These organizations weren’t hard to identify. Perumal signed contracts with not only Sierra Leone, but also Bolivia, El Salvador, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and others, paying them as much as $100,000 in return for the right to select the officials who would referee the international friendlies that he would arrange. Perumal would also handle travel, accommodation, TV rights, and sponsorship, insinuating himself into the federations at multiple levels. The struggling federations soon found themselves suddenly wealthier, and playing against high-profile clubs in the kinds of matches that would draw liquidity to the international betting market, if also a curious amount of red cards and penalty kicks. Perumal knew what he was doing. So did many federation officials, who either turned a blind eye or became actively involved. Meanwhile, Perumal built relations with not only refs and administrators, but players, coaches, and anyone else who might be able to influence the outcome of a match.
It was easy. Once Football 4U had forged an agreement with a national federation, together they targeted an unwitting opponent, then paid a FIFA match agent to sanction a friendly or a series of friendlies. At that point, bookmakers would list the matches, and Perumal was in business.
Perumal’s communications with officials from the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) revealed his opportunistic zeal. Perumal claimed to have found a willing partner in Henrietta Rushwaya, the CEO of ZIFA, and that the two discussed numerous opportunities, including Zimbabwe’s October World Cup qualifier match against neighboring Namibia.* By the middle of 2008, Perumal and Rushwaya were negotiating a friendly between Zimbabwe and Iran. In advance of the CAF Champions League, Africa’s equivalent of the UEFA Champions League, their communications intensified. On August 17 and August 30, 2008, the Dynamos Football Club, from the Zimbabwean capital of Harare, would face Cairo’s Al Ahly, the biggest club in Egypt. Writing from the account of his then girlfriend, Aisha Iqbal, Perumal sent Rushwaya the following email, on August 4:
Subject: Re: Friendly international with Iran
Hello, Maam
How are you doing. Please keep me posted on the Dinamo’s [sic] game with AI Ahli [sic]. We want 2 goals in each half and you can get 1 goal after conceding the 4th goal. Reward will be 100,000 US dollars. You will have to take your cut from this sum. CAF champions league is not very popular yet and that is the reason why it will not fetch more than 100,000.
I can influence the match against Namibia in your favour leave that to me. Please ensure your team gets adequate match practice to ensure a safe passage into the next round. There is close to 500,000 US dollars if your team can go to the next round. Please arrange friendly matches with european nations even if it falls in 2009. airfare will be taken care of.
I have some youth tournaments comming up in november. Do you have a U21 boys team. Please assemble 1 if you dont.
Thank you.
Raj
Please keep me posted on the Iran match.
In its essence, Perumal’s new strategy was no different from his first fixes back in Singapore’s Jalan Besar Stadium. The difference was the amount of money he was handling. He was now in the big leagues.
CHAPTER 10
SINGAPORE, GOODWOOD PARK HOTEL, 2007
Dan 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 pla
yers, 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
Qatar 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.
The Big Fix Page 8