by Declan Hill
Kenan Erol was a man with a plan. On April 6, 2005, he walked up to Sefer Hakan Olgun and tried to bribe him. Erol brought a bag stuffed with 500 euros to his meeting with Olgun, the goalkeeper for the Turkish Super League side Akçaabat Sebatspor. There were a couple of reasons why it might have been a good idea to bribe the Akçaabat Sebatspor keeper. Coming into that Saturday’s game, Akçaabat Sebatspor was almost certain to get relegated. They were bottom of the league table, eight points behind their nearest rivals. Their opponents in the match were Kayserispor. They, too, were in a relegation battle, but they still had a good chance of staying in the Super League if they could win the game. But there was another, more compelling, motive for a fix to happen. The morning of the game, someone walked into a betting shop in the nearby town of Trabzon and bet more than 250,000 euros with a Turkish betting agency that Akçaabat Sebatspor would lose. Somebody wanted Akçaabat Sebatspor to lose the game and was willing to pay someone a lot of money to make sure that they did. Kenan Erol was their man.
Erol talked to at least three other players on the team, but he needed to make sure the goalie, the player who could save or destroy a team’s chances with a couple of mistakes, was on board. Kenan Erol met Olgun. But it really was not Kenan Erol’s day. Why not? Because Olgun secretly taped their conversation.
Erol: I have spoken to all the other players about this fix. The others know about it.
Olgun: What? The whole team knows?
Erol: Don’t worry about it!
Olgun: I don’t understand. Do you want me just to leave the goal area and “eat” a goal?
Erol: First half you will be ahead 1-0. But Kayseri should win the game. You should let in two or three goals in the second half.
Olgun: Can I trust these people?
Erol: The money is in the car. Let me show you.
Olgun: So this is both betting business and also you have an arrangement with the other team? Is that right? Does our team management know?
Erol: If this “encouragement” went to your management, you won’t get a single lira! I’m trying to do you a favour. These guys are trying to bet 500 to 600 billion lira. [He shows him the bag with the money inside]. There are 200,000 euros in the bag and there will be more. Just get the score we want.
Olgun: Brother! They are all 500 euro notes. I have never seen that much money in my life! Are you going to give it to me?
Erol: When the match is finished, it will be in your pocket.
Olgun: I have 130 to 140 billion TL [Turkish lira, approximately 84,000 euros] debt. How much will I get?
Erol: At least 75 billion TL [approximately 45,000 euros]. The rest will go to your friends.
The identity of “these guys” who were purportedly willing to bet 500 to 600 billion Turkish lira on the game has never been revealed. But the potential payoff of the bet could have been spectacular: for getting the score line exactly right, the unknown bettors could have netted twenty-five times their initial stake. However, when Veli Sezgin, the chairman of Akçaabat Sebatspor, heard about the attempts to bribe some of his players, he fitted out his goalkeeper with a tape recorder. The fix attempt failed and the game was drawn. However, his gutsiness may have cost him. In August 2005, four months later, someone ambushed Sezgin and shot him. He was severely wounded but survived. The transcript of Erol’s meeting with Olgun did give the Turkish Football Federation an accurate record of what happened. Their administrative board suspended six players for their alleged role in the fix, gave Hakan Olgun 50,000 Turkish lira as a reward for his coming forward, and invited Kenan Erol to explain his actions before their committee. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Erol declared that he was unavailable to meet with the committee, and perhaps surprisingly, the Turkish police declined to pursue the case. Possibly they believed Erol’s original statement when he declared that the whole thing had been an eastern Turkish joke that had been unappreciated by the Istanbul sophisticates.
That a fix attempt or even a mob-style ambush would happen in Turkish soccer is no surprise. The league is notorious for the connections between its soccer officials and leading mafia figures. A few months before the fix attempt, in November 2004, the Turkish parliament opened an inquiry into the links between a notorious mafioso, Sedat Peker, and the soccer league. His mafia associates had been covertly taped arranging matches with referees and club officials. However, neither the attention of the politicians nor the interest of the Turkish Football Federation seemed to have stopped Peker’s years of activities in the Turkish league.
If Sedat Peker were the only criminal to be involved with a Super League squad, Turkish soccer would still have a problem. But he is not. Beşiktaş is one of the big three clubs of Turkish soccer, equivalent to Liverpool or Inter Milan. However, for all their success, the Beşiktaş team management had a curious fondness for Alaattin Çakιcι. Alaattin Çakιcι was a leading member of the Grey Wolves, a paramilitary organization that tortured and killed political dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. Çakιcι graduated into organized crime, murder, and drug dealing in the 1990s. But when the police finally came to arrest him, thirty years after he began his career of violence and intimidation, they discovered he had good friends at the Beşiktaş soccer club. In fact, the Besşktaş manager liked Çakιcι so much that when the police came looking for him, he helped him escape the country by arranging a visa under a false name.
For all the murky circumstances around Kenan Erol, the Akçaabat Sebatspor team in particular, and the Turkish league’s mafia connections in general, one thing is clear: Kenan Erol should stick to his day job. Normally, Erol is a businessman. Hopefully, he is good at “business,” because he is a terrible match-fixer. His bribery attempts were inept and clumsy, his instructions were incompetent, and in conversation he displayed all the finesse of a dodgy used-car salesman. But if he wanted to, how could he improve his performance?
My intellectual mentor for this question is Michael Franzese, a character you could only find in America. He is the son of notorious mob hitman John “Sonny” Franzese. Michael became a capo for the Colombo crime family of New York while still in his twenties. His rise to prominence was partly due to his family connections, but mostly due to an extraordinary gas-tax scam scheme he organized with Michael Markowitz, a criminal connected with the Russian mafia. The scheme consisted of opening and closing hundreds of shell companies that owned gas stations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The companies collected the gas tax from their customers, declared bankruptcy, and then never paid the tax to federal, state, and county authorities. It was simple, straightforward, and it netted his “family” hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It was the perfect crime: lots of money, little risk, and low penalties if caught. On the side, Franzese fixed professional sports games, including, some people claim, New York Yankees baseball games. In the 1990s, after a series of federal busts, Franzese went straight, moved to Hollywood and became, of course, a movie producer.
I met him when he came to Canada. He had become a devout born-again Christian and was promoting an anti-drug concert tour in Toronto. I was researching the documentary about the Russian mafia and the National Hockey League for Frontline when we spoke briefly. Franzese was very straightforward:
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!
Tall, dark-haired, and dressed in black leather, Franzese is an interesting man. When I met him, he was with his wife, Camille Garcia, who he credits for turning around his life. They had brought their baby with them and seemed to present the picture of a hard-working, happy family. But it is not difficult to see Franzese as the mobster he once was: he oozes intelligence, power, and danger. He knows what it takes to get a sportsman to come on side:
Athletes like
to gamble. They are confident, aggressive risk-takers. All the things that make them good athletes make them good gamblers … Once they got in trouble with us, we got them to do things for us. They would shave points, you know, maybe not try so hard. Or just share information, let us know what was going on.
Franzese is no one’s fool. He understands the psychology of people and he used it in his fixing. I asked him whether it was difficult to get sports people to throw games. Franzese replied that if you are a mobster, you actually want to be friends – at first – with sports people. The idea is to find their weakness. If it is blondes, you use blondes. If it is drugs, you use drugs. Whatever it is, you use it to get a hold over the sports person. Then you try to get them to throw games:
You might approach them or set them up with a woman. She would get pregnant or pretend to be. That would screw their game up. Or you would get them partying hard the night before the game.
This amoral brilliance for discovering human weakness, which Franzese now renounces, was at the heart of his success at match-fixing. However, the first problem that confronts a gambling match-fixer, brilliant or not, is how to get access to the players. If the match-fixers cannot speak to the players, then they cannot arrange a fix. Yet access to the world of the players is closely guarded, not only by the players but also the people close to them. How then do match-fixers get access to the players?
For long-term match-fixers working in their own domestic league, the process is something akin to seduction. The Prosecutor’s Report of the Berlin Staatsanwaltschaft has a description of the Sapina brothers, the Croatian gamblers who were able to persuade Robert Hoyzer to “come on side,” and their sports bar, where many of the German referees not only partied at but felt comfortable. Other fixers may try to establish themselves in some official capacity at the club. In international games and tournaments, the match-fixers have to rely on other methods. Several players and officials talked about the match-fixers manoeuvring so as to share the same hotel corridor. The fixer would then sometimes use prostitutes to establish a connection between the players and themselves.
The second method fixers use to get access to players is to hire that access. In this scenario, they employ agents, known as “runners,” to ensure access between them and the players, or they may even set themselves up as “player-agents” who will represent the players in corporate and business deals. In the Asian leagues, where corruption is purportedly better established than in Europe, there exists a series of independent runners who work for corrupt players on each of the teams; these runners could then be contacted by potential match-fixers when they wanted to establish a fix. Chin Lai (*) is a former player who was approached a number of times to fix games. He also had teammates who fixed games. He claims that runners were key to the operation. They would make friends with players, figure out which players may be susceptible to bribes, and then introduce them to nationallevel bookies.
… there were runners. They were ex-players, good friends of the team. Sometimes they would be guys we would meet in a disco. The owner or someone, they would party with us for months. Then maybe say something. These guys were key. They had to be people with access to the players. They had to be people the players would trust. It was the same as the cricket fixing. You needed people who could contact the team. They were vital. They had to be people who could come to training sessions or games and matches.
The common thread between these two methods – direct contact or runner-arranged – is at this initial stage, the match-fixer is simply seeking to gain access to as wide an assortment of players as possible. How players are approached to make the corrupt deal and what is said to them is decided in the next stage.
THE SET UP
It is not enough for a match-fixer simply to be introduced to players. As Kenan Erol, the unsuccessful Turkish match-fixer showed, being in the same room does not guarantee a successfully fixed match. What is also important is how the match-fixer approaches a player. There are two main types of approaches, and ironically, they mirror the two principal business strategies of erotic dancers in North American strip bars.
For anyone innocent enough not to have been in a North American strip bar, this is how they work. A whole bunch of men go in with lots of money in their pockets to look at semi-naked women. They think the whole experience is about sex. They are wrong. The semi-naked women know the whole experience is about getting as much of that money out of the men’s pockets as possible. In other words, it is about profit maximization. To make that money, a woman will have to do as many lap-dances as possible. A lap-dance is when the dancer will grind herself against a customer for the length of one song. She will receive a set fee for each song. Believe it or not, how the women get the men to hire them has been the subject of extensive sociological study. Some of the research has been done by traditional male academics, but lots of feminists have also studied the business and discovered that the dancers generally choose one of two business strategies: there are those who try for fast bucks – quick, direct approaches to as many different customers as possible (“Hi, honey, want to see my tits?”); and those who manufacture “counterfeit intimacy” or pseudo-relationships with specific customers (“Hi, sweetie, you look like you had a long day – want me to sit down and be your little girl?”) who then spend more money on them.
The Asian match-fixers, when they are working in leagues with lots of corruption, often use the “fast bucks” approach. Tohari Paijan was a player who agreed to play in fixed matches in the Malaysian-Singaporean league. When asked about the methods of approaches, he replied, “Oh no, there was nothing subtle. They would just call us up at the hotel and propose it over the phone.” This method is also common when access is limited. For example, in the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the FIFA-ranked referees were hidden away in a maximum-security compound used by the Vatican in central Rome. One source reported, “It was incredible. The phone lines were supposed to be confidential and unlisted, but the referees were receiving phone calls in their rooms from bookies offering bribes.” In these examples, because there was so much corruption in the league, in the first case, and access was so restricted, in the second case, the match-fixers had to use fast, direct approaches.
In leagues where corruption is rarer, fixers face a more difficult job. It is at this point that the counterfeit intimacy method is frequently used. One example was described by a U.S. college basketball player in the early 1960s. Art Hicks was black. One day, after a white teammate made yet another racist comment, Hicks decided to fix some games with an organized crime syndicate. He was eventually caught and when he testified he revealed how the match-fixers were “experts at human nature”:
One thing you never heard about the gamblers is how good they were at what they did. They were experts at human nature and that’s why so few of the kids they approached ever turned them down. They catch you at just the right time, when you’re vulnerable. They can look at a kid’s game and see there ain’t no love there … Whatever the problem, they knew how to exploit it. The gambler becomes the most reliable person in your life. He replaces the coach.
This is what the former New York mafia capo Michael Franzese was talking about when he spoke of “being friends” with the players first and then using their weaknesses against them. Here a match-fixer is not trying the direct, fast method; it is more like a savage animal stalking its victim. The fixer is getting close to his prey (the athlete) and weakening or using weakness to propose match-fixing.
However, for all this discussion about relationship-building, how do match-fixers actually propose a corrupt deal? What language do they use? When German referee Robert Hoyzer was persuaded by Croatian gamblers to fix matches, he struggled to explain how they were able to do so. He had always regarded himself as a very honest and a well-brought-up person, yet in a relatively short time they were able to persuade him to do something that he never would have considered before:
It was an ongoing process that I wasn’t aware of any mo
re in the end. It affected me in a way that I stopped noticing things going on around me. I only hung out at this café, at some point it was like my second living room. I was around all the time. I was there eight days out of the week and was treated by them like a very special person.
A soccer administrator in Malaysia describes a similar pattern in proposing match-fixing where the fixers use language that would allow the players not to “feel criminal in their thinking … they [the match-fixers] would call it coffee money.” Another popular form of corrupt invitation is for match-fixers to say, “You can get X amount of money for just ninety minutes of work. Think about it.” These invitations are couched in a lovely, neutral language, as if there were nothing wrong with the proposal.
The following excerpt is a good example of how to set up a fixed game in a league of high corruption. It is a direct, fast-bucks approach. Chieu (*) was one of the match-fixers in the Malaysian-Singaporean league of the early 1990s. He was something of “an expert in human nature” and along with other fixers who created networks of corruption throughout the league he made himself a great deal of money. This excerpt is from one of the previously unpublished police confessions; the player is reenacting the general outline of his first conversation with the fixer. Chieu had already established a relationship with David (*) – a top Malaysian player – who then introduces him to two other players – Ali (*) and Rahil (*) – on his team to help set up a match-fixing ring.
David: This is our friend Chieu.
Chieu: I am Chieu. [Ali and Rahil shake hands with him]. I have come here to talk to you. I will try to help you reach the final of the Malaysian Cup. Okay, I’ll make it simple! First, I help your team in five games. I will pay you 15,000 RM for winning each game. After winning those five, you will have to lose or draw the game. I will pay you 25,000 RM to draw a game, and to lose a game 40,000 RM.