The Big Fix (4 page)

There was another lesson that was more valuable, though Perumal was not ready to learn it. Since Kurusamy had many influential ­people on his payroll in Malaysia and Singapore, he felt comfortable enough to boast. He had spent ten years in prison, starting in the 1980s, and through that despair had attained wealth and criminal authority. But he became too public. The king of this “victimless” crime hadn't figured on the pride of the victim. Kurusamy wasn't concerned about defrauding bettors or preying on the morality of the players on the field. But he would have profited by understanding that he was lampooning the state. In 1994, Singapore's Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB), the terror of local criminals, initiated a match-­fixing crackdown. Kurusamy was arrested.

He wasn't the only one. In September 1994, a Singaporean tournament called the Constituency Cup was coming up, and Perumal phoned a player, proposing a fix in the competition, offering $3,000. In light of the CPIB crackdown, the player reported the approach to police. The authorities researched the phone record. They traced the call to Perumal's residence, and in short order, Perumal had a new residence: prison. But in time, he would soon go further afield than he had ever imagined.

B
ail was Singapore's beautiful game, as Perumal and Kurusamy quickly gained their liberty while awaiting sentencing. But their business was shackled by the CPIB. Fixing was too hot in Singapore and Malaysia. The cash had ceased flowing. Kurusamy needed to find another way.

Kurusamy had no other way, no other place. He was uneducated. He spoke only passable English. He was not a man of the world. His world was the Malay Peninsula, with its government and police officials whom the Boss knew by name and shared history. Now this world was off-­limits to him. Kurusamy developed an idea. Like the many goods that flowed out of the Singapore port, one of the busiest in the world, export was the key to financial mobility. The Boss summoned Perumal. “Go to Europe,” he told him.

Perumal traveled on the passport of a friend, easily slipping off the island, breaking the bounds of his bail agreement. He traveled with a partner. The two flew to the United Kingdom, the center of world soccer, where the inhospitable weather surprised them. They weren't in Asia anymore, and they realized that they had wandered into the deep end of the pool. Back home, they had been suave operators. England neutralized any special powers they thought they possessed. They didn't know any players. They didn't know any cops or politicians. Wandering nearly without aim, they found their way to the training grounds of Birmingham, and of Chelsea, the latter one of the biggest clubs in the game. Like rank amateurs, Perumal and his partner posed as journalists.

This was the land of Ladbrokes and William Hill, a sophisticated, legal gambling market that provided the Englishman with a betting slip to heighten his interest in a match. But this had nothing on the Asian marketplace. Betting in Asia was not for fun, or even for watching a game. It was serious business, the business of cultural addiction, and it was about to grow exponentially, making the English market look like a child's hobby. The Singaporean, Indonesian, and Chinese had no favorite teams, just favorite bets, those that appeared winnable. These billions of ­people drawn together in identical behavior constituted an enormous market. Ladbrokes had the name, the veneer of English respectability. It had little more. The market and the power were Asian. But few ­people knew this. Not yet.

When Perumal approached players in Great Britain, they turned their backs on him, walked right past him, looked right through him. When he did happen to get close enough to players to make his proposal—­£60,000 to enhance a match—­players laughed at him, then reported him. Word got around, and soon coaches and administrators were running Perumal and his partner off their grounds. Most insulting of all: no one ever called the cops. They didn't take Perumal seriously.

Back in Singapore, Kurusamy was furious with Perumal's lack of results, though there was not much he could do. His trial was approaching. Perumal himself stood trial in January 1995. The court convicted him for match-­fixing and leaving the country on a false passport. He was sentenced to one year in prison.

When Perumal received parole, eight months later, little had changed. Match-­fixing was still too hot in Singapore. The country's international reputation was at stake. How could Singapore be known for best business practices when its most public events constituted a fraud? The CPIB set out to eradicate fixing in Singapore. The Boss still had to make his money. The United Kingdom had proven impenetrable, for now. But there was another market, and it was even bigger.

K
urusamy arrived in the United States flush with cash, connecting in New York for a flight to Atlanta. Perumal joined him, as did several others from a gathering Asian syndicate. The opportunity before them was worth a concentrated effort.

In Atlanta, they blended in with all the other tourists who were there for the 1996 Olympics. They hung around the hotels, the stadiums, and practice fields where they might encounter players for the sixteen national teams included in the soccer tournament. Olympic soccer was a jerry-­rigged competition that FIFA tolerated, so long as it wouldn't infringe on the popularity of the World Cup. After limitations on players' ages and levels of experience diluted the rosters, the result was a marginalized round-­robin that hardly did justice to an Olympics competition of the world's most popular game.

All the same, the betting on the Olympics soccer tournament would be worth the effort that Kurusamy and Perumal put into manipulating it. Five different cities in the eastern United States hosted the Olympics soccer competition. Kurusamy and Perumal traveled to one of the venues—­Birmingham, Alabama—­where the tournament's Group C played in Legion Field. There, according to Perumal, they approached Mexico's goaltender, Jorge Campos, one of the most well-­known players in the international game. The Singaporeans attempted to corrupt Campos, but he turned them down.

A partner of Kurusamy, a middle-­aged man whom Perumal knew only as “Uncle,” had made contact with players from the Tunisian national team before the games started. He claimed to have struck a deal with the team's defenders and goalie. Perumal couldn't be sure, but it appeared to him that Uncle wasn't exaggerating his influence over the Tunisian team, which lost all three of its Olympic matches, 5–1 in aggregate.

It was Perumal's first taste of success while abroad. He saw how it might be done, how you could approach national team players, how willing they were likely to be. And when he returned to Singapore, Perumal wished he had simply stayed in America.

Singaporean police had issued another warrant for his arrest. He spent the night in lockup at the CPIB holding pen. The following day, as officers escorted him to a car on the police grounds, Perumal slipped one of his handcuffs and ran for it. He tried to scale a fence, but it was too high, and the officers dragged him back to the ground. At court, a judge sent him down for two years—­plus extra time for attempting to escape custody. Police also picked up Kurusamy. The Boss ended up spending two years in solitary confinement.

When Perumal was released, in 2000, while those around him were excited about the prospects of the new millennium, his hopes were dim. He was thirty-­five years old, a convicted felon with no professional skills, no references, and no viable financial prospects. There was only one thing he had ever known how to do. And his time in prison, where he shared a small cell with a dozen men, where a small bowl served as his toilet and his drinking cup, this period had not caused him to develop his talents.

When Perumal consulted the schedule and noticed that a match between two S. League teams was a few days off, he got an idea. There was still too much heat on fixing. Perumal didn't trust the players. They were liable to turn him in, notifying the CPIB to save themselves. But there were other ways to influence the outcome of a match.

The strongest player for the Woodlands Wellington club was a Croatian import, a midfielder named Ivica Raguz. Perumal had watched enough Wellington matches to understand that the team's chances were largely dependent on Raguz's performance. If Raguz happened to miss a game, and if Perumal happened to possess this knowledge before a bookmaker knew that Raguz was going to sit, Perumal stood to gain. Perumal had always considered match-­fixing a victimless crime. The only ­people who got burned were the bookies, and they were dealing in such high volume that, Perumal rationalized, his manner of fraud made little impact. Perumal had developed a philosophy by which he was the patron of soccer's lost souls, the financial champion of players whom the establishment paid less than a living wage. Perumal was the one who augmented their salaries, made their lives possible. Financial desperation may have altered his character. Maybe it was prison. Or maybe the elaborate stories that he was telling himself and others were the convoluted justifications of someone who would indeed do anything to beat the system.

Perumal hired two Bangladeshi men to assault Ivica Raguz before Wellington's next match, against Geylang United. Perumal and a friend placed a bet, 30,000 Singapore dollars, on Wellington's opponent to win. Then they sat back and waited to hear from the Bangladeshis. But the call from the Bangladeshis, confirming that they had incapacitated Raguz, never came. Raguz was a large, heavily muscled man, and when the Bangladeshis saw him in person, they froze. They decided this job wasn't for them. But the bet had already been placed. Perumal had to do something. He had to do the job himself. With money on the line, and a crude sort of match-­fixing proposed, Perumal proved his industry.

He lay in wait in a stand of bushes near the Lower Seletar Reservoir, in northern Singapore, where Wellington's practice field was located. Perumal held a field hockey stick in his hand. He waited for some time before Raguz appeared. When Raguz did materialize, a teammate was by his side. This was Perumal's chance to abandon his plan. He hadn't yet crossed over from fraud to felony assault. His victims showed no visible bruises. He hadn't threatened anyone's health or livelihood. But desperation outweighed all concerns. Perumal didn't want to miss the chance. He stepped out of the bushes, approaching the men from behind. He swung his field hockey stick, striking Raguz on the right knee with the dull, hard wood. Raguz and his teammate managed to escape, but the damage was done. Raguz didn't play against Geylang United, and the bet came off.

Perumal had little time to enjoy his winnings. A few days after the match, police arrested him on assault charges. He spent another year in prison.

W
hen he was released, in September 2001, Perumal kept to himself. He felt like a pariah. He kept away from the few friends who continued to associate with him. Fixing was off-­limits, even if he had wanted to revive his connections in that world. But he had to earn a living somehow. Regular work was not an option for Perumal. He had never held a traditional job. With his criminal record, he would not have been able to find honest work that equaled his conception of himself. Instead, he opted for credit card fraud. Match-­fixing had earned Perumal fairly light sentences—­six months, a year. Considering fixing's financial potential, the risk of such limited prison time seemed worth the gamble. However, institutional financial crime was serious business in Singapore. When the bank that Perumal targeted traced the source of the fraud, it was easy to identify the perpetrator.

Perumal was too poor to hire an attorney, and he instead represented himself at trial. Because of Perumal's previous escape attempts, the judge ordered him to wear handcuffs in court. It was humiliating. And inevitable. Perumal wasn't surprised when he was convicted of fraud. He understood the evidence. He also figured that his days as a match-­fixer were over. He had already begun to conceive of how he was going to make a living when he got out of prison. But all of this thinking stopped, as he was staggered to learn of the penalty he would have to pay. When the judge pronounced a judgment of four years, Perumal wanted to hide his face in his hands. But he couldn't, since he was shackled.

 

CHAPTER 5

C
hris Eaton was at the wheel of his Ford Fairmont. The headlights up ahead belonged to a refrigeration truck that was crossing over into his lane. Eaton had little time to react. Instinctively, he swerved to the right. Eaton was driving in the left lane, as is the way in Australia, in a right-­hand-­drive car. A simple twist of the steering wheel. Debbie, mercifully asleep against her pillow, accepted the force of the collision. Everything transpired at highway speed.

Ian's front teeth were knocked out, and his face was severely lacerated. Eaton's daughter, Sarah, was just fine. At the door of the ambulance, parked across the M31 highway, Eaton looked on. He knew the protocol. He was a cop. He had looked the victim in the eye before, delivered the news. The victim was the last one to hope for a good outcome, and Eaton knew better than to do that now. He watched the paramedics work, and he knew. The whip of the crash had snapped Debbie's brain stem. She was gone. “Life was to be lived for Debbie,” Eaton says. “Which was good, since she had such a short life.”

Eaton was a widower at twenty-­nine, with two young children. He couldn't handle the variable hours of shift work any longer, nor long-­term investigations. He had to find stable work. This is how the man who wasn't suited to be a bureaucrat became just that, joining Australia's federal police union, eventually becoming its chief. He thrived in the union, learning how to operate in a political environment, though a rough-­and-­tumble Australian one, aided by what he had endured. “I developed a healthy cynicism as a result of the tragic parts of my life,” he says. “It made me see the realities of life for what they were.” Eaton remarried, and with his second wife, Kathie, he had twin daughters. He spent the rest of the 1980s and '90s gaining administrative experience, an Aussie cop for life, it appeared, until an unexpected opportunity arose, expanding his policing portfolio in ways he had never imagined.

I
n 1999, at the age of forty-­seven, Eaton broke from his established career path, challenging himself in a foreign world. He joined Interpol. Headquartered in Lyon, France, Interpol was the eyes and ears of international law enforcement, the second-­largest intergovernmental organization in the world, after the United Nations. Interpol didn't arrest suspects. It served a more critical function in the modern, globalized environment. Interpol was the one agency that could serve as a liaison between various national and local police forces, a hub of international criminal intelligence. When a suspect fled one country for another—­or, worse, one continent for another—­Interpol was instrumental in tracking this person and connecting the relevant policing agencies in order to apprehend him. Interpol was like an international FBI, which made sense to Eaton, from his study of J. Edgar Hoover. As international borders, especially European borders, disappeared, as technology shrank the world, Interpol's role enlarged.

However, when Eaton arrived, Interpol was technically behind the times, and woefully so. The agency still dispatched messages to foreign branches by telex. Among various initial jobs, Eaton managed the implementation of a new communication protocol, Interpol 24/7, which replaced the telex system. He worked as the chief of staff for Interpol's president. All the while, he attended a school of new social and professional manners. He had come from a continent unto itself. Australia in its isolation produced some of the most professional, energetic, and cooperative police officers in the world. But they had limited experience globally. They knew a little about Southeast Asia. But for Eaton, this didn't compare to the astounding complexity of working in Europe, with its sophistication, with its fifty countries and dozens of languages, customs, and legal codes.

At Interpol, Eaton also mixed with African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and American colleagues. A great reader, he now became a great listener, coming to understand what other cultures valued, how they operated. He made quick friendships with his counterparts from Germany, Austria, Russia, Thailand. Eaton further burnished his international credentials when Interpol lent him to the United Nations' independent inquiry committee, which was investigating the Iraqi Oil-­for-­Food program. Working under Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Eaton traced the sources of Saddam Hussein's wealth. Eaton had come a long way from the beat in St. Kilda. He was learning the skills that would transform him into a cop who could capably and imaginatively combat an international criminal conspiracy.

Eaton had come to the attention of Ron Noble, Interpol's secretary general. A tenured professor at the New York University School of Law, Noble had served as an undersecretary at the U.S. Treasury Department before coming to Lyon. He was credited with sweeping structural reform that revitalized Interpol after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But he was frustrated. Interpol's Command and Coordination Center was brand new, a reaction to the rising global terrorist threat. It was designed to be the room through which all of Interpol's critical information flowed in up-­to-­the-­minute fashion. In practice, the center was underutilized, noncritical, an underperforming asset. Noble recalled Eaton from the UN in order to fix the problem.

Noble knew that Eaton was a talented administrator. Eaton was aggressive. In pressure situations, he acted calmly, asser­tively, insulating his subordinates from distraction and giving them the assurance to perform. When he returned to Lyon, Eaton went about transforming the command center into the innovation that Noble had envisioned. In short order, the command center became a hive of activity. A massive screen hung on the main wall, and it displayed the status of active incidents and investigations from across the globe. Operators at individual desks communicated to international police agencies in Russian, French, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic. The world of crime and cops generated an intense, unending flow of information, which Eaton's seventy-­five charges coordinated with increasing adeptness. A serial killer on the loose in Southeast Asia, a terrorist incident in Africa, a drug suspect arrested in South America, a prison break in the Middle East. As Eaton's daily attention switched from terrorism to organized crime to genocide, he learned the value of sharing live operational information with the ­people who could utilize it to put an end to the victimization of others.

When this sharing didn't happen, Eaton grew furious, then morose. He watched in disgust as national police agencies greedily hoarded information about a Swiss pedophile who had traveled around Europe on a thirty-­year killing spree. This only confirmed Eaton's belief in the need for international cooperation. It didn't matter who got credit for solving a crime or making a collar. All that mattered was getting it right in the end.

Within a few years, Interpol's command center had become the single most important repository of operational data and information in all of international policing. Cops in the field contacted the command center because they believed that Interpol—­through Eaton, its manager of operations—­would react with the information and assistance that would make a difference in their investigations. Each day, as Eaton scanned the command center's big screen of human frailty, he knew that he was harboring a secret frailty of his own.

E
aton took some getting used to. Colleagues who met him for the first time often found him crass, direct, a little touchy. But once the heat rose in the command center, these same ­people discovered that there were few senior Interpol officials who were more capable, more fraternal.

Eaton displayed a striking, fundamental dedication to the job. Most ­people who worked at Interpol were there by appointment, on temporary assignment while still employed by national policing agencies. They were there to make professional contacts, to pad their résumés—­there for an education in French wine—­until their real bosses called them home. Eaton was an Interpol employee, so he had a stake. But there was something more. “Always remember what you're doing this for,” he would routinely tell those in his charge. “What you're trying to do is help the police officer in the field.”

One night, Eaton was leaving work, making his way around the command center to shake hands with each person on duty, as was his custom. Word arrived of a South American prison break. When Eaton learned that one of the escapees had shot and killed a cop, he hung up his coat. He slumped in a chair, identifying with the victim.

He phoned one of his underlings, whose expertise he required in order to dispatch the Interpol notices that would aid in the search for the suspects. The employee said that she was home, and that she would come to office once she had finished her dinner. “The only reason you have food on your table is because of these police officers,” Eaton told her. “Get your ass in here. Now.” Eaton's professional behavior left no doubt that he was operational, not political, and come what may.

When his passion was inflamed, Eaton's voice would boom. His words would come out in a high-­vocabulary jumble, and it might be hard to understand him, especially if you weren't a native English speaker, which was true of many at Interpol. Although his arguments were often correct, the bluntness of his debating style derailed him from a path to the top jobs in Interpol's highly political environment.

Often over the years, he and Ron Noble differed. Yet they retained mutual respect. One night over dinner in 2008, Noble told Eaton: “You might be the only person who is more loyal to Interpol than to me.”

Eaton “aspired to leadership at Interpol,” but he was not obtuse. Such a determined cop, such a disinclined politician. His fundamental political flaw was what made him operationally effective. He was unforgiving. But he was not perfect.

He had had a liaison with a Frenchwoman he had met in Lyon. In secret, there was a daughter. Eaton's marriage to his second wife, Kathie, ended—­though, he says, not acrimoniously. The two remain in cordial contact today. “My wife was a good housekeeper,” he says. “She kept the house. She deserved it.”

Approaching sixty, Eaton's career had stalled, advancement at Interpol closed off to him. His personal life was an open question. But unlike many others of his age, he was not unduly discouraged by the future. He believed he had more to do. He had energy. He was an expert in not only the way that international organized crime operated, but also the way that international police did its business—­and how it might cooperate more effectively in combating global conspiracy. Eaton had acquired the knowledge and skills that come to only the adept, energetic, well-­placed international policeman. All he needed was a place to apply them.