have another opinion.

I am working as hard as ever and with some excellent ­people, to bring integrity to international sport where it needs it, and it does need it. Something you know better than most.

Keep safe Wilson, and I will be happy to meet you some day and try to understand you more, and perhaps you to understand me more.

Though Perumal may not have sensed it, Eaton was trying to cultivate him to eventual use. Eaton knew that this would take a while. Meanwhile, Eaton maintained close contact with his ICSS investigators in Southeast Asia. The time had come to manufacture new results for a new employer, one that was eager to show the world that it deserved its World Cup.

CHAPTER 32

JAKARTA, INDONESIA, 2013

T
he bookie was late. No surprise. These are not ­people who operate by any clock other than the one that counts down the time remaining in a match. Jakarta's street buzzed beyond the door of the café, the constant stream of motorcycles and scooters navigating the traffic. Indonesia was a logical locus for two of Eaton's ICSS operatives. They had arrived here after visits to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, and Singapore. Their investigation into bookies was under way. And while they waited for this bookie, a local, ethnically Chinese man, they discussed the seriousness of the environment. Players in Indonesian leagues had met with bad ends, or such was the gossip. “If you stop the fix here,” says one of Eaton's men, “they'll kill you.”

Sports betting is illegal in Indonesia. But Indonesians of Chinese descent established an illegal gambling market here decades ago, in the days before live betting, and before the Chinese economic boom. At the time, many of Indonesia's 250 million ­people possessed the expendable cash that would soon come to the Chinese. The market was controlled and managed by the ruthless Triad criminal groups that underpinned all of Chinese vice.

Triads financed all bookmaking enterprises, opening them, closing them, relocating them, renaming them in rapid succession. The operators of the books assumed great responsibility. A bookie might have to take a fall with the police, because the syndicate said so. Sometimes a bookie had to accept a bet on a fixed match, understanding that he would absorb a loss, perhaps one that would put him out of business. Why? “Sometimes to stay alive,” says one of Eaton's operatives. “This is not a rational market.”

Eaton's investigators discovered that over time, organized crime had developed algorithms similar to Sportradar's, writing code to monitor the betting market for weaknesses. They watched how the money flowed, timing when to place their bets. “Sportradar is a big company, with big turnover,” says one of Eaton's investigators. “But in organized crime terms, they're not even on the map. If you want to throw forty million dollars at it, organized crime will throw four hundred million. Everything's relative to the amount of money that you have and the amount of expertise that you can buy.” As Sportradar and others pushed the market toward sophistication, the syndicate outdistanced them, evolving its technology for speed, to be able to place bets as quickly as possible, their models the speed traders of the financial markets.

Eaton's men learned that the syndicate would put together a betting team for big fixes, a chance to put massive money into the market. Speed was essential. They had devised a system by which one worker could place 127 bets in three seconds, the wagers varying from $500 to $5,000. Timing was as critical. If the betting team flooded the market for a red card in the eighty-­fifth minute, laying thousands of bets in three seconds, the bookmaker wouldn't be able to react. Sportradar's algorithm would pick up the inconsistency, but too late for anyone to do anything about it.

Sources talked about Russian organized crime and the way it was evolving. Russian criminal leaders had started recruiting indigenous criminals in various countries, providing them with their organization's full backing—­financing, drugs, women, weapons—­marrying foreign elements into a previously closed brotherhood. By fostering this transnational unity, the Russians had expanded their reach globally, rivaling the Triads for supremacy. The bosses in the betting syndicates were always either Chinese or Russian. Everybody respected the South Koreans for their rigid criminal discipline. A name that frequently surfaced was Dawood Ibrahim, India's most powerful criminal, whose so-­called D Company syndicate ruled the fixing of cricket in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Government immigration files revealed that Singapore's Tamil fixers often visited India, and Eaton's men found it of professional obligation to consider this something other than a coincidence. They traveled to Manila to investigate the advantages of lax government regulation. “Once you have a legitimate front, you can approach legitimate business, as well as take money from organized crime,” says one of Eaton's investigators. “There are a lot of companies out there that are backed by the Triads. You'll never find out who's actually behind them.”

They traveled to Macau, the casino capital of the world, a choppy hour-­long ferry ride from Hong Kong. They examined the Wynn casino, walked the main floor of the Sands. They saw how this differed from Las Vegas. Nobody was drinking. The low limits looked like high limits, fifty dollars the minimum. There was no energy in the room. This wasn't entertainment. This was gambling, though it wasn't the most serious gambling of all. On an upper level, behind frosted glass, that's where the junkets played out.

Triads controlled the junkets. A Chinese gambler would deposit cash into a Triad account on the mainland. Then he would join a small group of high rollers for the trip to Macau. The Macau casinos counted on these whales for 70 percent of their bottom line. Behind the closed doors of the junket, the casino answered all needs and urges, and the gambling was constant. The casino would give the gambler a stack of chips, his stake against the cash he had deposited on the mainland. At the end of the night, or at the end of the weekend, or the week, if the gambler was in the black, the casino would cut him a check for the total. If he was in the red, the Triads would kindly inform him to cover arrears.

For the match-­fixing syndicate, the junket was the endpoint of the field activities of Wilson Perumal. Junkets at Macau casinos were a revolving laundry. When the criminal used the fix to win on illegal Chinese sportsbooks, he had to find a way to make that money legal. He would transfer it to a mainland Triad account, then head to Macau on a junket. With chips in hand, he wouldn't even have to gamble. But if he wanted to fit in, he could mark out a place at the roulette wheel. He could place half of his chips on red, the other half on black. When the ball found its slot, the casino paid out, taking its cut. Then he could cash out, receiving his clean casino check from a legitimate casino account.

The only way to get in was to dive in. Eaton's ICSS operatives were passing themselves off as gamblers looking for a fix. They had $25,000 to throw around. The plan was to get advance warning of a fix from the syndicate contacts they had made while working for FIFA. With that information, they would place their $25,000 on the proper match, and in the proper way. If they did that a few times, they would build their stake. Eventually they would have the kind of cash that would get them in front of an influential bookie, not the one who finally arrived at the Jakarta café, looking like he was in the middle of a weeklong bender.