The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  My views on soccer have changed. I still love the Saturday-morning game between amateurs: the camaraderie and the fresh smell of grass. But the professional game leaves me cold. I hope you will understand why after reading the book. I think you may never look at sport in the same way again.

  PROLOGUE

  Raul Hernandez (*) was at one time one of the most promising young players in the world. I interviewed him in Singapore on the night of a Champions League game. European games start at two or three o’clock in the morning Singapore time, so after the interview we sat up long into the night to watch the match. In the interview and conversation, Hernandez seemed very honest. He had spoken about his problems adapting to a lifestyle of fame and status. He had become a drug addict, got divorced, and eventually dropped out of the game. But now with his parents’ help, he had turned his life around. Hernandez remarried, became a publicly professed Christian, and re-entered soccer.

  He told me he had taken part in fixed matches where his team’s manager or owner had bribed players on the opposing team. But he claimed he had never taken a bribe or had anything to do with gambling in his life.

  The next day we met for coffee. He had been playing for his club and had received no salary. The owner had simply refused to pay him.

  But he had a surprise for me.

  As we drank our coffees and chatted about the game the night before, he leaned forward and said, “You know a lot of these fixers, don’t you?”

  “Well, I have interviewed some of them, yes,” I replied.

  “Give me one of their phone numbers.”

  “What?”

  “Give me one of their phone numbers,” he repeated. “Look, I haven’t been paid in four months. I have a wife. I have commitments. I could make a lot of money this way.”

  1

  THE CONQUEST OF THE LOCUSTS

  He was a great guy. He took me into “table talks” with the Tiger Generals. That is a rank in the triads. They would sit down and pull out their knives and screwdrivers, put them on the table and then it was, “Okay, let’s talk.” There were men behind us, armed bodyguards, and we would just wait. This was all the ritual of the table talk. It depended on the invitation. If the invite said, “Between 7:00 and 7:30,” it meant “there was still room for talk.” If it said, “7:30 exactly,” it meant “you are going to fight.”

  On October 2, 2004, Yang Zuwu, the manager of the Chinese team Beijing Hyundai, did something odd. In the eighty-fourth minute of a game in front of thousands of fans at the Wulihe Stadium in Shenyang, he ordered his team to walk off the field. The referee had just called a penalty against his team. However, several even odder things followed Yang’s command. Not only did his entire team obey him, but as the players sat in their dressing room, Yang stood outside and announced that his team was refusing to take part in the rest of the match or in any more matches in the Chinese Super League.

  Yang was no ordinary head of an ordinary team that could be dismissed for mere petulance. Beijing Hyundai was one of the richest teams in the league, sponsored by the Korean car company. Yang Zuwu, a veteran of more than forty years of Chinese soccer, declared that the league was too full of “faked matches, black whistles, illegal betting on games, and other ugly phenomena.” All these factors had become so blatant that it was, in his view, impossible to play honestly in the league. Yang received support from other top clubs. One official, Xu Ming, the owner of the Dalian Shide football club and the most powerful private investor in the sport, came out publicly with his support, saying that another group of teams was also considering pulling out of the Chinese league because the corruption was so bad.

  At first, the Chinese Football Association (CFA) refused to listen. It was all too embarrassing. They had only established the new league six months before Yang’s pull out. The idea had been to establish an elite, professionally run league that could help catapult Chinese soccer to the top of the world game. Each team that wanted to participate in the league had to have a capitalization of tens of millions of dollars. A prominent Asian soccer official who had visited one of the Chinese clubs described it in awestruck tones:

  I visited one club that had twelve practice pitches: an Olympic standard stadium, fitness centre, community centre. There were dormitories, housing complexes. It was incredible, like something out of the days of Mao.

  Now, with Mr. Yang’s very public protest, only six months after its inception, the Chinese Super League, with all its hundreds of millions of dollars, had effectively collapsed.

  It really should not have come as a surprise to anyone connected with Chinese soccer. For years before the founding of the Super League, the Chinese Football Association had heard about the stories of corruption that swirled around their sport. The Chinese national team had taken part in the 2002 World Cup; they had not scored a goal and it was alleged in Chinese newspapers that they had thrown their games in return for gambling payoffs. The players and officials all denied it, claiming that they would never betray their country; however, many newspapers remained skeptical. But the big scandal that might have led to a cleansing of the game was the Black Whistles Affair. It broke in 2001, when Song Weiping, a construction magnate turned soccer club owner, went public with his complaints about corruption. He made hundreds of millions as a property developer and sponsored his city’s second division soccer team. Then Song publicly threatened to give up soccer for the kinder, gentler world of the construction business because the sport was so corrupt and he was tired of paying bribes to referees. Song even provided documents and a list of referees who took bribes – “most of them,” he alleged. A sports newspaper, Qiu Bao, took up the investigation and discovered that the corruption might have spread further, right into the Chinese Football Association. One team alleged that they had paid 800,000 RMB (Chinese renminbi, roughly US$100,000) to an official of that organization – alternately described by commentators as “non-descript” to “radioactive – everything they touch seems to shrivel and die” – to appoint referees favourable to their team.

  The Chinese Football Association responded to this situation by declaring an amnesty and no public exposure for any corrupt referee who came forward. Gong Jianping, the chief referee of the association and a FIFA-ranked international referee, promptly took them up on their offer. Just as promptly, the Chinese authorities broke their word and arrested him. His trial featured accounts of sex bribes for referees and card games with high-ranking Chinese Football Association officials. An ambitious referee, it was alleged, was supposed to play cards for high stakes with the CFA officials, then lose the game, so that the officials would receive his money. In return, the referee would receive the plum international games to referee. The only way the average referee could afford to play in the card games was to accept bribes. For his apparent honesty, Gong Jianping received the “lenient sentence” of ten years in a hard labour camp. He died soon afterwards. Since then, no other referee has taken up the Chinese Football Association’s offer of an amnesty.

  This was the state of affairs that Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, flew into in the summer of 2004. At first, he seemed curiously unaware of the corruption in Chinese soccer. He gave a speech in which he did not mention corruption. Rather, he talked about top European clubs sending their young players to Asia to give them more experience. Blatter seemed ignorant of the nature of the “experience” that the rising stars of the game may have begun to learn, but he did not remain ignorant for long.

  On July 17, 2004, Blatter and other FIFA officials along with senior officials of the Chinese Football Association visited the Beijing Workers’ Stadium to see the opening of the Asian Cup. Someone probably thought that a ceremony in one of the most repressive countries in the world, held a few kilometres from Tiananmen Square, would present no controversy or problems. But that is to underestimate the power of soccer. When the unpopular deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Football Association tried to address the stadium, the furious crowd shouted him down. They sc
reamed insults at all the Chinese Football Association officials. When the head of the Asian wing of FIFA stood up, they insulted him too. Then someone really made a mistake. Thinking that no one would dare jeer the president of FIFA, authorities let Blatter go ahead with his planned speech. The crowd booed him. The whole thing became an international diplomatic incident. What really shocked the Chinese was that FIFA officials, whose idea of a heated discussion is normally about as spicy as fizzy water, held a press conference after the game, and said publicly, “You don’t deserve to hold the Olympics, if this is how you treat your guests.”

  The horde of locusts that destroyed the credibility of the Chinese Super League has devoured soccer across Asia. Five players on Hong Kong’s 1998 World Cup team were caught fixing a qualifying match against Thailand. The players were convicted after the Hong Kong anti-corruption squad busted a $50 million illegal gambling syndicate with connections in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. In Indonesia, a prominent soccer official came forward and spoke about the existence of a “referees’ mafia.” In Vietnam, the notorious mafia chief Nam Cam was put in front of a firing squad June 3, 2004. The reason for his execution was partly his widespread fixing of soccer games. He was so successful that he fixed many of the Vietnamese soccer league and national team matches. He even fixed matches featuring the Hanoi police team. His death did not end the fixing.

  These Asian fixers kept me up at night. As I travelled the continent researching their activities, I was nervous. I heard stories of their terrifying reach almost everywhere I went. Each night before I went to bed, I would carefully unscrew the lightbulb in my hotel room, rearrange the furniture, and put my bed in a different position. I calculated that if anyone came into the room, they would enter in one of two ways: either barge straight in, switch the light on, and shoot me or creep in slowly in the dark and kill me while I was still asleep. Either way, I thought I had about five seconds to alter their strategy and throw them off balance. If the door was barricaded with a dresser, if they could not switch the light on, or if they tripped over something while searching for the bed, it changed the odds in my favour just a little. Goodness knows what I could have done after that. The fixers are not known for their gentility. The legends of their violence hang over the world of Asian sport. I received countless warnings to stay away from them. They are spoken of in whispers by frightened players and sports officials. Bruce Grobbelaar, the goalkeeper with the English team Liverpool who allegedly took money from an Asian gambling syndicate, once told a friend about the dangers of crossing the “Mr. Bigs” of this world:

  Because then you’re fucking him around, and he won’t like it, and he’ll tell his Short Man … and then you get the chop and then you better watch it. You better get a bulletproof fucking vest, then … That’s how fucking big it is … This is how fucking dangerous it is … When you’re playing with fucking dangerous men, it’s fucking dangerous.

  Grobbelaar is not alone in his fear. In Malaysia and Singapore, there are stories of gang attacks, a poisonous cobra being put in a player’s car, and of a goalkeeper dying in a “mysterious” car accident. One defender told the police about how he was forced into fixing a game:

  It was during training time. Two Chinese men, maybe five feet six inches, thirty years old, came up to me and congratulated me. They said they knew Mike and Jimmy [two Singaporean match-fixers]. They were Jimmy’s men. They had just met some of the other players. They asked me to co-operate with a fix against Singapore. I refused. I left. The two Chinese followed me and forced me to stop. One of them took out a Rambo-style knife and threatened to kill me and my wife if I did not agree to help them.

  A coach who had worked in Asian leagues told me how his players were approached by gambling match-fixers.

  There is no nice chat, no long-term relationship stuff. They just ring up the players and say, “You do it or else.” They will phone the players and say, “We want this game to be 2-0 spread. You win. Or you lose.” If the player tells them to fuck off, they say, “We know where your sister goes to school” or “where your granny shops.”

  These are not isolated incidents. In the last fifteen years, soccer leagues across the continent have effectively been sabotaged by match-fixing. But the first, the biggest, and the most public fiasco was in Malaysia and Singapore in the early 1990s. It was there that I decided to begin my research.

  In 1989, the Malaysian and Singapore Football Associations established a new professional league. The idea, as with the Chinese league fifteen years later, was to catapult their national teams into international prominence by having a well-established, well-run domestic league. The two federal governments helped with funding. There were new, modern stadiums built. There was a lucrative television contract that ensured that the league was seen by millions of people. Teams were allowed to import foreign stars to improve the quality of the play. The league was popular, with some matches attracting over fifty thousand fans.

  It became a complete disaster.

  The conventional story is that as interest in the league grew, so did the number of people betting on the results of the games. The fixers moved in. They understood there was an enormous amount of money to be made fleecing the betting public if they could fix the results. By the time the authorities finally cracked down on the league in 1994, over 80 per cent of the games were thought to have been fixed, and the fixers had spread their attention to matches around the world, purportedly trying to fix English Premier League matches. However, the real story about the collapse of the Malaysian and Singaporean soccer league has not been told before.

  Every story needs a hero and this one has two: Lazarus Rokk and Johnson Fernandez. In the early 1990s, they were two hard-working sports journalists writing for the sister papers the Malay Mail and the New Straits Times. They were not investigative journalists, simply two guys who liked their soccer. I interviewed a wide range of journalists on the Malay Peninsula, and some of them are quite open about helping criminals or players fix games. One even told me exactly how he helped out:

  I worked a couple of times for the bookies. They asked me to speak to some of the players. So during the practice I said [to the player], “Lim (*) asks, Okay?” And the player replied, “Okay.” That was it. No more. They had their agreement. They were just confirming it.

  This journalistic culture of sleaze is part of what made doing the research so tense. I knew that some of the journalists I interviewed worked as middlemen for the gangs. In a way, the more honest ones were the ones who told me that they helped the fixers. What I did not know was if, or when, other, more complicit people that I interviewed were going to tell their criminal friends to pay me a visit in the middle of the night.

  Rokk and Fernandez are not like that. They are two decent men, now in their early fifties, who remain traumatized years after these events. Their suspicions of the widespread fixing began soon after the end of the professional league’s first season. Fernandez was summoned to his editor’s office. There was a “well-dressed gentleman” from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) who wanted to talk to him. The ACA man had come to Fernandez because of his knowledge about sport, and he started asking Fernandez questions about the possible involvement of some members of one of the Malay Royal Families in some of the fixing.

  There is a huge difference between what journalists think they know and what they can legally print in their newspapers. The official investigation into one of the Malaysian Royal Families, perhaps deliberately, went nowhere. So at first Fernandez and Rokk were not able to get the evidence to write full stories.

  For years, we had been trying to get the state FAs and the Malay Football Association to start probing into match-fixing in the country. But they didn’t take us too seriously. They didn’t think it was serious enough. So we decided to go in ourselves … after we dug further, whatever we knew and whatever we saw was only the tip of the iceberg. Our probing became a little bit more intense, and we discovered a whole lot more maggots in soccer
.

  They got their break when they discovered a source who worked with the fixing gangs. He brought a whole new perspective to the investigation. He would tell them before the games what the final score would be. Their source was a big, tough Brickfields gangster. Brickfields is the working-class area, mainly Indian, around the Kuala Lumpur central train station. Malaysia is not a particularly dangerous country for street crime, but Brickfields is not the kind of place you want to wander around at night. Rokk and Fernandez’s source was the King of Brickfields. He showed them a whole new side to life and sports. Rokk even remembers him bringing them to meetings with the triads:

  He was a great guy. He took me into “table talks” with the Tiger Generals. That is a rank in the triads. They would sit down and pull out their knives and screwdrivers, put them on the table and then it was, “Okay, let’s talk.” There were men behind us, armed bodyguards, and we would just wait. This was all the ritual of the table talk. It depended on the invitation. If the invite said, “Between 7:00 and 7:30,” it meant “there was still room for talk.” If it said, “7:30 exactly,” it meant “you are going to fight.”

  With the help of their underworld source and others, the two journalists discovered how the fixing in the league was organized. Fernandez and Rokk laid it out for me, and I was able to corroborate the fixers’ strategies with the players, policemen, and the fixers themselves. First off, here is how the fixers and players use networks to co-operate with one another. For a start, most gambling fixers don’t actually meet directly with the players. Rather, they use what are known as “runners.” Fernandez explained to me who they were: