by Declan Hill
In the early 1990s, the chief reason mobsters entered the world of Russian soccer was that control of sports clubs gave them a significant commercial advantage. The story begins in 1993, when Boris Yeltsin – in a fit of imperial grandeur that would have embarrassed a Czar – made his former tennis coach, Shamil Tarpischev, Russia’s sports minister. The Russian economy was in free fall, and the once-great Soviet sporting machine was crumbling. At some top-level sports clubs, the teams were so poor that the players were sharing unwashed team shirts. A few years later, on my visit to a CSKA Moscow practice, I saw the players swapping equipment as they practised. Tarpischev proposed to Yeltsin that sports clubs be allowed to import alcohol and tobacco duty-free, so the clubs could earn extra money. This was a huge concession. Jim Moody, former head of organized crime for the FBI, claimed that “almost 30 percent maybe even more” of all Russian government money came from taxes on alcohol and tobacco. The idea was that each sports club would simply import as much alcohol or tobacco as they wanted tax-free. This gave them a huge commercial advantage over other legitimate, non-sporting importers of these substances. So it took Russian mobsters all of about 3.2 seconds to figure out they should get into the sport business. As a result, various mafia groups seized control of different clubs and began to compete in the tax-free importation of goods. No single mob group was able to gain control over the sports market, although they certainly tried, as the body count shows.
Some Russian journalists I spoke to claimed most of the violence occurred in the bad old days of the post-Soviet breakup in the 1990s, when mobsters ran around the streets killing anyone who threatened the expansion of their power. Sport, runs the argument, is no exception from other industries. In 1993 for example, dozens of the presidents of the private banks in Moscow were assassinated in mob-style killings. Nor are soccer and hockey the exceptions in Russian sports; in 1999 figure skater Maria Butyrskaya’s BMW was blown up by a mysterious car bomb explosion. Chevalier Nusuyev, the president of the Russian Youth Sports Federation, was killed in a mob-style murder, and eighteen-year-old European Junior Boxing Champion Sergei Latushko was ambushed and shot eight times in the head and chest as he was leaving his practice stadium. He died soon afterwards. Those are a few examples, but there are many others, from many other sports.
To some extent, however, the journalists are right: the murder rate in sports has dropped. Murders and violent incidents are still going on but not to such an extent as ten years ago. However, there are undercurrents that exist in today’s Russian sport that to outsiders may seem baffling. For example, in the 1990s, the FBI revealed in court documents that Vyacheslav Ivankov was the head of the Russian mafia in America. He was convicted to ten years in jail for, among other things, running a violent extortion ring out of the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn. Part of the court proceedings concerned a company, Slavic Inc., that was allegedly money laundering for Ivankov. However, Ivankov’s name did not appear on the company registration. Rather, the president of the company was listed as Slava Fetisov, a famous hockey player, who played for top teams in the Soviet Union, North America, and for the Russian national team. In his career, he won numerous league championships, Stanley Cups, and Olympic medals. Fetisov never fully explained how his name ended up on the registration documents of a company linked by the FBI to the head of the Russian mafia. To my colleagues on the Frontline documentary and to Robert Friedman, the freelance journalist who broke the story, Slava Fetisov denied that Ivankov had anything to do with the company (although his lawyer Barry Slotnick actually confirmed that Ivankov was involved with the company, but it was a legitimate import-export company). Fetisov is now back in Moscow. He is, in 2008, the Russian Sports Minister.
How does someone like Dmitri Chepel go about fixing the game?
The first challenge is deciding with whom to organize the fix. There are three possible groups of people: the referees, the opposing players, and the opposing team administration.
Chepel and his aides spend considerable time debating which ones they should bribe, as the following excerpt illustrates. At this point in the attempted fix, Chepel has contacted the players of the opposing team. They are willing to fix the match but insist on being paid US $60,000. Chepel does not have the money, so he telephones a friend and they have the following conversation:
Friend: $60,000?! The team wants this?
Chepel: Yes.
Friend: Fuck … Well, just give the referees the $40,000, if you don’t find the rest.
Chepel: What else can I do, fuck? Faggots! We can give them [the players] $60,000 or $20,000, fuck. The most important thing is the effect [fixing the game]. Now we will be talking with them and see and maybe we can make a deal. We will give forty, and then bring the twenty later. Fuck! So then there is a guarantee already?
Friend: Yes, of course, the guarantee is needed.
Chepel: Well, fuck. They also have enough. Those fuckers [the players] already have too much. This is the situation.
Friend: Maybe you fucking give the referees thirty [$30,000], fuck. And say to the players: fuck, if you don’t do it for thirty, I will give the other thirty to someone else, rather than you, fuck!
The real dilemma for Chepel is how much certainty can he buy, and for how much? Which set of people – the referees or the players – can give him the best chance of a properly fixed match?
I did some statistical work on this question and the answer is actually pretty close. Bribed referees can bring about a successful fix around 79 per cent of the time; players are a little higher, they can successfully fix around 83 per cent of the time. However, lots of people in the game think that corrupt referees simply cannot guarantee a fix with enough precision to make it worth bribing them. The comments of a UEFA official, who investigated a number of fixed matches, are typical:
[Laughing] I had a case a few years ago. The referee had been bribed. So he gave a penalty. And the team missed the penalty! So you know even if you bribe people, you are not guaranteed to win.
But after a considerable series of negotiations, Dmitri Chepel decides not to bribe either the players or the referees. Rather, he arranges a corrupt deal with the opposing team administration. In the following excerpt of the transcripts, Chepel is speaking to Sergei (*), a team administrator of the opposition. He has already negotiated a potential deal with the players, but he is going to betray them to their own club officials:
Chepel: Okay. I’ll tell it to you. Our way. I’m dealing with you. Because some of the players came and offered this [to fix the match], but I’m dealing with you.
Sergei: Who came?
Chepel: Your players.
Sergei: They contacted you themselves?
Chepel: Yes. But it is not to be talked about in a rush. I will tell you their names later, if you want.
Why does Chepel betray his deal with the players? It is because of the idea of favour-banks, or “you do me a favour now, I’ll do you a favour later.” In many European leagues, owners of teams do one another favours – like ordering their team to lose a game – and then take payment in a favour later: whether it be a “return fix” or a transfer of a particular player. In Italy and Portugal, it is so prevalent there is a name for it: il sistema or “the system.”
If Chepel made a deal with the players, it would simply be a one-shot agreement, done and then forgotten. However, if he makes a deal with the team administration, it becomes part of the ongoing system of business that team officials conduct with one another.
But he runs into a problem soon after the conversation above. The team administrator claims that an official from a third club had said that Chepel had not honoured a match-fixing deal in the past. If he wants to continue, he must clear his reputation. Chepel is furious and phones up the third administrator:
Chepel: Grigori (*), this is Chepel. Explain to me this fact! Where or when do I not keep my obligations to your club? What are the times that I have let you down?
Administrator: I don’t underst
and.
Chepel: You are telling Sergei that I won’t keep my promises! He told me that you don’t trust me. And that I will end up tricking him. This is fucking nonsense! Because when I had to, I solved all the problems.
Administrator: I told him that you and I made a deal [fixed a match] but nothing else!
Chepel is not simply angry because the deal may go wrong, he also needs to re-establish his credibility quickly. Otherwise his chances of conducting future match-fixing deals will be small. This is not only important because of the present corrupt deal, but because in a league with lots of corrupt favour-banks, the ability and reputation to be able to arrange fixed matches is an important business asset for an administrator to have.
Trust is the oil of the favour-bank. The problem with most corrupt acts is that you cannot legally protect them. There is no use going into most courts and saying, “I bribed so-and-so after he promised to fix a game, and then he didn’t do it.” At best the judges will laugh you out of the building: at worst, you could face a whole slew of other problems. Without trust, people wanting to act corruptly would be unable to work with one another, so enormous amounts of energy are spent maintaining this favour-bank to ensure future corrupt deals can be made. Luciano Moggi, the Italian fixer for the team Juventus, was the master craftsman of a favour-bank. In 2005, in an investigation into corruption in the Italian soccer leagues, the police taped a whole series of his phone calls. The transcripts reveal that he enacted a constant series of favours with a large network of internal sports figures that allowed him to fix a number of games for his team. The following excerpt is typical. It shows Moggi’s relationship with Pierluigi Pairetto, one of the officials in charge of appointing referees for UEFA, the ostensibly neutral organization in charge of running the Champions League. Moggi’s Juventus team had a difficult game against the Dutch team Ajax coming up, and he requested a good referee for the match. Pairetto phones him:
Moggi: Hello.
Pairetto: Hey, have you forgotten me? I always remember you!
Moggi: Oh come on!
Pairetto: Hey, I’ve put in a great referee for the Amsterdam game.
Moggi: Who’s that then?
Pairetto: It’s Meier. [Urs Meier, a Swiss referee. There is no suspicion that he was corrupt; merely that he is an excellent referee.]
Moggi: Well done!
Pairetto: I only called you to tell you that. See I remember you, even if you these days …
Moggi: Oh, don’t break my balls! You’ll see that when I’m back, you’ll realize that I haven’t forgotten you.
A few days later, Moggi helped Pairetto acquire a rare four-door Maserati. Moggi’s conversations are full of these favour transactions. Here is another example: he is talking to Fabio Baldas, who was the designator of the national referees’ commission, the man responsible for choosing who referees each match in the Italian League. Baldas appeared regularly on a popular TV show, Il Processo di Biscardi, hosted by Aldo Biscardi, also an old friend of Moggi’s, to give his expert opinion on refereeing decisions from the weekend’s games. Moggi essentially fixed Biscardi’s show. He vetted the comments and determined which referees get the most favourable comments or criticism. Their conversation ends in the following way:
Baldas: OK … if I need a favour will you do me a favour?
Moggi: No problem.
Baldas: You’ll call me back soon?
Moggi: Yup, soon.
Baldas: Fine, bye.
Dmitri Chepel is not in the same class as Luciano Moggi. He simply does not have the resources that Moggi did. So midway through his fixing attempts, he runs into a problem. His credibility has already been damaged by rumours of unreliability. Now he must use another common corrupt soccer practice: he must provide a guarantor. In this excerpt he is complaining to a friend about his difficulties in getting the other team administration to accept the fix.
You understand that is how it is being talked about. Fuck! I’m saying [to the other team officials], that when asked [to sell a match] I solved the problems. Fuck! I didn’t say fuck [nothing]. And I didn’t try to pass it to other people. And I didn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t say, “Give it [the payment] immediately.” You understand? And he started telling me stories [about Chepel’s purported unreliability]. And I say, “Wait. If, fuck, you need the guarantees, go to the Moldovan (*) and clear up the situation.
In the previous section, Chepel was attempting to guarantee the match; here he needs a third party who can do two things: re-establish his reputation and also guarantee the fix. In other words, this third party is forceful enough to work as a quasi-legal system. This is a common practice in highly corrupt leagues – using third parties, possibly mobsters, to “guarantee” the fix. However, it seems that as Chepel’s game approached, the opposing team administrators changed their mind and didn’t insist on a guarantor. The game took place, and Baltika Kaliningrad “won” the match.
A month later, Novye Kolyosa magazine published the transcripts. One of the other teams confirmed that Baltika had attempted to fix the match, but they had turned down the offer. Dmitri Chepel and the Baltika Kaliningrad administration denied the charges, claiming that the tapes were fake and that, anyway, they had been illegally obtained.
Chepel resigned from the team management in late October, citing his disappointment at not being able keep the club in the first division. He did not mention the tapes, and their authenticity has never been challenged in court. Despite repeated attempts to interview Dmitri Chepel, I was unable to contact him.
There is a theme that runs through almost all the cases of corruption in soccer, no matter where in the world they occur. The good, honourable men who try to do the decent thing and stand up against the corruption are generally punished. The villains go free. There is the case of Chinese whistleblower Gong Jianping, the referee who was sentenced to ten years in a hard labour camp after he admitted to the corruption in Chinese soccer. There is the case of Malaysian journalists Lazarus Rokk and Johnson Fernandez, who first revealed the extent of the problem in their country. They were threatened, sued, and their careers jeopardized. There is the case of Marc Piron, the aggressive Belgian police detective who was pulled off the case in the middle of the investigation. There is, of course, the case of the English tabloid The People that mounted a breathtakingly brilliant investigation into the extent of match-fixing in their league. Years later, the secretary of the league wrote that “he knew everything that was going on,” but at the time did not thank the paper. Rather, the soccer authorities tried to ban The People’s journalists from their soccer grounds.
But of all these cases, possibly the man who received the most harsh treatment is Igor Rudnikov, the man who published the Dmitri Chepel tapes. At the time of writing, he is in the infamous Kresty Prison in St. Petersburg. It is a nasty place: built by the Tsars, used by Stalin, and now crammed with prisoners, many of whom suffer from tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. It is known as the world’s most over crowded jail. Rudnikov’s crime? He kept publishing articles about corruption in his home town of Kaliningrad. Two years after his magazine revealed the local soccer team was not only hopeless, but their management corrupt, Rudnikov made a serious mistake. He published a series of articles that alleged that some of the town police and prosecutors were running a brothel and also organizing a major international shipment of drugs. The police immediately began an investigation. Not, you might be surprised, into the allegations, but into Rudnikov. Thirty-six police officers raided Rudnikov’s offices. He was enraged. In fact, he was so enraged that it is alleged that he beat up eight of them. The rest of the police officers were so distressed that they had to arrest the powerful Rudnikov and take him to prison. While in prison, the town prosecutors felt that, in the interests of public safety, he should be removed from the city and placed in the Kresty Prison.
A disinterested person might find it difficult to imagine a magazine editor so muscular that he can beat up eight Russian police officers sin
gle-handedly. A disinterested person might also think that it was an extraordinarily unlucky coincidence that Rudnikov lost his temper so badly that he committed a violent crime just after publishing an exposé about widescale police corruption. A disinterested person might even think that the whole thing was a set up by a bunch of criminal thugs masquerading as public officials.
In many other European countries, the case of Igor Rudnikov would be a national scandal. In post-Soviet Russia, it is par for the course. The researchers at the Committee to Protect Journalists, the New York–based humanitarian group, replied wearily when I asked them about his case: “Every week in Putin’s Russia, there is something like this, some journalist in a small town who is beaten up or threatened or even murdered.”
A cynic may respond that this is, after all, a European country in transition. They claim that Russia will become a far less corrupt country in the future. So in the next two chapters, let us examine how the fixers work in general and then specifically how they work in the bigger, richer Western European leagues.
11
HOW TO FIX A SOCCER GAME
My personal opinion as one who has been involved in organized crime and gambling is how easy it is to do…. It is very easy to get a professional athlete to come “on side.” We would spend a lot of time trying to get these guys to do this … we would deliberately target them … Heck, a lot of the time they would come to us!
So far, I have discussed the effects of gambling fixers. I have shown the chaos in some of the Asian leagues, how players actually perform the fixes, and the long history of corruption in the European game. But how do gambling fixers actually work? How do they go about fixing matches? In this chapter, I will show you some of their methods – but let’s start with a case that demonstrates perfectly how not to fix a match.