The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  Praise for THE FIX by DECLAN HILL

  Winner of the 2009 Play the Game Award

  “The Fix is a ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism of a kind almost never seen in sport. It contains the necessary mix of love for its subject and ice-cold analysis to function as an effective remedy against an illness that threatens to eradicate sport as we know it.”

  – Jens Sejer Andersen, Director of Play the Game, an international conference and website for sports debate

  “[This book] is one that any lover of soccer really should not ignore.”

  – Fox Sports

  “A book I cannot recommend highly enough.”

  – Lawrence Donegan, The Guardian

  “Excellent book! Top research, clean prose, beautifully paced.”

  – Financial Times

  “Sensational…. fascinating reading.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “A wake-up call for those in authority in football, and a call to arms for all of us who love the ‘the beautiful game.’”

  – Steven Powell, Director of Policy & Campaigns, Football Supporters’ Federation (England & Wales)

  “The Fix is only the second football book, after Jennings’s Foul, worthy of sharing the shelf with Yallop’s How They Stole The Game. This book has me reaching into the depths of my own memory for any unappreciated signs of its existence in the world I was proudly a part of for so long. Declan Hill, many may fear, has produced an account of major significance.”

  – Shaka Hislop, ESPN soccer commentator and former English Premier League and World Cup goalkeeper

  “… written with elegance and verve. Declan Hill has announced himself on the world stage with nothing less than a total triumph. No one who reads this will ever watch a match the same way.”

  – Joe McGinniss (author of Selling the Presidency and The Miracle of Castel di Sangro)

  To Mum, for teaching “never give up” even when my team was losing 8-0.

  CONTENTS

  Note about Language

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Introduction The Birds of Prey

  PART I ASIA: THE STORM CLOUDS

  Prologue

  1 The Conquest of the Locusts

  2 “What the Hell Do You Think You’re Doing?”

  3 Experts in Verbal Bullshit

  4 Missing the Big Boys

  5 Keeping the System Turning

  6 The Mob, Trust, and Serious Reprimands

  7 The Collapse of the Betting Line

  PART II EUROPE: A NORMAL WAY OF BUSINESS

  Prologue

  8 The Arrival of the Locusts

  9 The Golden Age

  10 To Fix or Not to Fix?

  11 How to Fix a Soccer Game

  12 Sex and the Men in Black

  13 The Guns are Facing the Wrong Way

  14 No Point in Going Out There

  PART III THE WORLD CUP

  Prologue

  15 The Story of Pal

  16 Behind the Door

  17 The Set-Up

  18 A Small Town in Germany

  19 The Gold Coast

  20 I Swear, I’m Innocent

  21 Who Guards the Guardians?

  Epilogue: The Salvation of Soccer

  Photo Inserts

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  NOTE ABOUT LANGUAGE

  The cultural gap between Europe and North America is never bigger than when discussing the world’s most popular sport. To Europeans, the sport is football and there is no other possible word. To North Americans, football is what men with shoulder pads, tight pants, and helmets play and the other sport is called soccer. In this book, I have tried to be consistent and call the sport soccer wherever possible. However, there are certain proper names – European Football Associations, FIFA, UEFA, etc. – where the word football is necessary. I have also not changed the interview excerpts: if a person used football or soccer I have kept the original usages. I have included certain words that are part of the universal language and lore of soccer. Most North Americans play soccer games or matches on either a field or a pitch. I hope the reader will understand when I use both.

  PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  This story is about the battle between good and evil that is at the heart of international soccer.

  Emmanuel Petit, World Cup–winning French midfielder.

  It begins with a murder. Actually, it begins with two gruesome, bloody murders. On August 9, 2008, in the northern English town of Newcastle, the bodies of Kevin Zhen Xing Yang, a good-looking, friendly Chinese graduate student, and his girlfriend, Cici Xi Zhou, were discovered in a small flat near the city centre. Yang and Zhou had not simply been killed but tortured for hours before their deaths: his throat was slashed, her head smashed in three places. The police were mystified. The couple seemed to be popular. They had lots of friends and no apparent enemies. The case seemed unsolvable, until the police discovered Yang’s real career. He was not, as he had told immigration authorities, a graduate student, but part of an international gambling ring. Yang’s job was to organize other young Chinese living in the UK to monitor British soccer games for the multibillion-dollar illegal Asian gambling market. They would go to the stadiums, watch the games, and provide live commentary on their mobile phones back to Asia. It was a clear, simple and very well-rewarded task, but somewhere, some how, Yang decided to betray his employers.

  When the mob decides to kill, what they do with their victims’ bodies sends a clear signal to the rest of the world. Most people disappear, ending up in anonymous cement holes or piles of acid-made dust dumped into a harbour. But for traitors and betrayers there must be a public demonstration of the power of the mob. Yang and Zhou got made into a message. Their mutilated bodies were symbols of what happens to those who betray a powerful, criminal industry.

  English police caught a man who had been at the house. He had blood on his clothes and Yang’s watch and computer. His defense was that he was simply renting a room in their apartment. He had been forced to open the door to the murderers and was tied up, terrified, in the bathroom while the torture and murders were going on. Despite this story, he was convicted and sentenced to thirty-three years in jail, but no one, not the police, not the judge, not the victims’ families thought he was the brains behind the killings nor that he had acted alone. The judge said at the trial that he thought the defendant was too frightened to reveal who the other killers had been. To announce this finding, the English police held a public press conference. It was largely ignored in their own country and in the rest of Europe. However, it was broadcast live to China. There, an estimated five hundred million people tuned in to watch the event, or five times the number who watched the 2008 Super Bowl.

  Kevin Yang, Cici Zhou, and their murderers are part of an international revolution. A global phenomenon of gambling and match-fixing that is transforming societies and destroying sports around the world. Many of the leagues in Asia, where it started, and Eastern Europe, have effectively collapsed because of this corruption. Now, the fixers are coming to Western Europe and North America and they are fixing hundreds of games.

  A reader might be thinking, “Say what!? A multi-billion-dollar illegal gambling market? Five hundred million people watching what? Hundreds of fixed matches? This is too much!” I would not blame you if you did think that. When I began my research seven years ago, I knew little of this industry or its power. I was extraordinarily skeptical. This book is a record of what I discovered. It will explain to you how the industry functions and why the fixers have been so successful. You will read about hundreds of fixed matches in dozens of differ
ent countries around the world. You will read about pistol whippings, kidnappings, and murders. You will read about the good men who have tried to fight against this tide of corruption and how they have often been marginalized, sacked, imprisoned, or killed.

  In short, you will read about the two greatest scandals in world sports today. You will read that there is a gang of fixers linked to organized criminals who have fixed some matches at the biggest sports tournaments in the world.

  There has been a major European police investigation motivated, in part, by the first edition of The Fix and the controversy generated by the book. The investigation was launched by the organized crime team of the Federal Police in Bochum, Germany. The detectives listened to thousands of hours of covertly recorded telephone conversations. They placed dozens of people under surveillance and worked around the clock to try to uncover the true extent of the fixing network. After more than a year of this work, at exactly 6:24 a.m., on a cold November morning in 2009, hundreds of policemen across Europe moved in and arrested dozens of suspects. Over the next few days, they announced the preliminary findings of their work: two hundred suspicious matches across nine countries, and one hundred different players, referees, coaches, league officials, and gangsters were suspected of being involved. Over the ensuing weeks, the number of suspicious games and players involved climbed. It was a new type of globalized corruption that stretched across countries and continents: a fixer living in Germany, allegedly controlling players living in Switzerland, Turkey or Greece, defrauding the illegal gambling markets in Hong Kong and Malaysia with the help of assistants in London and Holland.

  The games under suspicion range from matches in the prestigious Champions League down to youth-level games played by adolescents in local parks. Even the hapless Canadian national team was unwittingly involved. In November 2009, a few weeks before the arrests were made, the Canadians had lost 3-0 to a weak Macedonian team. It was not that the Canadians had lost to such pitiful opposition that aroused the suspicions of the investigators, but that the match had featured four penalties. Four penalties is a lot for a soccer match; most games do not even feature one. Stranger still was that on the Asian illegal gambling market, someone had placed a very large bet on there being at least three goals and the exact number of penalties awarded. When news of the “irregular betting patterns” on the number of goals and penalties emerged, UEFA, the organization that runs European soccer, decided to both investigate and suspend the referee.

  This book introduces you to some of the key fixers and shows you how they operate. You will read in Chapter 8 about a fixer from China who in 2004 moved to Belgium. He was helped by a local Sicilian businessman and he fixed dozens of games over the next year in the Belgian top division. You will read in Chapter 11 about the depth of corruption in the Turkish league, how both players and club officials there were involved in numerous cases of match-fixing. In Chapter 12, you will read about the Sapina brothers, two Croatians living in Germany, who fixed a number of matches in the German leagues. In Chapter 14, you will read about William Lim, a Malaysian-Chinese, who in 2007 was convicted of fixing games in Austria. From Chapter 16 on, you will meet Lee Chin, a gangster-fixer living in Bangkok, who claims to have fixed dozens of high-level matches.

  Here is the headline: they are – according to the German police investigation – connected. Most of them know each other and phoned each other regularly. According to the prosecution report, and this has been untested in court, Sapina’s good friend and business partner was a fellow-Croat living in Nuremburg who was heard on secret surveillance tape talking about William Lim as “his good friend.” They even phoned Lim in his secret hideout in Europe. There is other evidence of the linkages between these convicted fixers. For example, in Lim’s copious police files and phone records, marked VNR ST/1528209/2005, there is a sheet of paper with the Belgian fixer’s phone number and the name of a well-known fixed match written on it. I want to stress that this is not a well-ordered criminal conspiracy. They do not have a strict hierarchy and clear structure. There is no Capo or boss of bosses ordering the rest of them around. It is simply a group of criminals doing what they do: sometimes colluding, sometimes competing with each other, but always looking for the next chance to profit by fixing a soccer game.

  Here is a second headline, and this strangely has not yet motivated a major police investigation: a similar gang of fixers has been operating at every single major international soccer tournament for at least the last twenty years. As you will read in this book, their record has been confirmed by dozens of different players, coaches, and senior sporting officials. These fixers have been present at the Under-17 World Cup, the Under-20 World Cup, the Olympic soccer tournament, the Women’s World Cup, and the Men’s World Cups. I believe they have successfully fixed matches at a very high level of international soccer.

  When The Fix was first published in September 2008, there was a big push-back against my findings. Much of that push-back was innocent. Many fans simply did not want to know bad news. It is like a patient hearing from a doctor that they have cancer. It is easier, in some cases, to deny reality than to admit what is actually going on. Now that the European police investigation is confirming much of what is written in this book, some fans are proceeding from denial to resignation, without going through combat. They are saying things like, “Well, it is only the small games in small leagues from small countries that are involved.” This is the attitude of the deliberately blind. It also avoids the question, What happens in five years? Star players do not emerge fully grown from the ground. Many players on big teams in the big leagues come from the very teams and leagues that have now been shown to be corrupt.

  Nor, if you are reading this book in North America, should you be too smug. It may all sound exotic and quaint, but this new form of sports corruption will come here. The amount of money in the Asian gambling market is simply too large not to start flooding into North American sports, even down to a very low-level. It is already here in a small way. I have spoken to a number of professionals in the Major League Soccer (MLS). They told me of other players working for gamblers – not fixing but just providing them with information, who was injured, who was getting on the bus, who was going to play well. This is where it starts. It is what is known as “a gateway crime,” and it means that in a few years, unless something is done to stop it, North America will have its own fixing scandals based on this new network of corruption.

  Strangely the attitude of deliberate ignorance does not stop with ordinary soccer fans; the push-back goes all the way to many top-level soccer officials. This is why I wrote earlier of the two greatest scandals in the sports world today. The first scandal is that gangs of criminals have been so successful at destroying so many soccer leagues and tournaments. The second scandal is that many sports officials, in charge of running those tournaments, have known of the presence of these fixers and chosen to take very little effective action against them. I am not saying that all games in all leagues should be suspected, nor am I saying that all sports officials are corrupt or have chosen to be complicit with corruption. The world of international sports organizations is a house with many rooms: most people in most of those rooms are hard-working, honest, decent people. However, many officials simply do not want to know what is really going on.

  This may seem extraordinary to a reader. Surely, everyone connected would want to do everything possible to stop corruption? However, some of the very top officials, the ones in charge of leading the organizations, have some very odd backgrounds. There is, for example, Grigori Surkis. In 1995, he was the president of Dynamo Kiev, the top team in the Ukraine at the time. Dynamo was thrown out of the Champions League, when some of its officials tried to bribe the Spanish referee for an upcoming game with fur coats. Two of Dynamo’s administrators were banned for life from the sport: Vasiliy Babiychuk, the general secretary of Dynamo, and Igor Surkis, Grigori’s brother and a board member of the club. A number of UEFA officials told me that af
ter they made this decision they had to receive police protection from who they thought were the Ukrainian mafia, presumably unconnected with the club. A few months later, UEFA changed its decision and Dynamo Kiev was allowed back into the competition the next year and the bans against Igor Surkis and Babiychuk were overturned. Igor Surkis has subsequently become president of Dynamo Kiev. However, in 2004, Grigori Surkis was officially banned from entering the United States for corruption and falsifying election results. Surkis claimed in an Ukrainian newspaper that the American charges “do not correspond with reality.” Certainly, they have not hindered his rise in the Ukraine where he is now both a politician and President of the Ukrainian Football Federation. Nor have they hindered him in the world of international soccer, for also in 2004, he was appointed to sit on the Executive Committee of UEFA – the board that runs the organization that runs all of European soccer.

  Another football association, another room. Since the publication of this book I have been asked by a number of European soccer officials to consult for their organizations. At best, the officials want to discuss how to put in place measures to stop match-corruption. There are lots of ways to do this – more women and professional referees, better pensions and education benefits for players, an integrity unit in each soccer association made up of ex-policemen. All of these things are relatively easy to do and many soccer officials are often ready and willing to listen to the ideas.

  However, at worst, the officials actually want to know who my sources are and how to get hold of them. Last year, I had a meeting with two prominent European soccer officials in a café that was one of those types of meetings. We spoke at length, and I told them that, like all good researchers, I would never reveal my sources. It is a principle of trust. One of the executives is a very honest and decent man. His colleague, who is from a European area renowned for organized crime, had a different attitude towards corruption than his colleague. He said, “Maybe the best way to deal with corruption is to bury it. Deny it exists. If too many people start to doubt the sport, what can we do?”