by Declan Hill
At one point, the first executive excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he was gone, the second executive leaned across the table and said, “You spoke about trust at the beginning of our conversation. Well it also works the other way. In my home city I have lots of friends, of the type that you know. If you fuck us over, they will fuck you over, you understand?” There was a slight pause and then he laughed. I said, “Oh really? Well maybe your people should speak to my people.” And then we both laughed. When the other executive came back neither of us said a word about this conversation and they left soon afterwards.
A final note. You will understand that the research for this book has been dangerous. For that reason I have held back certain names, dates, and other information. After the publication, I placed complete files with two different lawyers in two different countries. I gave them specific instructions, if anything were to happen to me, that they should release all the details. I did this for my family and for my own protection. I hope you will never read those files. I hope that this book will do. I hope it will be enough to change the sport for good, forever.
INTRODUCTION
THE BIRDS OF PREY
July 17, 1994, was a hot, sunny Californian day. In the Rose Bowl, Pasadena, over 90,000 spectators had jammed themselves in to watch the final of the World Cup. On the field, the Italian and Brazilian national teams would fight it out for soccer supremacy, and a worldwide television audience estimated at more than two billion people watched them. Meanwhile, in the VIP section sat the cream of international society. Pelé, the man who had been the world’s best and most popular player, mingled among celebrities and political leaders such as Al Gore and Henry Kissinger. But in the box sat someone with a more controversial background – Anzor Kikalishvili. A U.S. Congressional inquiry and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would both name him as one of the top mobsters of Russian organized crime. He had been a communist government functionary, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became the president of an organization: the 21st Century Association. The 21st Century Association had bad luck with its presidents. Its last chief executive had been killed by a sniper’s bullet. The one before that had been murdered in a mafia shoot-out. 21st Century was reputed to offer protection (or “krisha”) to the other Russian “mafiyas” who offered krisha to the rest of the country. A month after the World Cup Final, an FBI investigation – attempting to stop Kikalishvili’s steady incursion into Florida – had wiretapped him threatening to skin a Florida couple like animals. None of the FBI investigators doubted his threats.
Anzor Kikalishvili probably felt quite comfortable with some of the other guests in the section that afternoon. At the centre of the box was João Havelange, then head of the Fédération Inter nationale de Football Association (FIFA). He had been named in 1994 by a Brazilian district attorney for his connections with “the country’s most notorious capo,” one Castor de Andrade, the head of an illegal gambling network estimated at $2.6 billion. A man who also had, according to Brazilian law enforcement, connections with top Colombian drug gangs. Near to him sat Vyacheslav Koloskov, then president of the Russian Football Union, an organization plagued by the problem of mafiya contract killings. Juan José Bellini, the president of the Colombian Football Federation, was not there. He could not make it that afternoon: one of the players on the Colombian team had been gunned down soon after returning from the World Cup. A year later, Bellini would be convicted of “illegal enrichment” and money laundering for the Cali cartel. FIFA is the world organization that runs soccer. All of these men were either members of FIFA or were guests at the biggest showcase of soccer in the world.
I met Anzor Kikalishvili in a Georgian restaurant in Moscow in the winter of 1999. He told me the story of how he had enjoyed watching the 1994 World Cup Final and how he loved sports, particularly soccer. I was there as an associate producer on a television documentary for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that was later broadcast for the American program Frontline. Since the 1994 World Cup, Kikalishvili had been banned from entering the United States, and he wanted to impress us as a reasonable and civilized man. He took us for dinner at a tiny restaurant. It was, like a lot of Moscow at the time, slightly surreal. The front section of the restaurant was full of English construction workers who had been flown into Moscow to work on a building project. Why one would fly English workers into Russia, a country with high unemployment and low wages, was never explained. They were drinking pints of lager and rapidly getting drunk. Behind their section was a narrow hallway that led to an expensive restaurant. It was beautifully decorated and served exquisite Georgian food. Kikalishvili arrived late; his armour-plated 4 x 4 mounting the pavement and stopping three feet from the restaurant door. A very large, muscular guard in a designer suit stood in front of the door. Two more men were in the tiny hallway. I know this because when I got up to go outside and check on our driver, they would not let me leave without a nod from Kikalishvili. There were no other exits from the room. The food was excellent, the wine plentiful, and Kikalishvili a very good host. However, Kikalishvili’s security precautions were probably a good idea. A few weeks after our visit, his offices near the Kremlin were blown up in a bomb attack. Kikalishvili was unhurt, which is more than can be said for the heavily damaged building.
The research for the television documentary was interesting. The program was based on the revelations of a freelance journalist, Robert Friedman, who had shown the connections between Russian mobsters and players in the National Hockey League. He had also had a contract put on him by some of the same Russian mobsters. Although one U.S. Senate investigator estimated that more than 80 per cent of hockey players were paying protection money to mobsters, the connections were often deeper: they were about friendships, business, or political ambitions. Pavel Bure, for example, was a great hockey player, but also a kind of male Anna Kournikova, a high-profile pin-up boy who enjoyed wide popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. He was, as well, Anzor Kikalishvili’s political protégé, and when we visited Moscow, there were posters across the city of the two men together, campaigning for the 21st Century Association. Other major hockey players were helping mobsters with their immigration requirements or their business activities or just hanging out as friends.
What stunned me was that so few people actually seemed to mind the presence of so many organized crime figures in a sport. I went to interview a top Russian player, one of the most influential players in the league. He had been linked to mobsters by sources at the FBI. As I was leaving to meet him, one of my bosses came out of his office and spoke to me about the meeting. He did not want to know the player’s views on the mafia or the possibility of games being fixed or even some of his potential connections. Rather, my boss asked me to inquire about his play in a recent play-off game. I was struck by this incident. Here was a seasoned, cynical journalist who knew the essential structure of the story, but even he was dazzled by the thought of meeting, albeit indirectly, a top player. It made me realize the power and ability of sports players to airbrush the images of even the most unsavory characters. After the investigation, I worked on other organized crime stories. But as I did so, I could not help my mind turning over the question: if a relatively low-profile sport like hockey could sanitize mobsters, would the same be true for international soccer?
I was raised in England, so soccer was my sport. I love the game with a love and desire that is almost unexplainable except to other lovers. My first experience came in one of those moments that change your life. I was in primary school and a gang of classmates came up to me and asked which team I liked better, Arsenal or Liverpool? I was six. I had heard of neither team, but I thought that Arsenal was such a ridiculous name that they must be the weaker, underdog team, so I chose them. It was a decision, casually made, that has been impossible to alter. I read once of a soccer fan who said, “You can be a lousy father, you can divorce your wife, you can move countries, but you can never change your soccer team
.” So it has proven with me. For most of my childhood and adult years, I loathed everything about Arsenal. Their style was unpardonably ugly. They delighted in kicking great lumps out of their opponents and then kicking the ball far down the pitch. They had no technique, no skill, and no verve. Worse, I discovered that, unlike a genuine underdog team, they were rich. They could have played with panache and flair. But instead under a range of different managers they played as thugs. Not much good it did me. Like a man in love with a faithless woman, I discovered I was powerless to change a decision of my heart. Years were spent, until the arrival of Arsène Wenger, watching Arsenal kick, thump, and intimidate their way to victory.
I also played for years, but I was never a particularly good player. Every season I would play superbly for about half an hour. In that half an hour, I would fly across the pitch. Whatever skills, stamina, speed I had would all unite in one brief moment of injury-free bliss. The memories of those half-hours would keep me warm in the winter. They would keep me playing in dozens of games, when I did nothing of note. They would keep me turning up at the start of new seasons ready to enjoy my half-hour of soccer heaven. So I do not have racks of medals or trophies. But I do have good memories and great friends given to me by the beautiful game. It is for those memories and loves that I decided to use my investigative skills to give back something to the game that has given me so much.
It is easier to write a book with the weight of a large institution behind you than as a freelance writer. So I enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. It was a place I had dreamed of going for most of my life. It is glorious: full of interesting history, superb buildings, and great resources. My first year there was, probably, the happiest of my life. However, it was not a complete dream, and I have a great dislike of those books about Oxford whose authors describe it all as glamour, glory, and glittering prizes. There are plenty of little people in the big buildings there. But I do owe the university a large debt of gratitude. The teachers, tutors, and supervisors, for the most part, did something almost unknown in the academic world: they left me alone. They made it clear that they were ready to chat if I needed any help, but then they figuratively nodded at the books and all the resources of the university and told me to get on with it.
My college, Green, was a scholar’s dream: a small, protective enclave full of fascinating people. It even has an eighteenth-century observatory at its centre, surrounded by a garden perpetually in bloom. I loved my life there. I joined Green’s rowing team. One of my teammates spoke eighteen languages (no, I didn’t believe him either, until I heard him speak them all); another was a graduate student/computer hacker/CEO of a computer company that had invented a new form of Internet money (no, I don’t know when he slept either); another one has graduated to running six-day marathons in the Sahara Desert; and the rest were simply medical students or Fulbright Scholars. I ended my time at the university working with the type of man that I thought had disappeared with the death of David Niven or Rex Harrison – a true English gentleman. His name is Anthony Heath. He was the chairman of the Sociology Department. We would meet in his book-lined office and our discussions of the work were usually conducted over cups of tea, but Heath’s beautifully gentle manner hides a tough, rigorous mind and an athlete’s past. He has done a range of interesting work, from exploring class and education in the U.K. to designing political surveys in current-day Iraq. He guided me through the difficulties of completing a doctorate at Oxford, and I will forever be grateful to him for his graciousness and intelligence.
But I did not work simply as an academic. I also used the skills that I had developed as an investigative journalist. I interviewed people who had been involved in the game. It may seem odd, but very few journalists have tried to speak to people inside soccer about the presence of organized crime in the game. This is partly to do with the role of sports journalists. Sports journalists are often intelligent, hard-working, principled people. However, they have a job to do, and that job is to report on the results of not one particular game but on every single game, week after week, season after season. This means that they depend on the club or league officials to get them access to the matches and players. It means that if they discover something scandalous, they have to weigh up an odd dilemma: do I reveal the scandal and thereby potentially lose my access, or do I keep quiet and keep my job easy? For me, there was no dilemma. I did not care about the results of the game. I was not interested in securing long-term access to players. I just wanted to understand the truth of what was going on inside the sport. Ironically, people were often very interested in speaking to me, because no one had contacted them before and they desperately wanted to speak out about the corruption in the sport.
At first, I was interested in the general issue of organized crime in soccer. I was particularly fascinated with the concept of image laundering, where a previously unknown gangster takes over a prominent club or links himself with a famous player and begins to transform himself from a “controversial businessman” to a “colourful businessman” to, when his team or player wins the championship, a “member of the establishment.” The most successful proponent of this skill was Joseph Kennedy, who had gone from a bootlegging scumbag supplying the mob with liquor in the midst of Prohibition in one generation to being the father of the president of the United States in the next. However, events overtook me. Some of the top teams in Europe were bought up by people so corrupt that you would hesitate to have your wife, son, or wallet within a hundred yards of them. Yet no one seemed to have stopped them.
However, I began to become interested in the subject of match-fixing. It was, in the words of one worried tennis executive I spoke to, “the ultimate threat to the credibility of the sport.”
I visited some of the world’s most famous soccer stadiums, teams, and games to see organized criminals in action. I investigated leagues where Chinese triads have fixed more than 80 per cent of the games; and I found that top international referees often get offered, and accept, “female bribes” before they arbitrate some of the biggest games in soccer.
When I first started giving lectures at Oxford, people were surprised to hear about the connections between organized crime and sport. I gave presentations at international conferences. I said publicly, and at some risk to myself because my research was not finished, that European sport leagues were facing a tsunami of match-fixing by Asian criminals. Few people wanted to believe it. Even fewer people seemed to want to do anything about it. It was mostly, as I will show, out of incompetence and racist ignorance. It was also because the factors that have given rise to this new wave of fixing are unprecedented and have never really been seen or studied before. But it was in small part because of a phenomenon that was recognized more than eighty years ago. It was supposed to have occurred during the scandal surrounding the trial of baseball’s Chicago White Sox. The team threw the 1919 World Series with the help of mobster Arnold Rothstein. One of their players was the clean-cut star “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. As Jackson came up to the courthouse, a little boy was supposed to have elbowed his way through the crowd, gazed up at his hero with big, clear, innocent eyes, and said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe. Just say it ain’t so.” The little boy represents the faith that we embody in our sporting heroes. We do not want to believe that human frailty lurks within them. We do not want to believe that they, who can do what we cannot, would stoop to sully themselves. We do not want to believe, when so much in our lives is so corrupt, that the garden of innocence that is supposed to be sport could also be corrupt.
In my journey I did find real heroes: people who have attempted to clean up the world’s “beautiful game.” They have, for the most part, been marginalized, stamped on, or silenced. Their stories are littered throughout this book: failed journalists, dead referees, ignored players. I will also introduce you to some of the fixers, criminals, and con men who corrupt the sport. Whenever possible I have tried to allow the criminals to speak for themselves, using verbatim tra
nscripts of either their interviews or covertly recorded conversations. The work has, at times, been difficult and dangerous. For that reason, in some places in the text, I have changed the locations of the interviews and the names of both the innocent and the guilty. (The first time that I introduce someone whose name has been changed, I will place an asterisk beside it in the text.) I have done that to protect myself and my interview subjects from all the dangers that a reader can imagine.
I have also tried to show the results of my research at the university. Woven through the journey, I try to explain how soccer players and referees actually perform in fixed games, the structure and mechanics of illegal gambling syndicates, why relatively rich and high-status athletes would fix games, why club officials decide to try to bribe the opposition, how clubs go about doing it, how they get referees “on their side” and how, I believe, Asian gambling fixers have successfully entered the game and fixed top international matches. I found that many of these underlying criminal mechanics are not only found in soccer. Really, the methods, manners, and motivations of the fixers could work for almost any other team sport, be it hockey, basketball, or baseball. Consequently, I have put in examples from other sports to show the similarities. Understand how gambling fixers work to corrupt a soccer game and you will understand how they move into a basketball league, a cricket tournament, or a tennis match (all places, by the way, that criminal fixers have moved into).