The Big Fix (3 page)

 

CHAPTER 4

KUALA LUMPUR, 1990

R
ajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadiums of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was—­controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-­renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-­model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-­five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn't have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy's muscle engaging in one-­sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-­Internet racket.

As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world's tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-­time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.

The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn't be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn't tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.

The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few ­people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, ­people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.

Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren't clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn't control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn't need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.

Perumal's profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn't back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you're bound to lose big, especially when you're not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn't know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn't confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.

T
hey said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn't mind letting ­people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-­fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful ­people in Malaysia.

Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy's enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss's place near Yishun Park, in Singapore's Sembawang district. It didn't take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.

Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.

Perumal wasn't sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-­Singaporean horse-­racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn't cover a large soccer bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore's bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.

Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy's fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy's side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.

Perumal watched and learned how fixing was done at the highest level. How to approach a player in false friendship. The way to pay him far greater than the competition, in order to poach him. How to use women to trap players. How to develop a player, then pull strings to get him transferred to a club under your control. How to threaten someone else in the player's presence, so that he would get the message without feeling in danger himself. How to take a player shopping, buy him some clothes, some shoes, make him feel special, as you would do for your girlfriend. How to follow through on a threat if a player resisted your demands.

Perumal also saw that even a figure as important as Kurusamy still had to bow to the Chinese in gambling circles. The Chinese ultimately held every big ticket. Not only did China have the largest mass of ­people the world, as well as a rising economy, but it also had the strongest organized crime network in Asia, the Triads. All down the line in the bookmaking business, Chinese controlled everything of worth and importance.

Kurusamy was undeniable, but he was not the only one. Perumal watched teams staying in the same hotel get friendly with one another. Club officials had drinks together in the lounge. One team needed a win to advance in the tournament. The other team had already gained the next round. Money exchanged hands. Or sometimes just the promise of a return favor. It was easy. No victims. It was just the way things were done in Asian soccer. To Perumal, it appeared that everybody was in on the fix, and that nobody was trying to stop it.

He watched players inexplicably miss the net on penalty kicks, and he knew why. The talk was in the market, and if you listened to the talk, you could make some real money. But the money was fleeting. It came and went. Whatever he made fixing, he ended up betting on English Premier League matches, on UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League matches. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost, because he never knew how those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.

In his own fixes, Perumal was learning the valuable lessons of experience. He learned that the fix was not always easy to complete. Players were unreliable. They wouldn't follow directions. They would score when they were supposed to be scored upon. They were sometimes hungover, or they just didn't care. Perumal would watch as the clock wound down on a match, and all he needed was his chosen team to let in one more goal, but sometimes it just wouldn't come. He would harangue the players, but it was clear that even though he paid them money, they didn't feel like they owed him anything. To them, he was just a small-­time criminal. He couldn't control them. He was missing something.

Perumal would escape it all at Orchard Towers, Singapore's “Four Floors of Whores,” a shopping complex that turned into a sprawling boudoir in the evening. Here there was business to be done. Perumal mingled with soccer players there, many of them foreign players, the high-­priced imports with the disposable income that Perumal was trying to secure for himself. As the European players tossed money around and as the girls laughed and wanted in on the action, Perumal sauntered into their circle. He approached one of the players, this time with a new strategy.

M
ichael Vana was Czech. Perumal knew him from watching Singapore's Geylang United matches. And from what Perumal could surmise, Vana was disinterested. At times, he was the strongest player on the field. At other times, it was hard to pick him out of the lazy back-­and-­forth of the play. As he spoke with Vana over the music at Orchard Towers, Perumal asked him to win.

Perumal had been fixing single games by compromising the defenders and goalkeeper, compelling them to allow the opposing team to score. Now he saw how the fix could work in another way, with a foreign player who was slumming, on the downside of his career, stuck in an Asian lower league for the nightclubs, the easy money, the women, not the glory that he had once imagined, but which had long faded from his aspirations. In those nights at the Orchard Towers, Perumal realized that the players were just like he was, living without a thought for tomorrow, concerned with money only to spend it. Perumal and Vana locked eyes in agreement over the flashing lights of the action.

Perumal instructed Vana to jog along with the rest of the players throughout a game, until that moment when he needed a goal. Perumal would then shout from the stands, like an impassioned fan. That was the signal, and Vana would exert himself. In the first game that Vana played for Perumal, he scored four goals. Vana easily controlled the intensity with which he played, especially since he was superior to the competition he faced. The partnership thrived. Things went well, so successfully and profitably that Vana started suggesting fixes. Perumal realized that he was not the only one getting addicted to easy money.

Perumal was liquid again, and he rejoined Kurusamy's poker game. He wasn't consistently winning at Pal's table, but he was bragging plenty. The Boss listened closely to what Perumal said, even if he didn't let on. And soon Vana had slipped through Perumal's fingers, gone to work for Kurusamy. Perumal was left with nothing besides a costly lesson in the fix. Players had fleeting loyalty. Fixing partners had none at all. Years later, such realities would upend the high life that Perumal had constructed for himself.