by Declan Hill
It was not always so. My great-grandfather taught the now-forgotten art of rhetoric at a university. I have some of his writings. He was essentially trying to teach the trick of conveying complex ideas in a simple way. Most academic papers are now completely the opposite: they convey extraordinarily simple ideas in the most complex manner possible. In the 1930s, when my great-grandfather retired from his university, it was still possible for an intellectually curious person of almost any educational level, to pick up a university journal article and read it. That person may not have been able to understand every nuance, but they could get the general direction of the debate. It is no longer so. I defy most readers to pick up an article from sociology or psychology or linguistics and, as the author goes on about postmodernism or Foucault or structuralism, even understand the introduction.
Those experiences in Iraq and Oxford changed me. I began to look around and see factories of bullshit everywhere. I do not mean the usual corporate hucksterism that we see all the time on television. I mean places like government ministries, international development agencies, think tanks, Royal Commissions, corporate public relations departments that all pump out documents, studies, and reports that will never be read in a thick, turgid, seemingly unending stream.
Sport is different. At its best, sport gives us the truth. It is one of the rare places in this modern age where anything might happen. There may be a freak weather pattern. The underdog team, playing their hearts out, may achieve a miracle and upset the odds. The strong team, full of people who dedicated themselves to making the difficult – winning – look easy, may inspire us. But whatever happens, sports, played honestly, is unscripted and truthful.
We all have our favourite moments in sport. One of mine came when I watched a cross-country ski race in the 1998 Olympics. If you know anything about ski racing, you know Bjorn Daehlie. He dominated his sport, winning twelve Olympic medals, fourteen World Champion ships, and setting a host of individual records. The race that I watched was typical Daehlie: he won easily. In fact, he finished so far ahead of the rest of the competition that he could have gone home, made a cup of tea, drank it, and returned before many of the other competitors had finished. But he did not leave. He waited by the finishing gate and shook hands with as many of the other competitors as he could. They left. He stayed. Daehlie remained behind because there was one final competitor who was taking part in almost his first ski race. He was at least twenty minutes behind everyone else. It was bitterly cold. Most of the spectators had left. Most of the media people had packed their gear and left. Most other athletes would have contented themselves with a handshake in the warmth of the Olympic Village. But not Daehlie. Not a man who demonstrated the true nature of what it is to be a champion. He waited. He waited in the freezing temperatures. He waited until he saw that last racer come around the final turn and he cheered him on, clapping and waving as the other man finished the race.
This is the beauty of sport. It produces events that inspire us to become bigger than who we really are, be it Liverpool and their extraordinary comeback in the Champions League Final; be it the courage of the survivors of the Munich air crash trying to win the FA Cup for their dead teammates; be it a ski champion at the end of a race cheering on another competitor.
Match-fixing destroys all of that. Match-fixing ruins our dreams and ideals. Match-fixing turns sport into one more area of predictable bullshit. I am going to introduce you to some people who claim they fixed a number of international soccer games. It may shock and disturb you, but from what I can tell, it is the truth.
15
THE STORY OF PAL
Lawyer: In your evidence in the trial-within-a-trial, you told the judge you made millions [from match-fixing]?
Kurusamy: Yes.
Lawyer: How much?
Kurusamy: Actually, I earned over $20 million.
Lawyer: How much goes to yourself?
Kurusamy: I also have to pay the players. After all those, I had $16 to $17 million for myself.
Lawyer: This is one year’s work in 1994?
Kurusamy: Not one year, five months.
Rajendran Kurusamy is a genius. In a few years, he was able to take over much of the fixing in the Malaysian-Singapore league from the traditional Chinese-Malaysian horse racing gangs and essentially run the games. Kurusamy is not like Ljubomir Barin or other urbane, sophisticated fixers such as Luciano Moggi. He is not a player-agent, so he does not care too much about judging players’ abilities. He does not dress in immaculate suits. He claims to be almost illiterate. He has a number of nicknames: Raj, Ah Sing, but the most popular is Pal. “Pal” in Tamil means “milk,” and Kurusamy got the name after his first job delivering milk. His parents were Sri Lankan peasants. But Pal reckons he could teach most professors of psychology a thing or two about human nature.
“Any game, anywhere in the world, I could fix it,” he told me confidently. “I could tell within the first twenty or thirty minutes of talking to him if a player would take a bribe. That’s all it took.”
I tracked him down after weeks of searching, including a night of touring around the Sembawang area of northern Singapore. The anticorruption investigator that I spoke to would not give me Pal’s address. “He is a very dangerous character, and I do not want to be responsible if anything bad happened to you.” His organization had a lot to do with Pal. They had used him as a prosecution witness, then arrested and finally convicted him for his match-fixing. They were, seemingly, still frightened of him. One of the senior officers told me about one of their investigators being threatened by the match-fixing gangs with a snake in his car. He assured me solemnly, “Anything is possible with those people.”
After I spoke to the police, I spent some time going through the court archives that detailed Pal’s testimony of match-fixing. I found a number of addresses for him in the files and on a hot night in June set out to try to find him. Sembawang is a working-class area of Singapore, full of identical-looking apartment blocks between ill-used patches of grass. I walked up the long concrete stairs and banged on doors, only to be received by bewildered, non-gangster residents. After the third fruitless visit to an apartment, the taxi driver asked me what I was doing.
“I am trying to track down a bookie called Pal. Do you know him?” I replied.
The driver paled. “Yes, I know him. You don’t want to be a clown. No monkey business with those people.” He spent the next forty-five minutes telling me stories of Pal’s gangster reach into the world of Singapore sports. Then every time he parked the car, he was careful to park it so we could get out of the lot quickly if necessary. He seemed very frightened.
He was not the only one. The legends of Pal’s work spread all over Singapore sports. I met an official from the Football Association of Singapore. He was petrified of talking to me publicly, so we met in an anonymous little coffee shop just off Bencoolen Street and he looked carefully around to make sure no one saw us together. It was not just the gangsters he feared, but the Singapore authorities. Like many soccer people in Singapore, he was still traumatized by the disappearance of the Czech midfielder Michael Vana. He felt that there had been some kind of covert deal between officials and Vana to get him out of the country: “I believe they let Vana go,” he whispered across the table at me, “I think there may be some truth to the accusation that there were a lot of players in Singapore involved, and if they had put Vana in the dock he would have opened up a whole can of worms.”
He was also concerned that one of his colleagues would find out that he had told me that he thought there was still match-fixing going on in the Singapore league. He need not have bothered; a year later there was yet another major trial publicly showing his suspicions were correct. However, when he spoke about Pal, his voice dropped even lower and I had to hunch over the table to hear him properly. He told me he had seen Pal once inside a soccer stadium just before a match actually talking to one of the goalkeepers. He had ordered his security people to creep quietly up to Pa
l and try to get a good photo of him. Pal had discovered them doing it. He went straight up to the official and said, “You want a photo of me? I’ll fax you a photo of me anytime. Just let me know.” The official declined his offer.
However, a macho Chinese “businessman” that I met laughed sardonically when I asked him about Pal’s reach into the criminal world. “Pal? He is a chicken gangster,” he said “The real tough gangsters were above him. They were businessmen, insurance sales people – whatever. Most of them connected with horse racing. Now Pal is broke. He runs around the north side of Singapore doing little labour deals but there is nothing to be afraid of. He is broke and penniless – yesterday’s man.”
The businessman’s description was not particularly reassuring, as “chicken gangsters” can still kill you. In fact, to prove that they are not “chicken,” they may be more likely to do something violent than a non-chicken gangster. Also, the businessman had made the description over beers, in a bar, at least sixteen kilometres away from Pal with absolutely no intention of going up to Sembawang to help me track Pal down. In life, nothing is impossible for the man who does not have to do it himself. And most men’s bravado mounts proportionally to the declining probability of their actually doing anything.
I kept remembering the descriptions of the trial of Lutz Pfannenstiel, the German goalkeeper who was convicted of match-fixing in the Singapore league in 2000. It was revealed that Wilson Raj Perumal, a muscular Indian fixer had arranged an attack on one of Pfannenstiel’s teammates, the Croatian defender Ivica Raguz. Raj and an accomplice had ambushed him while he was walking on a Singapore street, using a field hockey stick to smash in his left knee. During the trial, some of the other players testified that they had received calls from people threatening to break their legs. What was even less reassuring is that the Singaporean soccer official thought that Wilson Raj and Pal sometimes worked together, but that “Wilson Raj is more gentle than Pal.”
I went up to northern Singapore. This was his home territory: vast apartment blocks where Indian workers lived. In the courtroom, this area was described as Pal’s “power base.” Pal acknowledged the truth of the claim, but said, “It was because, people were grateful to me. If you do good, there will be a ‘power base’ … As far as I was concerned, I have done good only.”
In the end, I simply sent Pal a fax asking him if we could do an interview. Then I followed up a few days later with a phone call. His secretary and he were both polite and open. When we actually did talk, Pal was forthcoming and seemingly direct and honest about his match-fixing. He is also supremely confident. He claims that in his prime he could have fixed almost any soccer game anywhere in the world, including top international matches:
First thing I did was fake a card. I said that I was from the Singapore press, something like that. Then I met the player and had an interview with them. I took them to a restaurant, treated them well. I talked about the game for a little bit. Then I would start to talk about their family. I showed them that I cared. I could figure out very quickly if they were supporting their family, how they cared about them. Then I could tell if they were ready to take my offer or not.
We spoke in his company’s offices. Pal was dressed in a casual shirt and jeans. He drives a black German salon car. He seemed like a normal, hard-working businessman. The only unusual thing was that when we went upstairs into his private office, there was a six-foot-tall statue of the Goddess Kali, with multiple arms, and the figure of a hapless and bloodied man being trampled under her feet.
The tactic he mentioned, the fake journalist card, sounds exactly like the method the English Premier League goalkeeper Ian Bennett of Birmingham City said was used on him when he was offered £20,000 by two men who claimed to be Singapore journalists. So Pal certainly talks a good game, but can he deliver fixed matches? History suggests he could.
It was Pal that built a network of corrupted players, coaches, and officials across the Malaysian-Singaporean League. He was not the first, last, or only match-fixer, but in his day he was by far the most successful.
A referee told me what it was like to officiate one of the many fixed games between one team and Selangor, the most popular club in the league.
I am not stupid. I knew the game was fixed. Sometimes you could see the signs, but I didn’t care; it makes my life easier. I go to the game mentally and physically prepared for a tough game. Then nothing happens! It makes my life easier. It is not my business if the teams want to do stupid things.
In the summer of 1994, the Malaysian and Singaporean police decided that it was their business and they moved in. It was difficult for the investigators. The more people they arrested, the more the police realized how big the fixing network actually was. By the end of their investigation, more than 150 people had been arrested, and police estimated that 80 per cent of the games played in the league had been fixed.
Rajendran Kurusamy was the master conductor of a superb orchestra of match-fixing. Again, he was not the only fixer, but he had established match-fixing syndicates on not just one, but at least nine of the league’s teams. On the witness stand, he testified to netting more than US$16 million in five months by fixing matches.
The players fixing the games were not junior players. They were some of the top talent that their country and continent could produce, and they talked about how they were recruited into the fixer’s networks. One player, Junaid (*), who worked for Pal, said:
Pal contacted me. He was speaking Tamil on the phone. He wanted me to sell the match. I was scared. Pal said, “Don’t worry. I already control your entire team.” He then asked me to inform Zahid (*) that if he [Zahid] does not co-operate, Pal will break his legs. I told Zahid. He agreed to fix the match. Pal then asked me to inform the rest of the group. All of them agreed. They promised us 20,000 RM [approximately US$7,500] each to fix the game. We had to lose or draw, make sure we did not win.
In this excerpt, Pal reveals himself to be a brilliant strategist. First, he spoke in Tamil, a language that is used by only a small, ethnic, working-class community in Malaysia. By speaking in this language, Pal establishes a kind of “us against them” bond with the player. Then he follows up with a threat, but not, of course, directed at the player. “Could you tell Zahid that I will break his legs?” There is nothing to stop Pal from telling the player directly that he will break his legs but that would destroy the friendliness and confidence he is trying to establish. After the player tells Zahid of the threat, he not unsurprisingly joins Pal’s network.
I asked him about some fixers’ habit of giving women to players and referees. “Of course,” he said, sounding amazed that anyone would make a big thing out of it, like a dentist wanting to know why you would not have magazines in the waiting room. But he used an interesting phrase, one that revealed the inner menace of his charm: “Then we could buy their heart from them.”
Officially, the Singapore anti-corruption police are known as the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB). In Chinese their title is the Foul Greed Investigation Bureau. They are a feared lot in Singapore, famous for dawn raids and strong-arm tactics. Many Singaporeans both inside and outside the bureau believe that their success is key to the country’s economic strength. Over forty years ago, just after independence and the split with Malaysia, Singapore was simply another Asian city-state dependent on trade and corrupt to the core. Upon assuming power, the authoritarian president Lee Kuan Yew declared that corruption was a competitive disadvantage to the country and that henceforth the government would use the carrot-and-stick tactic of both paying civil servants well and founding the CPIB. The strategy seems to have worked, and Singapore now has the reputation of a purportedly rare corruption-free zone in Southeast Asia.
At the CPIB headquarters is a museum where visitors can go on a tour of the artifacts of decades of investigations and successful convictions of a range of con men, crooks, and corruptors. There is a display announcing the success of Operation False Start, when the CPIB inve
stigators smashed a horse-doping ring at Singapore’s prestigious Turf Club. Another display boasts of Operation Ah Gu or the conviction of six corrupt house inspectors who were extorting cash from developers. There is even a display showing that the CPIB mounted Operation Drugnet against their own Singapore police Central Narcotics Bureau. In one corner in this hall of busted infamy is a StarTAC mobile phone. It is broken and bruised. The CPIB officers had to go into a sewer to recover it, after the phone was flushed down a toilet. But it is a mute testimony to the extraordinary powers of both the CPIB and Rajendran “Pal” Kurusamy.
Pal’s moment of glory came in 1998. He had been arrested for match-fixing in the Singapore league. He was in jail. Singaporean prisons are not places for the weak-kneed. The authorities do not subscribe to the idea of prisons as houses of reform or gentle correction. They are nasty, brutish, and savage places. The German goalkeeper, Lutz Pfannenstiel, who was jailed there for match-fixing, described conditions inside: “At night there were people being raped. Someone died and I remember them carrying him out … I could hear the screams of people being caned. It was horrific.” But somehow, maybe by his ability to judge human nature, Pal thrived in the place. He managed to get a prison guard to smuggle in a mobile phone. From then on, he was set.
“I did everything,” he said happily. “I worked from inside the prison. European matches, World Cup matches, international games.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Did you say that you were gambling on games inside a prison or you were fixing from inside the prison?”
“Both. I did both. I fixed games as well. Or I did until they caught me.”