The Big Fix (8 page)

 

CHAPTER 10

SINGAPORE, GOODWOOD PARK HOTEL, 2007

D
an Tan knew about Wilson Perumal for all the wrong reasons. The horse-­racing bookie who had to leave town for a while, Dan Tan occasionally worked for Kurasamy's top lieutenant. In the '90s, Dan Tan had heard plenty in Kurusamy's company about how Perumal didn't pay his debts. But Dan Tan understood the changing face of the fixing business better than almost anyone else, and there were few ­people, like Perumal, who were in positions to capitalize on the new opportunities.

Dan Tan had been involved in some of the first efforts by Asian fixers to try to conquer Europe. While these attempts were unsuccessful, by 2005, Dan Tan had returned to Europe, as investigators in the Bochum trial would maintain, eventually fixing in Italy. It was a testament to the Singaporean's fixing competence and reliability that Italian organized crime found it profitable to partner with them. Ironically, it was Singapore's honest business reputation that attracted organized crime groups in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, and Slovenia.

These parties organized into a group of shareholders, pooling their finances and logistical resources. The syndicate used money carriers from Panama, Nicaragua, and Slovenia to traffic the cash needed to pay compromised players, refs, coaches, and administrators. Investigators later identified Dan Tan's and Perumal's involvement in first-­ and second-­division matches in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, and elsewhere on the continent. The shareholders eventually bought pieces of European clubs. German police subsequently identified the syndicate's involvement in a qualifier for the 2010 World Cup, between Finland and Liechtenstein, as well as a 2009 Champions League match between Liverpool and the Hungarian club Debrecen.

Dan Tan had manipulated matches, but he was more financier than fixer. He grasped the changing landscape in a way that no simple financial backer could. When Perumal got out of prison and embarked on his first international successes, Dan Tan recognized someone who might be good for business, no matter what had transpired between him and Kurusamy. Dan Tan was a man of business, not of emotion. Through a Malaysian syndicate runner they knew in common, Dan Tan summoned Perumal to a meeting.

As Perumal recounts it, the two met in the lobby of the Goodwood Park Hotel, a colonial-­era property on Scotts Road in Singapore. Dan Tan had boyish looks, his hair parted down the middle. He gave the impression of an earnest, aspiring businessman, rather than a sophisticated criminal. Perumal was impressed.

“I've known about you for a very long time,” Dan Tan said.

“I've also heard of you,” Perumal replied.

“You have crossed a lot of ­people,” said Dan Tan. “Never mind. We'll put the past behind us. We'll see what we can do together.”

Dan Tan financed Perumal for a few small-­scale fixes, as the two felt each other out. Perumal then went to Syria with Dan Tan's support. Players in the Syrian domestic league earned about $1,000 per month. Perumal offered several players $10,000 for a fix. The players proved more willing than capable, and three planned fixes failed. Dan Tan lost money on the operation, yet he continued to work with Perumal, their first big score a friendly between Bahrain and Zimbabwe. Dan Tan and Perumal, with their various skills and ever-­widening networks of contacts inside and outside the game, would go on to undermine the integrity of the sport on a massive scale. The syndicate provided all the benefits of cooperation, but this kind of cooperation brought its own risks. “If someone betrays the group or gains benefit only to himself at the expense of others, the other members of the group may cause really serious trouble to this shareholder,” Perumal would explain later. “By this, I mean they may put your life in danger.”

 

CHAPTER 11

A
new opportunity was about to arise, one that could make Wilson Perumal wealthier than he had ever imagined. Through Dan Tan's mainland Chinese criminal connections, the syndicate had come upon several new betting ser­vices. These were Triad-­controlled groups that utilized sweatshops across Southeast Asia. Rows of workers sat in front of computers placing $3,000 bets as fast as their fingers could press the keys, the wagers small enough and spread widely enough on enough credit cards to avoid detection by bookmakers both legal and otherwise. Whereas before, the most the syndicate could wager on a match without raising attention was roughly $1 million, depending on which teams were playing, now the total bet could top $5 million. The Singapore syndicate, through Dan Tan's contacts, afforded its European criminal partners access to this new opportunity, which only elevated the volume of business all of the shareholders could do together. If only the syndicate could hold, the potential for profit was boundless.

The players whom Perumal targeted were so receptive to an approach that the first question they would ask him was “How much?” Soon players, referees, and club officials from distant pockets of the world were doing likewise, calling Perumal and his lieutenants directly, their desire for side money was so acute. “Hey, we have a game next week,” they would say. “Let's fix it.”

One of Perumal's subordinates attended an international youth tournament in Kenya. At the opening of the competition, dignitaries entered the stadium in a solemn procession. Once they spotted Perumal's representative in the stands, they rerouted the procession, climbing the many stairs to greet the man, who placed one-­hundred-­dollar bills in the hand of each supplicant dignitary.

There was more business than anyone could handle. The fix was on at every level, from players to coaches to refs to federation officials. National coaches would call them from the sidelines during games, telling them, “We're about to let in a goal for you.” The head of one national federation called one of Perumal's subordinates while in London. “Oh, I've lost my wallet, and I'm here with my family,” the man said. “Could you lend me five thousand dollars?” The syndicate used imposter refs. Not that they needed to. It wasn't long before Perumal had more than ten FIFA refs on his payroll. At the African Cup of Nations, one of his associates claims, he fixed the entire tournament.

A few ­people involved in the fixing business had become international professional gamblers. Others gave themselves over to debauchery. Perumal was always after business, selling players on the advantages of being in his stable, entertaining them all over the world. He routinely took players to a brothel. The price at one of his haunts was $150. But not for the African player that Perumal once brought there. “The African guy comes out once he's finished,” says Perumal. “The guy who owns the place tells me $450. I say, ‘What? It's $150.' The guy says, ‘No, he did it three times.' ”

By 2009, Dan Tan had become Perumal's regular financier. Hidden beneath was the match-­fixing syndicate in Singapore, which, according to FIFA, was run by Tan and three other bosses whose legitimate businesses enabled them to fund the payouts and travel expenses that Perumal and his lieutenants required to enact the fix. These men worked in concert with one another, often using the international Hawala system, a sort of organized crime financial honor system, to move sums around the world without detection.

This financial backing put Perumal over the top, and it made him boastful. He once claimed that he was “in better control of the Syrian Football League than Assad was over his ­people.” And he found moral grounding in his activities. He styled himself as soccer's Robin Hood, his payments to compromised players in Africa, Central America, and the Middle East providing funding to buy homes, to send children to school, to secure medical treatment for old and ailing parents. “I would send these kids home from a friendly with ten thousand dollars in their pockets,” he says. “Do you know what that kind of money means to a young guy like that?”

As close as Perumal and Dan Tan had become, fixing was an entrepreneurial marketplace. Perumal was free to sell his proposed fixes to whoever wanted to back them. A Chinese financier offered him $100,000, and with this Perumal returned to Syria. When Dan Tan learned that all was going well in Syria, where he had lost considerable sums with Perumal in the past, he bristled.

Perumal was in Kuala Lumpur in August 2009, where he was overseeing a fix between Kenya and Malaysia, a scoreless draw. He was sleeping in his hotel bed when the door to his room burst open and a handful of men entered. Perumal had used a travel agency that Dan Tan owned, and he believed that Dan Tan had given his whereabouts to the man who stood over his bed. “You're here for the money?” Perumal asked.

Pal Kurusamy replied: “I'm here for the money.”

Kurusamy still held Perumal accountable for an $80,000 misunderstanding from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Thirteen years later, he had come to collect. Perumal had no choice but to settle the debt. Perumal and Dan Tan would continue to do business with one another—­there weren't many ­people capable of carrying out their elaborate business—­but any trust that had existed between them was gone forever.

 

CHAPTER 12

FIFA HEADQUARTERS, ZURICH, 2010

Q
atar was a tiny country of fewer than two million ­people. But its position along the hydrocarbon-­rich Persian Gulf gave Qatar access to the world's third-­largest natural gas reserves. It had the richest per capita gross domestic product in the global economy, more than $100,000. Because of this liquidity, the leaders of this small nation believed that they possessed the stature to host the World Cup. With desert heat and humidity beyond human endurance in June and July, the traditional staging time of the World Cup, Qatar, it would have seemed, hardly stood a chance. No matter. Officials with the country's soccer federation were doing all they could do in order to prove that they were honorable members of what Blatter persisted in calling “the football family.” By the time Eaton started his job at FIFA, Qatar's bid for the 2022 World Cup had made it to the final round of consideration.

Sensitive to any hint of impropriety at a moment of such opportunity, officials at the Qatar Football Association were interested to receive a provocative email on September 12, 2010, just five days after a questionable match between Togo and Bahrain. The letter, titled “4 NATION INTERNATIONAL U23 YOUTH TOURNAMENT,” read:

Dear Sir,

We are keen to organize a u 23 youth tournament in Qatar from 10 o 14 October 2010.

We are prepared to incur the airfare and accommodation cost for 3 visiting teams.

We will [be] grateful in [case] you can give us an appointment as soon as possible to discuss further on this matter.

Looking forward to your positive reply.

Qatari soccer officials weren't sure what to make of the email. It was rare to receive such a proposal from an unknown party. The sender of the email appeared already to have contracted three other teams for a tournament. And there was little time to arrange everything—­less than a month—­in a region, the Middle East, where the professional culture was not known for urgency. International soccer was a politicized world of intrigue and double-­dealing, with the World Cup worth perhaps $10 billion to the host economy. On the eve of voting for the 2022 World Cup, was this letter a ruse, meant to undermine Qatar's bid? The Qataris thought it best to investigate. And Wilson Perumal had made that easy, since he had signed his name at the close of the email.

Perumal's brazenness (he had sent the letter from his own personal email account) evidenced the fact that no one was pursuing him. He had nothing to fear. His email to the Qataris bore the markings of a typical Perumal fix: an overture to an out-­of-­the-­way country, an offer to arrange a series of international friendlies, a collapsed window of opportunity. This time, however, Perumal reached too far. The years of his fixing success had eroded his discipline. He made one critical mistake. He abandoned his well-­constructed strategy of approaching poor soccer federations, those likely to look the other way in exchange for the financial assistance that would rescue them from insolvency. Qatar may have had a low international profile, but it was no poor nation with an impoverished football federation. Money was the one thing that Qatar didn't need. Instead, it wanted respectability.

One week after receiving Perumal's email, Saud al-­Mohannadi, the general secretary of the Qatar Football Association, drafted a letter to Mohamed bin Hammam, the president of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). Bin Hammam was one of the most senior administrators in international soccer. Himself a Qatari, bin Hammam was a fifteen-­year member of the FIFA Executive Committee, which was meeting underground in the Zurich headquarters to determine which country would host the 2022 World Cup, an announcement that would come in less than two months. Citing the Togo-­Bahrain match, Al-­Mohannadi's letter read:

 

We would like to bring to your attention that the agent in question for this match is very much active and in contact with many associations and please find attached the recent email we have received from him with an offer for a friendly tournament.

We recommend that AFC can warn all member associations to be cautious when dealing with the alleged agent.

 

Bin Hammam passed along this letter to Jerome Valcke. In late October 2010, the letter wended its way to Eaton. “It rattled around the office,” he says. “Now that FIFA had a head of security, they had someone to give the letter to.”

After the World Cup in South Africa had finished without a serious breach, FIFA hired Eaton as its first head of security. He arrived at FIFA's Zurich headquarters, a $200 million steel and glass structure finished four years earlier. Two-­thirds of the building was located underground. The design reflected FIFA's bunker mentality. The organization was losing public confidence under increasing pressure over match-­fixing and internal corruption.

Eaton's desk was situated in the basement. Under Swiss law, employers were required to place their charges in sight of natural light. Eaton's office was lit by a shaft of daylight from the building's central atrium. Jerome Valcke, FIFA's secretary general, apologized to Eaton when he showed him to his new workspace. FIFA had been growing rapidly; there was just nothing else available.

Eaton didn't much care. He had plenty to occupy him. When he read Perumal's email to the Qataris, the name at the bottom of it meant nothing to him. Wilson Perumal was one of thousands of suspected criminals he had encountered in his police career. The only difference was that now Eaton was no longer a cop. He had no badge, no gun, no power to arrest. He knew nothing about how match-­fixing was accomplished, nor the identity of the influential actors in the market. Eaton was unequipped and uninformed, a crusader in the raw. Curiosity and enthusiasm were all he had.

He continued to receive evidence, including a letter of complaint from several Zimbabwean referees, which named Perumal. Eaton researched the company Football 4U. Another promotional company, Exclusive Sports, had been registered under Perumal's name in Singapore. Eaton learned that it now belonged to a taxi driver, who couldn't say why or for how much Perumal had sold it to him.

In his research, Eaton encountered various names and combinations of names connected to these front companies—­Anthony Raj Santia, Blapp Johnsen, Wilson Raj, Hedy Larsen, Perumal Raj—­and he struggled to bring order to it all. He found evidence in contracts and in press reports of Perumal's front companies operating in South America, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. In Africa, players and administrators referred to a match promoter named, simply, Raj. “These things were all happening in rapid fire,” Eaton says. “Perumal kept cropping up. The picture became clear quickly.” Eaton was learning Perumal's mode of operating. His companies generally paid a federation fee of $30,000 per match, plus expenses of $16,000. Match contracts invariably included no income stream for the company. They simply authorized Perumal to select referees. All payments were in cash. As Eaton pieced things together, his focus gradually shifted away from Robin Boksic. The Singaporean angle appeared even more insidious than the Croatian who had nearly infiltrated FIFA at the World Cup. Realizing how widespread Perumal's activities were, Eaton looked at a map of the world and thought to himself, “How does a copper do an investigation on this?” He needed help.

Eaton petitioned Valcke: he wanted to hire a team of investigators. Even though he had hired Eaton to manage operational security, and not to investigate, Valcke approved the request. FIFA was now showing signs that it intended to play an active role—­perhaps
the
most active role—­in combating fixing. Over the fall of 2010, Eaton assembled a team of investigators, former cops like himself, choosing his subordinates for their “high energy and high criminal hatred,” their affability, their ability to cultivate human sources. One Australian, an Englishman, and a Spaniard. He gave them free rein to operate in a “decentralized, bloody active way,” stationing them around the globe—­Kuala Lumpur, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. Eaton himself maintained his desk at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, though his passport pages began to fill with the stamps of the world as he coordinated the effort to map the shadow landscape of global match-­fixing. “FIFA was supposed to be a nice ending to my career,” Eaton says. “But I was busier than I had ever been before.”

Time and again through the last quarter of 2010, Eaton returned to evidence that appeared to incriminate Wilson Perumal. Besides Qatar and Zimbabwe, information pointed to El Salvador, Peru, and Costa Rica. “Perumal had left his footprints all over the globe,” Eaton says. “All this was retrospective. We were chasing the guy's tail. But the times between our arrival in a country and his departure were getting shorter.”

Looking more closely at the Americas, Eaton uncovered the involvement of Perumal's companies in suspicious matches in Argentina, Bolivia, and Panama. Eaton believed that Perumal's front company had infiltrated the Salvadoran Football Federation. Visiting San Salvador, along with his Latin America operative, Eaton confronted officials at the federation offices, one of whom, a former federation president, demanded six thousand dollars to talk. Eaton wasn't there to pay, or to make friends. He possessed evidence that the Salvadoran national team had fixed, among other matches, a 2010 friendly against the U.S. team, a 2–1 loss in Tampa, Florida. This was the beginning of an investigation that would take more than two years to complete.

The location of Eaton's FIFA office ultimately didn't matter, since he was rarely in it. The only way he was going to find Perumal, or Raj, or Wilson, or whoever this gathering phantom happened to be, was by doing it in the field. As Eaton stepped out of first class and into a balmy black sedan in another equatorial country, he would think to himself or even mutter it aloud: “the thrill of the chase.” To gather his prey in the present, Eaton was forced to go back in time, re-­creating Perumal's previous activities.