The Big Fix (9 page)

 

CHAPTER 13

SINGAPORE, 2012

O
ut of the pedestrian horde of a Singaporean shopping district, Dany Jay Prakesh appears, saying, “I think we have an eye for each other.” He takes a seat in a café and calmly orders an espresso. He wears a red Air Jordan T-­shirt and a diamond stud in each earlobe. He is in his late forties, and he is in noticeably good shape for his age. There is not a line on his face. One of Eaton's FIFA operatives once explained how Prakesh had eluded their surveillance following a meeting one afternoon. Prakesh sprinted through a hotel lobby, ducked down a ser­vice corridor, leapt over a retaining wall, and disappeared on the street.

Prakesh is friendly and engaging, an easy talker, as every match-­fixer must be. He brags about the number of goals he has arranged in a single match. He says that fixing is easy. “Anywhere there is a Central American player, or an African player—­even in Europe—­it's done.” He talks about his old friend Wilson Perumal and how they fell out.

Perumal was riding high, crisscrossing the globe, playing by his own rules, manipulating financial backers for his own gain. He slipped with impunity in and out of stadium locker rooms, nightclubbed with players, met with dignitaries who wanted to be his friend for pocket change. Perumal was an entrepreneur. He was also an operative for Chinese Triads, the Italian mafia, and Russian organized crime, the point man for a fraudulent, transnationally interconnected enterprise worth possibly billions of dollars per year. He would do anything to force the fix. With the boundless cash of the great Chinese economic boom at his disposal, Perumal was everybody's best friend, the one who made it easy to be vulnerable. He was the most high-­profile fixer in the world. But this is not a profession that favors publicity.

Perumal's merry-­go-­round stopped in Costa Rica. He had his hooks into the national soccer federation. He had a day to kill. He holed up in his hotel room and started betting. It wasn't enough for Perumal to bet on games that he fixed. For in this, there was no gamble. It was like playing solitaire. The man who specialized in guarantees found no thrill in the fix. He laid bets on the Chicago Bulls, on Manchester United, on clubs and contests he knew were not fixed. The same instinct that served him well in fixing a match—­reading players, feeling the nuance of the action—­benefited him when he wagered his money on the unknown outcomes of random games. “He was in that hotel room betting for twelve hours,” says Prakesh, “and he won one million dollars.”

A windfall is only a distraction from the fundamental reality that you are willing to risk it all. Perumal had been gambling so actively and losing so heavily—­“he lost ten million dollars in three months,” says Prakesh—­that he began engaging in a dangerous game.

T
he pressure was getting to Perumal when he walked out of Singapore's Changi Airport in May 2009 to find a security guard writing a ticket on his illegally parked Honda. “I gambled three hundred thousand dollars on one game,” he thought. “What is a ticket for two hundred dollars?” Money wasn't Perumal's problem. His problem was authority.

Perumal pleaded with the security guard, but the man ignored him, continuing to complete the traffic slip. When Perumal opened the driver's-­side door, the security guard slapped his wrist. “You're not supposed to drive away,” said the man. “I've called the police.” Perumal seethed. He had played tough with players, referees, coaches—­­people who were easily frightened by someone they perceived as a connected criminal—­and it usually worked. But when he turned on the security guard, the man stood firm. Perumal felt the blood rushing to his head. He walked back inside the airport to cool down. With all that he stood to lose, with his criminal past and his current criminal enterprise, Perumal would have been wise to take the traffic ticket and pay it. Instead, he returned to the Honda and attempted once again to open the door. The security guard rushed at him. Perumal stood his ground. The guard bounced off him. Prosecutors later determined that Perumal had used criminal force. He sped off the airport lot, the Honda's front corner panel grazing the security guard's leg.

Police arrested him on charges of assault. Perumal was convicted. Making special note of Perumal's criminal record, the presiding judge handed down a crushing prison sentence: five years. Perumal was devastated. For all of the hundreds of crimes he had committed, he had trouble accepting that this minor altercation with a security guard would cost him the most time of all. Perumal was forty-­four years old. He had only just resurrected his fixing career. He couldn't foresee what kind of man he would be after five more years of confinement. Singapore had spawned the world's most prolific match-­fixers, who roamed the world in their crimes, and the state did little about it. But Perumal's checkered past had awoken Singapore's judicial zeal. He thought about those five years, and he was determined not to serve them.

Post-­sentencing, temporarily free on bail, Perumal frantically searched for a solution to his predicament. Where was the loophole? He came up with an idea. He managed to get a replacement passport in the name of a friend, Raja Morgan Chelliah, but with Perumal's picture on it. If he could make it out of Singapore, he foresaw no problems. Even if the photo of the real Chelliah appeared on a computer screen of a customs official at a European border, he would be in the clear. “White ­people can't tell one Indian from another,” he thought. At home, there was another problem, though easily solved. Singapore passports include the holder's biometric print. Airport immigration officers were the only ones who checked for it. The checkpoints along the roads leading to Malaysia were not yet equipped with the optical imaging equipment that could read the passport thumbprints. He would travel by road.

Perumal had run before, and he had paid for it. He could only imagine what the penalty would be if police caught him this time. And if he did make it over the border, there would be another price to pay. No matter Perumal's hostility for its judicial system, Singapore was his home. His base of operations. His financial backing came from Singapore. He weighed his options, and found that he had only one. As he drove across the Johor Causeway and into Malaysia, he was again a free man, though now a fugitive. It was difficult to say what weighed more heavily on Perumal's mind: his mounting debts or this new priority, to avoid ever returning to Singapore again.

P
erumal needed to find a new home base. He moved to London, renting a one-­bedroom apartment near Wembley Stadium, paying six months in advance. In the year before the World Cup in South Africa, Perumal left his footprints across the international game. He had players, coaches, refs, national soccer federation officials, and political leaders in on fixes. He fixed league games, high-­profile friendlies, youth games, untelevised matches played on patchy grass with a dozen ­people in attendance—­whatever the Asian bookies offered, whatever was bound to initiate in-­game betting. Perumal worked in more than sixty countries. No one was tracking him and his crew of runners and bagmen. There was no legislation enacted to prosecute match-­fixing. And it was difficult to identify just who these match-fixers were anyway. European police received a tip about a fixer named Ah Blur, which was one of Dan Tan's aliases. When the authorities managed to locate a photo of him, it was fittingly out of focus.

Even when cops happened into a discovery, they didn't recognize it for what it was. Border police at Toncontin International Airport, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, stopped Jason Jo Lourdes and discovered $85,000 in his suitcase. He was traveling with the goalie for the Guatemalan team. Lourdes said that he was in the textile business, and that he was a bit of a gambler, hence his need for all the cash. On another occasion, border guards found $50,000 in his suitcase. Both times, Lourdes walked.

The halfhearted search for match-­fixers recalled the days before the FBI, before cooperation between neighboring police forces, when a criminal was home free the moment he crossed a state line. With no police pursuit, Perumal grew brazen. Bookies routinely employ spotters to relay information from untelevised matches as they happen. Perumal simply compromised several spotters, who then tricked bookmakers with regular updates from games that weren't happening. Nevertheless, these “ghost matches” were listed on international sportsbooks. Underscoring the fact that no one was monitoring their activities, Perumal and his partners created dubious names for the officials of their front companies—­Hedy Larsen and Blapp Johnsen—­the latter a reference, no doubt, to FIFA president Sepp Blatter. Perumal was laughing at the soccer establishment, and the soccer establishment didn't get the joke.

As Perumal bribed and lied and hoped each time for the fix to come through, the vagaries of the players and the field, and the knowledge of the sums wagered by the syndicates back in Asia, made fixing a nail-­biting affair. He would use a hat to signal the players during matches. If he turned his hat sideways, for example, it might mean that he wanted them to let in three goals in the first half. Perumal took advantage of the fact that FIFA sanctions all matches, but that many matches go off without sanctioning. The only thing that mattered was that the major legal and illegal books picked up a match, creating a betting market for it.

Perumal was interested in those who had no money at all, his search for impoverished soccer federations leading him and his lieutenants to the world's poorest places. “One time, I was led out into sugarcane fields in Trinidad with drug kingpins with guns,” Prakesh recalls. “I told my wife, ‘I don't think I'm coming home this time.' ” Mexico was the lone country they didn't operate in, for the cartels there didn't tolerate outsiders. Otherwise, they worked with the confidence that they could get to any team.

The success and international adventure cloaked a brewing darkness. Perumal brought the Zimbabwean national team to Malaysia for a pair of friendlies in July 2009. Zimbabwe lost the first match to Malaysia, 4–0. The syndicate profited from the fix, but the players were dissatisfied. Perumal hadn't paid them. During halftime of the second match, also against Malaysia, the Zimbabwean players argued with him. In the visitors' locker room at Shah Alam Stadium, one of the players said, “We're not coming out for the second half.” Perumal pulled his coat aside. According to investigators, a handgun was tucked into the waistband of his pants. “You may not be coming back from Malaysia,” he said. The players returned to the field for the second half, losing 1–0. Soon after the match, word spread that this was not the Zimbabwean national team, but a Zimbabwean club team called Monomotapa United. Perumal was taking new risks.

N
o location was too remote, no climate too extreme. Meganathan Subramaniam, who went by the theatrical alias of Simon Megadiamond, had, according to Perumal, been watching over the syndicate's operations in the Veikkausliiga, the Finnish first division. Perumal joined him at the grounds of the club Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS), located along the Arctic Circle, and there Perumal enacted a trusted strategy. Subramaniam had built a relationship with Christopher Musonda, the team captain, a Zambian who already had an acquaintance with fixing.
*

On the afternoon of September 24, 2009, Musonda rode his bike to a fishing hole along a river outside Rovaniemi. Musonda stood out in this whitewashed town along the Arctic Circle. He had emailed a picture to his family. Standing in front of a towering snowbank, he held a chunk of ice in his hand. He was a long way from home. But he wasn't alone. Four other players for the RoPS club were also from Zambia, as was the team's coach, Zeddy Saileti.

The RoPS captain, Musonda, pedaled up to the riverbank with two of his teammates. Saileti was already there, accompanied by three men whom Musonda didn't recognize. When the men spoke, in English, they did so with what sounded to Musonda like Eastern European accents. RoPS was scheduled to play a match against a club called TPS in a few days. Saileti explained that these three men wanted to make sure that the players understood what was supposed to happen. RoPS had to lose by a score of 4–2, or 3–1, or 3–0.

Saileti had driven to the fishing hole in a van. One of the Eastern Europeans, a large bald man, led Musonda inside the van, where he gave him €4,000, promising another €4,000 once the game was over. “But if the final score isn't what we expect,” he told Musonda, “I'm going to sink all of you in this van in the river.” The man wasn't laughing. Even though Musonda badly needed the money, he wanted to give it back. In the days leading up to the game, he couldn't sleep, “thinking what might happen if we did not lose the match.” To Musonda's relief, RoPS lost comfortably, 4–0. When Musonda and his teammates received an additional €1,000, instead of €4,000, they didn't complain. They realized that they had been used, but there was nothing they could have done. Worse yet, they had gotten a taste for easy money.