by Declan Hill
What is truly extraordinary is that while the investigation was going on in England, at exactly the same time senior members of the Royal Malaysian Police and the Singapore anti-corruption agency were cracking down on the networks of match-fixers in their country. If the European and Asian police had joined forces then, soccer might have become a great deal safer and this book might never have come to be written.
The second undeniable fact is that a member of a dangerous and violent Asian triad group was connected to “Richard” Heng Suan Lim, a.k.a. The Short Man, and that this contact would try again to fix English Premier League matches.
It took three attempts and four bullets and still “George” Wai Hen Cheung could not take down his man.
It was September 7, 1991, and the Shui Fong Triad in England was facing problems. A new group of Hong Kong “businessmen” had come into the U.K. and they were trying to take over the criminal group. So Cheung, a man who would later serve time for extortion, racketeering, drug smuggling, and carving up a man’s face with a double-bladed Stanley knife, was instructed to shoot one of the interlopers – a man called Ying Kit Lam. One fall night, he followed Ying Kit Lam through the streets of London’s Chinatown. He had been planning to shoot him the previous evening in a Chinese disco but had failed when Lam suddenly went to visit a brothel-cum-casino in Maida Vale in West London. This time as Cheung moved in to shoot Lam, two teenaged girls got in the way and he had to turn around quickly and pretend to stare at a window.
Finally, Cheung had his opportunity. He came up behind Lam, stuck his gun in his back, and fired twice. But even this did not go according to plan. The wounded Lam grabbed him and the two of them fought in a deadly struggle in the middle of the street. Cheung fired twice more, but his gun jammed and he fled, dropping the weapon.
The eventual trial at the Old Bailey was one of the most intriguing in triad history. For the first time, a made member of a Chinese gang – “George” Wai Hen Cheung – publicly described his initiation rites. He talked about going at two o’clock in the morning to the basement of the Princess Gardens restaurant in Fulham. There a gang member, Ng Lo, a.k.a. No. 5, told him and the other initiates to take off their clothes and any jewellery. They were to kneel on the floor in front of a table covered with red paper, a pot with burning joss sticks, a bottle of wine, and paper cut into the shape of a man. Cheung then had to hold the burning joss stick with four fingers of his left hand and five fingers of his right and repeat a series of traditional oaths. The most important of these oaths, he testified, were: “never to betray a brother, never to steal from a brother, and never to commit adultery with a brother’s wife. If we broke these oaths, we would be punished severely. I was told I would be crippled or killed.”
Despite the warning, Cheung testified at the trial that he had been ordered to do the shooting by six members of the Shui Fong Triad. One of them was “Danny” Wai Yuen Liu, thirty-one, who at the time had a conviction for helping to run a stolen and forged credit card ring. In the trial four of the defendants were acquitted of planning the attack, although two were convicted of visiting Cheung in prison and threatening him if he testified. Then Liu disappeared from public life until six years later when he surfaced in the most serious attempts to manipulate a soccer match England has seen.
On February 10, 1999, Liu was driving a BMW containing two Malaysian criminals. As they left, Charlton FC’s stadium in southeast London, armed members of the Scotland Yard’s Organised Crime Squad arrested them. It was a dramatic ending to a series of fixed matches, called the “floodlights swindles.” Essentially, the scam had involved a number of English soccer games that were being televised in Asia. The games were all between teams of varying strengths. But if the underdog was either tied with the favourite or losing by only one goal and it was the second half of the game (so the bets could not be called off), the Asian fixers would switch the lights off. Since most of the Asian betting public were gambling on the favourites winning, the fixers were estimated to make up to £30 million per match.
The gang was caught when their English assistant had unsuccessfully tried to recruit another man to help them. There were three members of the group. They were all arrested, and two of them, and possibly the third, have interesting connections to the other match-fixing trials. The first of these men was “Danny” Wai Yuen Liu, the driver who had been involved, although acquitted, in the triad shooting trial. The second was “Mark” Chee Kew Ong, who had been arrested for illegal gambling in Malaysia. In 1987, Ong had written to “Richard” Heng Suan “The Short Man” Lim, the alleged go-between in the Grobbelaar match-fixing plot, saying, “You must try your best to tackle Wimbledon and some other club [sic]. Make use of your time, for you can do it.” Lim had just arrived in London and was trying to cultivate connections in the soccer world. Ong told Lim that they could both make a lot of money on the Kuala Lumpur gambling markets with the right kind of information.
The third member of the gang was also called Lim – Eng Hwa. He was from a small northern state in Malaysia called Penang. All three Asians in the floodlights gang were convicted to time in jail. It was the one unequivocal success that European law enforcement has had against Asian fixers, but the information does not seem to have permeated to other European police forces.
The most recent trial took place in Sitzungssaal 1 – or Trial Room Number 1 – in the State Regional Court of Frankfurt. It was, like many things connected to the justice system, slightly underwhelming. It was a modern courtroom with subdued neon lights and a large seal on the wall. Five judges sat behind a long desk at the top of the room.
On the left side of the courtroom sat the seven defendants and their fourteen lawyers. Most of them – at least, the defendants – slouched down behind the low-slung table like a bored UN delegation. On the right side of the court, facing them – alone – for the prosecution sat a young, attractive, blonde woman.
It was the most important case of Asian match-fixing in Europe since the floodlights case and there was practically no one watching it. The case was so obscure that I had spent forty-five minutes in the courthouse trying to find the right room. Few of the officials had known where the trial was, or what it was about.
In the actual courtroom, there were exactly three people watching the proceedings: an elderly lawyer in an ill-fitting suit who turned out to be the German Football Association’s representative, a fat, Lebanese-looking fellow wearing a bright lime green T-shirt who continually spoke into a cellphone, and me.
The case had been jogging along since March 2006, when the German police announced they had caught a gang of unsuccessful fixers who had tried to rig ten games in the Austrian and German leagues. At the centre of the trial was yet another Malaysian Chinese by the name of Bee Wah Lim, or William. He, like the Lim at the centre of the floodlights trial, had been born in Penang, a northern state of Malaysia, in 1962. He was, according to the press reports, a poor hapless cook who had lost at least 700,000 euros in attempting to fix ten games in the German and Austrian leagues. I had wondered about the case. It seemed strange to me that a purportedly unemployed chef could afford to lose hundreds of thousands in euros fixing games.
Then even the small press interest died and I heard no more about the case until I phoned a contact in June 2007. He was connected to the Asian fixers and told me that one of them was in Frankfurt. What was he doing in Frankfurt? I thought. It was the off-season. There was no soccer. He is not the type to get on planes for the fun of it. What business would be so important that he would want to go to Frankfurt? Then I remembered the trial.
I knew nothing and phoned the court lawyers. They told me that Lim had been in jail for more than a year, but that week he had agreed to confess. So on a dreary Friday afternoon in June, he revealed to the court how he had arranged the fixes. His defence lawyer claimed that his wealthy wife had died, leaving him with a lot of money. Lim had used some of the money to get a Serbian former professional soccer player, Dragan Anić, and a Lebanes
e petty criminal, to approach the players to throw games. The lawyers read into the court record the text messages between the accused. Then the judges put a 30,000 euros bail on Lim and asked him to come back next week to the court.
He disappeared, just like Michael Vana, the Czech star player in Singapore. He disappeared the same day my Asian fixer source was in Frankfurt. And no one – not the police, not the prosecutors, not his own lawyer – knew where he had gone. I asked the German law enforcement officials what happened to him. They replied:
We think he left the country. We were told that he left the country, but we really don’t know. There was a court date the next week and he did not show up for it. He has a number of passports: British, Malaysian, Singaporean, Chinese. He travels under them all, so he could be anywhere.
What they also do not know was where exactly Lim was betting his money. They don’t know with whom or which Asian organization. They didn’t even know what language he might have been talking to his contacts in Asia (Hokkien or Hakka would be the answer). His methods, manner, and finances all suggest that Lim may have been connected to a far larger organization. Yet the German authorities let him go. It is yet another example of how the Asian fixers completely outwit the European authorities. Here was a prime catch, a man who used precisely the same methods and manner of fixing matches that Ye Zheyun was using in Belgium at precisely the same time. But again the Asian fixer was allowed to disappear: and again the German police, like the English police before them, had not been to Asia and had no idea of the scale of organization that may have been behind Lim.
There is no suspicion that the police were corrupt. Rather, they were purely and simply ignorant. To paraphrase the former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, they did not know what they did not know. But how good was the German Football Association? One of the police officers said something interesting to me, when we spoke about why there was so little discussion of the trial:
No one wants to know about this case. Everyone wants to believe in a clean game. So the German Football Association does not want to talk about this case.
This is not to suggest that there was an explicit cover-up, the German FA did form a match-fixing committee to look into the Hoyzer allegations, but it does echo the comments from the English detectives and lawyers who were connected to the Grobbelaar investigation. One of them said, “At first, they wanted to help. But as the trial started, the soccer world banded together and would not help us at all. They wanted the bad publicity to go away.”
The final chapter of the Siege of Singapore in 1942 was, if possible, the most shameful of all. The outnumbered Japanese army had come so far, so quickly that their supply lines were shattered: they were to the north of Singapore but were at the end of their equipment. The Allies had 120,000 men in Singapore; the guns, contrary to legend, could swing around and face north – and yet they surrendered. There is all kinds of debate around the surrender but the psychological side of what happened to the Allied army is clear: they panicked. The streets of the city were full of chaos and disorder. Few people knew what to do. There was no effective central command and from stupid overconfidence based on racial prejudice, they turned quickly to stupid unnecessary panic.
The same is true of the European sports world.
Three years ago when I first started speaking out about the Asian match-fixers, I was greeted, for the most part, with skepticism and disbelief. It was a little like being an Old Testament prophet. I would come wandering out of the desert of research with tales of destruction and doom about the sport being in peril. People would listen politely but essentially not believe me. After a couple of years, I noticed that people had reached the rationalization stage: now they believed there was a problem but they would say things like, “Sure there is fixing, but it is only in the lower divisions, not the big games. The top teams would never fix a match.” Now they have reached the stage of resignation. “There is nothing that anyone can do,” they say shrugging the problem off as if match-fixing was as inevitable as cold in the winter.
They were wrong to deny there was a problem, they were wrong to think that top teams cannot fix games, and they are wrong to believe that there is nothing that can be done. I have shown that there is, in some clubs, a culture of supplying women to referees before big matches. There is a very easy, simple way of stopping that culture dead in its tracks – have more female match officials. “Hey, did you like the girl I sent to your room last night?” becomes, in most cases, redundant if you are talking to a woman. So if soccer associations really want to stop that culture, they should simply fast-track women officials. Of the top referees in Europe at the moment, the ones who handle the big Champions League matches and European Championship, none are women.
Want to stop the players from taking any bribes? Tell them about the change in their status – from coveted friend to slave – when the matchfixers start “calling the fix.” The U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association does that: they have the former Mafia capo Michael Franzese lecture their players about how the mob really works. At the moment, not a single European soccer association has any education or training for their players on how to avoid criminals or the dangers of dealing with them.
I am not trying to be unfair to the European soccer associations or the police. There are inept and incompetent officials among them; there are also very good people trying to the best of their abilities to defend the sport and the law. But they do lack some very basic tools. For example, very few European soccer associations have a security department, which is standard in North American sports, like the NFL and NHL. Not even UEFA, a sports body that runs the Champions League and European Football Championship (tournaments that produce billions of dollars in spinoff revenue), has a unit specifically interested in protecting and policing the game. There is no one who can tell interested but uninformed law enforcement officials in other countries, possibly unrelated facts – for example, that there was a Richard Lim and a William Lim at the heart of two major match-fixing trials. Or that Richard Lim had been connected with a triad member who was involved in later match-fixing attempts, and that all of the cases had links back to illegal organized crime syndicates in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. Until such organizations are put into place, then the fixing will continue.
Outside the Frankfurt courtroom, after the day’s proceedings had ended, I introduced myself to the lawyer from the German Football Association. He told me he was monitoring the case and that he had been on the Association’s investigation committee of match-fixing. I took him to one side and explained what I did, who I was connected to, and that if he needed any corroborating information to vouch for my honesty I would be happy to make sure someone provided it to him. I gave him my e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and all my contact details. Finally, I told him that I suspected that the same Asian fixers who had escaped this particular trial may have successfully targeted the Bundesliga, the top German league. The lawyer’s response? He ran away. He disappeared out of the court, past the security scanner, and out the door waving his battered briefcase at me as if to ward off any more knowledge. To this day, I have not heard from him. His response is typical of the reaction I have met from European police. As a researcher, it is not my job to work for the police, but on several occasions, the fixes that I was hearing about were occurring at such an enormously high level that I felt it was my public duty to go to the police. I did not walk into an ordinary police station and ask to speak to the duty officer. Rather, I went to units that had been organizing criminal investigations into match-fixing. I offered to brief them on what I knew. None of them took me up on the offer. It’s too bad, because the Asian fixers came back, and I believe they fixed some of the very highest games in the world.
PROLOGUE
My time in Oxford growed me up. Two incidents in particular changed me. The first was coincidental to the university. I was working as a freelance journalist during the spring vacation of 2004. I was back in Iraq,
a year after the invasion. It was a normal morning at the Kirkuk Business Centre, in the oil-rich north of the country. The business centre had no customers in it. The halls had metaphorical tumbleweeds floating through the corridors. All the Iraqis working there told me that they were about to leave for places like West Virginia, Florida, or Los Angeles, or that they would do so as soon as their visa came through. Every American I spoke to spun a line about how the city was going to be “the Houston of the Middle East.” Then they told me that they were leaving in nine days or two weeks or next month and their eyes told me a story of the fear in which they lived.
I got it then. I got it as if someone had tattooed it on my forehead. The United States had lost in Iraq. It had lost as surely and certainly as if it had been defeated in battle. It was over. Then I watched while, in the next three and half years, hundreds of thousands of people died to sustain something doomed to die anyway. They died needlessly. They died from a lack of imagination. They died because of bullshit. They died because thousands of other people in Washington, London, and obscure little caves in Pakistan kept pumping out clouds of bullshit to hide unpalatable facts – like it was an unwinnable war for any side and all that will be left after the years of misery and bullshit is chaos and death.
I had a similar experience one day while walking through one of the sub-branches of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. This part of the library was where the social science books are kept and, for the most part, students can actually see and touch these books. I walked past stacks and stacks of books and found a few, a painful few, books that I actually wanted to read. Actually, I found painfully few books that I could read. In recent years, the language used in the social sciences has become so increasingly obtuse and convoluted as to be unreadable.