by Declan Hill
What?!
I jumped out of my chair in the back of the studio. The producers and even the director looked at me oddly. The program was almost over. The complaining producer told me that yes, one of the coaches of the Ghana Under-23 team had got some of the players to visit “friends” of his from Malaysia or Hong Kong. They were to pay the players for losing the game.
I frantically searched and then found a newspaper; fortunately they seemed to have more news sense than the television journalists. There on the front page of the sports section, directly under the headline “I swear, I’m innocent” was a large photo of the man I had last seen in the Bangkok KFC. I knew him instantly, and I knew, whatever he might say, he was not innocent.
The coach’s name was Abukari Damba. He had played for the great Ghanaian national team of the early 1990s, the one that featured Abédi Pelé. Now he was in trouble. I immediately phoned him, and we agreed to meet that afternoon for an interview.
Before the interview, I went over to the Ghana Football Association. Their headquarters are in downtown Accra, near the overpriced conference centre for the Africa Summit. It is, like much of the developing world, a mixture of the highly modern, a newly built office building, and the shambolic. The day I was there, the building had a twenty-foot puddle, like an impromptu moat, in front of it. Journalists and soccer administrators stood around waiting for passing taxis so they could get through the water.
The president of the GFA was the same man, Kwesi Nyantakyi, that I had met the year before while he was waiting for his coffee in the Würzburg restaurant. Again, he had the slightly officious air, but he was still relatively forthright. When he spoke, I had the impression that the GFA actually understood how important the issue of match-fixing was to their sport. It seemed like the exact reverse of European countries, where the journalists would be salivating after a story of match-fixing while the officials would try to play it down. Here the officials were forthright about there being a problem while the sports journalists, with the one exception of the newspaper that put it on the front page of their sports section, did not rank it higher than a discussion about the musical taste of a star forward.
He spoke about the presence of fixers – he called them gamblers – at international tournaments.
In every competition you find gamblers around. Yes, every competition, every competition, they are there. It is done all the time in major competitions. In all the major tournaments, World Cup, Cup of Nations. The gamblers are not Africans, they are Europeans and Asians. So they have a lot of money to do bet on these things.
I asked him whether he thought the same thing may have occurred in the World Cup in Germany.
I would not rule out the possibility of gamblers approaching our players. We put in place in Germany precautions to stop unauthorized persons from entering the room of our players. But it is impossible to stop it.
I thought back to my experience in Germany when it had been relatively easy to contact the players. Even if you could not meet them in the hotel, which I did all the time, the players were still wandering out to bars where any fixer could meet them. Nyantakyi seemed to realize the same thing and said:
They may not necessarily have to come to the hotels. Some have agents who establish links and then they do their business. Even at the World Cup in 1991 when we won the Under-17 World Cup, there were gamblers around, offering a lot of money to the team to throw away the match.
He laughed. We spoke about the meetings with the players to discuss salary in the 2006 World Cup – he said they were “hectic” with “free and frank” negotiations – and the current allegations of bribery before the Iran game:
Even last week when we played Iran in a friendly match, gamblers were at the team, they bribed our players. They did it to one of our assistant coaches … The coach let an official of a gambling company to see the players one by one; and the players were paid $1,000, and the coach took $500 as his commission from each of the players. So he got about $3,000 worth, each player got about $500 each.
After the interview, Nyantakyi passed me on to Randy Abbey, who was the GFA official in charge of the trip to Iran. Abbey looks like a tough, no-nonsense character, but he claimed that “this was the first time he had encountered such a thing [match-fixing]” and he was in still in shock from the events.
One of our coaches got involved with some people. I hear two of them were Chinese-looking, and one was supposed to be an Iranian. And he had these people in his room, and he would go speak with the players … and ask them to come meet these people.
Abbey claimed that in the hotel room the players were supposedly instructed on how to throw the game, and then they received $1,000. It was this money that the coach was taking his cut from. Whether the players were angry about that, or genuinely remorseful, one of them went to the captain of the team, who went to the coach. Abbey immediately fired the assistant coach. But that night he had a visitor.
The coach came to my room and knelt, and said that he was sorry, he’s not a bad person, but he was tempted by the devil, and all that. Well, I thought he should go tell that story to a priest, I’m no priest, I’m a football administrator.
Not everyone in the Ghanaian delegation at the Würzburg hotel in Germany was an innocent fan. I discovered soon after arriving in Ghana the story of Kofi Boakye. Boakye was the police officer appointed to head up security for the Africa Cup of Nations to be held in Accra in 2008. He went to Germany with the team to gain experience of a major sporting event. Two months later, it was revealed that part of his time in Würzburg was spent phoning back to Ghana to find out who had covertly taped him meeting with a group of Ghanaian drug traffickers. During the meeting he was heard saying that he would “sort out” some Colombian business partners of the drug barons if they gave them any trouble. There was also a question of seventy-six bags of cocaine that had been discovered by police in a raid and then had gone missing. After a year-long trial, the two drug traffickers who had met and taped Boakye were convicted to fifteen years of hard labour, while the trial judge stated that he was displeased with the attorney-general for not also prosecuting Boakye. One of Boakye’s favourite bars, and one where he allegedly would sit and discuss his business, was called the Bus Stop, located on the side of the busy ring road that circled the centre of Accra. Strangely it was the same bar where the coach had chosen to meet me. As I took the taxi down to bar, I thought about the Hilton Hotels in Brussels and how, by coincidence, that particular hotel chain has attracted a lot of the match-fixing history of Belgian soccer. Now it seemed that one bar in central Accra was an unwitting magnet for tales of corruption.
When I got to the Bus Stop, I realized I was not particularly nervous. I was tired and curiously unexcited. This was not like the first time I met Chin. Well, to be honest, every time I met Chin, I was terrified of what would happen to me. It had now been thirteen months since the meeting in the Bangkok KFC. It had been a long chase. I had gone across three continents. I had gone through countless disappointments. I was prepared for it not to be the same man.
Then I met Damba.
It was him. I know memory can prove fallible, but it was the same person that I had seen thirteen months before in Bangkok. One of the things that had struck me as true about Chin’s story in Thailand was how clearly athletic the man was who had met them in the fast-food outlet. His body and physique had the hardness that only comes from the absolute focus of the professional athlete. One of the first things I recognized about Damba was that he had that same hard, professional athlete’s body.
We shook hands amiably. He did not seem to recognize me. We sat down. Unlike the last time we had been in the same room in public, I tried to make sure no one was around to listen to our conversation. Almost immediately, and almost without any prompting, he told me the story of his life.
As I listened, a series of clicks went off in my head confirming that he was the man I had seen.
He had been one of the regulars in the great Gh
ana team of the early 1990s, along with Abédi Pelé. Click. (The reputation of the squad was such that any member of it would have instant access to the Ghanaian team, even to its dressing room.)
He had been an Under-17 coach for the Ghana Football Association. Click. (Exactly as Chin had claimed him to be.)
He had been in Athens during the Olympic Games. Click. (He could have helped put the purported fixes and payments together that Appiah and Chin had spoken of.)
He had not been in Athens officially; rather, he claimed that he had financed himself privately to go there. Click. (I wondered about the nature of the private financial arrangements that had allowed him to go.)
He had played in Malaysia, just after the great collapse of the league through match-fixing. Click. (Surely, he would have met some of the fixers then.)
In Malaysia, someone who he thought was a friend had stolen more than $100,000 from him. Click. (A good reason for wanting to get into match-fixing?)
He had been in Würzburg, again ostensibly to improve himself as a coach. Again ostensibly, he had been privately financed. He had left just before I had arrived. Click. (That is why I had not seen him there.)
I asked him what had happened in the game against Iran the week before.
He claimed that he had made a mistake. He had thought his friends were simply agents who wanted to recruit some of the players. The whole thing had been a terrible misunderstanding. Then he claimed that he was trying to lure the gamblers into giving up the money, but not make the players play badly. Then he claimed that if people could come inside him, they would know how innocent he was. In truth, he was a mess. His eyes darted around the room and he looked completely devastated.
I listened to Damba’s entire life story. He said he was a chief’s son from the poorer Muslim area in the north of Ghana. It is an area that, generally, Ghanaians from the richer, more urban south of the country speak of with some disdain. Damba’s father, at first, would not let him become a soccer player, insisting that he finish his education, but after completing his teacher’s training Damba began to play as a professional goalkeeper. He worked hard, becoming at his time one of the best goalkeepers in Africa. At the end of his career he moved to Malaysia and played there.
I felt sorry for him. It was all rather sad to see a former great player reduced to such a state. I also did not like what I was going to do: betray him. I was going to pretend to be friendly and in the meantime, collect information on him. Some journalists thrive at this kind of thing, pandering to interview sources or sucking up to famous people before putting the knife in. I don’t like it, but it was the only way that I could get more information on Chin’s gang of fixers.
So at a pause in our meeting I leaned forward and told him that I had friends who were friends of his.
I told him that he had been in Bangkok in May 2006.
He shuffled, blinked twice and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
I smiled and said, “I think you were.”
“I am not sure. I must remember. Maybe.”
We fenced around each other like swordsmen on a sheet of ice. The real question he was asking me was, “Who are you?” It was a question that I was not sure I wanted to answer, but I tried to be as honest as I could. I told him that I had done research on match-fixers in Asia. His colleagues had helped me out.
We shook hands and agreed to meet the next day.
The next day I met his wife. She was not a glamorous Ghanaian beauty queen, but she was a tough-minded, politically well-connected woman who wore hijab and stared intently at me. They were also clearly very much in love. They held hands at one point and when they laughed they looked into one another’s eyes. However, that was about the only light point in the first hour and a half of the meeting. If the atmosphere around Damba and I had been tense the night before at the bar, it was now really tense. We were meeting on the patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a tiny, white-painted establishment in the centre of Accra. It looked like the kind of place where married couples, who are not necessarily married to one another, go to stay. It was near my hotel. So we agreed to meet there. Mrs. Damba eyed me up and down as if I were a blackmailer.
I don’t really blame her. I must have been a living embodiment of the expression that no matter how bad something is, it can always get worst. Here was her husband’s reputation destroyed and his job gone, and now a man who could be anything from a spy for the Football Association to a match-fixer’s assistant to a blackmailer was sitting in front of them telling them back their secrets that neither thought anybody should have known.
I managed to reassure them. I told Mrs. Damba that her husband had “friends who were my friends. They had been very good to me.” Now I was nervous. I was speaking the literal truth, but I was also using the deliberate code of organized crime. I was implying that I was one of the gang. We had a cup of coffee. Then they asked me to come to a radio station, Joy FM, to see Damba being interviewed. I helped him prepare for the interview, which made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
In the afternoon, I went back to the notes of my conversations with Chin that I had made thirteen months before. I realized I had missed a key detail. In a number of different places, he had actually used Damba’s first name – Abu – to describe the runner. As in:
Hill: Why do you think you’re going to have to meet the players? To coach them on how to fix?
Chin: No, No. Myself, No problem. I trust Abu, I know. He tell me to play, I play. I trust him, He do this only a few years, a couple of years. I trust him, OK?
Abu is a pretty standard title in some Asian cultures, a bit like a younger person calling someone “Uncle.” I had put it down to Chin not wanting me to guess his runner’s name. Now I was realizing it actually was the runner’s first name.
I also began to do some more research into the Iran versus Ghana fix. There were a number of interesting things that struck me. One, it was exactly like the purported World Cup fixes. The favourites, the Iranians, had won the game. Even though it had been advertised as a full friendly international, the Ghana team was actually not their full-strength team. Rather it was a considerably weakened Under-23 team. The Iranians, however, fielded their top national squad. Therefore, no one would have suspected a potential fix if the Ghana team lost.
Two, the loss was one of the easiest to arrange for the fixers. The weaker team, the Ghanaians, simply had to lose above the spread, by two clear goals. Presumably, it is generally easier for fixers to convince players who expected to lose anyway to lose.
Three, after all the hysteria, after all the investigations, after all the team meetings about potential fixes, the final score of the game was 4-2. A result that the fixers had wanted was still reached.
I managed to get the summarized transcripts of the July 3 GFA hearings into the affair. They had not been publicly released and they were very damning. The hearings had actually occurred before the press stories about the attempted match-fixing. The meeting opened with prayers and the announcement that testimony could be given in any of the indigenous Ghanaian languages, not just English. Four of the players had testified. Their stories were remarkably consistent. They said that Damba had approached them. A couple of them said that he either asked them directly or was in the room when they were asked to fix the game. There were two Chinese men and an “Iranian-looking” man who he introduced them to.
Sampson Cudjoe was one of the players who testified. Part of his summarized testimony reads:
On the day of the match Coach Damba came to his room and took him to a room where he met three people. After shaking hands with the people, they gave him $1,000 for shopping and that Mr. Damba will tell him what to do next. As he was about to leave, they told him to throw the match by a two-goal margin.
Emmanuel Allan was another one of the players; he gave his testimony in Ga, a southern Ghanaian language.
He said before they emplaned for Iran, Coach Damba told him that his friends from Hong Kong would come and give him money
. In Iran Coach Damba introduced those people to me after we [the players] had finished our meeting with Mr. Abbey. He said he was informed but was not given any money. When I went to the room with Coach Damba, I met the three people who promised me money for shopping. They told me that we must allow them to score two goals in the first half, then one in the second half before we will pull a consolation goal in the dying minutes of the game. The people were very particular about the score line.
Coach Damba confirmed that Allan’s story was true.
I don’t know what the expression for “Gotcha” is in Ga, but that pretty well expresses Damba’s status in any language. He was fired after the hearings.
The players’ testimonies also present a larger problem and possibly the reason why the GFA did not want the tribunal made public. If the players’ testimony is to be believed, it sounds as if someone from Iran was also involved. There was an “Iranian-looking man” who was with the two Asian fixers to ensure the fix went to plan. But the corroborating support for this theory is Emmanuel Allan’s testimony. He claims that there was the offer of the Ghanaians being allowed to score a goal in the final minute, which implies that the fixers were also working with some of the Iranians, so they could guarantee the Ghanaians a goal.