by Declan Hill
“I’m sorry. I can’t believe you. You say you fixed a World Cup game from inside a Singaporean prison?”
“Oh yes; once you have the network it is easy. I tell you, I could tell any games that are fixed. Doesn’t matter what they are. And I could fix almost any match.”
Then he told me the story of how he achieved the ultimate soccer fixer’s goal, arranging a match in the World Cup Finals.
Ironically, Pal began match-fixing in prison. In 1990, he was in prison for a mob murder: he and a group of Tamil criminals had surrounded a labour contractor and stabbed him to death. No one confessed to the actual killing, so they were all convicted with a reduced sentence. Inside the prison, Pal had “a life-changing experience;” he discovered volleyball and his talent for successful sports corruption:
While I was in prison, I was a champion volleyball player. The best. There was a lot of betting going on in the prison on these games. The prisoners would bet $1,000 or $2,000, to be paid by their families, family to family outside. I would find out when there was a lot of money on the game. And I would play badly to lose and make money that way. I came out of the prison with a lot of money.
He may have come out of prison with a lot of money, but he had almost no skills, apart from knowing how to throw volleyball games. So he took the natural step and began to get interested in the business of gambling. The vast networks of illegal gambling intrigued him. The whole peninsula was obsessed with soccer, and Pal started to bet like almost everyone else. But he noticed that when he bet, he routinely lost. It was only when friends told him that many of the games in the league were fixed that he began to understand why he was losing money. He decided to try to beat the fixers at their own game.
At first, Pal went to work for a group of Chinese-Indonesian gangsters, run by a fixer who called himself Uncle Jimmie (*) or Uncle Frankie or Chong – depending on what day it was or who he was speaking to. Uncle Jimmie had been fixing matches in the Malay Peninsula for a long time. In one confession, a player speaks of Uncle Jimmie paying his team off in matches dating back to 1987:
One week before the game, Uncle Jimmie would contact me. Uncle Jimmie will tell me whether he wants us to win or lose. Then one day before the match, Uncle Jimmie will confirm whether he wants us to lose and by how many goals. Normally one day after the match, I would collect the money from Uncle Jimmie in different places around the town.
The player had a long, relatively complicated relationship with Uncle Jimmie. When the player lost a contract with his team and was unemployed on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Uncle Jimmie did what few soccer officials would presumably do – he met him and lent him money:
I was walking around in Kuala Lumpur. I phoned Uncle Jimmie. We met, I can’t remember where. Uncle Jimmie gave me $2,000 just for “pocket money.”
If you want a good diagram of the fixing networks in the league, than just draw a picture of a shark frenzy. Anyone who could fix, did fix. Alongside Pal and Uncle Frankie, was a Chinese bookie – Ong, a.k.a. The Blind Man – from Malaysia – whose territory was concentrated in Kuala Lumpur and Malacca. There were reports that he too had made vast amounts of money from fixing – up to $10 million. There was another group of fixers based out of the racecourses who had a reputation of absolute brutality based on the murder and maiming of a number of jockeys and trainers. There was a gang of loosely connected Indonesians, one of whom would strut around Marine Drive in Singapore loaded down with gold jewellery. Their reputations for corruption and violence were equal to anything in the Pal storybook. Even ten years later, when I spoke with a Kuala Lumpur crime reporter about these gangs, his hands shook when he spoke of them. It was the rivalry between these fixers that led to the violence. Teams were divided into cliques, some of whom followed one set of fixers, while another clique followed another group. There was actually a fight inside the dressing room of Selangor, one of the top teams in the league, between players representing different fixers. Another Singapore fixer told me much the same thing. We had talked about the North American mafia. He said:
Here a runner can also be a bookie. In North America, maybe you have a hierarchy but here, money talks. They will do everything. Take money, gamble, fix games … see that their bookie is taking odds heavily one way, so go to the other side and take other odds that way or fix the game. There is no control over them.
However, when Pal entered this world, he found he had a great competitive advantage over the other fixers. Many of the players in the league were either Indian or working-class Malays. The Chinese were at a disadvantage. For all kinds of cultural and economic reasons, few of the players were Chinese. When the Chinese fixers tried to talk to the players, they couldn’t do so in their own language. Pal, on the other hand, had grown up in the same area as many of the players. He understood them in ways the Chinese fixers simply could not. Uncle Jimmie and Pal worked closely together through the 1993 season. In one of the Royal Malaysian Police confessions, Uncle Jimmie tells a player looking for direction that “his partner” Pal will help him. It was, seemingly, a friendly relationship. However, for all the cordiality, Pal began to undercut the other fixers. Ironically, his chief weapon was the same one used by the Singaporean government to combat corruption – he paid the players more money:
The other fixers only paid the players 2,000 to 3,000 ringgit. But I paid each player 30,000 ringgit. So because of the money a lot of players knew me, a lot of players came back to me.
Finally, according to Pal, in the spring of 1994, Uncle Jimmie shared with him the secrets of fixing international tournaments. At first, Pal was not really interested. He was making all the money he could by fixing in the local leagues – why bother with international competitions? But Uncle Jimmie came to him before the 1994 World Cup and allegedly said:
We have a team. It is the Cameroon team … The guy he came to see me. He is my runner.
I said, “Are you sure? The Cameroon team? Who have you got?” [Names a player on the team, claims he is “their runner” for a network of corrupt Cameroon players …]
So I said, “Are you sure? Okay what’s the deal?”
He proposed me. He talked to me about the price. About the function of what he is doing and then he asked me for $100,000. Then I met them. I see them. I talked to them. They said, “We are willing to do the business in our game against Brazil.” Then he recommended the Russian team. So many teams.
Because of the time that has elapsed, it was impossible for me to confirm if these stories of fixing at the 1994 World Cup were true. Certainly it is not the first time that elements on a Cameroon team were alleged to have thrown a game at the biggest tournament in the world. In 1984, Italian journalists Oliviero Beha and Roberto Chiodi claimed to have spoken to a mysterious source from Cameroon who told them that the game between Cameroon and Italy in the 1982 World Cup Finals had been sold.
Back at home in Malaysia and Singapore, the end was in sight: Johnson Fernandez, Lazarus Rokk, and other journalists were publishing stories on the fixing. The police investigations were beginning and the tension was ramped up. Runners began to betray fixers, and Pal claims he was betrayed by one of his Chinese runners.
The Chinese guy informed to CPIB…. He was my runner. We were betting on a game. We had $8 million one way. He took $5 million and put it in his own pocket, only gave me $3 million. That was stupid. The betting market very small [sic], you always find out what is going on. So I got on the phone and worked the market in Indonesia, Thailand, and I switched the odds. I got $22 million on. I turned the game 2-1. It was a counter-fix. The Chinese guy lost the money, so he was angry with me so he informed on me to the CPIB.
It was all like something out of a sinking ship. As the investigators moved in, the fixers scrambled to protect themselves. One player claimed he was frightened of the investigation, so he phoned one of his fixers to ask what to do:
10 December 1994, I contacted my fixer and I was afraid of being arrested so I phoned him. He warned me, “Don’t m
ention my name. Mention the other guys. If you mention my name, I will do something to you …”
The problem for Pal was that here, he was at a serious competitive disadvantage to the other fixers. As a former labourer, his strength was his contacts with working-class players and their families from disadvantaged Indian and Malay backgrounds. When the police moved in, he did not have the political protection that the Chinese fixers could claim. Push a police investigation with a Chinese triad–connected fixing gang and somewhere, somehow there would be repercussions for the police investigator. Push a case against Pal and his Indian cronies and a police officer was safe, at least from political repercussions. It also, of course, did not help Pal’s cause that he was guilty, very guilty.
So Pal did what countless other major criminals have done before and since then. He cut a deal with the police and agreed to testify on their behalf. In 1994 to 1995, there was a series of dramatic cases in Singapore courts, all featuring one Rajendran Kurusamy as a prosecution witness. Thiru Rajamanickam, a FIFA-ranked referee, was convicted of aiding and abetting in a fixed match. The Michael Vana trial, the great Czech disappearing act, if it had gone ahead, was to feature Pal as a witness. The hugely popular midfielder Abbas Saad, the “Maradona of Singapore,” was convicted of accepting bribes to win games, thanks in part to Pal’s testimony. And Ong Kheng Hock, the match-fixer who helped get me drunk and distracted in a bar, was sent away for a number of years based again in part on Pal’s performance in the witness box.
It was all hugely irritating for the Singapore Chinese establishment. Here was an Indian labourer with no political connections running the most successful match-fixing network in their national soccer league, defrauding hundreds of thousands of gamblers, helping to ruin the league, and even causing a scandal between neighbouring Malaysia and themselves. And any establishment members who were connected to the Chinese triads must have been even more furious, because Pal had largely cut them out of the fixing business for a year and a half. And at the end of the day the same Indian labourer was not serving a single day in jail but was going about his business, after cheerfully testifying in court that he had made between $16 and $17 million in five months.
Pal should have laid low, very low. His lawyer warned him, the CPIB special investigator warned him, even the CPIB director warned him, not to fix matches any more. But Pal did not listen. Like the addict who discovers that crack is not a benign party drug but cannot help himself, Pal started fixing matches again.
After the glamour of the alleged World Cup fix, the games that the police eventually got Pal on were very low level. They took place, practically in his backyard in the summer of 1996: Woodlands Wellington versus Sembawang Rangers and Woodlands Wellington versus Balestier Central United. It would have been difficult to find anyone, outside of northern Singapore, and even then not too many, who cared about the matches. But the trial featured Pal and his two accomplices, Maran A. Jagannathan and Devaraj Doraisamy, the captain of his team and national team player. Pal was supposed to have paged the two of them the figure – $80,000 – just before kick off. At which point Devaraj took out a pair of blue socks from his bag and put them on. It was a secret signal to the rest of the fixing players on his team that the fix was on and they should try to lose. If he had pulled out a pair of white socks, it would have meant that they should ignore the offer of the fix and simply try their best. In vain did Pal argue that the money was for a business debt that Jagannathan had incurred opening a flower shop. He wasn’t helped by the fact that Jagannathan had broken down in a CPIB interrogation room and confessed the whole crime. Then in the middle of the trial when Jagannathan realized that his mates had not betrayed him, he very dramatically began to testify against the prosecution. Neither the trial judge nor the appeal judge was persuaded by his last-minute change of side, and they convicted all the defendants to jail. The appeal judge added in his statement the heartfelt sentiments of most of the Singapore ruling class:
Soccer is a sport with a wide following. Offences of this nature have attracted much public attention lately. If left unchecked, they are capable of tarnishing the image of Singapore.
In the spring of 1998, Pal was finally back in prison, and the various appeals of the case were quashed. There was a certain biblical cycle to his life. His fixing games had begun in prison and they would end in prison. What is known both from Pal himself and the CPIB is that he paid a prison guard tens of thousands of dollars for a cellphone and replacement batteries. Even that, given Singapore’s stance on corruption, is pretty remarkable. But seemingly completely unfazed by his surroundings, Pal claims to have set out to fix games in the World Cup in France in 1998. The CPIB official I spoke to said:
Pal continued to match-fix, even in prison! He had a hand phone smuggled into his jail cell by a corrupt prison guard who we also caught.
What the CPIB did not say was the story that Pal told me. He claimed that a few weeks before he entered prison, he had gone to Cameroon:
The game I fixed from the prison cell. I made $3 million. I had gone to the Cameroon before the prison. I had met X [a player that had allegedly been his runner at the 1994 World Cup]. I arranged for water pipes to his village. That is how I fixed the games.
Pal claimed that in return for cash and the water pipes, the runner arranged with some of his Cameroon teammates to sell one game in the 1998 World Cup Finals. I was not able to confirm or deny this story. I put it here simply for the public record, but I will add a few further pieces of circumstantial evidence that may be of importance to readers in deciding for themselves the truth of Pal’s claims.
One, the CPIB official did say that Pal was match-fixing on the phone in the jail when they arrested him. He did not specify which match or matches, but he did claim that had been the nature of Pal’s business inside the prison.
Two, in June 1998, a furious Mike Saunders, the managing director of Victor Chandler, a large British bookmaker, announced to the press that he was convinced that there had been a fixed match in the World Cup. He said that there had been massive amounts of bets coming from Malaysia-Singapore, all on one outcome of one particular game. The rumours in the market was that one team had been bribed. The game Saunders claimed that had been a “bribery target” – one featuring Cameroon. He would tell me later, “We had agents working the Asian market, they were swamped. Their phones were going crazy. There is no doubt in my mind there was a fixed match in that World Cup.”
Finally, I had heard the story of the water pipes, Cameroon, and the World Cup fix from three different sources in Singapore before I had met Pal. If the story is a fantasy, which it may be, it is at the very least a consistent fantasy. It is a story that Pal has not changed in its essential details.
Whatever the specific truth of his fixing claims, Pal’s generous nature in prison got him into trouble. He claims he told the entire wing of his prison that they all should take France in the final:
Even in prison. Who will take the Cup? You know? But I know. I tell them – take France. Happens. Happens to beat them. Most people I tell them.
This final piece of flamboyance ensured that the prison authorities got to know about his activities, and one day they staged a sudden raid on his cell. Pal was on the phone and he frantically flushed the phone down the toilet. The CPIB, who by now were really angry with Pal, went down the sewer to get it.
The prison authorities were even more furious with him. Singapore prisons are not designed to be nice, but there is a further section which is for the really hard cases. Alone for twenty-four hours a day, no windows, no contact with other prisoners, Pal was placed in it for more than two years.
You see I am alone in prison. In prison a lot of people but I am in the Shell. I am alone. I cannot go down. I cannot see the sun or the night. I am alone for twenty-eight months.
When he emerged from prison in 2001, Pal fit at least one of the descriptions of the Chinese businessman. He was broke. Labour duties on his imported workers had bankrupted
his company. He had a young family and lots of responsibilities. When I met him four years later, he was like any hard-working businessman, trying to get deals. We even spoke about the possibility of writing a book. He claimed he had given up on match-fixing, although he did seem nostalgic for the days when he caused such havoc on the highest stage of international soccer. But, he assured me, he had completely retired from match-fixing; his son was too important to him. This was in contrast to the fixer I would meet next, who was definitely in the thick of top international soccer matches and, in fact, allegedly proceeded to fix them as I watched.
16
BEHIND THE DOOR
All the leagues in the world – EPL, Champions League, World Cup – they can be fixed. I had players on Crystal Palace, Wimbledon, and Liverpool. You say these are great teams. They are bullshit. We can bribe them. You think because the clubs make big money in the transfer that it means that the players won’t take a bribe. That is not true. They will take the money.
Saturday, November 26, 2005, 8:00 p.m., Bangkok, Thailand. For months I had been tracking down one particular match-fixer. His name is famous among the Asian gambling community. He has a track record of fixing games for more than fifteen years. His name was associated with some of the major match-fixing trials in the last decade, but always as the “shadowy figure” about whom not much is known. But he supplies the bets or the money or the guarantee of violence. I will call him Lee Chin (*).
It had taken months of faxes, calls, and abruptly cancelled meetings. A few weeks before, I had received a phone call inviting me to a meeting. It may have been because I had recently learned how to look at a business card in the proper Chinese fashion: holding it in both hands, studying it, and then asking a question that showed you understood the rank of the person who had given you the card. I had, unknowingly, done so to one of Chin’s associates when I had met him in the VIP section at a soccer match, showing him proper “face.” I heard through the grapevine that the gesture had been appreciated and that an interview might be possible.