by Declan Hill
He looked at me incredulously. “You want to see more matches like that?” he asked. “You should stay around! You think that game was played honestly? One team scored all their goals in the second half! Ha ha! If you like games like that, this is the place for you. Never-say-die attitude! Oh dear.” He laughed uproariously into his drink at my naïveté. A businessman came up to the table.
“Hey, Wing (*), meet this fellow. He thinks that Singaporean soccer players are very honest. He thinks they never give up!”
The businessman began to laugh too. He nodded at me politely, though, and then handed the sports official a brown envelope. The official opened it, took out the bank notes that were inside, checked them, and then said, “Thanks. Come and join us for a drink.”
“No, I can’t. I have some more meetings like this one.”
They both laughed. Then the businessman left and the sports official continued to tell me about all the corruption in the soccer leagues.
However, if there is complicity and corruption among high-level Asian sports officials, it is nothing to the connections between the most powerful people in their society and the criminal organizations.
In 1882, a British colonial official W.A. Pickering was concerned about the effects of gaming houses in Singapore. They were more than a hundred of them in the city at that time, established and run by Chinese organized crime groups or triads. Pickering set up a commission to investigate the activities of one group, the “Ghee Hok Secret Society,” who ran a number of the gambling establishments. A few months later, a carpenter by the name of Chua Ah Siok went into Pickering’s office under the guise of presenting a petition. Instead, he threw an axe into Pickering’s forehead. It is a warning that echoes through the ages for anyone who messes with the power of these groups. If influential sporting officials are helping with the fixes on one side, on the other side, even more powerful people aid the criminal organizations that run the gambling industry that surrounds the fixing.
The purported division that is supposed to exist in the West between organized crime and “respectable” society does not exist in Asia. (It is not clear that it actually exists in the West, but that is another story.) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, for example, was founded by two rival triad operations. They only allowed the British government into the area as a form of neutral referee, to settle a series of mining disputes between the triads. In Imperial China, much of the political opposition to the Manchu rule and the colonial domination came from triads. Asian organized crime is immensely powerful precisely because it is so embedded in society.
At the heads of these groups are quite literally the heads of society or “respectable,” legitimate businessmen. These “Mr. Bigs” may not always be involved in the day-to-day running of the groups, but they do provide the triads with political protection and influence. At the lower levels, they can provide the protection that will keep the police from interfering too often or demanding too much in bribes. At the higher levels, they can even influence government decisions. Mr. Bigs can provide this protection because, if the rumours are true, who they are is a hair-raising proposition for anyone interested in Asian civil society: cabinet ministers, very prominent businessmen, men who drive Rolls Royces and own swathes of real estate property. One source I spoke to was quite phlegmatic about the relationship between organized crime and politicians. He told me, “You won’t understand Malaysia if you look at the government. The government is the shadow of the mafia. It is the mafia that controls everything and then the government is their shadow.”
His views are echoed by Bertil Lintner, a long-time correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review, who wrote:
Success in politics and business in Asia depends on powerful contacts, who are often above the law and adept at bending it. It is contacts rather than the courts which serve as arbiter; who you know, not how many lawyers you employ, which decides the outcome of difficult business undertakings and political careers. The same factors decide how successful you will be as an extortionist, a pimp or a pirate.
Lintner also wrote the excellent book Blood Brothers about these wideranging connections in Asia between politics, business, and crime. There is one job description he could have added to the last sentence – illegal gambling bookmaker.
Joe Saumarez-Smith, a London-based gambling consultant, was once asked to come out to Thailand to do some work for one of the heads of an Asian gambling syndicate. He laughingly told me of his experience:
They are “illegal.” I mean, the guy in Thailand. When I got off the plane there was a police officer at the airport with my name on a board. And when he saw me, I thought, Oh no! What is happening? He took me straight through customs and my luggage had been put to the front of the plane and we are escorted into the centre of Bangkok by a three police car cavalcade. We go to the bookmaker’s office and have a nice meeting and go out to his shop and restaurant and there is a chief of police coming to dinner with us. If that is not the message “I’ve got protection,” I don’t know what is!
The question is, why would these powerful individuals be so interested in helping and protecting organized crime groups and bookies? The answer is that it is because all those people are involved in an industry so vast, so massive, that it dwarves almost all others in Asia.
5
KEEPING THE SYSTEM TURNING
I do remember that one of the police officers, one of the lead guys in the investigation, we caught him meeting with one of the bookies that we were trying to investigate. We put a tail on him and I got a call on my phone from people who were tailing him. He was meeting with the Chinese bookie we were investigating in a hotel in Klang.
I was on an obscure little dock on a tidal inlet in Batam, the Indonesian island just south of Singapore. The scene was a sleepy one: palm trees, little bamboo groves, the early morning sun casting a golden light over the wooden dock. Then the gambling boat from Singapore came in. Casino gambling was, until very recently, illegal in Singapore. If Singaporeans wanted to gamble, they had do it on a ship in international waters. However, for various legal reasons, the gamblers had to stop in Indonesia and then transfer to another boat to take them out to the ship. The gambling boat was a very small cruiser that looked like the ocean-going version of a Mini. But like the circus performance in which innumerable clowns pour out of a tiny car, from out of this boat came a stream of gamblers. Forty seemed too many to fit into the boat, but first sixty, then eighty, then a hundred, then finally more than a hundred and twenty people came pouring out of the boat, walked over the dock, and boarded another tiny boat that puttered back out of the inlet to one of the large gambling ships.
The scene is repeated frequently across Asia. In casinos in the jungles of Burma to the wastelands of North Korea, millions of people are gambling. In 2006, Macau “officially” surpassed Las Vegas as the gambling capital of the world. “Officially” because the illegal amount of money washing through that city has always been far more than any official count. The Asian gambling world is like the American porn industry. It is a vast, well-connected structure of indeterminate legal status that has connections with both organized crime and legitimate companies generating enormous amounts of money. In the same way that the porn industry is financially larger than many regular entertainment industries, so the Asian gambling industry is far larger than many regular, well-established industries. But because much of the industry is officially illegal, it is, like the porn industry, difficult to measure. However, a recent study for the American journal Foreign Policy estimated that the entire Asian gambling industry, both legal and illegal, at US$450 billion a year. In comparison, the Asian pharmaceutical industry is worth roughly US$106 billion a year. It is difficult to know how accurate that figure is or how much of it is spent on sports gambling. However, a Harvard School of Govern ment Affairs study (2002) estimated that the amount of money put on illegal sports bets on just one league, the English Premier League, for just one year – 2001 – in just one Asian co
untry (Hong Kong) at US$2.5 billion. The estimated figure for the illegal sports betting market in Singapore is roughly the same, so when the range of other countries that share gambling organizations – Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia – are factored into the estimate, then the size of the illegal Asian sports gambling is in the tens of billions of dollars.
These financial estimates may seem incredible, except for the following politically incorrect, but utterly truthful, fact: lots and lots of Chinese people love to gamble. Actually, that is not strictly accurate. The truth is: lots of Chinese people really, really, really, really, really, really love to gamble.
This is not a covert boast of cultural superiority. All cultures choose their own form of pleasure. In Western societies, lots of people drink far too much. Alcoholism and alcoholic dependency is so common that few people even notice it. In the same way that it is almost impossible to go bankrupt selling alcohol to Westerners, it is almost impossible to overestimate the Chinese propensity for gambling. Go to most Chinese social or family gatherings and people will be gambling in the same way other cultures will play charades or Scrabble.
This love of gambling has a long history in the continent. In 1868, the British colonial lieutenant-governor of Malacca, a province of Malaysia, despairingly wrote of the efforts of his tiny police force to control gambling:
A passion for gambling pervades all classes of the Chinese, it may be said to be the national pastime, and the only results of our efforts to make it criminal is a through demoralization of the Police who extort large amounts as hush money from the players and then become their confederates and scouts.
The quote can serve as an exact and accurate prophecy about the next 140 years of Malaysian police efforts against gambling.
There are about two dozen international-level bookies who are at the head of national gambling syndicates across Asia. One of their business associates told me that they don’t like the term bookies; they prefer super-agents, and the people who work for them are agents. This is because bookmaking is still illegal in most Asian countries, so the term bookies attracts too much unwanted attention. But they really are bookies and they are based in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Johor Bahru (a small city just across the Malay Peninsula from Singapore), Taiwan, and Jakarta. Most of them are ethnically Chinese, meaning they consider themselves Chinese, even though they were born and raised in other countries. They have very strong interconnections in that they compete and co-operate with one another every day. They will balance their accounts by laying off bets with one another. (Figure 5.1 shows the rough structure of the Asian gambling industry.) There are a couple of caveats to this diagram. It is not an exact anatomical chart. A lab skeleton tells you that the foot bone is attached to the ankle bone and the ankle bone is attached to the shin bone. A structure of the skeleton of the American mob would tell you that the foot soldiers report to the capos who report to the dons: and the consiglieri are elder statesmen and advisers to the dons of each of the families. The Asian gambling world is not quite so precise.
Inspector Lee Chung (*) gave me that warning. He is, I suspect, a bent cop, one of the “demoralized police,” warned of by the lieutenant-governor 140 years ago who has become a “confederate and scout” of the gambling operations. I don’t have any proof to support that accusation. It is just a feeling. He is a high-ranking officer in the Royal Malaysian Police. We met in my hotel room, as he did not want to be seen meeting me in public. Before we talked or even shook hands, he searched the room for hidden video cameras and frisked my shirt and suit for listening devices. However, it was not those actions that made me think he was on the take, but his clear, deep, and very obvious passion for gambling, the very “criminal” action he was supposed to be clamping down on. He talked enthusiastically for more than an hour on the successful, long-term strategy for betting on soccer that he uses. For the record, one of his strategies is: “Always take the favourite: Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal. They rarely lose; the bookies will try to make you forget it, but don’t. I could show you the places to gamble.” Then he would remember and correct himself hurriedly and say, “Where my friends gamble. My friends gamble.” He did, however, have a number of good points about illegal gambling in his country. “Very loosely knitted organization,” he said. “Lots of small-timers. Just like direct selling or marketing. One line. One partner. Thousands of small bookies.”
Figure 5.1 Structure of Illegal Asian Bookmaking Syndicate
What he is speaking of are the bottom rungs of the illegal gambling ladder. Here, there are literally millions of punters. They place their bets with runners for local bookies. These local runners are small fry. They have the same name as the runners who work for the fixers to corrupt the games. This is because they literally do the same thing: they run back and forth for the bookies. Again, there are thousands of them; they work for different organizations or bookies. They compete, collude, and co-operate with one another, depending on the bets or the event.
Steve and Don (*) are examples of the people at the lower levels of the gambling market. They are two pleasant Chinese guys living in Johor Bahru. I met them a number of times, and they gave me tutorials both on how to gamble and how the system works. We would usually meet at Don’s house, which looks like a suburban house anywhere: a low-slung brick house with a little lawn in front of it. Inside his living room he has a giant satellite TV screen and leather chairs where we could watch the European soccer matches as they came in live in the middle of the night. The walls are covered with framed bank notes from around the world. Don runs a small casino in Indonesia. Steve is a shipping executive, although he claims that his brother-in-law runs an illegal bookmaking operation in Georgetown, a city in northern Malaysia.
Together they look a little like an Asian Laurel and Hardy. Don is chubby, perpetually in jeans, perpetually on the hunt for the next business scheme, perpetually with an affable grin on his face. Steve is the slim puritan of the pair: lips tight as he moralizes about gambling. They share two great loves: betting and cooking. Incongruously, in the midst of discussing illegal gambling syndicates, they would break off to give one another recipe tips. The conversations went something like:
Don: You took Liverpool, two ball [Liverpool to win the game by two goals]! Why? You crazy?
Steve: No way, la. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Rafa, he knows what he is doing. Take the odds, la.
Don: Bullshit! Fowler. He is too old, just fucking around. Go under. Eat ball. Hey, I have a great menu for you! Fish satay with deep-fried mushrooms.
Steve: You told me about that last week – didn’t work.
Don: That’s because you weren’t using right kind of mushrooms. Fucking idiot! Shiitake. Shiitake. Not ordinary shit mushrooms. You heat the pan, then garlic, then mushrooms.
Steve: You didn’t say that!
When I first met them, Don was bemoaning his luck over an English Premier League match the night before. He had bet the total goal line. The higher and more unlikely the score, the more money you stand to win if correct. Don had bet on Fulham to beat Norwich with a total score in the game of four goals (3-1, 4-0). The actual result was that Fulham beat Norwich 6-0. If they had kept the score down, Don would have made twenty-three times the money on his bet. As it was, he had lost it all.
The things that can be bet on in the Asian gambling syndicates are a testimony to the human imagination: four-digit number rackets, horse races, cockfights, boxing matches, basketball games, Formula One racing, hockey competitions, cricket tournaments, pre-Olympic events. In soccer alone you can bet on which team will win, by how much, who scores first, who scores last, who will get the first yellow card, who will get a red card, how many yellow cards will be shown, when the first goal will be scored, when the last goal will be scored, the total number of goals, how many headers there will be in the match, how many offsides, corners, and free kicks. The most popular structure of bet, however, is the Asian Handicap, which is
like the North American idea of the point spread, where the favourite to win in the gambling market has to win the match by a certain number of goals. So if I bet on a really strong team to beat a weaker team by “two ball,” it means that the strong team must score at least two goals more than the other team: if it loses, draws, or wins by only one goal, it is counted as a loss in gambling terms.
These bets are a subject of obsessive interest across Asia. A gambler can bet on just about any soccer league in the world – from the Chinese Super League, to the English Premier League, to the Scottish youth leagues where the players are students or part-time amateurs. I once had a long and fascinating conversation with a supplier for one of the major triad operations in Kuala Lumpur. He was an expert on betting patterns in the Icelandic Football League. I did not know that Iceland had a soccer league before our conversation, but we sat in the cocktail bar of a five-star hotel drinking coffee and beer, discussing the fortunes of various teams in places such as Reykjavik and Akranes. He reckoned that the Icelandic league was so small that it must be honest. “After all they are Scandinavian. Like Vikings. Very honest. Very blonde, la. No fixes.”
Don and Steve, like the beer supplier, would often stay up most nights betting live on European soccer matches. It used to all be done by phone calls or word of mouth, but Steve and others told me that in the last few years technology has begun to change the methods of the gambling syndicates. “Internet and pagers have replaced the phone. When we talked, we would say ten sen, which would mean a hundred RM (Malaysian ringgit, or $30), or one RM, which means a thousand RM ($300). Now you get an Internet CD from the bookie. He wants to know your business address and phone, and your home address and phone, and your credit card info, everything possible … the technology was from India, but the gang is Hongkies [from Hong Kong] and Malays. The Hongkies came in three years ago and they agreed to split up the market.”