The Big Fix (2 page)

T
he 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 surely understood as they calculated in-­game odds for the Sharjah match.

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. 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 later discovered, the match referee had received a tip that the contest 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 soccer 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

SINGAPORE, 1983

T
he best soccer 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 soccer. 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 soccer 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 soccer 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 soccer. Everyone saw eye to eye, common understanding being the essential element of manipulation. He purchased two sets of soccer 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 soccer 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

W
ith 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 soccer 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 soccer'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. Soccer, 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.